Considering Accessibility in Your Online Courses
Have you considered accessibility when designing your course? Do you know what it means for your course to be accessible? This article will help raise awareness of accessibility in your course and point you to tools or techniques for improving accessibility in your course.
What is Web Accessibility?
Web accessibility means ensuring that your content can be understood and navigated by all users including those with disabilities. Disabilities might include users who are blind or have low vision, who are deaf or hard of hearing, and users with cognitive or motor disabilities. Users with disabilities may be using tools to assist them such as screen readers or using methods other than a keyboard and mouse to navigate your content. Following are some tools and techniques for making your Web content more accessible.
Source: CDC Disability and Health Promotion
Screen Readers
Many users with disabilities will rely on a screen reader to assist them with navigating content.
Screen readers are software that can be installed to help describe and navigate applications (including web pages in browsers) by reading off content or options (menus, dialogs, etc.) and describing what is currently focused.
Users with screen readers may only be navigating software or web pages via the keyboard, making use of hotkeys to help them navigate faster.
Some common screen readers are:
Narrator for Windows 10 (Windows 10, included in OS)
VoiceOver (Mac, included in OS)
NVDA (Windows, free, donation-supported)
JAWS (Windows, paid)
Click the links above to learn more about or download the software.
Users Accessibility Modifications
Users might also be inclined to make software adjustments to ease navigations, such as:
- Zooming or magnifying content
- Adjusting text size on the page
- Using an Onscreen Keyboard
Some design decisions could make using the modifications more difficult, such as text not scaling properly. Consider where possible enabling options that simplify navigation elements that users may require or just find beneficial.
How can you improve accessibility?
Understanding some of the difficulties users with disabilities go through, there are steps you can take to improve their experience:
- Caption all videos.
- Use the Canvas Accessibility Checker when editing pages.
- Provide alternate resources when possible (scripts or text notes, alternate assignments for visual/audible related tasks, etc.)
Video Captions
All videos should contain captions to assist persons who are deaf or hard of hearing.
SharkMedia (Kaltura) contains an automated tool that will generate captions for you and an editor tool to correct any mistakes. While the automated captions are not perfect, they should generate enough to get you started, then you can use the accompanying editor tool which allows you to correct mistakes and adjust timing.
Dr. Anymir Orellana has provided many instructional videos on this topic, Closed Captioning Videos in SharkMedia, which provides instructions on requesting captions and editing them in SharkMedia as well as From Zooming to Sharing Closed-Captioned Videos with steps on embedding closed captions to videos recorded on Zoom. Dr. Orellana even provides instructions on how to add translated subtitles for other languages.
Zoom also supports live transcription and if necessary, you can assign participants to type captions. You can read more about this here.
Checking Canvas Pages for Accessibility
Canvas has a built-in accessibility checker in the page editor. This Accessibility Checker will look for issues such as alt tags, table layout issues, color contrast, and more. Run this tool each time you edit a page, prior to saving it to look for issues.
Provide Alternate Resources
Attaching notes or scripts for meetings, lectures or other resources is good practice and can be extremely helpful for users with disabilities. PDFs or PowerPoint presentations can cause issues with screen readers so try to use a text file or Word document when possible. If you must use PowerPoint or PDFs, make sure to read the guide to making PPT presentations accessible or the PDF Accessibility Overview. Avoid posting images with text, which cannot be read by a screen reader.
If you do have students with disabilities, you might consider offering alternate assignments in some situations. Canvas allows you to create assignments that are assigned only to individuals or groups. Ask them what you can do to accommodate them.
You should also be aware of Student Disability Services, they can work with you to get captions and materials that are fully ADA compliant.
More about Accessibility
Accessibility is something that some may ignore. Once you read about and experience the struggles that occur with disabilities, you will realize how relatively simple adjustments to your course can help create an educational environment where all students have an opportunity to learn and demonstrate their mastery of the course content.
Dr. Jennifer Wilson & Dr. Judith Slapak-Barski recently hosted a Universal Design Workshop, which provides a discussion on both awareness and accommodations in the classroom.
Web Accessibility in Mind (WebAIM) provides research, documentation, and training resources related to accessibility.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops international standards for the web and created the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) to develop standards and support materials that help you understand and implement accessibility.
The Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE), a browser extension can be installed and run to look for further issues with content. For more on WAVE, visit the website at https://wave.webaim.org/.
“LEC Challenge”
The LEC challenges you to take a moment and try watching one of your videos with no audio or captions. Use this opportunity to experience the difficulties that some users face when relying on captions, but no captions are included.