Creating Accessible Content
At its basic level, accessibility is about making your course and its content usable by students with specific disabilities. However, accessibility is really about making a course more usable for all students by creating a clear course structure using multiple modalities.
There have been some very high profile legal cases recently involving schools who have neglected to make courses accessible, and while we should work on accessibility out of a desire to make our courses stronger for all students, the need to avoid legal action is also real and compelling. You can read more about some of these recent cases at ATHEN Legal News (Links to an external site).
@ONE and the OEI recently offered a five-part webinar series on course accessibility led by Jayme Johnson, Director of Accessibility and User Experience for the OEI.
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Creating Accessible PDFs with MS Word and Acrobat Pro (Links to an external site).
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Your Online Course Usability: 10 Ways to Kick It Up a Notch (Links to an external site).
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Evaluating Web Content for Accessibility (Links to an external site).
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Creating Accessible Online Presentations (Links to an external site).
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Captioning Considerations (Links to an external site).
Need help with creating captions for your YouTube videos?
Find help here:
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Creating Subtitles and Closed Captions on Your YouTube Videos (Links to an external site).
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"Add Subtitles and Close Captions" (Links to an external site).
The @One group also offers a free, self-paced course on making instructional videos, including captioning.
Jayme Johnson is the Director of Accessibility and User Experience of the Online Education Initiative. He has crated a self-guided course to better orient online instructors to the requirements of accessibility. You can join Creating Accessible Online Courses with Canvas at any time to learn more.
