Accessibility Matters

As you start to design your MyCourses course, it’s important to take a moment to think about the accessibility of your course—the content, navigational experience, activities, and assessments. 

Your courses should be designed with accessibility in mind regardless of whether you are aware of whether a student in your class has a disclosed disability or not.  A best practice recommendation is to not wait until you receive an accommodation notice from Disability Services before considering how to make courses accessible. 

MyCourses itself is accessible.  Our vendor, D2L, provides documentation on the current status of their platform and their roadmap for enhancing accessibility.  The HTML Editor within MyCourses provides a built-in accessibility checker to help ensure that the content you add to the system is accessible.  The HTML Templates found within the HTML Editor can also help to address accessibility and enhance the content viewing experience when viewed on mobile devices. The Quiz Tool offers features that allow you to provide accommodations on a quiz.  The Classlist also offers an feature to set course-wide (global) accommodations for students.

Each MyCourses course comes with a default course navigation bar. The best practice is to use the default course navigation bar so that students have a consistent experience from course to course.

MyCourses also provides Panorama, which evaluates the accessibility of your Word, PowerPoint, PDF, and HTML files and provides you with recommendations, instructions for remediating content, and quick fixes.  Panorama also offers students the option to obtain alternate formats for content.  The Microsoft Office Products include accessibility checkers that you can use before uploading files to MyCourses. 

Videos hosted in the integrated Kaltura environment are automatically machine captioned and for cases where Disability Services requires professional captions as an accommodation, Information Technology (IT) can assist with ordering professional captions. IT can also assist with adding sign language interpreters to a course.  Your Zoom sessions can be live-captioned.  Zoom recordings are automatically captioned and added to Kaltura. 

Beyond accessibility, you may want to consider using Universal Design Principles (UDL) when designing your course.  These principles go beyond the mechanics of what might need to be done to make course content accessible and includes recommendations for offering content in multiple formats and multiple ways to assess student learning. 

The use of UDL principles helps to ensure that our courses are ready for a diverse body of learners–not just those with a disclosed disability–English language learners, learners with temporary mobility issues, aging learners, etc. 

To learn more visit UDL on Campus and consider reading Advancing online teaching: creating equity-based digital learning environments.

Information Technology (IT) offers 1-1 consultations and an event calendar.