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 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 as does Adobe Acrobat that you can use before uploading files to MyCourses.
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.
