In September 2016, UC Berkeley made news for considering taking down their free MOOCs rather than making them accessible. The full Department of Justice letter cites Berkeley for inaccessible links, videos without captions, lack of alternate text on images and visuals, poor formatting of documents, and using inaccessible websites. UC Berkeley responded with a statement of their own, claiming that… Read more →
Blackboard’s Discussion Boards are a great place to build community among your students and to mimic face-to-face classroom discussion in hybrid or online courses. The asynchronous nature of online discussions allows students to reflect on their responses before posting them and can help more reserved students feel comfortable participating. A Forum is a site where instructors and students can hold… Read more →
Text and Textbooks/Readings Is your adopted textbook available in a digital format? Is your course pack available digitally, or have you informed your students which books you took chapters from and the original page numbers? Are your syllabus, journal articles and other text content arranged in one-column formats, and saved as Word documents or accessible PDFs? Are you using 12… Read more →
Why? This guide will show you how to link your Vista Higher Learning course Supersite with your Blackboard course. This allows your rosters to stay in sync and allows students to easily access their Supersite assignments through the Blackboard course. Not only does this method contribute to students’ feeling of consistency across their courses but it also helps ensure that… Read more →
When most people think of accessibility, they might think of something like a wheelchair-accessible bathroom stall, or a ramp instead of stairs. When we talk about online or web accessibility, we have other considerations to keep in mind: tasks which one user might take as second nature are very difficult or impossible for another user. The best way to accommodate… Read more →
Have you ever watched a foreign language film or TV show and the captions stopped working for a moment or two? It’s a very frustrating experience, especially if you were riveted to the show and you’re missing pertinent information. It’s important to create captions for all video content you create, and to make sure that the captions are accurate. You may… Read more →
Post-secondary institutions are required to grant all students equal access to course materials and information. When you use images in your PowerPoint presentations, class documents, or other media, you risk making your course inaccessible to certain groups of students. The way to make images accessible to all students is by creating alternative text, or alt text, which describes the image. Alt… Read more →
When creating content for your course, whether online or face-to-face, it is important that you ensure all of your students have equal access to the material presented. We’ve referred to this concept before as universal design. Making documents accessible is very simple, because Microsoft provides tools for creating accessible content in Word, Excel, and in PowerPoint. General Tips Although there are specific do’s… Read more →
It’s very fun to create vibrant, decorative PowerPoint presentations, but it’s important not to go overboard. Aesthetics are nice, but the end goal of your course is to teach your students. If the color contrast, images, etc. are getting in the way of the content, it’s time to rethink your design. Additionally, although slide transitions can be exciting, they can… Read more →
Microsoft has published an exhaustive article pertaining to screen readers and Word, and many of the conventions content creators use can apply to Word just as they would to HTML or other documents. There are, of course, some techniques specific to Word, which will be addressed here. Microsoft has also released a short video discussing accessibility and Word: Reading Order and… Read more →
