Accessibility


Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is very important for all students. There are numerous resources as to how to make your content accessible to people with disabilities. Also, when you make material accessible, you help all students. For example, you might have a learner who prefers to read a transcript over watching a video.

Documents

Websites

Pages that contain course content in Moodle and Canvas are set up similarly to web pages with links, images, tables, and other website basics. The ADA requirements for web pages also apply in each of your course content pages in these learning management systems.

Videos

Captioning, transcripts, and audio description of visuals

Present content in multiple forms, for example, consider the following:

  • You have an image on a page in Moodle or Canvas - provide a detailed description of the image in the text that follows it or as alt-text in the HTML on the page. You might need help locating this feature in your page editor and one of the ETMD members can help you locate this option.
  • You have a text-only module - provide a video option with captions that reviews the text-only content.
  • You have a text-only interactive -  provide an audio narration and captions as well.

Helpful checklist:

Checklist for ADA Compliance in Online Courses

This checklist is downloadable in the link provided above. This checklist covers the following items in online courses:

  • Provide wording for the links instead of saying "click here"
  • Use text descriptions for the links
  • Use sans serif fonts for readability
  • Use dark font colors on light backgrounds
  • Avoiding extremely bring colors in the background
  • Use one font throughout the entire site
  • Avoid the use of all caps, bold, or italics
  • Avoid underlining words unless they are navigation links
  • Make clear images
  • Image files are optimized to load quickly
  • Use of animated images are limited to those that are directly involved in the learning experience
  • Avoid animated, blinking, moving images, texts, or cursors
  • All images have alt-text descriptions attached to them
  • Audio and video quality are clear
  • Audio and video are downloadable
  • Written transcripts are provided
  • Audio and video players can be used on Mac, PC, and Linux and all major browsers
  • Closed-captioning is provided

Resources on Accessibility