Things You Can Do Right Now To Make Your Course More Accessible
Committing to accessible design and teaching means being both proactive and responsive. While 100% accessibility is impossible, here are a few things you can do right now to make your course more accessible.
Use built-in accessible features
- MS Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Canvas have built-in accessibility checkers that can help instructors build accessible content from the ground up. See the following Microsoft and Canvas Checkers resources for more information:
- Microsoft: Improve accessibility with the Accessibility Checker Links to an external site.
- Canvas has two checkers:
- Accessibility Checker in the Rich Text Editor Links to an external site. – checks content directly added to Canvas and images.
- Ally Links to an external site. – dual use checker; it checks all uploaded faculty files to a Canvas course and provides alternate converted formats to students.
Use less PDFs
- PDFs natively tend to be the least accessible type of document. Canvas pages, on the other hand, use HTML-based text - a highly accessible format. Well-formatted Word, Excel, and PowerPoint resources are also more accessible than PDFs. The links below provide overviews of how to create accessible Canvas pages and MS Office resources.
- To be accessible, PDFs need to be "tagged". This means that it has tags which identify types content (e.g., body text, headings, lists, tables, etc.), which helps screen readers do their job. Without tags, a PDF is essentially a bunch of text to a screenreader. Printing to PDF from a web browser does not produce a tagged PDF - you must tag the document yourself. Sound onerous? It is!...which is why we discourage the use of PDFs. The UW Accessibility website provides guidance on how to check PDFs for accessibility Links to an external site.. If you create PDF scans for students, follow these UW recommendations for high quality scans Links to an external site..
Use the "permalink" for library articles
- Many library database articles offer HTML, PDF, or audio versions of articles. The direct link to the article is called a "permalink." After selecting your article, click on the "Permalink" icon 1 , and select the "Copy the Permalink to Clipboard" link. 2 You can use this link in your course to connect learners to the article. Note: Learners will need to log in to the library to access the permalink.
Use best practices for scanning content
- Follow the UW's practices for creating high-quality scans Links to an external site. to increase the accessibility of your scanned content.
Scan your Canvas course for broken links
- The Link Validation tool Links to an external site. in Canvas can help you identify broken links in your course. To access the tool, click on the "Settings" link in your Course Navigation Menu and then click on the "Validate Links in Content" option.
Learn more about accessibility
- Check out the this Get started with accessibility Links to an external site. resource from the UW Accessibility website.