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What is Accessibility?

Throughout this course you will be guided in creating accessible course materials. There are two kinds of accessibility to keep in mind:

  1. Technical accessibility: are your course materials literally accessible? Are your external links all working?
  2. General accessibility: can your course be effectively taken by anyone, regardless of ability?

Technical accessibility is easy to achieve by simply (a) using Canvas, which takes care of a lot of the work for you and, (b) testing your course, particularly using Student View Links to an external site. and the Canvas Link Validator Links to an external site..

General accessibility is more complex and involves ensuring that:

  • Documents use common formats and are well-structured, tagged, and designed for alternative interfaces such as screen readers used by the visually impaired
  • The information conveyed by graphs, charts, infographics and other complex visual media is provided in other forms
  • Images have "alt text" for screen readers
  • Multimedia is captioned or accompanied by transcripts

Canvas at UWT provides tools to help ensure accessibility, including visual indicators associated with specific items where accessibility can be improved and a Course Accessibility Report Links to an external site. you can run to find areas for improvement.

As you work through this course we will provide guidance on the specifics of creating accessible materials,  including Canvas pages, Word documents, PDF files, videos, etc.

Additional Training Opportunity

We highly recommend the UW Bothell Accessibility 101 - Principles of Inclusive Design course that provides online training for UW faculty. This is an excellent self-paced course that walks you through: 

  • Accessibility basics and Universal Design for Learning
  • Creating accessible documents and email
  • Accessible web content
  • Accessible Canvas content