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Accessibility by Design

Accessibility by Design Faculty Responsibilities

Faculty play a vital role in producing content for the university, whether it’s for instructional or research purposes. Faculty are expected to ensure that any content they’re creating and distributing is accessible at least to a base level. This baseline of accessibility is an essential step towards meeting required WCAG compliance standards. Students who need full accessibility will receive additional support from the SDC.

How to Prioritize

You likely won’t be able to fix all of your content at once. Consider these options to help you prioritize.

  1. If your student has a “Base Level Accessibility of Course Materials” accommodation, prioritize fixing any Scanned PDFs you have in the course. This is the least accessible format and will create the most barriers for the most students.
  2. Try to stay at least a couple weeks ahead of when readings or coursework are due so students are able to complete the work in an equal timeframe to other students in the course.
  3. If your student has a “Captioning” or “Audio Description” accommodation, prioritize the tasks for Multimedia. These steps will simplify the process for the captioning support team. Make sure to coordinate with the captioning team as far as possible in advance.

Make sure you replace old content with the new versions so they will be available for all students going forward and reduce the need for individual accommodations in the future.

If you still need assistance prioritizing or understanding your tasks after you have reviewed the tutorials on this website, please email CSU IT Accessibility Support. For multimedia questions, please email TILT Caption and Audio Description Support.

Types of Content

Scanned PDF

Scanned PDF is the most inaccessible type of document and the highest priority to fix. This applies to PDFs that contain only images of text, not to PDFs converted from other programs.

  • Ensure the copy is clear and legible. If not, find or make a new copy.
  • Run text recognition using one of these tools:
    • Free Adobe OCR Tool
    • Adobe Acrobat Professional (licensed through College IT)
    • Anthology Ally – a new tool within Canvas that will be available soon!

Please see the tutorials on Scanned PDF for how to use these tools.

All Other Document Types

These concepts apply to multiple document types, including Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Canvas, and web content.

Please note that alternative presentation tools have significant accessibility concerns and should be avoided.

  • Use accessible templates and layouts
  • Use colors with good contrast
  • Use headings and slide titles to provide document structure
  • Make links descriptive
  • Provide alternative text for simple images
  • Use accessibility checkers
  • Give documents descriptive file names

See the tutorials on implementing these concepts in specific platforms:

Multimedia

These items are top priority for students that have captioning or audio description accommodations.

Creating Content:

  • Create good quality audio recordings 
  • Ensure that any text in videos has sufficient contrast 
  • Describe visual content orally as much as possible 

Sharing Content:

  • Avoid Canvas’ built-in media player 
  • Use Echo360 or Kaltura to post video and audio content in Canvas 
    • Enable captions and transcripts for download 
  • If using YouTube videos, ensure that auto-generated captions are enabled 
  • Ensure that podcasts or radio broadcasts have transcripts, or that auto-transcripts are available for audio-only content 

See the tutorials for Multimedia.