UVM wants to recognize that faculty on this campus work hard at providing students with access to a wide variety of top-flight digital materials in order to make UVM courses and coursework come alive and stay relevant in the modern educational setting. In many cases, this entails creating and curating a large body of readings, data sets, activities, handouts, and multimedia that pertain to each individual course. And UVM faculty each teach many courses every semester, making them responsible for sharing and explaining a huge amount of learning materials.
The process of ensuring that all these materials become and stay accessible under the new Title II ADA guidelines is going to take a collaborative, campus-wide approach to auditing, education, remediation, and sustainability.
Auditing Your Course Materials
There are three key ways to begin auditing your course materials to ensure they're accessible: 1) take stock of what you have and currently use; 2) create a priority plan for remediating your materials, and 3) as you choose new course materials, ensure you're choosing accessible learning materials.
Take Stock of What You Currently Use: Is It Accessible?
As you lay out your courses in Brightspace for the semester, take notice of which materials you're adding as readings, syllabi, datasets, and multimedia, and determine whether it's already accessible.
Accessible Course Materials
- For videos, this means human-edited closed captions.
- For audio files, this means a text transcript.
- For Word documents and PowerPoint slides, this means all accessibility errors have been resolved via the Microsoft Accessibility Assistant, plus color contrast has been checked, and the document has a title in the metadata, and the language is set.
- For faculty-created .pdfs and third-party .pdfs, this means that the .pdf is accessible as evaluated by Adobe Acrobat, Foxit Editor Pro, or a similar .pdf editing tool. Please note: as of Fall 2026, faculty are encouraged to either make use of OAS' PDF remediation service, or seek guidance from their home departments as to how each department is planning on organizing .pdf remediation. UVM is aiming to provide faculty with an upgraded accessibility remediation tool in Brightspace as of January 2027 to support .pdf remediation.
Please visit the Accessibility Standards for Digital Course Materials page for more guidance on how to make individual course materials accessible, by type.
Create A Priority Plan for Remediation
Every faculty member at UVM has a full plate with teaching, research, and service, and we want to recognize that everything won't be ready all at once. So to make this process manageable, prioritize making the materials you use and/or create for current classes over materials in previous classes. UVM will share guidance in late Fall 2026 around how to prioritize remediation of previous class materials.
Ensure You're Choosing Accessible Learning Materials
As part of the auditing process, we're asking faculty members to spend a moment making sure that as they curate third-party content to include in courses, that they choose the most accessible materials available.
Instructors are not responsible for ensuring that an independent museum’s entire website is fully accessible, for example, nor would an inaccessible webpage automatically mean that it could not be linked in Brightspace.
The key question is whether students can access the specific content needed to participate in the course activity.
If the linked page contains required information or images that are not accessible, the professor should provide an accessible way for students to obtain the same information—for example, through image descriptions, an accessible document, or a comparable alternative source. If the link is optional or supplemental, the concern would generally be lower.
In short, faculty may link to external resources they do not control, but they should consider the accessibility of the specific material students are expected to use and ensure that an effective alternative is available when necessary. The link within Brightspace should also be clearly and meaningfully labeled.
Learn About Accessibility
UVM is committed to providing learning opportunities for faculty, staff, and students around digital accessibility. For faculty, the UVM Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) is offering a series of workshops in Fall 2026: Creating Accessible Learning Materials (CALM) Workshops. CTL's CALM Courses workshops focus on why digital accessibility matters, introduces a framework for creating accessible courses, and shares the institutional resources that are available to support this work.
Remediate Your Course Materials
As you notice digital accessibility barriers in your course materials (and those produced by third parties), either go through and fix, or remediate, the issues, or make use of OAS' remediation services.
Some Quick Accessibility Fixes
- Ensure all meaningful images have meaningful alt-text.
- Ensure all videos with dialogue have fully accurate closed captions.
- Ensure all videos with no dialogue have audio-described versions available.
- Ensure all podcasts or audio files have readable text transcripts.
- Check that Word documents, PowerPoint slides, and Excel spreadsheets, are fully accessible, per the Microsoft Accessibility Assistant.
- If you have access to Adobe Acrobat Pro, Foxit Editor Pro, or Allyant, verify that your .pdfs are fully accessible.
OAS Remediation Services
OAS offers several types of digital accessibility remediation services. Namely:
All services are provided to campus instructors and departments free of charge.
Work With Your Department or College on Creating Sustainable Support for Accessibility
Campus instructors aren't alone in needing to learn how to incorporate digital accessibility into everyday workflows. UVM staff need to learn to create and remediate digital materials, and departments are responsible for ensuring continuous access to accessible digital materials for students, staff, and faculty, as well as creating ways to support digital accessibility as a common practice, moving forwards.
OAS recommends that instructors ask their departments to share accessibility planning and workflow documents and strategies as UVM moves into this era of enhanced digital accessibility.