UVM OA – Course Accessibility Services for Faculty
CTL Teaching with Accessibility in Mind
Guidelines for Accessible Course Materials
Use proper headings in documents
Word documents, PDFs, articles, and websites you link to should all provide appropriate headings. Imagine that you have a visual impairment, and you are using a screen reader to navigate a long article. When the page is structured with clear, descriptive headings, you can press a shortcut (like “H”) to jump through them. They allow you to skim the page structure and jump directly to the section you need just as sighted users can scan visually. However, with no headers, all words must be read from beginning to end with no opportunity to choose a single section for review.
Heading tags give your pages a hierarchy as follows:
H1: Title (only one H1 should exist in any document)
H2: Main section names
H3: Sub-sections
H4: Sub-sub-sections
and so on.... H5, H6...
Caption videos and transcribe audio resources
Provide captions for all video content and transcripts for audio recordings used in instruction. (The Office of Accessibility has a captioning service to help)
Avoid scanned “image” PDFs
Ensure all digital materials have selectable, machine-readable text. The Office of Accessibility can help convert your documents - use this form to make a request.
Structure documents with headings using high-contrast colors. Use heading styles in Word, PDFs, PowerPoint, and in the Brightspace text editor. This organizes your content hierarchically and makes it accessible to students using screen readers. (See Microsoft's guide to making accessible documents)
Use alternative text and descriptions for visual content
Add meaningful alt text to images, charts, and other visual elements within documents and presentations. (See WebAIM page on accessible images and how to write effective alt tags.)
Use Brightspace's Anthology Ally
Visit our page on Anthology Ally to learn about it's features and how it can help both you and your students.
Use Brightspace's Accessibility Checker
This Knowledge Base Article shows where to find the checker and what it will do for instructors.