Five Essential Accessibility Tips As You Move Courses Online

As faculty across the nation find themselves quickly adapting their on-ground courses to remote learning due to COVID-19, they may also find themselves having to quickly adapt content for universal design. It is absolutely critical that your course content is as accessible as possible. This is not a time to cut corners. On the contrary. Given that nearly 100% of students will be immersed in remote learning for the foreseeable future - either by choice or not - you are almost assured to have up to 20% of your students identify as having a physical or learning disability. In some cases, this number could be even higher depending on their age and other conditions. Remember, too, that a variety of students leverage accessible content, including the physically disabled, international/non-native-language speaking students, veterans suffering from PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury, and students with dyslexia and color-blindness - the so-called invisible disabilities. Even nondisabled students regularly leverage universally-designed content. With that in mind, here are my top five essential accessibility tips that every faculty member should exercise as they migrate content to this format. Bear in mind that many, if not all of these strategies apply equally to on-ground courses as well. Note, too that these are only cursory suggestions to help kick-start the process of developing universally-designed content. To truly develop accessible content and courses requires a bigger lift than you may be able to accomplish without specialized assistance. Seek your accessibility specialists on your campus to learn what training, resources, and tools you have available.

Tip 1: Microsoft Office is Your Friend

The newest version of Office (365) includes many amazing accessibility features and enhancements. Most of the basic accessibility features are easy to use - even for the newbie. And since the majority of course materials are usually Word or PowerPoint, you'll normally be able to make a big dent in your content conversion. To do this, simply run the Check Accessibility tool from the Review ribbon located in any of the Office products. Guided feedback and suggestions help you correct deficiencies. There is even an Artificial Intelligence engine that scans your images and photos and provides an alternative description suggestion. Take advantage of this feature for all your Office documents before you upload them. It's simple and easy to use.

Tip 2: Acrobat Can Be Problematic

As tempting and easy as it can be, never upload a photocopied PDF, such as a page from a book. You might be surprised how often this occurs. Scanned or photocopied PDF files are completely inaccessible and should be avoided. Using certain products, the photocopied PDF can be "OCRd" so that assistive technology can read them. If you do not have access to Acrobat DC - normally required to make accessible PDF files - then your next best option is to simply use Google Drive.

1. To add your documents to Google Drive, first go into your Drive account.
2. On the My Drive page, click the My Drive button next to the New button on the left side of the page.
3. Select Upload Files. Use the Upload files option to upload a file to Google Drive.
4. Find the file that you want to convert from PDF or image to text. Click the Open button. The document now appears in your Google Drive.
5. Right-click on the document to bring up a drop-down menu. Click the Open with option and click Google Docs.
6. A sheet icon appears while the file is downloading. Google is now in the process of converting your PDF or image file to OCR text. The file will open in Google Docs with the PDF converted to text, but with little formatting applied. You can now edit and format the new text file using Docs. You can also export it to Word.

Tip 3: You Need Video Captions. NO Exceptions

Captions are a federal mandate. Even nondisabled students use captions. We really strive for 99%+ caption accuracy. However, this can be difficult without a captioning service. And since the captioning services are backlogged as universities migrate thousands of hours of video online in only a matter of days, you often have few options. At the very least, you should utilize automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies. YouTube, Panopto, Kaltura, Zoom, Flipgrid, Stream, and others all provide this technology natively. While the accuracy is often far less than 99%, you can easily edit these captions to improve fidelity. Consider this automation the 'big lift', but you will want to clean up the obvious garbles and misinterpretations. To improve audio quality, improve your microphone. A simple over-the-ear microphone that is not tethered to the computer is a great solution. The better the microphone, the better the ASR. Remember, too, that packaged videos such as TED talks are already captioned.

Tip 4: Familiarize Yourself With Your LMS

Most learning management systems include built-in accessibility checkers. These are used to scan text that is typed directly into the system, such as pages, discussions, quizzes, announcements, and assignments. Locate the accessibility tool for your LMS and engage the check on each content element. While these checkers often do not automatically correct the problems, they will provide guided feedback.

Tip 5: Avoid Fancy Stuff. Stick to Simple

As tempting as it may be to add lots of bold, oblique, colors, and other stylistic type elements, try to refrain from doing so. Screen readers often can't distinguish these stylized elements. Instead, keep your typeface (a particular design of type) and fonts (the type in a particular size and weight) consistent, simple and uncluttered. Normally a sans-serif typeface is fine when it's available, but certain serif typefaces work as well. If you need to draw attention to type elements, train yourself to insert the word "Important" or "Note" preceding the text. Remember, too, that colors are often indistinguishable to someone with color-blindness. Therefore, adding red to type to draw attention may translate to gray for someone with visual impairments. Line length is also important. Avoid line lengths longer than 60 characters. People with dyslexia often have trouble tracking and eye-sweeping long lines of text. Finally, avoid using the words "click here" and other non-descriptive hyperlinks. Hyperlinks should accurately denote their destination without listing the entire URL

Bonus tip: Design for Mobile

Make sure all your content is mobile friendly. Many disabled students rely on mobile devices almost exclusively given the wealth of apps that are available. Anything developed for online needs to be tested for mobile access. Simply download your LMS app > open your course > and ensure your content is responsive to the device size and OS.