Accessibility Guides for Teachers

Making your digital materials accessible can help anyone with a documented disability, but it will also help everyone: people developing their English language skills, people using older technologies to access the internet, people in very loud or very quiet environments where speech is difficult or impossible to understand, for example.

Why Accessibility?

Video example of what using a screen reader is like

Guides to Accessibility in Canvas

Canvas supports a number of screen-readers, and can be operated through keyboard shortcuts. Canvas conforms with the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WAI WCAG) 2.0 AA and Section 508 guidelines.

More information can be found at this Guide to Accessibility within Canvas.

• General Accessibility Guidelines

• Accessibility in Canvas - Duke University Teacher Guide

• Accessibility Posters

• Printable Tips for Accessible Design

• ALT-Tag Decision Tree - This decision tree describes how to use the alt attribute of the <img> element in various situations. For some types of images, there are alternative approaches, such as using CSS background images for decorative images or web fonts instead of images of text.

UDOIT Advantage

UDOIT (Pronounced “You Do It”) is a course-level accessibility checker, built to help you create more inclusive and usable course experiences for students in Canvas. UDOIT  works by scanning your entire course, identifying possible accessibility issues, and guiding you in repairing those issues using inclusive design principles.

(UDOIT stands for Universal Design Online Inspection Tool.)

UDOIT Advantage User Guides

Making Documents Accessible

• Video: Top 7 Accessibility Features in Google Docs and Slides

• Making PDFs Accessible in Adobe Acrobat

Zoom

Making Zoom meetings more accessible - Yale University

Panopto

Panopto Captions -

All videos uploaded to Panopto automatically have machine-generated captions added to them. While these captions are always improving, they are not considered ADA-compliant. If you have a student who needs accurate captioning, you can edit the machine-generated captions yourself, or request professional captioning (recommended).

If you have a student who requires ADA-compliant captions, please contact TLC.

Panopto Notes -

Let students or viewers share notes directly in Panopto. For many students, notes are an essential study aid. However, not all students can pay attention to a lecture or video and take notes at the same time. Learn more at How to Take Notes (opens in a new tab). The benefit to using Panopto for collective note-taking over something like Google Docs is that the notes are easily found any time someone views the video (notes are attached to the video itself).

Who this helps

• Students with auditory processing problems whose notes may be sparse or unclear

• Deaf and hard of hearing people who need to watch captions

• Students with physical disabilities who find typing or writing difficult

Who this also helps

• Note-takers who may benefit from better focus, comprehension, and retention

• Everyone who uses notes as a study aid

Closed Captioning

If you have a need for professional closed-captioned for videos or transcripts to videos, please contact NCSSM's Teaching, Learning, & Curriculum Support Team (TLC).

Additional Professional Development

• Quality Matters Accessibility & Usability Resource Site (Canvas Course)

• Designing for Accessibility at NCSSM - Self-paced Canvas course

• Create a personalized Accessibility Playlist to learn ways you can improve - you will be prompted to make a copy of a Google doc

• Dyslexia Empowerment in Schools

Accessibility Information for Commonly Used Technology at NCSSM

Accessibility Guides for Technology Commonly Used at NCSSM