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.
ALT-Tag Decision Tree - This decision tree describes how to use the
altattribute 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.)
Making Documents Accessible
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
Note-takers who may benefit from better focus, comprehension, and retention
Everyone who uses notes as a study aid
Captioning
Zoom Meeting Captions
We recommend using Zoom captions during all Zoom meetings.
Zoom’s built-in speech recognition transcribes spoken words automatically.
To Turn On: Click the Show Captions icon on the bottom meeting toolbar. (If you don't see it, click More
...to find it).Selecting Spoken Language: Click the ^ (up arrow) next to Show Captions, select Caption language, and choose the language being spoken in the meeting.
Captions in Classrooms
Option 1: Live Captions in Google Slides
When sharing slides, we recommend enabling live captions on screen.
It is also a popular "classroom hack" among teachers to use Google Slides as a free, real-time captioning engine for live lectures, even when no actual slides are involved.
Because Google Slides relies on Chrome’s built-in speech recognition, you can run a blank presentation in the background to project live subtitles onto a classroom screen or smartboard while you speak.
Step-by-Step Instructions
Start Your Presentation: Open your deck in Google Slides and click Slideshow (or Present) in the top-right corner.
Turn On Captions:
Hover over the bottom-left corner of your screen to bring up the presenter toolbar.
Click the
CC(Captions) icon.
Allow Microphone Access: If prompted by your browser, click Allow so Google Slides can pick up your voice.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Windows / ChromeOS:
Ctrl+Shift+CMac:
Cmd+Shift+C
Customizing Caption Appearance
Click the ^ arrow next to the CC icon on the presenter toolbar to tweak your view:
Position: Display text at the Top or Bottom of the screen.
Text Size: Choose between Small, Medium, Large, or X-Large.
Note: Live captions require an active internet connection and work best when using the Google Chrome browser. Captions are visible to everyone viewing your screen, but they are not saved to the presentation file.
Captions for Videos
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