Course Materials

Key Strategies to Develop Accessible Course Materials

Why is this so important?

  • UConn is committed to providing equal opportunities for all students and is required to do so under the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and state law.
  • In addition to this legal obligation, accessibility allows learners to engage fully with their classes, peers, and faculty. Accessible learning allows individuals to obtain the most out of their UConn experience, and ultimately ensures that education is inclusive and available to everyone.

Who does this apply to?

  • Instructors: To ensure that all members of the UConn community have equal access to course materials, it’s important for faculty to plan ahead and place their textbook orders through UConn’s partnership with Barnes & Noble in a timely manner. This gives Barnes & Noble the necessary lead time to work with publishers and make any necessary format accommodations. Providing course content in multiple formats, including but not limited to documents (such as Word, PowerPoint, and PDF documents), videos, audio, images, and websites, can also improve accessibility and ensure equal participation.
  • Publishers: One way publishers can support accessibility is by providing course content in multiple formats, including, but is not limited to: PDFs, Word documents, videos, and eBooks. Such formats offer various accessibility features, such as the ability to magnify text, adjust line spacing, and wrap text when resizing windows.

Essential Practices for Faculty

It’s important to provide an accessible platform for students and instructors for equal access to online courses. There are essential practices you should be aware of as a faculty member when designing course materials and online content for students.

For additional resources and self-paced trainings based on your content type, jump to the External Resources section of this page.

Ally Accessibility Checks

Run content through Ally to ensure content accessibility.

Let Ally systematically check course material to ensure content meets WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards while guiding remediation tasks. Ally also provides students with accessible alternative formats for their various needs.

Meaningful Titles

Give all course content a specific and meaningful title.

Any folders, modules, documents, tests, or other content need clear titles understandable to everyone. It helps organize learning and navigation while reducing cognitive overload.

Describe Content

Add meaningful content descriptions for intentionality.

Images must include concise yet valuable alternative text to describe their purpose. Images with purely visual appeal need to be marked as decorative.

Links need contextual descriptions without using generic words like “Click here” or “See more” that read as spam. URL or web addresses cannot be used as link display texts.

File attachments should be renamed to something more readable when they are uploaded. Keep it short while retaining essential information for students.

Audio and video require both appropriately readable name replacements and alt text to describe the content when uploaded. Keep name changes brief yet informative.

Text Styles

Use text styles in the content editor to support readability and structure.

Heading levels organize content for structure and hierarchy. Always work in descending order from the first level (H1) to the last (H6) without ever skipping.

Font formats are set to 14pt text size with a default font family of Open Sans. A few other sans-serif font like Arial and Verdana can be selected.

Formatted lists have options for unordered bullets and ordered numbers or letters. Never manually create a list using special characters.

Table Headers

Tables need to be informative with proper inclusion of headers.

Create tables with meaningful data and don’t rely on it for page layouts. Ensure table headers are selected in the settings based on data in rows or columns. Use true tables with headers to organize information. This makes it easier to read and understand relationships between data, which enhance accessibility for those using assistive technologies, and allows for easier data manipulation and analysis.

For more information on true tables, view the self-paced learning on accessible documents.

Multimedia Captions

Include captions that describe multimedia content.

Captions and transcripts should be accurate for audio in multimedia content. This ensures students with hearing impairments have equal access to consume the content.

Captioning and transcribing videos and audio files not only help make content accessible to those who are deaf or hard of hearing, but can benefit anyone, including those who prefer to read along with the audio, or those who speak a different language. For more information on captions and accessible video content, view the self-paced learning on accessible video and audio.

Color Contrast

Check colors for sufficient contrast in readability.

In many cases dark colors on light backgrounds and vice-versa provide great contrast. However, it’s always best to check this with a contrast checker tool keeping in mind a 4.5:1 minimum ratio. For more information on color contrast, view the self-paced learning on accessible colors.

The content editor will always meet this criteria with the provided colors on a white background. Avoid altering this too much to maintain sufficient contrast.

Additional Considerations

When relevant, consider the following:

Use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) when creating PDFs from scanned materials. Doing so makes the document searchable and selectable, allowing individuals with visual impairments to more easily access and use the information through screen readers or other assistive technology. It also makes the information more readily accessible for search and indexing purposes. 

For more information on OCR and accessible PDFs, view the self-paced learning on accessible PDFs.

Use accessibility checkers to help identify potential barriers to accessibility, such as missing alt text for images, improperly structured headings, poor color contrast, and accessibility issues. 

For a comprehensive list of accessibility checkers and tools, view the Accessibility Tools section under Resources.

For those in STEM disciplines using LaTeX to develop course material and written papers, note the following top best practices:

  • Use sectioning commands such as \section and \subsection for structure.
  • Use real LaTeX math commands; do not insert equation screenshots.
  • Use captions for every figure and table.
  • Write long descriptions for charts, maps, diagrams, and complex images.
  • Use true data tables, not tables for visual layout.
  • Use descriptive links instead of “click here.”
  • Avoid custom macros unless the conversion workflow has been tested.

For more information and examples by discipline, view the Self-Paced Training on Accessible LaTeX.

External Resources

Resources by Content Type

PDF Conversion

Microsoft Word

Microsoft PowerPoint

Microsoft Excel

Images

Video & Audio