Accessibility in Course Content
Universal Design for Learning
As described in Chapter 3, you can design your course to be accessible through the way(s) in which you present that content, applying the guidelines of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), “a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn.”[1]
UDL states that you can improve education for all learners by designing multiple ways of engaging with your course’s content. There are various ways to implement UDL in your teaching:
- Represent ideas from different angles and in different media types to accommodate the diverse needs of learners.
- Provide support for students to express their understanding of concepts in different ways.
- Allow students to engage in different ways by providing a variety of assignment types.[2]
As the BC Campus OER Accessibility Toolkit (2015) explains, UDL principles can be applied to accessibility as well as learning. The toolkit provides the following examples for instructors:[3]
- Design resources that can be accessed by learners in a variety of ways. If there is a text component, provide the ability to enlarge the font size or change the text color.
- Design multiple ways for learners to engage with information and demonstrate their knowledge.
- Identify activities that require specific sensory or physical capability and for which it might be difficult to accommodate the accessibility needs of learners (e.g., color matching activities).
As an educator, thinking about UDL as a process tied to the creation, sharing, and use of course content is essential. How can you get started? Think about one small step you might implement each semester.
Digital Accessibility: Image & Text Readability
Whenever you are presenting content to students, it’s important to check whether the text in your course content is recognizable to a computer as text. For PDFs, accurate optical character recognition (OCR) is often required to make the text understandable. Screen-readers require this information to accurately relay text back to students.
In April 2024, a new rule was added to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) for Title II institutions setting the minimum standards for digital content conformance of all web content, including text, images, sound, videos, and documents. All digital course materials need to meet accessibility standards. The best practices listed in the sections below will support you in this process.
Use heading levels (h1, h2, h3)
Text-based content should always have a clear and logical structure. Using headings and other structural elements to organize your resource can make it easier for all learners to access and understand the material. Many editing tools support table of contents (TOC) generation based on where these section markers are placed. This can help students navigate to a specific chapter or section of a text, especially if the digital version of the resource has