Supporting accessibility in your classroom begins with your course materials. While you will work with Student Accessibility Services to provide legally required accommodations for individual students, it can be extremely beneficial to think proactively about how accessible (and inclusive) your course can be.
On our team, we like to frame this work as Liberatory Access, drawing on disability scholar and activist Mia Mingus’s definition of the term: “access that is more than simply having a ramp or being scent free or providing captions. Access … done in the service of love, justice, connection and community” (Mia Mingus, “‘Disability Justice’ is Simply Another Term for Love”).
Liberatory access calls upon us to create different values for accessibility than we have historically had. It demands that the responsibility for access shifts from being an individual responsibility to a collective responsibility. That access shifts from being silencing to freeing; from being isolating to connecting; from hidden and invisible to visible; from burdensome to valuable; from a resentful obligation to an opportunity; from shameful to powerful; from [rigid] to creative. It’s the “good” kind of access, the moments when we are pleasantly surprised and feel seen. It is a way of doing access that transforms both our “today” and our “tomorrow.” In this way, Liberatory access both resists against the world we don’t want and actively builds the world we do want.
Mia Mingus, Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice
To support Dartmouth’s commitment to ensuring accessibility for all, we developed this guide to provide recommendations and resources for creating accessible materials. Contact ldi@dartmouth.edu if you have any questions or feedback.
Guiding Principles for Accessible Materials
Use well-organized visual and structural design
Practices include:
- Creating a logical hierarchy with heading styles
- Providing a Table of Contents with anchors for longer documents
- Including page numbers
- Using tables for data and relational information not for document layout
Ensure all information is perceivable to users
Practices include:
- Ensuring that you are using colors with distinguishable contrast
- Avoid using only color to convey information
- When hyperlinking, use descriptive links which provide context
- Ensuring that your links are a contrasting color from the surrounding text and preferably underlined
- Including alternative (alt) text for images; if an image is an object of study, consider creating a longer image description
- Including header rows in all tables
Use clear and understandable content
Practices include:
- Explaining acronyms and abbreviations
- Explaining jargon, figures of speech, idioms, or slang
- Providing literal text alternatives or define any unusual words or concepts
Offer users multiple means to access and engage with information
Practices include:
- Using tools that allow keyboard access for interactive navigation
- Ensuring that there are accurate captions for audiovisual content
- Providing accurate and readable transcripts for audio content.
- Checking that PDFs are text-searchable and readable by assistive technology
- When possible, providing documents that have customizable text (size, font, color, etc.)
Tool-Specific Resources
Canvas
- Scan courses and fix accessibility errors using UDOIT *Learning Lab recommends
- Improve accessibility on pages (Accessibility Checker)
Panopto
- Add captions and edit captions for videos
Zoom
- Manage captions for meetings and recordings
Google Workspace
- Make your Docs and Slides accessible
Microsoft Office
- Improve accessibility for Word, PowerPoint Excel, Outlook (Accessibility Checker)
SensusAccess
- Convert documents into a variety of alternative formats including audio books (mp3, and DAISY), e-books (ePub, ePub3, Mobi), and digital Braille.
Adobe Acrobat (PDFs)
- Create accessible PDFs that are text-searchable, legible and optimized for screen readers
Related Resources
Resources on this site are created by Dartmouth ITC’s Learning Design and Innovation team. If you have comments, questions, or feedback, please email ldi@dartmouth.edu. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 license — meaning anyone copy and redistribute the material as long as you give appropriate credit and do not use the material for commercial purposes (by Trustees of Dartmouth College). Other contributors are cited on each resource. Please give credit where credit is due.