Accessibility and Universal Design

The goal of Accessibility in education is truly about making available, or accessible, everything you as an instructor will use to teach. This might seem like a daunting task, but it's only daunting if you think of it as something extra, rather than something for everyone's benefit.

The idea of Universal Design is that when you plan your course and content, you are making with the most understandable vehicles for learning. What you develop will also be accessible content.

To further support this, Canvas conveniently has built in Accessibility Checker. When you check "Edit" and enter the Rich Content Editor, it is available as the person in a circle icon.

Accessibility Checker in Canvas is located on the right side of the page

For a step-by-step guide to the Accessibility tool, explore this Canvas Guide.

The Major Four

If you want to know the most common and easiest things you can do when preparing your course, that help keep it accessible, remember these:

Use the preset text formats.
Make sure images have appropriate Alternative Text describing the image.
Make sure your videos are appropriately captioned.
Provide the primary Instructional Materials.