Accessibility

As I review the various pages of my course, I am working to make sure everything is accessible. I went to a great workshop on accessibility in Canvas at the Washington Canvas Users Group conference in March.  The presenter, Terrill Thompson from the UW, said there were 5 key things that faculty could do to make courses accessible. One main one was to use headings instead of changing font sizes for emphasis and headers (here are my notes from that session). This seems pretty easy to do, I just have never really bothered to do it. So, as I'm revising my pages, I'm making sure everything uses headers.

I'm pretty good at using Alt Tags to identify images, but I'm trying to be more descriptive, not just describing the image, but explaining why I bothered to put the image. For example, instead of just saying "cat", I might say, "image of a cat illustrating how much people like to nap."  Now, if you were visually impaired, which one would be more useful? Exactly!

Also, and most painful for spontaneous me, I'm trying to write scripts for all of my videos. I put the script in each of the PowerPoint slides or write the script with screen shots to serve as an alternative to captioning, which is just too time consuming for me to tackle. From a pedagogical perspective, the hearing impaired person is still getting the content and I insert cues to note where slides or screens change.

Now, when I am less than one week out from the start of the quarter, this can seem like a bit much. But really, when am I ever going to have adequate time to do this? Never. So, now is as good a time as any. Here's to more accessible courses.



Resources:

• Accessibility in Canvas by Terrill Thompson – a 1 hour Tegrity Recording https://tegr.it/y/12ng3
• If you don't have an hour, here are my somewhat useful notes from the session 
• If you didn't make it to the Washington Canvas Users Group conference, it was really, really good. Fortunately, every session was recorded in Tegrity (thanks Tacoma Community College!!) Here is the recordings page.