When planning activities and assignments, it’s important to give some thought to how they would work if you had a student using adaptive technology in your course. You don’t need to (and really can’t) design everything to be fully accessible to everyone with every possible disability, but it is a good idea to plan activities that will be accessible to anyone experiencing one or more of the major types of disabilities.

Canvas Tools

The tools included in Canvas such as Pages, Quizzes, Assignments, etc. have been reviewed for accessibility and the results of these reviews can be found in the Canvas Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) Checklist. Basic uses of Canvas tools—such as having students upload a file to an assignment, participate in a text-based discussion forum, or take a text-based quiz—do not require alternatives, because the tools are designed to be usable by students with disabilities.

On the other hand, you will want to think about what would need to be done to make video, audio, and images accessible. You can use alternative means if that is appropriate. For example, you may have a student with a hearing impairment, so instead of asking students to introduce themselves using video, you could ask students to either post a text introduction along with the video, or edit their own captions in Kaltura.

If you use images in quizzes and ask students to identify particular parts or features of the image, the Assistive Technology and Accessibility Centers (ATAC) can provide a text description of the image for the student. However, the text description may end up answering the question you have asked. In that case, you could provide an alternative question, such as asking the student to list the parts or features that would normally occur in an image (i.e., bones of the hand or parts of a cell) or describe or explain the part or feature (i.e. a skewed distribution curve or the topography of a particular location) instead of identifying it by sight.

External Tools

Tools that are external to Canvas have varying levels of accessibility. The ones that are integrated into Canvas have been through an accessibility review and ATAC is prepared to work with students needing accommodations using these tools. That doesn’t mean that they are all accessible, it just means that there is on-campus accessibility support for the tool. Other tools that you may find on the web should be presumed to be inaccessible until you have confirmed otherwise. Unfortunately, confirming accessibility is not always easy, and the information you may receive from the vendor may not be totally accurate. For example, Adobe Presenter and Storyline are technically accessible in that they meet ADA guidelines. However, the interfaces that students use to view a presentation include blockers that they may not be able to get around.

Some external tools are accessible with exceptions. For example, students can view a VoiceThread through the VoiceThread Universal interface, but ATAC would still need to provide captioning and visual descriptions of content if an accommodation were required. In some cases, accessibility varies by platform in the same tool. Students using screen readers on a Windows computer will be able to comment on a VoiceThread, but students on a Mac will not, as VT does not support Safari, the only browser that works with Apple’s built-in screen reader.

Different Ways of Doing Things

Sometimes, no matter what tool you use, the activity itself is not accessible to individuals with particular types of disabilities. In these cases, it’s important to think about the purpose and desired learning outcome for that activity.

At a simple level, if you want your students to be able to show relationships between concepts, an outline may be able to serve the purpose instead of a concept map for a visually impaired student. A color-blind student could code items with a pattern or icon instead of a highlighting color. A student unable to use a mouse—who may be navigating the course with voice commands or a keypad—could complete a matching activity with drop-downs but not using a drag-and-drop format.

At a more complex level, if you want students to recognize and identify parts of an atom or parts of a cell, those parts could potentially be 3d printed for a student who cannot see the virtual model. ATAC has also worked with students to create tactile graphs with string on a pin board.

Asking for Help

Although many accessibility practices are fairly easy to do, some practices that improve accessibility are more difficult or time-consuming and will likely need professionals trained in accessibility to implement. The following are a list of situations where you should contact your campus teaching and learning center or ATAC:

• You are using third-party tools to create clicky interactions (e.g., Adobe Captivate, Camtasia, H5P, Articulate Storyline).
• You are using third-party tools offered by your textbook publisher (e.g., Pearson Mathlab or ALEKS from McGraw Hill).
• You are linking to many different websites where you want students to read/watch/listen to material.
• You are presenting a large amount of material that is highly dependent on a single sense (e.g. data visualizations that are highly dependent on color).
• You require students to use a specific software tool or package (e.g., SPSS, Variations, ArcGIS).

ATAC also offers free to-your-door workshops for departments to support the development of online courses and online instructional materials ranging from PDFs and PowerPoints to musical scores and mathematical diagrams. This support ensures the accessibility of your course content without the need for later fixes. Your campus teaching and learning center may also offer workshops and other support.

References and Resources

Ingeno, L. (2013) Online accessibility a faculty duty. Inside Higher Ed.

Talbert, R. (Feb., 2018). How do students with learning disabilities experience online and blended courses? 

Usability First (2015). Principles of Accessible and Universal Design.