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Accessibility Resources: Creating Accessible Content

Universal Design

Creating Accessible Content

Your Role in Creating Accessible Content 

In our every day work, we are creating digital content, and by law as a higher education institution, we need to ensure that we are creating them in an accessible format.

Examples of where we need to ensure we are creating accessible content includes: 

  • Emails we send 
  • Word, Excel, PowerPoints, and PDFs we create and send electronically or post online
  • Websites and webpages
  • Forms to be filled out on the computer, whether web or in a file
  • Materials uploaded into D2L
  • Videos posted (whether your own creation or not)
  • Software and/or web-tools we procure
  • Course publisher materials
  • Digital library resources
  • Open Educational Resources (OER) 

Removing Those Barriers 

To make content accessible to people with cognitive and neurological disabilities, you need to present information in a clear, concise, and consistent way while minimizing potential distractions.  

  • Write in a way that is concise, straightforward, and easy to understand—including graphs and illustrations where beneficial.
  • Structure your content so that people can orient themselves to the page and get an overview of it before moving to any one part (i.e. use headings and sub-headings to add sections to content).
  • Label links, page controls, and forms consistently so that the function is always apparent.
  • Provide different ways to navigate your site, such as a search box or site map.
  • Provide the option to turn off or hide blinking, flashing, or otherwise distracting content.

Alt Tags are text descriptors that describe images that convey meaning. Pictures are utilized a lot in faculty PowerPoints, it is important that you are adding these details to every image that is not simply decorative. Some images convey more meaning than can be conveyed in 140-200 characters.

In such situations, you have several ways you can make the image accessible: 

  1. add a descriptive text or audio caption below the image
  2. add another slide with more information about the picture and note the location of the slide in the alt tag
  3. in the alt tag, note where a description of the image can be found in a shared textbook or document that all students have access to.

When creating videos it is important to utilize Microsoft Stream. Microsoft Stream is a video hosting site, like YouTube, that is specifically for UMU faculty, staff, and students. There are many reasons why we use Microsoft Stream but one of the main ones is that it makes our videos more accessible. Even though Stream automatically creates captions for faculty, you should go back and edit them to ensure accuracy. 

VPAT & WCAG