Accessibility: Academic and Course Content

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Why Is This Important?
  • Creating accessible academic and course content ensures that every student can fully engage, participate and succeed in your course.
  • Allows for more effective learning.
  • Improves clarity, usability and flexibility across your courses.
When To Use It

Accessibility should be part of your standard workflow when you are preparing lecture material, sharing digital course files, using technology in the classroom or designing content in Desire2Learn.

How To Use It

Use accessibility practices when working with webpages, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs or creating media. These practices allow for consistent learning material that can be used by a variety of abilities.

Visit accessibility: documents and PDFs for specific recommended instructions on accessibility standards.

Accessible Learning Resources
D2L

D2L has a variety of accessible features that are easy to use and will allow you to view your course from a different perspective.
eLearning

Support tools for accessible learning include Panopto, Panorama, captioning, accessibility checkers and more.
Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

STEM fields rely heavily on specialized symbols, notation, diagrams and software tools. To ensure accessibility, this content should be presented in ways that assistive technologies can interpret, along with clear text alternatives for materials that are primarily visual.
Data Visualizations

Data visualizations often communicate information through charts, graphs and other visual formats. To make them accessible, it’s important to structure them in ways that assistive technologies can interpret them and to include clear text descriptions or summaries that convey the key insights shown visually.
Teaching and Classroom Accessibility

Tips: How to make courses accessible to all.

Course Materials
  • Let students know about alternative formats — the syllabus is a great place!
  • Deliver course requirements and assignments clearly and in multiple ways (e.g., orally, in printed form and electronically).
  • Ensure that all handouts, course readings and textbooks are available in an accessible format for all learners. This may mean providing hard copies and digital copies of readings or choosing a textbook that is available in an accessible format.
  • All videos shown in class should have accurate captions. If playing audio in class or posting an audio file online, provide a text transcript. Provide the transcript to all students before playing the audio in class so students can follow along while listening.
  • Use principles alongside to design materials that support learners with varied abilities, backgrounds and preferences.
Communication
  • Face the students in the classroom when speaking. Do not speak while facing the board or otherwise facing away from students.
  • Use a microphone (even if you consider yourself to be a loud speaker or think you can just project your voice).
  • Repeat all student questions or comments into the microphone before answering them or ask students to speak into a microphone.
  • If using a PowerPoint or other lecture aid, ensure that it has sufficient font size and color contrast to be easily read anywhere in the classroom.
  • If writing on a whiteboard or chalkboard or using an overhead projector, use large clear letters and drawings and don’t crowd the board.
  • Tech issues? Not sure where to start? Contact Instructional Design Services.
Classroom Layout
  • Classrooms, labs, workspaces, fieldwork spaces and spaces used for office hours should be physically accessible to students with limited mobility or using mobility aides (crutches, walkers, wheelchairs, etc.).
  • If your office is not physically accessible, provide alternative office hours in an accessible location on campus.
  • Consider providing office hours both in person and virtually via Zoom or another online meeting platform.
  • Arrange seating to give every student a clear line of sight to the instructor and instructional materials. Seating should allow room for users of wheelchairs, assistive technology and other devices to be seated within the group.
  • Do not segregate accessible seating.
Syllabus

An accessible syllabus is essential to ensuring that all SDSU students can fully engage in your course from the very beginning. When a syllabus is accessible, it allows students to easily run screen readers such as ReadSpeaker, text-to-speech tools (Panorama) or screen magnifiers to navigate and understand your class expectations, schedules and requirements equally.

Providing an accessible syllabus from day one promotes fairness, supports learning needs and complies with SDSU accessibility policy 4:13 and syllabus policy 2:3.

An accessible syllabus file is preferably in webpage format that can be created directly in D2L with the HTML accessibility checker. If it’s in other formats, you can use Microsoft Word to make it accessible with its built-in accessibility checker.