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Clemson Online

Instructor Resources for Digital Accessibility

Welcome Instructors! We hope the resources we've curated below will help you make your courses as accessible as possible. Under new federal regulations for 2024, Clemson is required to ensure all course content online meets WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility guidelines. For more on the new requirements and and overview of what these WCAG guidelines mean for Canvas, consider enrolling in our Intro Accessibility course, COFFEE: Accessibility I. It provides a broad overview of accessibility issues and how to implement them.

The rest of this page provides quick guides, tips, and resources to resolve (and avoid) common accessibility issues. This page is meant to be updated as needed, so don't hesitate to reach out to Clemson Online for other topics you would like to see covered.

Accessibility References

Canvas Accessibility

When building content in Canvas, make sure you use the Rich Content Editor (RCE) and its tools. Similarly to Word, the creation tools for headings, lists, indenting, and other formatting elements will create what you want while also ensuring accessibility.

Tips:

  • Use headings (h1-h4) to format titles and sub-titles on Canvas pages and in Word documents, rather than simply increasing font sizes, so that screen readers can help learners move from section to section easily.
  • Do not use colors (colored fonts, highlighted text) alone to convey meaning.
  • Never try to format your own lists; screen readers will have trouble presenting the information correctly. Use the list maker tool for both numbered and un-numbered/bulleted lists.
  • Use the "increase indent" tool to create sub-lists or to indent text. In the Canvas RCE, you can also use the "Tab" button. Avoid using the space bar to do this.

Resources:

Alt-text for Images, Graphs, Charts

Providing descriptions of visual information, whether through alt-text (also known as alt tags) or longer descriptions is important for learners using screen readers, as well as learners who may have a poor Internet connection.

Tips:

  • Compliance includes any slide decks provided for your learners, such as PowerPoint (PPTX) presentations. See the PowerPoint Guide below for how to add alt-text to PPTX slides.

Resources:

Video Captioning

Any video or film shown in your course, whether online or face-to-face must have captions. For videos posted online, a transcript is also helpful, but captions are preferred. 

Tips:

  • All videos created with or uploaded to the Kaltura video service are automatically captioned using machine-generated captions. They should be edited to ensure accuracy, but it provides a head start!
  • If you frequently record videos in Zoom, consider linking your Zoom and Kaltura accounts so that your Zoom cloud recordings are automatically uploaded and captioned in Kaltura. Email David Bassett, Learning Technology Manager for Clemson Online, to link these accounts.
  • If you film instructional videos with Clemson Online, high-quality captioning is included.

Resources:

Table Accessibility

Tables can be some of the most challenging course content to make accessible. However, if you stick with the built-in Canvas RCE tools, you can easily provide accessible tables for your learners.

Tips:

  • Avoid using the table maker tool for organization/layout of content. Screen readers will have trouble presenting the information in the correct order. Use tables for data organization only.
  • Tables will need captions and identifiable headers for columns and rows. These can all be done in Canvas.

Resources:

PDFs

PDFs can be very difficult to remediate, or to revise for accessibility. One way around this is to limit your use of PDFs! However, because they are a common document type, it's important to know how to make them accessible. The information below will help you with most small documents. Note: if you have a very long (10+ pages) document or a large quantity of documents, we recommend contacting Clemson's Digital Accessibility Team in the Office of Accessibility Services for assistance.

Tips:

  • For documents you create yourself, run the Word (or other software) Accessibility Checker and fix any issues before you convert it to a PDF.
  • If you scan a book or article yourself to use in a course, you may need to run the resulting file through Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which you can do easily with Adobe Acrobat. An easy way to check if this has already been done on a PDF is to try to select individual pieces of text, or to search for specific words in the document using ctrl-F. If you can do either, OCR has been applied to the document.

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