Making online courses digitally accessible is now required by UMN policy and law. Academic Technology and Design (ATD) are partnering with The Office for Digital Accessibility (ODA), the systemwide entity designated to promote and advocate for accessibility at the UMN. The information on this page defines accessibility and the responsibilities of instructors.

What is Digital Accessibility?

Usually when the topic of accessibility comes up, we think about wheelchair ramps or buttons at entrances of buildings to hold the door open. These are designed for a particular purpose for accommodation. But assistive technologies like this are available for all types of people that may need them. In the examples given, the ramps and door buttons are meant to accommodate people in wheelchairs or that have varying degrees of mobility challenges regarding access to campus buildings. They are also useful for someone that is moving equipment in or out of buildings where a ramp and having the door held open is helpful.

As new ways of sharing information with technology are becoming more easily available for all people, there are still vulnerable populations that don’t have the same access. While there are more and more tools being developed to assist, these tools still need content creators to be conscientious of what to consider when communicating and sharing knowledge online. This is what we need to consider with digital accessibility. Increasingly this is an important topic in regards to modern literacy as we need to consider everyone's access to information. The goal is designing online experiences to be accessible and usable for all people equally. 

Why should I care about Digital Accessibility?

It is an understandable question considering there is a lot of work to be done. Why should more effort be put into this? If you are an instructor with an online course:

All of this is a work in progress. It is something we are all trying to learn about and change. It won’t happen overnight. That is okay. Learning about the gaps in our knowledge about digital accessibility and working towards trying to change it is an excellent first step.

For more details, please check out the ODA’s page Understand Why Accessibility Matters.

What is my role as an instructor?

According to the UMN, as an instructor teaching an online course: you are responsible for the accessibility of ALL content in your course page. That also includes making sure: 

  • All documents uploaded to Canvas are accessible
  • All videos are captioned. Even short videos used for announcements, used in discussions or feedback for students.
  • All announcements you make in your course. 

ATD staff has been doing continuous work ensuring content pages made in Canvas follow best accessibility practices to help ensure your course sites are accessible (See “What is ATD’s Role” below), but we still need your help with ensuring other content you have added or produced is accessible.

What content needs to be made accessible?

All content that is made and hosted on UMN servers that students/users can access. This includes:

  • All published content in Canvas including: announcements, pages, assignments, discussions, and quizzes (including quiz questions)
  • Textbook integrated components that you can edit such as Canvas quizzes
  • All uploaded files to Canvas such as PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint slides, etc. Other specialized files may have other requirements that might need further consultation
  • All UMN hosted Google Drive files or Google Suite documents like Google Docs, Spreadsheets, or Slides
  • Videos hosted on Kaltura/Mediaspace

What content do I not need to make accessible?

Ideally all content that users consume in your course should be accessible. You have a duty to ensure whatever students are accessing is accessible to them. There are some types of content that are not in your or ATD’s ability to make accessible. These types of content include:

  • External web pages including UMN web pages that are not managed by you or ATD (Units managing those pages should have made or will make accessibility fixes)
  • Files hosted on external websites (Depending on the requirements of the host, they are responsible for making their own accessibility fixes)
  • Books/journals/articles through UMN library permalinks
  • Integrated Textbook content hosted on the vendor’s servers
  • Videos from third-party sites that you can’t add captions to like from YouTube or Vimeo
  • Unpublished personal files, like personal notes, that can only be accessed to yourself

What is ATD’s role?

Advocacy, Education and Consultation

We are here to advocate as a local unit for best accessibility practices in your online courses as well as provide resources to empower you on using those practices. Along with providing resources, we are more than happy to answer any questions or consult on concerns you may have regarding digital accessibility.

Feel free to reach out to ATD staff through the CCAPS-ATD Service Request form if you have any questions or are interested in an accessibility review of your course or consultation.

Canvas Course Page Content Maintenance 

ATD staff have and will continue to implement and fix content in Canvas pages for CCAPS online courses with best accessibility practices in mind. This is something we have already provided through our projects creating new courses, redesigning existing courses and even updating course sites. Staff review content pages and make edits to make sure that all Canvas content meets WCAG 2.1, Level AA standards. 

The Canvas content pieces ATD does actively fix/remediate on your behalf include:

  • the Home page
  • Module Overview pages
  • To-do pages
  • Other types of Canvas content pages
  • Assignments
  • Discussions
  • Quizzes

That said, there is some content that ATD does not have capacity to accommodate remediation services. They include:

  • contents of class Announcements made during the semester (this includes captioning for videos)
  • course edits made by you during the semester (we do remediate Canvas content the next time the course is revised or updated)
  • uploaded documents and files in Canvas
  • Other video content?

Reporting On Progress and Improvement Needs

To aid instructors ensuring their content is accessible, we will be providing feedback on items that require attention or remediation during the implementation phase. This will come in the form of an email to you after running a report using the UDOIT accessibility checker. Most of the efforts needed for remediation include videos and document files. ODA established remediation workflows for these content types which ATD has incorporated into our current processes.

Documents Audits and Process

  1. During pilot testing for all courses, academic technologists run a UDOIT report to identify accessibility issues in course files. The report will come in an email to you and detail the amount of files impacted as well as the number of issues that were encountered.
  2. This report will be sent by email for the course instructor for review.
  3. The course instructor should follow the Remove step from the 3Rs Framework. (More information below under “How do I make my content accessible?”)
  4. Tutorials and other resources are provided on the ATD website. Communications to instructors help build awareness of resources. ATD will also provide 1:1 consultations for education.
  5. The course instructor should follow the Revise step from the 3Rs Framework. (More information below “How do I make my content accessible?”)
Process flowchart for document audit, remediation and responsibilities. Full process listed above.

Video Audits and Process

  1. During pilot testing for all courses, academic technologists run a UDOIT report to identify accessibility issues with videos in the course. The report will detail the amount of videos that use automated captions or don’t have any captions.
  2. Academic technologists add information about videos such as their location, length, and video hosting platform to a spreadsheet used by the media team.
  3. The ATD media team works at taking videos directly uploaded into Canvas to host in Kaltura as well as assembling a notification email of impacted videos to faculty.
  4. Videos that are over 10 minutes will be sent for captioning services while shorter videos will need to have captions edited by instructors.
  5. Guides will be sent to instructors on how to edit captions.
  6. Once videos have been remediated, they will be marked as complete on the ATD media team spreadsheet.
Title II Captioning Process Flowchart

How do I make my content accessible?

Since there is a lot that needs to be done, the ODA has laid out a framework to prioritize your accessibility work: Remove, Revise, Right First.

Remove

This is the moment to take inventory of all the resources in your course. By starting with remove, you will reduce the amount of video and files that will need to be remediated. Videos and files that can be removed include:

  • any that are no longer necessary because they contain old/obsolete information
  • has a journal article or part of a book that has an available perma-link through the UMN Library or has an existing link to a third-party website
  • duplicates of preexisting uploaded documents (UDOIT: Finding and Removing Duplicate Files)

For more information from ODA, check out their page on Remove.

Revise

Now that we know what videos and files you have left, they will need to be checked that they are accessible and steps will need to be taken to remediate them. The steps are dependent on the type of resource:

For more information from ODA, check out their page on Revise.

Videos

All course videos should be hosted through Kaltura. Although Kaltura does generate automatic captions, they are only about ~80% accurate. Thus captions will need to be checked and fixed. Having an outline or script may help as you record your videos in streamlining the caption editing process. 

For videos under 10 minutes in length, instructors should manually edit their captions. Read the tutorial on Kaltura: Find and Edit Captions to learn more. Videos over 10 minutes in length can be sent to an external service for accurate human-reviewed captions, if budget allows.

Documents Uploaded to Canvas

Document files uploaded to Canvas such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents require minimal remediation. As long as the 7 core skills such as proper use of headings and lists, they should be accessible. Microsoft Office has its own built-in accessibility checker that can scan your document and give suggestions. Read the article Improve accessibility with the Accessibility Checker from Microsoft to learn more.

PDFs on the other hand are more problematic. There is a chance some files will pass an accessibility check and in those cases no action is required. In most cases, they will not. Remediation of PDFs can be complex but the biggest issue is that they are for the most part very time intensive. As such, The Office for Digital Accessibility and ATD strongly advises against using PDFs. See our tutorial PDFs and Accessibility for more information on what goes into remediation as well as next steps.

For more information on files in Canvas that potentially need remediation, see our article UDOIT and Document Accessibility.

Google Suite Documents

Like Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, Google Docs, Sheets and Slides require minimal remediation as long as the 7 core skills are adhered to. The UMN have purchased the plug-in GrackleDocs that works as an accessibility checker that also gives suggestions for fixes. To learn how to install and use GrackleDocs, check out the UMN Technology Help page Google Drive: Use GrackleDocs Accessibility Checker.

Right First

The Right First phase involves creating all content with digital accessibility in mind from the start. Once you understand what is needed to make online content accessible, you will know how to keep up the good work when developing or selecting content for your courses.

For more information from ODA, check out their page on Right First.