Digital accessibility is an increasingly important topic for many colleges and universities as they strive to make their campuses more inclusive for students and staff.
Implementing digital accessibility can be complex, and it’s easy to get bogged down in details and lose sight of the big picture.
It’s essential to strike a balance that allows faculty to focus on creating quality, engaging digital content for students with and without disabilities.
Eva Dale
Web Services Director, Digital Accessibility Coordinator
dale.36@osu.edu
College of Arts and Sciences Digital Accessibility Resources
Getting Started
Trying to meet all the requirements for digital accessibility can be a daunting task. Follow the suggestions shown here to help navigate the journey and level up your skills to provide an inclusive environment for everyone.
Improve Course Content
- Start with high population classes to make the highest impact
- Teach faculty to create accessible content
- Reference page for making content accessible in Canvas
- Document accessibility
- Do in person presentations and trainings
- Demonstrating how to make things accessible can help people who don’t enjoy asynchronous trainings
- This also allows for questions and conversation
Learn where pain points are for faculty
- Meet with faculty and audit a specific course to see what types of content the are using
- Learn what types of content are the most difficult and time-consuming for them to make accessible
- Dedicate resources to supporting those pain points
- Captioning and transcription is an area that often needs support
Review Software
- Software reviews through third-party companies are very expensive
- Create an in-house team to do reviews
- Share reviews with other areas at your university and with other higher-education institutions
- Many schools are often using the same software
- Make sure the reviews test against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 Standards
- At Ohio State we test against a set of criteria we call the Minimum Digital Accessibility Standards (MDAS)
Enhance Media
- Create transcripts and captions for media
- Consider using software like Otter.ai or Microsoft OneDrive to do the first pass at the captions
- Learn how to create quality alternative text
Fix Websites
- Start making fixes on your high traffic sites
- Teach developers how to code for a11y
- Make top ten important fixes
Request Resources
- Create strategic plan for administration
- Outline the risk of not doing a11y
- Example narrative to request resources
Change Culture
- Find champions for a11y on campus
- Work with your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion group
- Explain how a11y is about inclusion
- It can be people with disabilities who can demonstrate the barriers they face when using inaccessible content
Share Knowledge
- Reach out to other universities to learn from them
- Share best practices and successes
- Share software reviews and lists of software that is in good shape for accessibility
Continue the Journey
You cannot make all content accessible from day one. Be strategic and work on the areas where you make the most impact. From there keep making things better and more inclusive.
