Up Next on Your "To Do" List: Reviewing Your Course Site for Accessibility
This guest post is by Celine Greene, Senior Digital Teaching and Learning Strategist at the Center for Teaching and Learning.
An ongoing practice for anyone working with course design and development is to “review and refresh”. (See this earlier blog post for help getting started: Spring Cleaning Tips for Your Course.) One item that sometimes doesn’t get enough attention in this process is the course site. A part of reviewing and refreshing a class’s online presence is checking for digital accessibility and fixing any identified issues. Is this part of your “to do” list? Let’s break down how we can manage this task.
Step-by-step
- Prepare yourself. Review POUR Questions for a Digitally Accessible Classroom [PDF] and the Quick Check for Digital Accessibility [PDF].
- Use this document to track your progress: Course Site Review: Accessibility Checklist [.docx].
- Review your Online Library.
- Review the CoursePlus tools that allow you to format text, insert images, and upload files. Pay special attention to those often-forgotten images in Quiz Generator assessments.
- Review your CoursePlus lecture and other course pages.
- Fix, or remediate, your course site’s accessibility.
In this post, we will dive into the initial three steps.
Steps 1 and 2: Getting Started
Do you know what it means to be digitally accessible? It means something is purposefully designed to avoid barriers for humans and technologies, including assistive technologies. The characteristics of digital accessibility are to be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust (POUR). To have a better understanding, review the POUR Questions for a Digitally Accessible Classroom (linked above). This brief document breaks down many of the technicalities of accessibility into the vernacular of everyday observations.
These POUR questions are a good starting point to check the accessibility of any resource, including our course sites. But to have a more focused understanding when considering online resources, the Quick Check for Digital Accessibility document awaits you. It, too, is written in a friendly, non-technical voice so that everyone might be able to inspect a website or document. While there are similar guides available elsewhere, this Quick Check was written with you in mind. It starts with the inspection provided by automated accessibility validation tools but goes on to list items either missed or incorrectly assessed by these tools.
Keeping the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (BSPH) faculty’s point of view in mind, the Course Site Review: Accessibility Checklist was created explicitly to track progress while reviewing the accessibility of a CoursePlus site. This document guides anyone thoroughly reviewing a BSPH class’s online presence for digital accessibility. It lists tasks but also allows for organized, corresponding notes for fixing (remediating) course pages and linked resources that need to be addressed after the review.
Step 3: Reviewing the Online Library
The CoursePlus Online Library allows faculty to share organized files and external online resources (weblinks) throughout a term. The best way to start reviewing your library for accessibility is to reduce the number of individual items you have to review.
Only Keep What’s Necessary
The CoursePlus Online Library is archived with a class. When you remove an item from your course site, it remains available to you and students in the previous offerings.
Is a resource no longer relevant? Delete it. Is a resource optional? Check its tracking to see if your students were accessing it; then decide if it can be deleted. Can a resource, such as assignment instructions, be created as an accessible CoursePlus page? Create the new accessible page and delete the library item. Are there journal articles uploaded as PDFs? Instead use permalinks for students to access them directly through the Welch library or add them to your eReserves. (Your Welch informationist can help you!) The resources accessed directly through Welch are usually accessible; when they aren’t, they can find and share an accessible format when required.
Linked, External Library Items
The next thing you should do is check all your online library’s remaining external resources. For each, make sure that all weblinks are displayed as meaningful text by using the link title field appropriately. (Learn more about accessible hyperlinks.)
For every online video, website, or tool living outside of CoursePlus that is shared, do your best to determine if the external resource is accessible. Look for statements verifying or committing to accessibility; find third party reviews; and consider its source. For instance, there is a reasonable expectation that U.S. government hosted and funded websites are digitally accessible, though there may be exceptions.
If you are unsure about a resource’s accessibility, try to find an alternative. At the very least, manage the library item and denote its importance as optional. If you know it is not accessible, you are advised to remove its association entirely.
Uploaded Library Items
Lastly, check the accessibility of every formatted document (PDF, Word, Excel, etc.) that remains uploaded directly to your library. If anything fails the Quick Check for Digital Accessibility, either replace it with an accessible alternative, remediate it immediately (replacing the original item with the fixed version), delete it, or hide it from students until you’re able to return to do the remediation. And if you are waiting to do the remediation, make sure you have started a list of items you need to return to!
More to Come:
Stepping through the Online Library with the Quick Check document is a very good exercise as you begin the accessibility review of a course site. Especially for courses that have been copied, carrying over library items year to year, this opportunity removes several unintentional accessibility barriers. Often there is no need to edit – just replace or remove those items that don’t pass a quick inspection.
There is still more work to do, though. The next blog post discusses other parts of a CoursePlus site which can still hold barriers. Read on to continue your “review and refresh”!