Course Accessibility: Best Practices for Your Online and In-Person Courses

As the new semester begins, the amount of work on everyone's plates seems to be ever-growing. One task that is often an afterthought in seasons of busyness is course accessibility. However, if you begin to approach accessibility as part of the course planning process, and really, an everyday practice, it will assist your learners, as well anyone you are working with or in correspondence with.

While engaging with course accessibility, one important thing to remember is that no course is going to be 100% percent accessible all of the time, but these best practices will get you closer and be so helpful to your learners. This is incredibly useful whether students or colleagues are working with a specific learning challenge or not. Again, these recommendations can be used for courses, correspondence, general work, etc, and if they can be implemented as a daily best practice, the better.

To begin, think about what most people work with every day: documents, html pages, etc. One of the simplest ways to encourage accessibility is to focus on your fonts. A sans serif font like Arial, Lato, or Tahoma is recommended as the extra pieces of serif fonts like Times New Roman or Baskerville can make reading and focusing on the text challenging for some. While focusing on fonts, it is also important to think about size, 12-14 is recommended. This will help with the readability of the materials, without taking up too much space. Additionally, when thinking about fonts, ensure that you are using accessible emphasis. For example, most individuals recognize underlined words as hyperlinks, as that is the common practice. It may be confusing if you choose to use underlined words for emphasis. A way to avoid this is to use bolded or italicized words or a simple statement: Please Note/ Important. This draws the reader's attention without causing confusion.

The final piece of the font puzzle is color. The general best practice is to use colors that present a clear contrast between the background and text, such as black text on a white background. Keeping the colors simple and within the three-color usage range (white background, black text, and blue hyperlinks) ensures readability and ease for readers. The other important point to consider with color is the fact that many people experience the world with certain colors being unseen by them. Red is a popular color used in academia to emphasize certain points (point values, due dates, etc), but if seen by a person experiencing color blindness, all emphasis is lost. Color can absolutely be used sparingly to great effect when it is paired with accessible emphasis like being in bold or italicized.

The Headings and the Style of the document or HTML page is the next important piece of accessibility best practices. Using cascading headers to organize the layout of the materials helps to not only allow readers and students to locate specific information when needed, but helps create an outline to again organize the information. The idea of cascading headers (beginning with the Title or Heading 1, followed by Heading 2, then Heading 3, and so on if necessary) keeps the reading order organized and will help the order in which the text is read by tools like screen readers. Screen readers read the headings in order, and if the headings are out of order, information could be jumbled when read.

In addition to being focused on the fonts and organization of the text, another important aspect is ensuring that the media used in the document or HTML page is accessible. Images enhance and add character to materials, and the way to enhance their use is to include alternative text descriptions. These descriptions provide a clear and succinct description of essential information provided in the image, for those who may not be able to see the image. In the case that a brief description is not appropriate for a complex image (map of railroad routes, avian skeletons, etc), long descriptions can be appropriate to provide crucial information, but more often than not, the shorter alt-tags are appropriate.

A unique type of image that can provide accessibility challenges is a table. While helpful for sorting data and information, they can be tricky when it comes to accessibility and particularly being read by a screen reader. In order to ensure the accessibility of tables, there are three best practices you can engage with. To begin with, as previously mentioned, alt-tags are incredibly useful for tables. Additionally, employing specific header rows for the tables, both in the columns and rows to help to identify the pertinent information is incredibly useful. Finally,  keeping tables to one page if possible, as well as using them sparingly to designate specific information (schedules, calendars, grade tables, etc), as opposed to formatting with them, helps keep the document organized and readable for learners.

Furthermore, there are the best practices for creating accessible lists, which include ensuring they are numbered or bulleted and, if necessary, nested with their information. Along with accessible lists is the best practice of using accessible hyperlinks within a document. Specifically, naming and or labeling the hyperlink as what site it is linked to (UCATT, UA Disability Resource Center, the Writing Center), as opposed to using the entire hyperlink, which can be broken and often garbled if read by a screen reader. Additionally, avoid using phrases such as “click here” or “this link” as they do not describe the destination of the hyperlink.

Finally, using the accessibility checking tools in Microsoft, Adobe, D2L, etc, can give you another way to check on the accessibility of the materials you are creating.

By engaging with and employing these tips and best practices on a daily basis, as well as focusing on them in your courses, documents, etc., you will be able to ensure that you come across clearly and show your audience that you care that everyone can access these materials.