Digital Accessibility: Faculty Guide
The Department of Justice (DOJ) introduced a significant change to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requiring public entities, including universities, to ensure digital content is accessible to individuals with disabilities by April 2026. In short, this law applies to all current course materials, websites, documents, media, and applications used for teaching and learning, except archive materials and archived courses.
To satisfy this new law, digital materials must meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA, which requires content to be:
- Perceivable: Material is presented to users in ways that allow them to perceive the information. This can include providing alternative text for images, ensuring sufficient color contrast, and captioned media.
- Operable: Users can easily navigate content, including through keyboard navigation. This can also include limiting your Canvas course site navigation menu to only used items, embedding links in descriptive text, and removing auto-play videos or flashing visuals.
- Understandable: Users can quickly identify the content and function of materials. This can include limiting technical jargon, defining acronyms, and ensuring readings and assignments have consistent naming conventions.
- Robust: Content is compatible with an array of assistive technologies and can be suitable for a range of users including those with hearing, visual, and cognitive or learning disabilities.
Why Accessibility Matters
Digital accessibility is about far more than compliance; it ensures and reflects our commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion. Accessible materials ensure all students feel welcome to learn and provide an environment where everyone has what they need to be successful.
Ready to Get Started? Remove, Revise, Right First!
It may be overwhelming to think about remediating your course content. Luckily the Office of Digital Accessibility provides a framework for transitioning toward more accessible content.
To make meaningful progress toward a more accessible course design practice, focus on the 3 Rs:
- Remove: Audit your existing materials and remove old or unused content that will not be used in future courses. See the written instructions for removing course content from Canvas or watch the video
- Revise: Identify the most high-impact learning materials you plan to use in your next few courses and revise those first. Use the UDoIT accessibility checker in Canvas to catch common errors such as image alt text, color contrast, and heading structure.
- Right First: Start designing materials with accessibility in mind first to save time and effort in editing content later. Familiarize yourself with Accessible U’s 7 Core Skills or take the Digital Accessibility: Foundations course to learn more.
This approach will ensure that accessibility improvements prioritize materials that will have the greatest impact on student learning outcomes and attend to the most up-to-date materials. As you plan to remediate your content, align your efforts with the strategic plan for your division, department, or specific situation. For individualized support, schedule a consult with the LX team.
Learn the 7 Core Skills of Accessibility
To begin creating accessible course materials, start by practicing the following 7 core accessibility skills to learn to recognize and correct some of the most common digital accessibility issues.
Explore the Skills
Alternative Text
Add alternative text, or “alt text,” to every meaningful image in digital content. See the guide to alt text in Canvas.
Contrast
Ensure foreground and background colors and other visual indicators have sufficient contrast. We recommend WebAIM’s color contrast checker.
Headings
Structure your digital content with paragraph styles in documents or heading tags in web pages.
In Canvas, use the paragraph drop-down to select your heading style. Canvas automatically uses Heading 1 as the title of the page, so begin your first heading with Heading 2.
Links
Do not provide a URL in full unless part of a citation style. Instead, embed links in concise and descriptive text that provides enough content to help users know where the link might point without clicking. Watch UMN's accessibility expert, Khaled Musa demonstrate how screenreaders announce links and learn how to make links accessible.
Canvas provides 2 options for embedding links into text:
- Course links provide stable links between content hosted on Canvas. These links will not break when copying a course over to a new semester and thus are recommended to use when possible. A course link would be recommended for linking to an assignment or module on a course page.
- External links are used for content hosted outside of Canvas or the libraries. These links may break if the URL is changed by the hosting website and thus need to be checked each semester. We recommend using the Link Validator tool in Canvas.
To link text, highlight your desired text, select Insert from the toolbar, select Link, then choose a link type.
Lists
When possible break up key concepts key concepts, sequences, and like items of more than two as lists. Lists visually break up information and make text easier to scan.
Tables
Reserve tables to showcase data best organized in a grid with labeled headers that indicate the relationship between rows and columns.
Avoid using tables to format text as even hidden lines will still be legible to anyone using a screenreader.
Video and Audio
Captions should be human-edited and include additional descriptions when needed. The University uses Kaltura to automatically generate closed captions for media uploaded to Canvas or MediaSpace. These captions are usually about 90% accurate for English and do not meet the legal requirements for disability accommodation requests. To be fully accessible, captions should be edited. See the guide on finding and editing captions in Kaltura.