Keeping your Course Site course accessible

The purpose of this documentation is to highlight best practices for keeping your Course Site course accessible.

About Course Site

By default, Course Site is an accessible web site. However, Course Site's ability to maintain great accessibility is limited, in part, by how well your content is structured, how well your course page is laid out, and how accessible your posted content is.

Best practices for keeping your Course Site course accessible

Stay mindful of how many items are posted in a single topic/week area

Think of your Course Site course page as a table of contents for your course. The more items you have under a given topic area (or throughout your entire course), the harder it will be to navigate and make logical sense of. Some courses require posting a lot of material. Think about strategically chunking your content, and grouping content under sub-sections (using headings).

Upload accessible documents and review existing documents

Make sure that the documents posted to your course page are accessible. Before you upload new documents, make sure they are accessible and/or have been created to be accessible.

It is common to copy course content from one semester/year to the current course and the posted content within does not get reviewed. Get into the habit of reviewing existing documents as you import content from previous courses so that as you move forward, more and more content will already be accessible the next time you import content. We have several resources available to help you make sure your documents are accessible:

resource

If you would like assistance getting started, you can contact (DDS, IT team, HD, other?)

Making images accessible

Making images you post to your course page accessible is very simple. There are two major attributes you need to specify:

Alt Text: This attribute describes, briefly, the content depicted in the image and gets read to the user via a screen reader
Description: This attribute allows you to provide a more detailed description of the content depicted in the image