Accessibility Checklist
- Nate St George (Unlicensed)
- Maria Shimel
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This article will help instructors to make decisions that will increase the accessibility of their course.
Overview
There are many choices that instructors can make to accommodate more students with their course content. This checklist provides some easy adjustments to start making more accessible content. Not only will these rules help make your content easier to use for all students, but they will also make it easier for screen reader programs to read your content.
Checklist
Use a font size of at least 12px.
Ensure there is sufficient contrast between text and background. If you're using the official Boise State colors, you can use this Color Grid to see which color combinations are accessible.
Ensure that proper heading styles are used.
If you're using Word, you can use Styles to help screen readers to read the document and provide a table of contents. If you've never used Styles before, Microsoft has a basic introduction that might be helpful.
Blackboard has headers formats available. For instructions on using these, see Adding Headers to Blackboard Content.
Ensure that a logical heading structure is used. Generally, each level header should be smaller than the previous (for example, the title of this article is the largest, while the section headers are smaller, and the sub-section headers are smaller than those).
Ensure that images have an alternative description that can convey the full meaning of the image.
Ensure that tables are used for tabular data only.
Ensure that all tables have column headings. For instructions on how to do this in Blackboard, see Adding Tables to Blackboard.
Ensure that all lists use built-in list functionality.
Ensure that all links have text that describes the content (for example, don't make links that only use one word, like "here" - instead, use an entire phrase).
Ensure that built-in PowerPoint slide templates are used.
Don't use scanned PDFs.
Ensure that all PDFs are tagged.
Have an issue or article suggestion?
Email us! lts@boisestate.edu
Content adapted from the Blackboard Ally Communication and Adoption Toolkit - CC BY 3.0