Public Digital Accessibility Course Check your course for accessibility

There is a lot of information in this course. Hopefully you have been finding it helpful. You may still be wondering where to start. How do you start applying what you have been learning? That's what you will learn on this page. We have created a step-by-step guide you can use to check an entire course.

If you just happened upon this page and you don't know much about the course, please head back to the Home page. This course is a reference guide. There is also an option to take the course as an SLCC employee. In the facilitated version, you will complete assignments and receive detailed feedback about your accessibility work.

Step 1: Clean up your course

The first step is to clean the course you are making accessible. This is not a very comfortable step for some people and for other people it is glorious (I love deleting things). It is necessary so that you don't end up checking the accessibility of files you no longer use. In the end, it will save you time. The good news is that we have a tool at SLCC to help with this step: TidyUP.

TidyUP is a technology that scans your course, makes a list of all files in the course, and lets you know which ones are used. Then it allows you to select files and delete them from that list. You are the best person to clean up your files because only you know which ones are useful and which ones aren't right now.

Important note

TidyUP cannot scan Question banks. Please verify files are not being used in a question bank before deleting them.

If you don't know what a Question Bank is and you built your course, don't worry about this note. You are likely not using Question Banks. If someone else built your course for you, check with them before deleting files from your course.

Written instructions

Add TidyUp to your course navigation
1. Select the Settings tab in course navigation
2. Select the Navigation tab
3. Locate TidyUP from the list
4. Drag and drop it to the visible list (or use the three dots to "Enable" it)
5. At the bottom of the Settings page, select "Save"
Select TidyUP from the course navigation menu
Select Scan Course
Look through the listed files and delete files that aren't used
- Files are only deleted from the course you are in. They are not deleted from previous instances of the course.

Resources

TidyUP User Guide

Step 2: Create a course inventory

Now that your course is cleaned up, it's time to create a course inventory. This is a list of all items in your course that you need to check for accessibility. It includes Canvas pages, assignments, quizzes, discussions, announcements, Word documents, PDFs, Excel files, PowerPoints, and all files you give to students. We are going to use TidyUP to create this inventory.

Note: We are working on an easier way to create this list, so check back in a week to see if the easier way is available yet.

Written instructions

Add TidyUp to your course navigation
1. Select the Settings tab in course navigation
2. Select the Navigation tab
3. Locate TidyUP from the list
4. Drag and drop it to the visible list (or use the three dots to "Enable" it)
5. At the bottom of the Settings page, select "Save"
Select TidyUP from the course navigation menu
Select Scan Course
Download both CSV reports
1. Scroll to the bottom of the Files tab and select "Download CSV Report"
2. Back at the top of TidyUP, select the Canvas Content tab. Scroll to the bottom of this tab and select "Download CSV Report".
Open the CSV reports on your computer
Combine the two reports if desired
Delete columns you won't need. For example, I like to delete the id, size, and updated_at columns from the file report and the id, published, and updated columns from the content report
Add a column titled "Accessibility status" and another column titled "Notes"
Save the file(s) to include the course name and Accessibility Inventory in the file name. Ex. BIOL 2420-DEV Accessibility Inventory

Resources

TidyUP User Guide

Step 3: Bookmark or download the accessibility checklists

You may have noticed that this course does not overly rely on any accessibility tools. Even though all of the tools are helpful, each of them has flaws. Sometimes they check more than we need them to check and sometimes they don't check enough. Even if an accessibility tool checked everything we wanted it to check, accessibility is still a human endeavor and we would still need to check with human eyes.

The course includes Accessibility Checklists that are a list of the basic principles of accessibility for Word, PowerPoint, PDF, and Canvas. These checklists can be used in conjunction with other accessibility tools to ensure you are making your whole course accessible in the most effective way possible.

To make it easy for you to access them later, you can bookmark (or favorite) the checklist page or download/print out the document versions of the checklists.

Step 4: Check and remediate using course inventory and checklists

Now that you have a course inventory it will be easy to keep track of what you have checked and what you have not checked. You can check the content in whichever order you choose. I will share my favorite way to check. If you aren't sure where to start, just follow along with me.

Written instructions

Check all Canvas items

Open the Canvas Accessibility Checklist (print it out if desired)
Start on the Home page of your course.
1. Check the Home page against the checklist. You may use accessibility checkers to aid your work, but none of them will be enough on their own.
2. Mark the accessibility status on your Course Inventory (ex. good, needs work, etc.)
3. Add any notes (ex. Course intro video needs captions)
Move to the next page you would expect students to visit.
1. Check this page against the checklist.
2. Mark the accessibility status on your Course Inventory (ex. good, needs work, etc.)
3. Add any notes (ex. Course intro video needs captions)
Continue checking pages and making notes.
When you have finished the course path, check all Announcements
Finish up by checking any pages not yet checked based on your Course Inventory

Check all Files by File Type

Select a file type to check first. I like to start with Word
Open the Word/PowerPoint/PDF Accessibility Checklist (print it out if desired)
Start with the first Word document on your Course Inventory.
1. Check the document against the checklist. You may use accessibility checkers to aid your work, but none of them will be enough on their own.
2. Mark the accessibility status on your Course Inventory (ex. good, needs work, etc.)
3. Add any notes (ex. Weird formatting, not sure what to do)
Continue checking documents and making notes.

Resources

Step 5: Submit remediation requests if needed

After all of your hard work you should take a break and possibly get yourself a piece of cake from your favorite bakery. That's a lot of work and you did it! Your students are going to be grateful (even if they don't say it).

After your break, come back for a minute. Check your notes. Do you have any videos that still need captions, PDFs that you couldn't figure out how to make accessible, or documents you just aren't quite sure about? It's time to ask for help.

On the Home page of this course there is a link for "Remediation Services". This will take you to a website where you can make a Remediation Request or a Captioning Request. Please send all video captioning requests through the Captioning Request form. The Remediation Request link is for difficult PDFs or other documents. You can also email James Farquharson to schedule a time to ask questions about specific documents that you just need some advice on.

After submitting remediation requests, you will need to replace files in your course with the new files. Captions will automatically be uploaded if you add the video to your course using Kaltura.

Final Note

Once you have checked your course for accessibility, make yourself some bacon and enjoy a quiet moment. You're doing excellent work!

Please keep in mind that we do all of this work for our students. You will never know how many students appreciate the work you are doing. There are still some students who may need accommodations beyond what you have provided by checking and remediating your course. We can't make everything accessible for 100% of people all the time because everyone has differing (and sometimes conflicting) needs. Don't be surprised if you still receive an email from the ADS someday. They will help you in your quest to accommodate your new students and will be grateful for the efforts you have already made.