How does one begin making their online college course ADA accessible?

Oh boy. This was a new experience.

I’ve been teaching online college courses for a few years now, but for the first time ever I was responsible for making my upcoming summer course shells ADA accessible at one of my schools. Talk about scary.

Some schools I work at haven’t reached this point yet in their online programs, and others have already worked past this point and have developed teams of people who do this as their job, and then just provide a master course to instructors to teach (so we’re not responsible for any course setup, technical stuff, compliance, etc.- just grading and checking emails).

One school I’m at is right in the middle, which has become time-consuming as we all muddle through. However, I’m actually kind of grateful for the opportunity to learn something I otherwise would have been clueless about.

During the last week when I was working on this ADA compliance ‘project,’ I saw things from a completely new perspective, and it was pretty interesting. I feel like I got the chance to dabble in a new career (it was fun to have a sneak peak- but I’ll stay where I’m at!).

For any instructors who may run into this in the near future, here are my recommendations to make your life easier (honestly, if I can do it, anyone can!):

• Run whatever accessibility scans you have access to (if you’re working in Canvas, UDOIT is a great tool).
• Keep the lines of communication open via email and phone with the Academic Technology Office (or whatever department can be helpful) since they will let you know exactly what the school/department is looking for (and be incredibly nice when you work with them!)
• If a document, PDF, video, etc. isn’t adding anything great to your course and it causes major accessibility issues, just delete it!
• Watch the following two YouTube videos and read through the WikiHow article below- they makes things simple and easy to follow.

Microsoft Word 2013 Accessibility Checker

Accessible Fonts, Font Size, and Line Spacing in Microsoft Word

How to Create Accessible Word Documents

Good luck my online instructor friends!