During the design and curation of course materials, an important issue to keep in mind is the equitable access of materials by all learners. Because it is difficult to anticipate and learn about the needs of all of your students, a more effective strategy is to become familiar with common barriers that students experience in class, such as poorly formatted text-based materials, uncaptioned video content, and inaccessible hyperlinks. By thinking of such classroom barriers rather than specific disabilities, instructors can cultivate an inclusive learning environment for all of their students. Doing this aligns with best practices in Universal Design for Learning.
Audio transcripts and video captions are essential for some students and helpful for all students. They make media accessible for students who are Deaf or have hearing impairments, students whose native language is different from the audio/video content, students who learn through multiple modalities, and students with equipment limitations (e.g. unreliable access to headphones or speakers).
Additional tips
Students who use assistive technology rely on heading styles to navigate and understand documents and webpages. Heading styles go beyond font styles and indicate a difference in hierarchical structure of the content. (Word processing applications such as Google Docs, Open Office, and Word allow you to designate text with multiple heading styles.) For example, use level 1 headings to indicate the title, topic, or purpose of a document, and level 2 and 3 headings to indicate main sections and subsections of the document. Read more from the Web Accessibility Initiative about giving structure to documents.
Depending on the type and purpose of the images we use in our pedagogical materials, there are different strategies for how to provide alternative (alt) text. The Web Accessibility Initiative recommends that alternative text for a decorative image does not need alt text while an informative image should include a short description about essential information. Complex images, such as graphs and charts, require a short image description and a summary of the information conveyed by the image. Read more from the Web Accessibility Initiative about providing alt text for complex images and different types of images and appropriate alternative text.