Check for accessibility of learning materials
- Katrina Casey Kosyk, Miss
Making documents used for teaching and learning purposes accessible means ensuring that they can be read and understood by all students in your course. When you check course documents for accessibility before you share them, students—including students with vision impairment or low vision—will be better able to read and understand the documents. This article offers guidance on how to increase documents’ accessibility by running the Accessibility Checker in Microsoft products and writing alternative text (“alt text”) to describe images.
Run the accessibility checker
The Accessibility Checker in Microsoft products flags potential accessibility issues and suggests how to fix them.
Read this general introduction to the Microsoft Accessibility Checker.
Learn more about specific tips for the type of document you want to make accessible:
Microsoft also offers a series of mini videos about how to create accessible documents.
Write alt text for images
Alternative text (“alt text”) is a brief written description sharing relevant information about an image, which supports readers’ understanding when the image itself cannot be viewed. Writing alt text for images in your documents is an important step in making them accessible because it enables readers to understand the meaning an image conveys, even if they do not see the image itself due to visual impairment, low vision, etc. Resources are available to support you in writing clear, effective alt text for graphics, photos, graphs and more. Start by consulting these alt text guidelines from Microsoft and these alt text guidelines from the University of South Carolina.
Learn more:
20 Tips for Teaching an Accessible Online Course (list starts at 06:14) (University of Washington)
Accessible Digital Documents & Websites and Educator’s Accessibility Toolkit (Ontario’s Universities: Accessible Campus)
Accessibility Hub Tutorials (Queen's University)
Addressing Disability at McGill (Teaching for Learning Blog)
Creating Accessible Documents (University of Washington - Accessible Technology)
Creating Accessible Exam Papers (University of Edinburgh)
Resources for Learning (Student Accessibility and Achievement)
Making Learning Inclusive and Accessible (Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur (Québec), Entente Canada-Québec, Concordia University, Bishop’s University, Cégep à Distance, Dawson College, McGill University)