Create accessible files

Owned by Joana Kort Mascort
Mar 18, 2024
2 min read

The Equity Team at McGill has developed these best practices concerning online delivery of education at McGill. The Equity at McGill team’s statement on making teaching more accessible during today’s times of online learning includes:

 

“While shifting to remote learning may be difficult for most of us, this method of learning may create added barriers for particular students. These barriers may be due to a disability, whether learning or otherwise, to financial constraints, to lack of the required technology, or other factors. In order to address this concern, and to effectively remove these barriers, we can work on making our virtual classroom more accessible.”


Create an accessible file

The Teaching for Learning Blog Addressing disability at McGill describes what an accessible document is and how to create an accessible document. In the words of author Timothy Swiffen,

“In the broadest sense, an accessible document is one that allows all potential to readers to autonomously access all the relevant and essential information without losing meaning and without having to rely on institutional support. In other words, a text that every student can fully engage with, regardless of disability. An accessible document then is one that will function with assistive technologies (like screen readers and other TTS software). However, there is a gradient when it comes to document accessibility. Simply put, some digital documents are more accessible than others.”

Swiffen outlines tips to make your written course material more accessible to students:

  1. Favour digital files: They are more accessible than hard copies, and students can access required readings without having to carry textbooks and course packs.

  2. Use files where the text is recognizable by a computer and where you can copy/paste and search by word.

  3. Check if your PDF has “tags”; tags help distinguish headings from subheadings.

  4. Avoid scanned material (which often does not have text that is recognizable by a computer or tags) and focus on extant digital files.

  5. Use the course outline template provided by TLS; this document has been written and reviewed according to accessibility standards.

See the Teaching for Learning Blog for further details.