Why?
Course content needs to be accessible so all students may have equal access to educational services and curriculum.
The Disability Resources office is responsible for ensuring students have equal access to their required textbooks. All other course materials are the responsibility of instructors and their departments. Disability Resources is happy to serve as a resource in supporting students with disabilities. Email Casey Hickey, Technology Accessibility Coordinator, to learn more.
How to provide accessible course content for your students
A variety of resources are available to faculty for assistance. Resources of Equitable and Accessible Course Help (REACH) offers workshops, consultations, events, and other programming to support SUNY Cortland faculty.
Additionally, SUNY offers free self-guided online courses on disability and accessibility through Deque University.
Accessible Documents
Brightspace at SUNY Cortland includes ReadSpeaker, a read aloud toolbar for students to listen to quizzes and documents. ReadSpeaker will not work well (or at all) with inaccessible documents, including scanned PDFs that have not been properly remediated. The best way to provide accessible documents to your students is to offer readings as searchable PDFs, accessible Word documents, Brightspace HTML content, or accessible websites.
Here are some tips on how to get started on your own:
Microsoft Office Documents
Most students using text-to-speech software will be able to read well-formatted Microsoft Office documents. Students who are blind will need fully-accessible documents to ensure they will be read properly by a screen reader. Microsoft provides some simple tips for ensuring your Word and PowerPoint documents are accessible. They also offer accessible templates of Office Documents.
PDFs
Ensuring that PDFs are readable and accessible can be challenging, especially for scanned PDFs. Before you spend a significant amount of time with these, consult with REACH or the Disability Resources office on first steps.
Captioned Videos
- Memorial Library offers many videos with accurate captions. You may place a remediation request if you discover a library video without captions or would like the library to purchase a captioned video they do not already own.
- Microsoft Teams and Webex offer automated captions for live events. If it is known that a
- If creating or posting your own video to Brightspace, contact Design Help for assistance.
- If sharing an online video with your class from a third party, like YouTube, be sure to preview the video with the captions turned on. Many videos have accurate captions included. Others have no captions or inaccurate ones. If you have a student that requires captions, please continue searching for an accurately captioned video. You may contact your librarian for assistance.
Common Mistakes
- Don't spend hours trying to make content accessible if you can find it already accessible elsewhere. Search online and in library databases. Colleagues and librarians can also be of assistance.
- Don't scan an old photocopy that has been through multiple generations. Instead, start with an original clean copy from a book or journal if an existing electronic copy is unavailable.
- Don't scan a hard copy without making it searchable and tagging it for accessibility.
- Don't scan a hard copy with shadows, underlining, highlighting, and/or marginalia. These additions may interfere with optical character recognition (OCR).
- Don't post a video with no captions or assume captions are accurate without checking.
Accessible course content has other benefits too
- It’s easier for all students to read high-quality documents and search for keywords in searchable PDFs and captioned videos.
- Many students process information better through videos when they can read captions while watching.
- As text-to-speech technology becomes more widespread, more students are using it—even those without disabilities. One Cortland student without a disability who uses text-to-speech software says, "Like most students, I have trouble concentrating on long reading assignments. Fatigue, a noisy environment and a heavy workload often add to my inability to focus for extended periods of time. I have found that using text-to-speech to read a passage out loud while following along not only significantly increases the length of time I can attend to a reading, it also increases my comprehension of the material."