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Creating Accessible Courses and Course Content
Organizing your course in a way that supports the learning needs and styles of all users can be a difficult task. Your learning materials need to engage, educate, evaluate, and accommodate people effectively. Set clear course expectations There are some design decisions you can make that will help all learners use your…
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Make Your HTML Content Pages More Accessible
This topic provides tips to help you focus on making HTML content pages more accessible to students with disabilities, particularly for those students using assistive technology such as a screen reader. Use headings to organize content Headings provide visual chunks to your content, but they also provide navigation for…
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What is a VPAT and how can it help you?
In this article, we'll look at a somewhat technical, and often over-looked aspect of using technology and software in education. What is a VPAT The Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) is a tool that provides information about how well a vendor’s product or service conforms to the US Government Section 508…
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Creating Accessible Course Content in Microsoft Word
Many educators use one or more programs contained in Microsoft® Office when creating course content or other instructional materials for online courses. In this post we’ll focus on a few tips and techniques for making accessible content using Microsoft® Word, although similar concepts apply to other word processing…
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Creating Accessible Course Content in Microsoft PowerPoint
Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentation graphics program and similar programs are frequently used for creating course content in all levels of education. If those PowerPoint slide decks are placed online as part of an online course, it is important for those decks to be accessible to student using assistive technology. Using…
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Alt Text for Web Page Images
What are Alternate Text Descriptions?Alt Text is the text-only information that is associated with an image for the purpose of providing information that is equivalent to the image itself. It’s used to provide information when images cannot be viewed; usually, when the person looking at the image has a visual impairment,…
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Improving accessibility through alignment with the latest standards
Originally published June 19, 2019 We are updating the accessibility level of our products to align with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA standards. This revision to the previous version – WCAG 2.0 Level AA – was published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in June 2018 and has stabilized in…
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Aira-Another Accessibility Offering from D2L
Aira – Another Accessibility Offering from D2L What is Aira?Aira is an assistive technology that helps users with vision loss get information about the visual world around them through their smartphone. The user could be trying to select a birthday card with a message they like or to find their favourite coffee shop in an…
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Using Accessible Videos for Your Online Courses
Videos seem to be playing an ever-increasing role in the delivery of online course materials. From step-by-step screencasts, to video interviews, to artistic or historical pieces; videos can be an effective way of developing skills or expanding the knowledge base of learners. However, if some learners cannot see or hear…
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Taking steps toward more usable and accessible math online
This topic contains information previously published by Andy Freed of Portland Community College in 2012. It has been updated and combined with other sources. D2L has come a long way since math equations relied on with a Java-based equation editor – those applets presented difficulties for overall usability, and they were…