Accessibility in Courses - Learning Portal - Faculty Toolkit - NWP Learning Commons at Northwestern Polytechnic

Top Tips

Don't make assumptions about a person's disabilities: Many persons with disabilities feel frustrated when people make assumptions about what they can and cannot do.
Be patient and understanding: Students may take more time or have difficulty communicating. Be patient and understanding (but not patronizing).
Speak clearly: Speak as you would with other students: clearly, facing your audience. Don’t speak facing away.
Closed caption audio/visual materials: Make sure any audio/visual materials you use are available with accurate closed captioning.
Make electronic resources available for students: Slides, lecture notes, and forms should be available to all students in advance in accessible formats easily read by assistive technologies.
Check for legibility and clarity: Use Sans Serif fonts and contrasting colours in your materials. Checklists can help.
Use alt-text: Use alt-text on images that are meaningful and convey value. Describe the image and add context if necessary.
Make sure resources are compatible with assistive technologies: Students may need to use assistive technologies like screen readers. Use the resources on this page to make sure your materials can be used with these technologies.
Use built-in accessibility checkers: MS Word, PowerPoint, and Adobe PDFs have built-in features to check your documents for accessibility.
Ask for help if you don't know: Consult Accessibility Services for additional resources and support.

Accessibility at Events

Creating Accessible Learning Resources

PowerPoint Resources

PowerPoint is the most common tool used for lectures. Below are some useful resources for creating accessible presentations:

Using PowerPoint (Accessible Campus)

Creating Accessible PowerPoints (Microsoft)

Word and PDF Resources

Below are resources for creating accessible Word and PDF documents.

Using Word Documents and/or PDFs (Accessible Campus)

Make your Word documents accessible to people with disabilities (Microsoft)

Accessible Word Document Checklist (Queen's University)

Creating Accessible Forms (Queen's University)

Images

One great way to make images more accessible is by including alt-text. This is the text that will be conveyed when using visual aids like a screen reader, descriptions that appear when a mouse hovers over an image, and text that is displayed when an image link is broken. See the resource below about how to create alt-text.

Creating Image ALT Text (Penn State)

Captions

Some resources describing how to create closed captions are provided below.

A Guide to Quality Captioning: Described and Captioned Media Program Captioning Key (via the DCMP's website):

When YouTube Automatic Closed Captioning Goes Wrong (McMaster University)

General Guides

Below are some teaching tips from the Accessible Campus website and elsewhere for creating an accessible learning environment in the classroom.

Universal Design for Learning (CAST)

Creating Accessible Documents Tutorial (Algonquin College)

Learning Portal - Faculty Toolkit: Accessibility in Courses

Creating Accessible Learning Resources