Creating Accessible Content

We design with accessibility in mind, and by aligning our processes with global accessibility standards, we make our products usable by people with disabilities and interoperable with assistive technologies.

Four Accessible Design

There are 4 main categories of disability: visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive, all of which require different approaches to inclusive course design. There are four more principles of inclusive design set out in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines:

1. Perceivable: Any user must be able to perceive content through a screen reader or assistive device.
2. Operable: Any user can interact with anything using an assistive device or keyboard.
3. Understandable: Beyond navigating content, it should be presented in a way users can understand.
4. Robust : In terms of overall user experience, a large range of technologies must be able to access and interpret content.

Read Developing Accessible Content for more information on how to put these principles into action within your Brightspace course.

If you want to learn more about D2L’s adherence to Accessibility Guidelines, look at our WCAG 2.1 checklist and VPAT here.

Accessible Course Checklist

Here are some things to check in your course to make sure you’re designing with accessibility in mind:

• HTML Accessibility Checker: Click the accessibility checker with the html editor for it to evaluate any content created inside and suggest changes such as colour contrast, image captioning, or heading structure.
• Use captioning on any videos. If you don’t/can’t do closed captioning on videos, provide alternative materials for those who may need them e.g. transcripts.
• Other content types: HTML is the most accessible form of web content, including word, PDFs and PowerPoint. SCORM is getting more accessible, but is certainly something to check as they have endless tabbing on screen readers.
• If you are using images or graphs make sure you’re using descriptive alt text, and perhaps an alternative version for those who need it.

Community Articles on Accessibility

• Meeting Web Accessibility Content Standards
• Providing Alternative Learning Materials
• Tips for Making your Online Courses More Accessible

If you have any other questions, please post them in the Accessibility area in the Brightspace community.