3.1 Introduction to Web Accessibility for Technology-Enabled Learning

Ensuring your course content is accessible helps reduce barriers to comprehension, helping all students engage with a course regardless of any differences in ability. A course will reach a wider audience when its content is made accessible. Even when there are no students with identified academic accommodations in a class, accessible course content can be reviewed in a variety of ways, while inaccessible content offers limited forms of engagement. This chapter will help ensure your course is accessible to students with access needs, including those with impairments to vision, hearing, physical coordination, and cognition, as well as those whose native language is not English.

If you’re wondering where to start in developing content that meets UDL standards, consider reviewing the following checklist. Completing this checklist will highlight the sections in this chapter that best meet your needs.

Benefits of accessible course content:

• Offers the widest range of learners the opportunity to succeed
• Makes large amounts of information easier to navigate
• Ensures information is clear and unambiguous

When developing an accessible course, this chapter will help you to:

• Write information with proper headings, fonts, and hyperlinks
• Structure content with tables and lists
• Use accessible colour and contrast
• Offer formulas and mathematical expressions for all learners
• Create documents and files that meet accessibility needs
• Design multimedia content for those with visual impairments
• Follow a basic checklist for accessibility