Faculty quick guide: 10 rules for accessible course materials
One page. Print it, pin it, forward it. Remediation doesn't
scale if new inaccessible content keeps arriving — prevention is the cheapest
fix in the whole program. (This is the web version of
program/faculty-quick-guide.md.)
The 10 rules
- Use real headings. Apply Heading 1/2/3 styles — don't just make text big and bold. Screen reader users navigate by heading; a page without them is one long undifferentiated block.
- Write meaningful link text. “Week 3 reading (PDF)” beats “click here.” Screen readers offer a list of links out of context — every link should make sense alone.
- Add alt text — and know when to leave it empty. Describe
what the image means in the lesson (“Bar chart: students who slept 8
hours scored higher”), not “image of chart.” Purely decorative images get
empty alt (
alt="") so screen readers skip them. - Don't rely on color alone. “Correct answers are in green” fails for color-blind students and screen readers. Add a word, a symbol, or a label: “Correct answers are marked Correct.”
- Use the built-in templates for slides. PowerPoint/Slides layout placeholders carry structure that exported images lose. Avoid pasting text as screenshots; use the outline view to check that all slide text is real text.
- Caption your videos — and correct the captions. Auto-captions are a draft (typically ~60–84% accurate). Correct speaker names, punctuation, and sound cues, or route media through the captioning service. Every required video needs accurate captions.
- Prefer HTML pages over PDFs. HTML reflows on phones, works with screen readers, and is searchable. If you must use a PDF, start from a tagged, text-based source document — never a scan — and run the accessibility checker on it.
- Use simple tables with header rows. Keep one idea per
table, mark the header row (and use “Header Row” in Word/PowerPoint or
<th>in HTML). Complex nested tables lose their meaning when read cell by cell. - Check contrast. Text should be dark-on-light or light-on-dark with real separation (aim for 4.5:1). Light gray on white and pastel-on-pastel fail. The checker in rule 10 flags this automatically.
- Run the built-in accessibility checker. Word, PowerPoint, and Canvas all have one (Review → Check Accessibility). Fix everything it marks “Error”; “Tips” are worth reading too. It takes two minutes on a typical document.
When you need help
- New course build or redesign: book the ID team — accessibility is cheapest at design time.
- Videos beyond 30 minutes, or more than an hour of video per course: media services routes them to captioning (human correction of a transcript, not from-scratch transcription).
- Scanned PDFs: don't remediate the scan — send it for HTML conversion; the result is better and reusable.
- A student reports a barrier: that becomes a priority-1 fix the same week, regardless of any model or schedule.