Welcome to CITL’s accessible syllabus challenge!

Over the course of five days, we invite you to learn how to create accessible documents for your courses, starting with your syllabus. Each day, we will: 

  • tell you about small change(s) you can make in your document to make it more accessible
  • explain who among your students benefit from these small changes
  • teach you how to implement the small change of the day
  • provide you with resources to learn more about accessibility

Note: This program best applies when your syllabus is 90% ready at least. You can work on these small changes one day at a time, following the challenge emails if you choose that option, or use these resources to fit your schedule, whether you are dedicating one day to go through it all, or you are spreading your efforts throughout a longer period of time.

Click on the tabs below to get started

Illustrated picture of 11 people of all ages, races and abilities standing outside on what appears to be a school or college campus.

Accessibility is usability for everyone. It is work done ahead of time to make content and platforms available to the widest audience possible. 

Designing accessible course content is real work, but it is work that can become part of your routine workflow, and this is what we want to help you achieve with this challenge: learn new skills to improve the accessibility of your courses overall, one day at a time, starting with your syllabus. 

Why should courses be accessible? 

It is the law

Instructors are required to provide reasonable accommodations to any student who has a documented disability and requests a course accommodation. 

It is easier to create accessible courses than to remediate inaccessible courses

If you take the time to learn how to create accessible course documents, making your courses more accessible becomes second nature and requires minimal extra work since the bulk of the work is spread over time. Work smarter, not harder. 

It is more inclusive

When you consider accessibility and thus inclusivity at the course design stage, you remove some of the most common barriers to access to course material which makes your course more welcoming to our diverse body of UMaine and UMM students. 

Note that you may still need to provide specific accommodations, on a case by case basis, in addition to providing accessible course material, depending on the individual needs of students.

Course Accessibility at UMaine

10% of the student population at UMaine documented having one or more disabilities in the academic year 2022-2023. The fastest growing reasons for accommodations are psychiatric or mental health disabilities and medical or health related disabilities, including chronic conditions with unpredictable flare-ups. 

Notes about students with disabilities and requests for accommodations 

  • Students can have several reasons for accommodation (one or more disabilities) and some of the reasons may not be perceivable (physical disabilities versus neurodivergence, color vision deficiency or chronic illness, just to name a few examples).
  • It is up to the student to disclose their need for accommodations. Research as well as experience show that students with disabilities may choose not to disclose their need for accommodation to their instructor by fear of being treated differently, and may disclose later on in a given semester if and when they meet barriers in the course they can’t overcome on their own.
  • Students who have a documented need for accommodation were able to provide the paperwork that allows them to qualify for a reasonable accommodation. There are many students on our campus who met with Student Accessibility Services but were not able to provide paperwork to qualify for a reasonable accommodation. Students can be non-documented for a variety of reasons, ranging from financial barriers to time and administrative constraints as getting a disability legally recognized can be a lengthy and difficult process.

Before tomorrow

  • Select the syllabus you would like to work on for this challenge, if you had not done so already
  • Think about the students in your class, the request for accommodations you have, or might encounter, and what needs to be different for these students to succeed in your class. You can also use one or more of our data driven student personas for this exercise
  • Schedule or set aside at least 15 minutes for everyday of this week to engage with the content of this challenge, and more time to apply what your learned and make changes in your syllabus
  • Curious to know what other people struggle with? Share your thoughts with each other via padlet.
Excerpt from a papyrus scroll covered with hieroglyphs in red and black ink. Text is arranged in two columns.

Structure can helps us to get oriented and make sense of an unknown document.

What is it? Importance of titles, headings and font choice

How can we tell what a document is about? Typically, we rely on the title and headings in the document, its format, and of course its content to identify and make sense of a document, but this can be difficult when we are presented with a wall of text without headings and white space. 

What helps us to navigate a document?

  • a clear an unique title (both the title of the file and the title at the top of the document itself)
  • headings and subheadings that give us a sense of the outline and help us find the information we are looking for
  • clear fonts that are large enough and easy to read
  • white space 

Who benefits from accessible documents?

  • Students who are screen reader users
  • Deaf students whose first language is American Sign Language
  • Students who have mental health issues such as anxiety and depression 
  • Students with ADHD
  • Students who have never had good organization modeled
  • And many more students who will be able to find the information they are looking for quickly and easily

How do you create accessible headings

Dig deeper into accessible headings and fonts

Now it’s your turn!

Before tomorrow

  • Have you consulted the tutorial for your chosen platform/software? 
  • Is the title of your syllabus file clear and unique?
  • Have you added appropriate headers throughout your syllabus?

Is your syllabus’ font at least 12pt font (14 is better!) and from the following list: Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Tahoma, Verdana, or a similar typeface?

Throughout this semester

  • Apply the same steps to every new document you create
  • Apply the same steps to existing documents in your course, including text in your Brightspace course
Multitude of question marks of various sizes arranged together to spell the word “where”

What are hyperlinks and permalinks?

A hyperlink is an electronic link that provides direct access from one location to another. This can be within the same document or between documents. 

A permalink is a hyperlink that can be expected to remain unchanged overtime, as long as the document remains available. 

Hyperlinks often read as series of letters, numbers and symbols, which makes them unintelligible to the reader. For a hyperlink or permalink to be accessible, it is best to use clear descriptive text to replace the original series of letters, numbers and symbols, so that the hyperlink becomes intelligible to human-beings.

Who benefits from accessible links?

  • Students who are screenreader users
  • Students who have learning disabilities
  • Students who get disoriented easily
  • Students who have anxiety
  • Students who have low vision
  • Students who are using a phone or tablet to access your course
  • And many more students who will appreciate knowing what it is exactly that you want them to access

How do you do create accessible links?

Read our tutorial on how to create accessible hyperlinks in your course documents

Resources on hyperlinks

Now it’s your turn to create accessible hyperlinks!

Before tomorrow

  • Review your syllabus for any hyperlinks
  • Replace/edit as needed

Throughout this semester

  • Review your content in Brightspace for any hyperlinks and edit as needed
  • Work towards using permalinks throughout your course

Note on permalinks

If instead of posting a downloaded PDF of a journal article, you share a permalink with your students, you:

  • provide a more accessible version of the document as publishers nowadays offer several different ways for the user to access and interact with their content
  • are in line with copyright and fair use legislation
  • make sure that the number of view for a journal article is recorded (Impact Factor), which is particularly important for early career and authors who belong to one or more minority groups
Eight images consisting of closely packed coloured dots and a number.
Excerpt of “Eight Ishihara charts for testing colour blindness” Credit: Science Museum, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk Eight Ishihara charts for testing colour blindness, Europe, 1917-1959. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0.

Use of colors and images

Today, we want to draw your attention to both the use of color and the use of images in your syllabus, and in your course documents in general. 

Color coding

About 1 in 12 individuals born with X and Y chromosomes (male biological sex) and 1 in 200 individuals born with X and X chromosomes (female biological sex) are affected by some kind of color vision deficiency, commonly referred to as color blindness. One of the main symptoms of color vision deficiency is the difficulty to tell some colors apart. Whether it is for text or for items such as lines on a graph, color coding alone may not be sufficient for students who have color vision deficiency to understand the information presented to them. It is thus important, when you are color coding information, to also provide an alternative to color coding to convey the information. We go over alternatives to color coding in the section on accessible use of color of today’s tutorial.

Images

In addition to the color scheme in an image, its quality and size matter, as well as the presence of an alternative text description of the image for screen reader users. We address all these aspects in today’s tutorial.

Who benefits from accessible color schemes and images?

  • Students who have a color vision deficiency (also known as “color blindness”)
  • Students who have low vision or other visual impairments
  • Blind students
  • Students who have learning disabilities
  • Students who have low internet bandwidth
  • And many more students who will have an easier time finding and understanding the information you are presenting

How do you make images accessible?  

Read CITL’s guide on Making images in your course accessible. In this guide, you will learn about alternative text, accessible use of colors, image resolution and image literacy. 

Dig deeper into the use of accessible colors and images

Now it’s your turn! Check that you are using accessible images and colors in your courses!

Before tomorrow

  • Review your syllabus for any color coding and add one other way to code the information
  • Review you syllabus for any images and add alternative text or a caption

Throughout this semester

  • Review your content in Brightspace for any images and color coding and edit as needed
  • Work towards adding alternative text to all images throughout your course
  • Work towards checking your use of colors and making changes when necessary throughout your course

Note: Adding alternative text to images is a big goal, especially if you are using multiple complex images in each lesson. We recommend that you break this goal down into smaller tasks such as a chapter or unit a month, or even one lesson a month, depending on the complexity of the images you are using. Focus on building the habit and address new content first. 

What are accessible layouts and formats?

An accessible layout or format for your document allows your students to access all the information in the intended order, without risks of confusions. There are three common areas where the layout and format can cause accessibility issues in your courses: tables, slides, and your Brightspace course. Since we are focusing on the syllabus, we will look at tables today, and specifically at tables when they are used as a formatting tool.

Tables as formatting tools

Tables are tools to organize data. Tables are also widely used as formatting tools, which help create pleasing designs but not necessarily accessible designs in documents. Does this mean that you can no longer use tables to format your class schedule or a graphic syllabus? No, you can still use tables as formatting tools, but you may need to make a few adjustments and, in some cases, be prepared to provide a more traditional syllabus to meet accommodations requests. 

Who benefits from accessible tables?

Everyone, but specifically:

  • Students who are using screen readers
  • Students who are blind or have low vision
  • Students who have learning disabilities
  • Students who have mental health issues
  • And many more students who will have an easier time finding and understanding the information you are presenting

How do you create accessible tables?

  1. Give your table a clear title
  2. Describe your table in a sentence or two
  3. Use clear headings for each column
  4. Do not merge cells. If you must merge cells to announce a new unit for example, then repeat the headers after the merged cells.
  5. Do not leave cells empty. If you prefer the look of empty cells, for example when there are no assignments, then write “No assignments” and change the color of the text to the color of the background of your document. A screen reader can read it, but it is invisible to sighted users.
  6. Make sure the content of the cell is understandable as a stand alone piece of information. For example, if you have a column for weeks, write “Week 1” instead of “1”, “Week 2” instead of “2”, and so on

Dig deeper into accessible practices for tables

Now it’s your turn to create accessible tables for your courses!

Before tomorrow

  • Review your syllabus for any tables
  • Edit as needed

Throughout the semester

  • Review your content in Brightspace for any tables and edit as needed
  • Work towards using accessible tables throughout your course

Thank you for participating in our syllabus challenge!

Consider applying one skill you learned in this challenge in all new documents you are creating this semester, so that it becomes second nature. Share your plans with each other via padlet!

If you would like to discuss accessibility in your course, request a consultation and we’ll look forward to learning about your course. 

Accessibility is a journey, not a destination. There is always more to learn but the goal remains the same: greater ease of access for all.