When designing your course within Brightspace, you can make your class and web-based materials accessible to the majority of your audience by employing some simple methods, such as utilizing accessibility and assistive technology tools. You can view Brightspace Accessibility and Navigation documentation on the Brightspace Community web site.

General Guidelines for Improved Accessibility 

Images

Use alternate text tags for images. For example, you can add alternate text when you embed an image from the web. Doing this will mean that people who use a screen reader to read aloud about the contents of a web page will hear an auditory description of the image.

Links

Rather than pasting in raw URLs, link to words that describe the link destination. Again, this will help people using a screen reader understand where the link will take them.

Color

Use other formatting besides color (bold words, different size font) to distinguish between important items in your course. Changing the font size rather than using different colors will benefit those people who cannot differentiate colors.

Headings

Use Heading Styles for section and topic headings. This allows people using a screen reader to navigate through the page by section rather than having to read through an entire page to locate a specific section.

Tables

In order for tables to be meaningful to learners using screen readers, table elements should be accompanied with HTML markup. Rows and columns should be identified with headers.

WebAIM - "Creating Accessible Tables" orange arrow button

Closed Captions

All videos must have closed captioning. Below is a list of the captioning and transcription tools available to IUP faculty, staff, and students. 

Automatically Transcribe Cloud Recordings using Zoom 

Recording Good Quality Audio to Ensure Accurate Transcripts

Add Subtitles or Captions to an MS Stream Video

Generate automatic captions and a transcript for your Microsoft Stream videos

YouTube: Translate videos, subtitles, & captions 

Specific Software Applications for Improving Accessibility 

Introduction to Web page (HTML file) Accessibility 

Methods for Posting Accessible PowerPoint Presentations 

Making Adobe PDF Files Accessible 

How to Make a Word Document Accessible 

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