It’s summer in Chicago, and with the abundance of fun activities to engage your attention the last thing you may want to do is think about how to improve the accessibility of your online course. Relax. I’m not here to harsh anyone’s summertime mellow. But the fall term is approaching, so step into Dee’s Course Spa® for a refreshing and therapeutic summer break course makeover. Your course will feel sparkly-new and ready for the next term!

Accessibility Stress Reliever

You can get stressed putting up content in an online course. Frequently all you have time to do is copy and paste your Word doc into the WYSIWYG editor and hope for the best. This generally doesn’t cause much trouble for the average student, but visually impaired students often rely on screen readers, and those need content that’s formatted to specific guidelines. Making sure your course content is formatted appropriately sounds impossible to do, but it really isn’t. We’ll work on some select pain points:

Headings and Lists

Let’s take care of the low-hanging fruit. First off, take a look at all your headings. They need to be actual headings, not just a line of bolded or larger text. Your word processing program has default styles that include at least Heading 1 and Heading 2. That’s an easy place to start. Use Heading 1 for the title of your page or document, and Heading 2 for the subheads, and you’ve made it much easier for users of a screen reader to understand the structure and meaning of the content. The approach is similar for listed items. Don’t manually number a series of items; use the list tool in your program’s formatting bar.

Images

You know that wonderful Creative Commons graphic you downloaded from a website? The one that has lots of data in it? Screen readers can’t read it! To make that information available to visually impaired users you must provide appropriate alternative text, or alt text. That could be as simple as “Professor X” if the image is a photo of yourself, but if you have detailed visual information you’ll want to provide more.

Let’s say you insert an illustration in your introductory physics course that details the workings of an internal combustion engine. Most WYSIWYG editors give you the opportunity to add alt text when you add the image. The specificity of the information you enter there as alt text depends on the context and purpose of the image. Assuming you give a description and explanation of the illustration in the text of your page, “illustration of the workings of an internal combustion engine” would be appropriate alt text. The point is to give visually impaired users enough information to determine the context and function of the image.

There’s comprehensive information for alternative text at WebAIM, a non-profit organization that’s an international leader in providing web accessibility expertise. I recommend using this resource if you want more in-depth guidance, especially if you work without an instructional designer.

Remember to Breathe

The thought of dealing with the accessibility of your online course can be stressful. Relax; it’s not as hard as you might imagine. I gave more detailed instructions for making your course accessible in a post last fall if you want to do a deeper dive, but following just these few easy tips will go a long way towards improving your course. Enjoy the summer!