Accessibility Requirements and Skills

When developing or revising an Online/Hybrid course, it is essential to ensure the course is fully accessible to people with a wide range of abilities, disabilities, and other characteristics as described by the Universal Design for Learning Links to an external site. framework and the OEI Rubric Links to an external site. and Peralta Online Equity Rubric Links to an external site..

Why do I need to understand accessibility?

Understanding online accessibility becomes an exercise in learning the fundamental capabilities of different file formats for supporting a core set of accessibility standards that will lead to content that is usable by everyone.
These core accessibility standards help us identify and measure the different capabilities of specific types of online content that affect the relationships between digital information and other computer technologies.
The essence of the challenge is to recognize the nature of what you're working with. You need to be able to distinguish between different digital page and document formats and understand what each format is capable of supporting in terms of accessibility.
This is important because not all formats are equal when it comes to supporting accessibility. Fortunately, the concepts and standards for assessing the content are constant.

The following three concerns apply to every digital page and document you create or include within your course:
1. Applying or using heading styles to headers and subheaders.
2. Providing alt text (textual description for images and complex charts)
3. Include closed captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions for any pre-recorded videos.
4. Include transcripts for any pre-recorded audio.
5. Define header cells for columns and/or rows in your tables.
When you address these three concerns within your digital pages and documents, you help ensure a basic level of accessibility that will allow most students to access your course successfully.

Digital Media Type	Accessibility Strategy
Digital Text	Apply semantic structure through the use of heading styles, and other formatting styles that can be useful for users of assistive technology.
Digital Images	Describe your digital images with succinct yet thorough verbiage in the form of alternate text.
Digital Audio	Provide a digital text transcript of digital audio information.
Digital Video	Provide a digital transcript of digital audio information contained in the video and caption the video. Automated transcription of the video through YouTube which uses ASR (automated speech recognition) is not considered to be acceptable quality for accessibility.

The following are guidelines for when to caption video and audio materials:

Material that will be archived or used in additional courses that have both video and audio.
Links to YouTube videos or other streaming video services (permission is not required if you use a caption overlay service).
Links to other publishers and other third party resources.
Any compilation of video clips that is archived.
Archived video material that is used in the classroom.
Video created by the campus and placed on a public website.
Section 508 is now requiring audio description for video as well.

Video and audio material that is one-time use and not carried over to another term in a course with restricted access (such as a password-protected class).
Student work that will not be archived.
Be aware that a transcript and/or captioning may be required as an accommodation for a student who has a disability.

Any instructional material that is audio-only and is archived as part of your course.