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Accessibility
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What is Accessibility?
Accessibility of learning materials and technologies ensures that all people—regardless of ability—can interact with the information or services provided.
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Education defines accessibility as meaning “when a person with a disability is afforded the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as a person without a disability in an equally integrated and equally effective manner, with substantially equivalent ease of use.”
Digital accessibility ensures everyone can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with information on the internet, regardless of ability. Accessible online content provides an equal experience for those with visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities or impairments.
Accessibility makes for a better experience for everyone. Accessibility is human-centered, yet technology-driven.
Accessible Canvas Courses
Online courses broaden our ability to reach a wide variety of students, but they can also serve as barriers when the students who need them are unable to access and use them. The UDOIT Accessibility Checker allows you to scan your Canvas courses for potential accessibility issues and resolve many of those issues from within the UDOIT app. UDOIT provides guidance for why accessibility issues may inhibit learning for some students. When used in conjunction with the other accessibility evaluation tools on this page, UDOIT also serves as a checklist for the files in your course, allowing you to quickly access course documents, review them outside of UDOIT to remediate accessibility issues, and mark them as reviewed.
Accessible Product Evaluation Guidelines
Learning technologies should always be evaluated to ensure they are universally accessible. Can everyone who needs to use them do so, or are they inaccessible to some learners or instructors? When the very nature of a technology imposes a barrier to its use, those individuals with certain types of disabilities will not be able to benefit from using it. It can be considered inaccessible along a continuum.
This procedure walks individuals, departments, or programs through the process of evaluating and documenting the relative accessibility of a product for procurement decisions and end-user support preparation.
Sign into the UTK Employee Hub to access the Accessible Product Evaluation Guidelines
Training and Support Guides
Accessible Learning Materials and Tools
Designing for accessibility is the process of proactively creating materials that are usable by the full range of potential end users. This training course introduces best practices that can be applied to ensure accessibility and usability of learning materials and communications.
Enroll in the Accessible Learning Materials and Tools training course
Captioning Lecture Video Instructions
These support references serve as quick reference guides for captioning videos you manage with YouTube or Canvas Studio, respectively.
YouTube: Captioning Videos
YouTube: Accessing your UTK Google YouTube Account
Canvas Studio: Captioning Videos
Have questions about captioning? Read OIT’s recommended captioning options.
Microsoft 365: Accessible Content
Explore the best practices and tips on how to easily make your Outlook emails, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and other content accessible to everyone.
Before you send an Outlook email message or share a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, PowerPoint presentation, or OneNote notebook, run the Accessibility Checker to make your content easier for people with disabilities to read and edit.
Screen Reader (JAWS) Instructional Design & Usage Tips
These training materials are for faculty looking to make their courses more accessible, as well as students who are learning how to navigate their Canvas courses while using a screen reader.
While JAWS (Job Access With Speech) was used in the creation of these materials, many of these concepts should apply to other screen readers.