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Instructional Support

Accessibility of Learning Materials



The Tennessee Higher Education Commission (THEC) has charged the University of Tennessee System (UT System) and the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR) to develop and implement policies for accessible information, materials, and technology used in the college and university setting.

The term accessible means everyone, including people with learning differences, is afforded the same opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services in an equally effective and integrated manner, with substantially equivalent ease of use.

The How-to Guides and checklists on this page will help you to ensure the learning materials you create are accessible to all.​ For additional support, you can contact the OIT HelpDesk at 865-974-9900.

Accessible Canvas Courses

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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.

Visit the UDOIT Accessibility User Guide.

Accessible 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.

Visit the Accessible Product Evaluation Guidelines page.

Training, Guides, and Checklists

AEIT

Accessibility Evaluation and Implementation Tools (AEIT)

This collection of tools help guide authors using common authoring tools to evaluate and implement best practices for accessibility. Download the checklists below, which each reference “just in time” descriptive tutorials.

Microsoft

Platforms

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Accessible Learning Materials & Tools

Learn how to design learning materials accessibly. This site contains courses that focus on making documents accessible, PowerPoints accessible, captioning videos, and using Read&Write software effectively.

Enroll in the Accessible Learning Materials training course.

Accessible Documents & PowerPoints

This document contains steps to follow to ensure accessibility of Microsoft Office 2016 documents including Word documents and PowerPoints. It also provides information about making accessible PDFs from Office 2016 source documents.

DownloadHow to Design Accessible Office Docs

DownloadUsing the Word Accessibility Checker

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Captioning Lecture Video Instructions

These documents serve as quick reference guides for captioning videos you manage with YouTube or Canvas Studio, respectively.

DownloadCaptioning YouTube Videos Quick Reference Guide

DownloadCaptioning Canvas Studio Videos Quick Reference Guide

Note: If you have never logged into your UTK YouTube account, detailed instructions on how to do so and how to create your first channel are at “First Time in YouTube.”

Have questions about captioning? Read more about OIT’s recommended captioning options

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Implementing UDL on Canvas

Don’t just put materials on Canvas, design courses on Canvas. This course can be used as a reference or as a learning tool to proactively address barriers to learning and enhance your Canvas courses for everyone!

Enroll in the Implementing UDL on Canvas training course.