Making your course accessible is a critical part of complying with the ADA Title II guidelines, ensuring that all students have equal access to your digital content. Accessible courses support students with visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive impairments, enabling them to engage fully with course materials.
Faculty are responsible for making their course content accessible for all users in accordance with George Mason’s implementation of ADA Title II requirements. This entails reviewing your course's current accessibility status using the Panorama tool, making sure your textbook is accessible, converting your commonly used files to accessible formats, and also making sure that the content you are not sharing with students is moved into your Canvas sandbox.
An explanation of all of this is available on George Mason’s Top Tips for Creating Accessible Courses page.
This week’s pro tip: How to enable and use the Panorama tool on your Canvas site and evaluate your current course for its accessibility score
Start by adding Panorama to your Canvas course's navigation menu. As you review the accessibility of your course content in Canvas using Panorama, prioritize content flagged with RED or ORANGE accessibility score icons. These icons mean your files have significant or moderate accessibility issues that may prevent some students from fully engaging with your instructional materials.
The most common issues identified are as follows:
- Images that lack alternative text (alt text) descriptions
- Poor color contrast
- Hyperlinks that lack descriptions
- Reading order issues in PPT and PDF documents
- Scanned PDFs (i.e., images of text)
- Tables that lack column headers
Would you like to increase the accessibility of your course? Find more information on George Mason’s Top Tips for Creating Accessible Courses page.
Do you specifically need help creating accessible documents? Find more information on George Mason’s Creating Accessible Documents page.
Learn how to create accessible instructional resources. Participate in self-guided accessibility trainings and/or one-on-one consultations through the ATI Office. Visit Training Workshops for more information.