Designing Accessible Materials Considerations
CHSS Online Teaching Initiative
Designing Accessible Materials
To accomplish the goal of providing the best educational experience to all students at UHD, consider accessibility issues and the Americans with Disabilities Act requirements and ensure that students with disabilities get access to all course materials and functions. The Accessible Education Center at UHD can assist in preparing online courses.
When uploading materials to the online learning management application, consider accessibility issues that may arise from conflicting programs or versions of commonly used word processing programs. If not sure, convert files to PDFs. Using PDFs can help in two ways:
- Instructors can decrease the size of files to be uploaded such as in the case of large PowerPoint files.
- PDF software is universal, and PDF reader programs are free and readily available.
PDFs will appear streamed (and thus won’t require downloading to a student’s computer for initial viewing) and can be easily saved to a student’s computer for later viewing. Make sure students have the most recent free version of Adobe Reader. Consider reducing the size of all files to no more than 15MB, so students can easily download and store course materials.