Remember the Office for Digital Accessibility's strategy of Remove, Revise, and Right First when looking at your courses.
Remove
As you are moving your course content, remember the biggest way to reduce the amount of work you need to do to make materials accessible is to remove it from your active teaching course into a development site, or leave it in your older courses, which do not need to be remediated.
The graph shows the amount of files and course content that exists in teaching sites across UMD is more than double the amount actually in use (published and/or attached to an assignment, page, module, etc).
Any materials in your active courses will need to be accessible, even if they are unpublished, once the University's updated Accessibility of Information Technology policy goes into effect in April 2026. Keeping the materials, activities, etc that you aren't actively using in your older course sites or moving them into a development site for storage purposes still allows easy access when you need them.
Tip!
If you use Modules or Pages to organize your content, there's a fairly straightforward way to bring forward the things you are using and leave the rest behind. Check out this slide deck, adapted from a presentation given by members of an Academic Technology accessibility working group, for tips on how to copy forward your materials.
Revise
Revising course content is an ongoing and evolving effort, and there's no need to make sweeping changes all at once. Instead, small adjustments can have a significant impact, especially when they are considered thoughtfully.
To run a UDOIT scan on your course, look for "Check Accessibility with UDOIT" in the left navigation menu. If you don't see it, enable it through your course settings menu.
When you are on any page in Canvas, there is a small icon in the bottom of the Rich Content Editor window that looks like a person with arms and legs outstretched - "the DaVinci man" as some have called it. That icon shows if there are any accessibility errors on the page. A great habit to build is fixing any errors when you are saving changes to a page anyway.
Tip!
Either tool will provide suggestions to help make remediation easier.
Right First
Familiarize yourself with the 7 core accessibility skills in order to build accessible content from the start. This is the easiest way to avoid remediation work later.
Tip!
Meet with an academic technologist, instructional designer, or Office of Digital Accessibility staff to create a plan for upcoming course content. UMD Academic Technology and Course Design team's support options are available year-around and are listed on our Academic Tech Support for Faculty website. The Office of Digital Accessibility offers consultations and provides custom presentations upon request. Consult the ODA website for their support details.
Next Fall
Invite Us to a Departmental Meeting Next Fall
The UMD Academic Digital Accessibility Liaisons have seen the most success when we can meet with individual departments to go over the most common issues in your unit, and have instructors run a UDOIT check and start asking questions. There was a general reduction in stress levels for many folks who started working on their course during the meeting, as they realized that they could do this work.
We encourage departments to reach out - we'd love to meet with you next fall! We can be reached at [email protected] to schedule time.
Focus on Creating Accessible PDFs, Images, and Presentations
The University community continues to build a list of approaches and tools that can help remediate or serve as an alternative to PDF files. Stay tuned for more information or schedule a consultation to learn how to address your specific needs.