Accessibility ensures that all students can equally access, use, and understand learning content. Additional accommodation needs may arise in online learning environments.

Whether a course is taught in person or online, course materials should be accessible to all students.  In addition, for online instruction, Cornell offers an array of services to support faculty including:

• CTI can consult on ways to use specific tools (captioning video recordings, providing alternate text for images, and more) to facilitate accessibility in an online learning environment
• the library can help identify teaching materials that are already fully accessible as well, and in many cases, the judicious choice of such materials greatly alleviates accessibility issues

Jump to Accommodation

Getting Started With Accessibility

Plan: What do I need to know?

Accessibility means ensuring that all students can equally access, use, and understand learning content. Universal design for learning can help with creating accessible content through consideration of a variety of learning modalities and disabilities. Accessible course materials include but are not limited to alternate text for images and graphs, a clear course structure, and captions and transcripts for course media like videos and audio.

Prepare: What do I need to do for my courses?

Course content and documents in Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint format can be accessible, but these formats are not accessible by default. Many of the issues are the same as for web pages (e.g., appropriate headings, alternate text for images) but the techniques vary across document authoring tools.

How do I get started?

Use an accessibility checker to ensure that all types of content in your course meet requirements:

• Canvas: for your Canvas course itself

• Ally: an accessibility checker integrated into Canvas to check your course content

• Equidox: a more intuitive and user-friendly tool for checking and remediating PDFs than the accessibility checker in Adobe Acrobat Pro

• Adobe Acrobat PRO: for PDFs
• MS Office: for Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents
• Website content: WAVE and SiteImprove are available to Cornell instructors

Accommodation

Plan: What do I need to know and do for my courses?

Cornell University's policy is that faculty should prioritize addressing known accessibility needs for students enrolled in their classes. Student Disability Services (SDS) works closely with faculty to support students who may need specific accommodations (e.g., support to complete classwork or additional time for examinations). SDS support can also help address new accommodation needs that arise in online learning environments. Many accommodations are possible; this includes a Alternative Testing Program, a pilot program that provides centralized support for testing accommodations. 

Prepare: How do I get started?

Some students may not have enough privacy to be able to participate freely in class discussions, especially around sensitive topics. Consider surveying students at the beginning of the course to learn about their remote environment. This will help you better understand how to make accommodations that might affect student learning but might not be apparent in an online setting.