Accessibility & 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:
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Canvas: for your Canvas course itself
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Ally: an accessibility checker integrated into Canvas to check your course content
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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
Topics not included in the Accessibility Guide include PDFs and audio and video resources.
Accommodation
Plan: What do I need to know and do for my courses?
Cornell University 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 help address new accommodation needs that arise in online and hybrid learning environments. Many accommodations are possible. For more assistance, please reach out for help.
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 a hybrid or online setting.