How do I build accessible course materials?
This wiki guide provides an overview on how to make your course materials (documents, slides, PDFs, videos, and Canvas pages) accessible to all learners.
Why This Strategy Matters
Accessible course materials remove barriers to learning before students encounter them. Although accessibility is essential for students who use captions, screen readers, or other assistive technologies, these practices benefit everyone; for example, clear structure aids navigation, captions support students in noisy environments or who are multilingual, and readable formatting reduces cognitive load. Building for accessibility at the start is far less work than retroactively remediating instructional materials after a student discloses a need. The Teaching and Learning Collaborative (TLC) at NECO encourages a Universal Design for Learning approach to ensure that no student has to ask for access to what their peers already have.
Best Practice Tips:
- Start by addressing the materials you use the most in your course. You do not need to fix everything at once; prioritize the current, high-use documents and build accessible materials as you replace and create new materials.
- Most accessibility work happens at the time of creation: using built-in styles, layouts, headers, and accessibility checkers in the software that you use for word processing or slide design.
- Accessible best practices apply across formats: A well-structured Word document converts into a well-structured PDF or LMS page.
- When in doubt, do it in HTML: Content built directly in a Canvas page is generally more accessible and mobile-friendly than the same content as an attached file.
Core Practices for Accessible Course Material
Structure content with proper headings and lists.
Use built-in heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2…) in Word/Docs, PowerPoint/Slides, or Canvas to apply semantic headings (H1, H2, H3) in order, and use the built-in list function in Canvas, Microsoft Office, Google Workspace, and other apps to organize information clearly. Do not use bold or enlarged “Paragraph/Normal” text.
Screen reader users navigate through text by headings the way sighted users skim a page. Keep the hierarchy logical and don’t skip heading levels! This improves navigation for screen readers and readability for everyone.
Provide meaningful alternative text (alt text) for images.
Alt text ensures that users with visual impairments can understand the purpose of images. Describe the information the image conveys in its context. Keep it concise and descriptive, and mark decorative images appropriately.
Add captions and provide transcripts for videos and audio.
All instructional videos need accurate captions; audio-only content needs a transcript. Auto-captions are a good starting point, but must be reviewed by a human and corrected to adhere to legal standards. Clinical and scientific terminology is where auto-captioning fails most often.
Captions and transcripts support all users. Captions also improve searchability, mobile access, and overall user experience.
Check color contrast and avoid color-only cues.
Ensure that your text and visuals have strong contrast between the text and background to be readable. Never rely on color alone to convey meaning—use labels, symbols or patterns (e.g., “Correct answers are marked in green and with an asterisk”). This helps support users with low vision, color blindness, neurodivergence, migraines, seizures, and reduces cognitive load.
Keep tables simple and labeled.
Use tables for data, not page layout or formatting. Designate a header row, avoid merged or split cells, and keep the information per cell organized and concise so screen readers can announce with column and row a value belongs to.
Format text for readability.
Use a clean, familiar true-type font at a readable size (12pt for documents, 24pt or larger for slides) and left-align the body text. Avoid long passages in ALL CAPS, italics, or underlined. Use the built-in layouts in Word/Docs, and when designing slides give every slide a unique title.
Make all interactive elements keyboard accessible.
Ensure that buttons, links, forms, and navigation can be used without a mouse. Link text should be descriptive and make sense out of context (e.g., “View the NBEO Content Outline” instead of “Click here”), because screen readers can pull up a list of links on a webpage. Do not paste long raw URLs.
This supports users with motor disabilities, reduces cognitive load, and improves overall usability.
Accessibility Checks
- Canvas: Use the Rich Content Editor to apply styles (headings, list formatting, alt text editor), then run the Accessibility Checker at the bottom of the editor (next to word count).
- Microsoft Word and PowerPoint: Run the built-in Accessibility Checker (Review > Check Accessibility) before saving the file. This tool catches missing alt text and slide titles, reading-order issues, and explains how to fix them.
- UDOIT: Use UDOIT to scan your course and flag accessibility issues across pages.
- PDFs: The most common barrier to accessibility is scanned, image-only PDFs which cannot be read by screen readers. Instead, consider sharing the source document or an accessible export (e.g., convert to HTML). Please see our guide on how to Create accessible PDFs or contact the TLC Team for assistance.
Quick Self-Check Questions
- Can I navigate this document by headings alone?
- Does every meaningful image have alt text? Is every decorative image tagged as decorative?
- Would every link make sense read out of context?
- If I printed this in grayscale, would any meaning disappear?
- Can I highlight all text with my cursor (i.e., all text is “true text”, not an image of text)?
- Did the Accessibility Checker tool come back clean?
Additional Resources
- NECO TLC | How do I write alt text for images?
- WebAIM Introduction to Web Accessibility
- AccessibleWeb: Are Semantic Heading Levels Important?
- WebAIM Alt Text
- Panopto: Adding Captions
- PennState | Color Contrast for Web
- Create accessible PDFs
- Canvas Accessibility Checker
Need Extra Support?
We are here to partner with you as you enhance your courses. If you run into technical issues or want a collaborative consultation on designing custom interactive modules, please reach out to our team:
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- Email: tlc@neco.edu
- Send us a request: Request Support