Whether you use a Learning Management System (LMS) to support face-to-face, blended or fully online courses, there are three things you need to know about making the course digitally accessible.
1. Find out what the accessibility features and challenges are for your LMS.
Some LMS systems are just plain crummy for accessibility. Even tools that purport to be accessible can cause users to experience a variety of insurmountable hurdles.
For example, some systems are painful to navigate with a screenreader and although it’s technically possible, no one should suffer to find course material. So, accessibility services at some institutions will actually copy all of the course content out of the LMS and recreate it elsewhere for students.
That said, the market is now responding to the web accessibility requirements and standards that have been legislated around the world. Ask your tech support team (the people who support educators to load the LMS) about the accessibility features in your LMS. Then ask your accessibility centre (the people supporting the students with disabilities) what common issues students experience when using the LMS.
2. Don’t ignore (or work around) accessibility features, use them!
Developers and designers could do everything right to make an LMS accessible, but if people ignore the built-in features or fill the system with inaccessible content, they can block accessibility.
For example, the text editor used for authoring an LMS page likely offers heading style options (H2, H3, H4). Headings are an important tool for establishing a structure for the content on any page.
So why does it matter if an author opts to NOT use the heading editor, and instead simply bolds or enlarges the font size of something that they intend to be heading?
A sighted student would scan the page and see the visual distinctions being made. It wouldn’t matter to them. But someone reading the page with a screen reader or other assistive technology would not see the distinctions.
The H tag (e.g. <h2>) assigned when an author uses the heading editor is what cues the assistive technology to see structure. Without that, students using assistive technology would have no way to scan for the headlines or comprehend how information is being grouped on the page. If an author works around the heading authoring feature, they work around digital accessibility.
This AIM article has more details on how heading structures are intended to work.
3. Load accessible content
Lots of educators use the LMS like a filing cabinet they can share with their students. They might load readings, assignments, videos or podcasts into the LMS grouped by week, or module.
Remember two things about loading accessible content into an LMS:
- Educators need to know how to curate and create accessible course content. Even if the LMS is loaded with accessibility features, and even if the author uses the features effectively, educators can still have an inaccessible course if the documents, links, video and audio files they LOAD aren’t accessible.
For example, there’s no magic plugin for your LMS that makes an old image-scan of a printed document readable by assistive technology. Imagine you want your students to look at data that was scanned in the 80s. The file may only exist as an image file. If you feel there is educative value in seeing the original form of the document, rather than seeing a transcribed, accessible version of the text, then you can offer both versions on the LMS and include a description of what about the scanned image is significant.
By taking that extra step, all students can engage with the material in multiple ways rather than limiting who can see certain materials.
In other words, educators need to ensure the files they upload or link to are accessible, or that appropriate alternatives are also available in the LMS. (For complicated files such as scientific diagrams, maps, or dynamic images such as weather imaging, contact your centre for accessibility for guidance.) - Educators are not the only authors in an LMS. Your students should be creating and curating accessible content too.
Are you asking students to check the accessibility of their assignments? Are you discussing accessibility in relation to collaboration tools and practices?
4. But wait… before you load files to an LMS ask yourself if that’s the best option.
As I mentioned, a lot of people use the LMS like a filing cabinet. Educators who have taught the course without an LMS, likely have Word documents for their course outline, assignments, etc.
But before you arbitrarily upload the course outline as a Word doc, ask yourself if that’s the most accessible way of offering the information. Consider using the HTML editor in the LMS to recreate the outline in a page of the course site in the LMS.
Why make a student navigate to a page named Outline, then download a Word doc they will have to open on their device? They could navigate to the Outline page and see everything they need right there. The HTML editor will let you set up headings for scanning and hyperlinks to get students to their readings, for example.
And you might consider adding a welcome video to the LMS Outline page. The LMS probably has a video capture tool built in, and educators can build instructor presence and set a welcoming tone by just saying a few words in an informal video that can be embedded in the course outline. You can’t do that in a word document.
Before you load your course, think about how you can use the accessibility features, and other features, built into the LMS to improve the accessibility of your course delivery as well at it’s content.
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