Getting Started With Digital Accessibility
No matter what software or tool you use, some accessibility practices apply everywhere. These universal principles help ensure that all students can access your course materials. The Digital Accessibility Basics (opens new window) guide introduced these core practices, while the section below shares best practices and tips to help you align your content with WCAG digital accessibility standards.
How to approach digital accessibility
Remediating course content to meet the new ADA technical standards can feel overwhelming, but you have time to make meaningful progress before the April 2026 deadline. Start by reviewing the instructional materials in your Spring 2025 courses and identify items that may need attention.
A practical approach is to tackle one module at a time:
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Review what’s already in your course and remove materials you no longer plan to use.
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Remediate accessibility issues in files and activities you plan to keep.
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Replace inaccessible materials when possible. For example, if you have a scanned image PDF, check whether an accessible HTML or text-based version is available through the library or publisher.
Each small step moves your course closer to full accessibility compliance and a better experience for all students.
Many content creation tools like Microsoft Office and Panorama/D2L include accessibility checkers that can flag common accessibility issues. These checkers are not perfect, but they are a quick way to identify and correct many accessibility issues.
Use styles and formatting options on software toolbars instead of manually inserting spaces, tabs, or visual formatting. This ensures screen readers and other assistive technologies can interpret the content structure correctly.
Alt text for image: The Microsoft Word toolbar allows many different formatting options such as font size, emphasis, and styles.
A 3:1 color contrast between adjacent colors makes content more viewable for individuals with low vision or color deficiencies. For normal text sized under 18 point, a 4.5:1 contrast ratio is required. Several tools are available to check contrast ratios and help you meet WCAG accessibility standards. Some accessibility checkers will identify insufficient contrast in content, and there are also websites, such as WebAIM Contrast Checker, where you can manually enter colors to see if they meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA 3:1 standards. For online content, browser extensions such as the WCAG Color contrast checker for Google Chrome can help you assess whether or not the color contrast on webpages is accessible.
Do not rely on color, sound, or visuals alone to convey instructions or meaning. For example, avoid statements like “Items highlighted in green are correct.” Provide text labels, captions, or other visual indicators so that all learners can access the same information regardless of how they perceive color or sound.
Scanned articles, photos of tables, and images that contain embedded text are not accessible to screen readers and cannot be easily resized or reformatted. Whenever possible, provide materials in a text-based format instead. If you must use an image of text, apply optical character recognition (OCR) to convert it into readable, searchable, and selectable text that screen readers can access.