Federal legislation mandates that the University of Illinois System provide reasonable accommodations that afford equal opportunity to all students. This list is designed to serve as a quick reference for some of the most important issues and adjustments that you should make in your courses to accommodate students with disabilities.
Read the Ten Principles for Enhancing Course Accessibility and Quality For All Students.
Best Practices for accessible media production
In preparing course content for online delivery efforts must be made to provide equivalent content for students who cannot engage the material via sight or sound: for audio-only, a transcript; for video, closed captions and audio descriptions.
Likewise, care should be taken in designing your online course to provide high-contrast visual aids that appear as informative as intended to audiences with color blindness or poor eyesight.
- Provide a transcript for audio recordings.
- Provide captions for video recordings.
- Provide a screen-reader friendly version of any informative visual aids that appear in a video (a PowerPoint, pdf, html, or Word document with labeled images, etc. as makes sense for the type of visual aid).
- Avoid referring to portions of visual aids with demonstrative pronouns. Instead of this line/that line, label the lines and refer to them by the labels, for example.
- Whenever possible, use media distribution services provided by campus, such as Illinois Media Space or Ensemble.
Additional Resources
Accessibility Help Documents