Educational Excellence Week - Notes and Takeaways

I love a presentation with takeaways I can implement immediately. If your campus has an Educational Excellence Week, your fellow teachers will load you up with their favorite tips and tricks to improve your teaching right now.  Scott January, an instructional designer at Tarleton, had me taking all kinds of notes this morning at our EEWeek in his presentation for making courses more accessible.

Photo by Elizabeth Woolner on Unsplash

• Use Headers in blocks of text. This helps those using a screen reader to jump from header to header. In Canvas, you can find the set headers under the Paragraph section. In Word, you're looking for the headings in the Styles gallery.
• Customized hyperlinks prevent a screen reader from having to announce a horrible list of characters and letters. Just highlight the words in a sentence you want linked to and engage the link system in Canvas or Word. See the last bullet for an example. And it makes the page look cleaner for everyone.
• Accessibility Checkers: Canvas has an automatic ADA checker; it looks like a circle with a body inside. Word has one, too! Look under the Review Tab.
• In Word and Canvas, use the list function to create lists so a screen reader will acknowledge the list.
• Alternative Text or alt tags are easy and make a huge difference for someone listening to a screen reader. It's basically an embedded description of a visual. Did you know Word lets you add alt tags?

Scott called it "Digital Equity" and using Universal Design can help all learners.