Course Accessibility Tools and Support

Ensuring that all students have equitable access to course materials and learning experiences is a vital part of inclusive teaching. This page provides guidance and resources to help faculty address common accessibility questions and implement best practices in their courses. Whether you're working in Canvas, using video content, or supporting students with accommodations, we’re here to help.

Accessibility Best Practices

Accessibility Tools Available in Canvas

Arkansas State provides several tools that can help instructors identify accessibility issues, improve course content, and maintain high-quality Canvas courses. These tools complement the accessibility features already built into Canvas.

🚀 DesignPLUS Accessibility Checker

The DesignPLUS Accessibility Checker reviews individual pages and identifies common accessibility concerns while you are editing content.

Common issues identified include:

To learn more see the Accessibility and Usability Tools section of the DesignPLUS User Guide.

🔍 UDOIT Advantage

UDOIT (Universal Design Online Inspection Tool) scans an entire Canvas course and identifies accessibility issues across pages, assignments, discussions, quizzes, and files. Then UFixIt helps guide you through the items identified by UDOIT to help resolve certain accessibility issues. In many cases UFixIt can automate or drastically simplify the correction process, reducing the amount of manual editing required.

Together they can help instructors:

To learn more see the UDOIT User Guide.

🗂️ TidyUP

TidyUP helps instructors manage course content and files.

Common uses include:

While TidyUP is primarily a course maintenance tool, it can also support accessibility efforts. All instructional materials in a course should be reviewed for accessibility. By helping identify unused, duplicate, or obsolete files, TidyUP can reduce the quantity of content that may need to be reviewed, updated, or remediated.

To learn more see the TidyUP User Guide.

Canvas Accessibility Features

Canvas includes several tools to help faculty implement accommodations and manage course accessibility.

Availability Dates

If you want to give them different start, stop, and due dates, you can use the Add button under the Assign To box. That will change the first box to be the dates assigned to everyone else and give you a second box to select individual students or groups. This new Assign To box will then let you give the selected students different availability dates from the rest of the class. 

How do I assign a quiz to everyone, individual students, differentiation tags, or sections?

Do Not change the single Assign To box to just have either a group or single student selected, as that will unassign it from the rest of the class. This will cause those submitted assignments to disappear from anyone who was removed from the Assign To Box. To restore their missing assignments, you just need to add back an Assign To box for Everyone Else, in addition to the other box for the students with an exception to their availability dates. 

Extra Time or Attempts

If you instead need to give one student a longer timer on the exam or extra attempts, you can use the Moderate option. The way you access the Moderate option is slightly different depending on whether you are using the Classic or New Quiz system. See the links to the Canvas Instructor Guide below for the instructions for the quiz type you are using.

• Classic Quizzes:
  • Moderate - Once I publish a quiz, how do I use the Moderate Quiz page?
  • Extra Attempts - Once I publish a quiz, how can I give my students extra attempts?
  • Extra Time - Once I publish a timed quiz, how can I give my students extra time?
• New Quizzes: How do I moderate a student's quiz attempt in New Quizzes?

Captioning

Providing captions for video content ensures accessibility for students who are deaf or hard of hearing and benefits all learners by supporting comprehension and retention.

The hope is that we don’t just meet the bare minimum compliance requirement but set a standard beyond our legal obligation. Below, you will find important information as it relates to the captioning process.

• Captioning Procedure
• Captioning Guide
• Transcription Guide

Accuracy Requirement: Best practices suggest that captions should be at least 99% accurate to fully meet accessibility standards (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Success Criterion 1.2.2). While machine-generated captions can provide a starting point, it is crucial to review and correct them to ensure they are accurate and complete. Captions must accurately represent all spoken content, including dialogue, non-verbal sounds (such as music or sound effects), and any relevant background speech.

University Policy: The Key Provisions of Captioning & Accessibility Operating Procedure outlines the university's official stance on captioning and accessibility. For the full policy, see Key Provisions of Captioning & Accessibility Operating Procedure.

For more detailed information on best practices for captioning and university requirements, please visit the page on Captioning from Access & Accommodation Services.

Kaltura Captioning

Kaltura offers automated captions for uploaded videos. These captions are generated using speech recognition and may require editing for accuracy.

How to Edit Captions: To correct the captions for the videos you upload to Kaltura, follow the instructions below:

• Upload and manage captions
• Create captions manually
• Edit captions

• Viewing and Editing Captions:
  After uploading a video, automated captions will appear within a few hours. You can edit these captions directly in Kaltura’s caption editor to correct errors and improve clarity.

• Best Practices:
  Review captions for accuracy, especially for technical terms or names. Consider adding punctuation and speaker identification for clarity.

Requests for Captioning Services

If you have a minimum of sixty minutes of content (this can be 60 minutes across multiple videos), please use the following link to send a captioning services request to AAS:

https://astate.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3ZPz5lsnHEhj8KW

Content may be processed in-house or sent to a third-party captioning company for processing depending on length, language, volume of requests, etc. To ensure quality content is received on time, AAS requires all captioning requests be submitted two (2) weeks prior to the date it will be used.

If your content does not meet the criteria above, you are responsible for making sure your content gets captioned.

Contact Access & Accommodations Services

If you have questions about student accommodations, accessibility concerns, or need support implementing accommodations in your course, please reach out to the Access & Accommodations Services office. 

Email: dservices@AState.edu
Phone: 870-972-3964
Website: https://www.astate.edu/accessibility.html
Knowledge Base: https://kb.astate.edu/shelves/access-accommodation-services

Or, please contact our Assistive Technology and Access Coordinator.

Office: Reng Student Union, 2181