Digital Accessibility

Preface

We’ve developed a list of items to help you create more accessible courses. It’s important to note that document and digital accessibility is only a small piece of making your course accessible. We recommend you read the following pages to help walk you through other important information you should know:

• Accessible Design Guide – This guide will give you information about important design choices when making content that will greatly benefit your students. It will also give you important information about how to structure/conduct your lectures.
• Hosting Accessible Trainings – While this was written with workshops in mind, this will give you great insight into best teaching practices

Overview of the standards

In order to make accessibility more achievable, and reflect the students who are actually in your class being able to benefit the most, we’ve developed a good, better, best model.

Bronze level

In this model, the Bronze level is the minimum level of accessibility that we would like all courses to reach. It is based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.1 Level A. This is the minimum level countries/organizations could choose to adopt. Here in the U.S, the DOJ has adopted Level AA, and thus, courses in this category do not meet the full letter of the law for course accessibility.

This level is meant to provide you with an achievable first step and allow an easy pathway to Silver (which is based mostly on WCAG 2.1 AA). Bronze is a baseline for courses and is not intended to be your final outcome.

Read the full list of bronze standards

Silver Level

For courses above a certain enrollment, we are asking all of those courses to achieve a Silver level. This was based on WCAG 2.1 AA, but also takes into account that certain aspects of WCAG may be more difficult for faculty to achieve without help/intervention from others on campus, i.e., the Office of Disability Services (ODS).

The items in this category are meant to be easily achievable given the foundation you have laid from the bronze level, and it also sets up departments like ODS and Rutgers Access and Disability Services to easily provide accommodations/support for students needing accommodations.

Gold Level

Any course with a student with a disability that is approved for accommodations falls into this level. This level fully conforms to WCAG 2.1 AA and details offices you should work with to achieve certain accommodations (like ASL Interpreters).

Considerations on how to use these levels

Ideally, this should be a gradient of colors as opposed to three distinct colors side by side. We’ve created a form that allows you to determine your minimum base level and then adds only those specific guidelines that apply to your course. For example, if you have a student with a disability, and that student is approved for an ASL interpreter, we can make general assumptions about the nature of their disability. Knowing this, we will provide you with Silver level as your base level, and for all those that apply to this student, we’ll provide you with Gold level items. To put into practice, you’ll see items about professional video captioning (which is likely another accommodation they have) but not Audio descriptions, as this student is likely a sighted student and doesn’t require audio descriptions.

The goal is to provide you a road map of the items that are going to make the most impact in your course, as you work overtime to improve the accessibility of your course.