Course syllabi are a required and fundamental piece of any college course. Technology for the creation of such accessible course documents, however, has only in recent years become widely available. Faculty who have not been exposed to creating accessible content often feel overwhelmed by the task, mainly because they are unaware of the recent progress and availability in accessibility tools. Our aim in this presentation is to show how a few simple steps performed with these new tools can dramatically improve the accessibility of a document.
In addition, since universities and colleges are required to maintain a collection of certain document types for accreditation purposes, we have chosen to use Blackboard and its Ally accessibility tool to combine these two goals. By teaching faculty how to generate an accessible version of a single and widely used document to a common repository, we can provide them with a very focused opportunity to learn and practice the skills to bring other course content into ADA compliance. At the same time this endeavor will aid our institution in creating a required section of data for Middle States.