Public-Facing Content Accessibility

Course Material Accessibility

Course materials are any documents, media, or HTML content included in your course through a learning management system or third-party software provider. These materials are directly presented to students in digital format as part of an online or on-ground course. Materials presented in person are NOT subject to digital accessibility requirements. Digital course materials include but are not limited to Microsoft 365 files, PDF files, video/audio files, text, images, assignments, and assessments. 

Academic Technology Services (ATS), The Center for Teaching Excellence, and Disability Services offer separate training resources for course material accessibility. 

Course material accessibility resources

For questions regarding accessible course materials, please reach out to ATS at ats@etsu.edu. 

Tips and Tricks

• My version of Acrobat Pro looks different than what is shown in the training video

  Acrobat Pro recently updated the interface of their program, so you can change Acrobat Pro to the previous version. Go to Menu > Disable New Acrobat. You will have to restart the program to change the version.

  

• Tagging text as a heading

  In order for a heading to be considered accessible it has to have more than just unique visual formatting. It has to be tagged as a heading. In Microsoft Word, tagging can be done using the Styles menu on the Home tab.

  

  To use this menu, simply select the text that you want to tag as a heading, and then select the appropriate heading level in the styles preview menu (shown below).

  

   

• How to apply headings level 3 or higher

  By default the styles menu only includes pre-defined styles for Heading 1 and Heading 2. However, you can utilize more levels if needed. To do this, select the text that you would like to tag and then click on the More arrow button in the Styles menu, and then select Apply Styles.

  

  

  This will open up a small panel menu that will allow you to use a wide range of styles not shown in the styles tab menu. In order to use other heading levels, you can simply type the name of the style into the search box (e.g. Heading 3) and then click Apply.

  

  Once you have applied an additional heading level using the Apply Styles menu it will then appear as an option in the Styles menu in the Home tab.

  

• Properly structured heading levels

  Heading levels are used to indicate the hierarchy of content sections. The heading levels start at 1 and descend hierarchically with each successive number (2, 3, etc.). Therefore, Heading 1 is the top-most level, and would be appropriate for things like chapter or major section titles. Heading 2, and everything under it, would fall under Heading 1, and so on.

  When using multiple heading levels in your document hierarchy, you need to be sure to descend through levels incrementally, without skipping levels along the way simply for the sake of aesthetics. If you skip through levels then you will create a document with unorganized heading tags that will not comply with accessibility standards. To illustrate this concept, it may be helpful to think of headings as being in a nested list. The list below illustrates an improper hierarchy that arbitrarily skips around between levels.

  

   

  You can understand how a structure like the one above would be confusing. In order to avoid such confusion, you instead need to organize heading levels in a way that makes sense, as in the example below.

  

• Meaningful links

  Document authors will often include URLs in their documents to point readers to files or pages on the Internet. However, including full URLs can frustrate users who rely on screen readers, because they are forced to listen to the entire URL being spelled out character by character. For example, a URL like https://www.etsu.edu/ would be real aloud as Link: H-T-T-P colon forward slash forward slash W-W-W dot E-T-S-U dot E-D-U forward slash. This is not the most convenient way to be led to the ETSU home page.

  Rather than spelling out URLs, hyperlinks should instead be embedded within meaningful text which describes where the link goes. For example, if you want someone to visit the ETSU home page then you could simply hyperlink some text that says "visit the ETSU homepage." This provides the link while also describing where the link goes.

  To create an embedded hyperlink, just select the text you want to add a link to, and then right click the selected text and choose Hyperlink from the context menu.