View all pages

Digital Accessibility

Getting Started

A quick guide to digital accessibility for learning & teaching.

This is intended as a quick guide to help ensure any digital content that is developed for learning and teaching meets the accessibility requirements for public sector bodies. For a more detailed guide to accessibility please access the full details in this Canvas module. 

Legal Requirement

From 23rd September 2020, the University is required by law to ensure that all digital material it shares online intended for current use must be accessible, including resources in VITAL and Canvas. This legislation is called Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Links to an external site.. There are a few exceptions, but very few, and you can check the regulations should you have a query about this.

‘Making a website or mobile app accessible means making sure it can be used by as many people as possible. This includes those with:

  • impaired vision
  • motor difficulties
  • cognitive impairments or learning disabilities
  • deafness or impaired hearing

Accessibility means more than putting things online. It means making your content and design clear and simple enough so that most people can use it without needing to adapt it, while supporting those who do need to adapt things’. (Government Digital Service, 2019).

Considerations for what is expected can be found here: an introduction to making your service accessible. Links to an external site.

Below we will outline the ways in which you can help ensure the accessible your content.

Expectation

At the very minimum we are required to be legally compliant and this means making use of some of the features provided in the technologies we will already be using:

The government has already produced some excellent general guidance for designing for accessibility. Links to an external site.

This means you need to do things like:

    • provide text alternatives (‘alt text’) for non-text content
    • provide transcripts for audio and video
    • provide captions for video
    • make sure content is structured logically and can be navigated and read by a screen reader - this also helps if stylesheets are disabled
    • use the proper markup for every feature (for example, forms and data tables), so the relationships between content are defined properly
    • not use colour as the only way to explain or distinguish something
    • use text colours that show up clearly against the background colour
    • make sure every feature can be used when text size is increased by 200% and that content reflows to a single column when it’s increased by 400%
    • not use images of text
    • make sure your service is responsive - for example to the user’s device, page orientation and font size they like to use
    • make sure your service works well with assistive technologies - for example, important messages are marked up in a way that the screen readers knows they’re important

CSD have produced a guide on how to make content accessible and so too have the University of Stirling with their accessibility checklist which can help you think through key considerations. Appendix D of this accessibility guidance document from SAS also outlines inclusive approaches as part of the  policy and guidance regarding reasonable adjustments and support for disabled students at the University of Liverpool

Minimum Requirements

At the very minimum we would expect:

Best practice,  beyond the minimum:

The requirements above require minimal additional time or effort at the time of developing the resources, but there is always more that can be done which would include:

  • Checking and editing of closed captions to be 100% accurate.
  • Provide resources in multiple formats (e.g. video file / audio file & separate transcript).
  • Tell your students using Canvas they can able to use Ally to request auto-generated alternative formats of text-based documents, pdfs etc. (not video) uploaded into Canvas.
  • Accessibility check all materials created prior to September 2020.
  • Test the accessibility of your own resources before publishing.
  • Provide an anonymous mechanism for students to alert you to accessibility issues.

All of this guidance is to ensure that our learning and teaching resources are as accessible as possible to as many students as possible, but there may still be occasions where additional reasonable adjustments are still required as part of a student support plan. For more information: Download a guide to digital accessibility.

Additionally, Advance HE have provided some very sensible advice on how to approach accessibility legislation, particularly captioning Links to an external site. which you may find helpful.