Alternative Access for Multimedia

Alternative access for media doesn't just help students with disabilities. It can help English Language Learners understand videos, allow students to study at work or home without disturbing their family, and provide multiple representations of content to students.

Note also that many students have either undiagnosed or undeclared disabilities. They will benefit from the alternative access formats as well. 

Here are several tips for ensuring your course will be accessible and helpful to all students. You can find more detail on this in the Building Accessible Content module, available after you complete the Canvas Orientation. 

Caption all video and audio

It doesn't matter what the source is. If it's not captioned, it's not accessible. A few tips to making this process more manageable:

  1. Search for videos that are captioned. Videos available through the Highline Library's online databases should all be captioned. You can also search YouTube so that you only see captioned videos Links to an external site..
  2. You can caption the videos Links to an external site. you put in Canvas through the Rich Content Editor.
  3. Contact the campus video production group for help with captioning videos in your courses. 

Provide a text alternative (ALT text) for all images

If a picture is worth a thousand words, you may have some writing ahead of you. Alternative text is a written description that explains what is in the image. It is read by screen-reading software that visually impaired students use to access the web. It can be brief, for instance, if an image is decorative, to extensive, such as a description of a graph. 

If the description is lengthy, you can include this as a link from the image, or as a separate document. For shorter descriptions, you can add alternate text when you embed an image from the web Links to an external site.. If you have an image in a course file you want to use, you can add an alt tag by switching to HTML view Links to an external site.. 

Resources

Five Tips for Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning Links to an external site., Jessica Phillips, Educause Review, February 9, 2018