Digital Accessibility

Digital accessibility ensures that all digital content is available to all people. This includes people with disabilities, but also with temporary disabilities - such as a broken arm or situational disabilities - such as being in an environment where they can't listen to audio (Lopes, He, & Swerzenski, 2019). By designing with accessibility in mind, you create higher quality learning opportunities for everyone. 

Web Design Basics for Educators, Digital Accessibility: This open education resource offers a chapter on digital accessibility. It is easy to read, provides multiple checklists, and lists additional resources for understanding digital accessibility. 

National Center on Accessible Educational Materials, Designing for Accessibility: The POUR principles are an easy to understand acronym for creating an accessible experience based on the WCAG guidelines. 

Digital Accessibility Foundations: This 20 hour, free, self-paced course is designed for technical and non-technical learners. The course will provide the foundations for creating accessible technology. The course is provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute for Information Technologies in Education (IITE).

Make your Word Documents Accessible: Best practices for making Word documents accessible with instructions based on your computer (or phone) operating system. 

Make your PowerPoint Documents Accessible: Best practices for making PowerPoint documents accessible with instructions based on your computer (or phone) operating system.

PDF Accessibility: Learn the best source documents to turn into a PDF and tips for remediating PDFs.

PDF Accessibility 101: Get a high level overview of what makes a PDF document accessible as well as ways to convert PDF documents to accessible documents. 

Contract Checker: Use this contrast checker to select the colors in your document (use the color picker) to check the contrast ratio of the foreground and background.

WebAim Accessible Images: Learn what makes images accessible beyond adding alt text.

WebAim Alt Text: Learn the details of writing good alt text for all different types of images.

Alt Text in Microsoft O365: If you use O365, AI can generate alt text for you or you can add your own alt text to help reduce ambiguity and improves user experience.

Image Description Guidelines: If you have a hard to caption image, get guidance from the Diagram Center.

Contract Checker: Use this contrast checker to select the colors in your image (use the color picker) to check the contrast ratio of the foreground and background.

Zoom Accessibility Best Practices: The University of Colorado Boulder's digital accessibility office offers easy to implement advice on making Zoom accessible. 

Panopto Accessibility Features: Panopto is our video hosting platform and provides automatic captions to every video uploaded to the platform. Additional accessibility features are available for users.

Accessible Virtual Events: The University of Colorado Boulder's digital accessibility office offers easy to implement advice for persons hosting virtual events.

Accessible In-person Events: The University of Colorado Boulder's digital accessibility office offers easy to implement advice for persons hosting in-person events. 

Note: For accessibility services at CU Denver, visit the CU Denver Accessibility website. For accessibility services at CU Anschutz, visit the CU Anschutz Accessibility website. 

How to use the Accessibility Checker: Canvas provides documentation on how to check Canvas content for accessibility through the built-in accessibility checker. 

Anthology Ally: Anthology Ally is built into Canvas. Begin by going to your "Course Accessibility Report" in your course menu and view our resources for more information. 

Canvas Course Accessibility Checklist: Use this checklist to help ensure your content is accessible to all students.

How to make an accessible PDF: The LaTeX Tagged PDF project is a tagging code that can be used to make LaTeX accessible. While still not easy, it is continually improving through this project.

Overlead's introduction to tagged PDF files: Reviews the evolution of the PDF and the challenges of accessibility, particularly with LaTeX. 

LaTeX and Accessibility: An academic shares real world experience trying to create accessible PDFs from LaTeX. 

Making Accessible Documents Using LaTeX: An article from the Notices of the American Mathematical Society discussing the difficulties of creating accessible PDFs from LaTeX. 

UDL Guidelines: The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework developed by CAST to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn.

UDL on Campus: Information on a variety of topics including course design, policy, and media.

Microsoft Accessibility 101: Explore the accessibility features and tools available within Microsoft products.

• Microsoft accessibility features and tools, Part 1
• Microsoft accessibility features and tools, Part 2

Viewing Video Captions in Panopto: Learn how to turn on and change the color, position, and size of captions in the viewer. 

Accessibility at CU Denver is everyone's responsibility. Therefore there are a number of groups, offices, and supports to assist you in your journey. 

Disability Resource & Services

• Coordinates accommodations for students with disabilities to give them equal access to all the university’s programs, activities and services
• Office Phone: 303-315-3510