Maintaining an accessible course requires consistent attention. Here are a few tips to help make that maintenance easier:
Broaden & Review As You Go
In general, we recommend working toward your accessibility goals as you go, instead of waiting until your course’s design is complete. Creating accessible new materials and remediating old materials may sound like a lot of work, but keeping accessibility in mind as you plan and develop can actually reduce the overall time required for future remediation efforts.
Tip: Learn about the accessibility guidelines and use them to develop new habits for creating accessible materials.
Retire & Remediate Outdated Materials
Over time, your courses can become a small compendium of diverse materials from different stages of the course’s development. Whether your materials include PowerPoint lectures, hyperlinks to journal articles, PDFs, or all of the above, we encourage you to periodically revisit materials to ensure they’re still accurately conveying your material and are accessible to all learners. Given how time-consuming remediation can be, we recommend retiring old materials for newer content when appropriate.
Tip: While revisiting these materials, if an older material is no longer relevant, or there’s a better resource on the same topic, consider retiring that material and focusing your remediation efforts on other, more current media.
Understand Your Time Investment
In the remediation process, some tasks are more time-consuming than others (e.g., tagging old multi-page PDFs, or captioning long lecture videos). Understanding how long these tasks may take and planning accordingly can help to ease the frustration of learning a new process, and help you make more efficient choices. We recommend starting to think about accessibility as early as possible to spread out the work load of remediation.
Tip: There are services instructor(s) or department(s) can hire to alleviate the time burden. Because that may not be financially feasible in all circumstances, it’s helpful to budget time for the more time-consuming remediation tasks.