I am upping the game for ADA compliance for my online courses at CSUDH. Next year, course materials at CSU will be required to be ADA compliant and I’m getting a jump on it now. In the past, some of my materials were mostly compliant although I wasn’t diligent about how much they complied percentage-wise. I realized I could do better when I looked into my materials.
Updating materials has been exciting. It’s been an awesome learning curve and I am already finding how some tools support ADA too. I am also learning that some popular software tools that are lacking ADA compliant aspects (I won’t mention names, but some very popular tools).
When I started teaching 18 years ago, compliance wasn’t talked about much, so I am happy to see it take to the forefront of teaching in the classroom. Although ADA compliance hasn’t been on the top of my list for things I do, now it is. To be honest, most of my clients don’t require ADA because of their clientele and in the past Universities I worked at were not as diligent and maybe because some LMS tools were not updated in that area. Today LMS systems have really come a long way in helping content creators and teachers be compliant.
ADA Requirements: Effective Communication is a good link to start with for those out there looking for some basic info in general. I want to translate what I’ve learned into my training documents and videos to make them the best I can. Whether I create supplemental material, transcripts for videos, closed caption, or clearly tagging images for text readers, I am stretching my knowledge on the tools I’ve used for a long time. Kudos to CSU system for focusing on this important topic. My past and new materials are a work-in-progress that I’m thrilled to update.
ADA materials that may be of interest:
- ADA main site
- Downloadable PDF Design standards are here (2010)
- For a beginner-level introduction to a topic, view Topics
- For information about the legal requirements, visit Law, Regulations & Standards
- Effective Communication Info
- CSU accessibility info
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0
