Course Accessibility Review Process

Course Accessibility Review Process

A Course Accessibility Review is a way for MSU Denver instructors to get an expert’s view on the accessibility of an entire course. This is an in-depth process, in which the Instructional Accessibility Group commits 6 hours of time, including time for coordination, preparation and the following four steps: 

1. Prep. Meeting: The instructor and a member of the Instructional Accessibility Group will meet for 30 minutes to make plans and discuss the course. They will agree on the following:
   1. How the course materials will be accessed by IAG staff
   2. Any high priority course components that should get extra attention
   3. A specific time for the follow-up meeting
2. Instructional Accessibility Work: IAG Staff will spend up to four hours assessing the accessibility of all aspects of the course including learning outcomes, materials, activities, assessments, tools, etc. For recurring types of materials, a sampling of each will be reviewed. For example, a few (but not all) of the Microsoft Word documents, Canvas pages, instructional videos, homework assignments, etc.
3. Outlining Results: IAG staff will spend up to an hour writing up the results of the Course Accessibility Review. Unique issues will be listed individually, while common issues will be illustrated with a few examples. Also included are recommended steps to fix the issues and relevant instructional accessibility resources.
4. Follow-up meeting: The instructor and IAG staff will have a follow-up 30-minute meeting to talk about the results.

Most Common Issues

For reference, here are some of the most common instructional accessibility issues: 

• Captions have errors and must be edited so that they are 100% accurate. 
• Canvas pages need structure and text coding. 
• PDF documents need to be converted to text (using Optical Character Recognition) and/or reading order needs to be adjusted. 
• Third-party tools and resources are not accessible and need to be replaced or removed. 
• Hyperlinks need to be displayed in ways that indicate their purpose.