During my employment, a teammate and I worked together to put together a presentation on how managing accessibility can benefit the D2L online environment for all who use it. This presentation was given at the 2015 MSU Making Learning Accessible Conference.

1. Desire to Learn Accessibility
D2L and Accessibility
Jojo Otchere & Desiree Slaughter

2. Introduction
MSU IT Services
● Teaching and Learning Technology
○ Digital Content and Accessibility
■ Remediating courses and universal design
■ Consult faculty members to build courses
The Digital Content and Accessibility team aids in creating accessible D2L
online courses by adhering to the WCAG2.0 AA accessibility guidelines

3. Why Web Accessibility?
Web accessibility allows for the web to become more inclusive to people with
disabilities that may limit their interactivity with the web
● Mr. Lee wants to buy some new clothes, appliances, and music. As he frequently
does, he is spending an evening shopping online. He has one of the most common
visual disabilities for men: color blindness, which in his case means an inability to
distinguish between green and red.
○ What could be done to aid Mr.Lee’s color blindness while shopping online?
● Take Ms. Martinez, a woman taking several distance learning courses in physics, and
has been hard of hearing since birth. She can hear some sounds but not enough to
understand all speech, so she learned sign language in addition to written language.
○ How could Ms.Martinez be expected to learn the content of the course if the course is based
on Audio lectures?
http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/people-use-web/stories

4. Web Accessibility for online courses/content
Contrast: Contrasting colors text and background colors make the text more readable for color-blind and low-vision
users.
Text Styles: Use more than color to denote differences, emphasis, and content meaning. In addition to contrasting
colors, consider adding text, shapes, and patterns.
Alternative Text: Provide alternative text for images, graphs, and charts. Screen readers “read” the images, graphs,
and charts using the alternative text that you have provided. This explains the purpose of your image, graph, or chart
to users who are visually impaired.
Multiple Avenues for Multimedia: Supply multiple avenues for multimedia content (e.g., audio with a transcript,
video with captioning). Video, audio, and interactive media requires captioning or an alternative method to deliver
the same information.
Tables: Format and use simple tables with column and row headers. Split nested tables up into simple tables, and
don’t use tables to control layout.
http://webaccess.msu.edu/Help_and_Resources/checklist.html

5. Faculty Work Plan
Abbreviated Faculty Work Plan Table
The Faculty Work Plan is a document used
to organize the contents of a D2L course by
the tally of each type of content eg.
Powerpoints, Text Documents, HTML Pages,
Videos etc.
As documents get reviewed, they are
specially marked in the work plan table to
indicate whether a document has been
made accessible, or if there were problems
in adjusting the document to meet the
necessary standards.

6. The Challenge (of remediating D2L courses)
● D2L course made by Professor X
○ Faculty Work Plan to organize content
■ Make each content type accessible
● includes powerpoints, quizzes, discussions, videos/captioning, links, and course flow,
● How to make powerpoints accessible?
● The best question types for the particular type of question
● Are the discussion questions accessible?
● Best options to caption videos?
● Are the destination of the links accessible?
● Does the course flow make sense?
DOES PROFESSOR X AGREE WITH ALL THESE CHANGES?

7. Examples

8. Captioning
Videos are a commonly used format for lectures on D2L, and videos can be made accessible through the
use of closed captions and transcripts.
Third Party Caption Services
● Amara
● Cielo
● REV
● 3PlayMedia
Video Captioning Work Plan
A video captioning work plan is necessary to handle large volumes of videos that need to be captioned.
Depending on the specific needs of the job, different third party captioning services are used for the
different accommodations they provide.
https://amara.org/en/ | https://cielo24.com/ | https://www.rev.com/ | http://www.3playmedia.com/

9. Screen Readers
IT Services, Teaching & Learning Technology at Will’s House provides remediation of D2L courses to ensure that they
meet the accessibility requirements. The main goal of the remediation is to make sure the documents in the courses are
compatible with screen readers and visually simple to follow.
A screen reader is a program or plugin that aids blind or visually impaired computer users in reading the contents of a
page by using a speech synthesizer to ‘say’ what’s on the page. For documents to be compatible with screen readers,
pages need to follow a specific ‘structure’ that the screen reader can identify.
Screen reader demo

10. For more info on Accessibility guidelines
webaccess.msu.edu
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