Dart Center Faculty Resource Center
Accessibility of Instructional Materials
The Justin Dart Jr. Student Accessibility Center team prides itself on providing valuable educational tools to help our faculty create accessible courses and instructional materials. Investing in this important area of education will help to ensure students with disabilities, whether they have identified themselves to the Dart Center or not, have equal access to the educational environment you have invisioned. Being intentional about accessibility helps create a more universally designed learning space that supports everyone and encourages engagement. The Dart Center looks forward to partnering with you in helping our students find success.
- If a faculty member needs guidance with a student who has been approved for Alternative Testing accommodations, please contact the Dart Center’s Testing Coordinator at jdexam@central.uh.edu with any questions or concerns.
- Any audio only, video only, or audio-video files must have captions or a transcript. Please note that YouTube videos often have inaccurate captions and must be checked for accuracy.
- Audio descriptions must also be included or a descriptive transcript included. When a non-visual learner watches a video, they must be able to understand what is going on as well.
- Any image must have a text description alternative text/alt-text. Which provides a textual alternative to non-text content in web pages and documents.
- For assistance adding alt-text in Word documents, please visit: WebAIM Word accessbility website.
- For assistance adding alt-text to PowerPoint documents, please visit: WebAIM Powerpoint accessbility website.
- All websites and applications must be accessible utilizing only a keyboard. (Screen-reader users typically do not use a mouse.)
- Course pages should be formatted in a similar way to make it easy to navigate.
- Headings should be utilized.
- When creating a list or table within the document, please utilize the list and table feature within the program, such as clicking the list button instead of creating your own list through the use of dashes or asterisks.
- All text should have appropriate color contrast.
- PDFs are often not accessible to all forms of assistive technology, especially screen readers. Important information within the PDF must not be contained within an image and the document must have been converted through optical character recognition (OCR) before it is able to be read. For more information on making PDFs accessible, please visit: WebAIM PDF Accesibilty website.
- If converting a PPT file to a PDF, please also include a link to the PPT file for accessibility.
- If using a third-party platform, please contact the Dart Center to discuss the accessibility of the online product which your course will be using. Many of these are not accessible.
- If recording a video to provide instruction or supplementary assistance, please be very descriptive. For example, please do not say "over here" and then point to a specific place. This is not helpful to non-visual learners. Instead you might say, "please click the X in the upper left corner of the screen."
- If utilizing LockDown Browser, please note that it is incompatible with many forms of assistive technology, such as screen magnification software, most screen readers, and text-to-speech software. Therefore, alternative accommodations will need to be arranged to facilitate the test administration as well as maintain test integrity.
- When presenting a graph to a non-visual student or staff, please reach out to the Dart Center to assist with converting the graph into a tactile format so that everyone can follow along.
- If faculty, staff or students need content in braille format, please reach out to the Dart Center so that we can print the text materials into braille format for low vision, blind, blind and deaf.
- A commonly utilized option is using an accessible Word document of the same exam using a computer in an offline environment running assistive technology. A PDF document will work too however, the PDF document should not be an image or picture. It must be an accessible PDF document. We offer these types of exams at the Dart Center which are students are already utilizing.
- Please be sure that when an exam needs to be in a different color paper or larger font size, that the exam is formatted correctly.
- As a part of the Dart Center we do offer long distance proctoring through TEAMS however, this is not a common process but is available to qualified students. Please note this process requires a mock test prior to the exam and the student must provide the equipment necessary to complete the exam.
- When linking to another page or document, please utilize a hyperlink with descriptive text. For example, please do not say "Click here!". This is not descriptive. Additionally, please do not list out the long hyperlink unless otherwise needed. A screen-reader will read each letter in the hyperlink.
- If you will be holding a class or instructional session via Zoom, please record it to the Cloud. This will allow students with disabilities to watch it again if needed to capture all of the information. It will also allow students who are d/Deaf or Hard of Hearing to have access to captions.
Please contact the Dart center at jdcenter@central.uh.EDU with any questions or concerns.
To better assist, please make sure to include your question, details of the issue, platform and any other contact information to help our team best assist you.
The entire Dart Center staff appreciates faculty and your efforts to make the University of Houston an inclusive and accessible space for all students.
Faculty Portal Instructional Guide
Accessible Information Management (AIM) Guide