Online Content Accessibility Workshops

This session provides a practical overview of how to create accessible PDFs for use in online course content, with a focus on real-world teaching materials and common accessibility barriers. You’ll gain a clearer understanding of how issues like missing tags, incorrect reading order, untagged images, and scanned documents affect student access. Then you will learn some ways of how to address these common issues using Adobe Acrobat and other tools. The session is designed to provide actionable strategies you can immediately apply to improve the accessibility of your course materials.

Participants will learn about:
Common accessibility issues in PDFs: Identify barriers such as missing tags, improper reading order, untagged images, and scanned documents that are not OCR-processed.
Creating accessible source documents: Apply best practices in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint before exporting to PDF to ensure a strong accessibility foundation.
Using Adobe Acrobat’s accessibility tools: Add and edit tags, set reading order, create accessible links, add alt text to images, and run accessibility checks.
Remediating existing PDFs: Use step-by-step strategies to improve the accessibility of PDFs you already use in your courses.
Best practices for online course delivery: Make informed decisions about when to use PDFs and how to ensure they are usable by screen reader and keyboard-only users.

This session will help you feel more confident creating and sharing accessible PDFs while building a more inclusive and equitable online learning environment for all students.

Images are a powerful instructional tool, but when they are not described appropriately, students who use screen readers or other assistive technologies may miss essential information. This session provides a practical introduction to writing effective alternative text (alt text) for images used in instructional materials. You’ll learn how to approach image description in a way that is clear, concise, and aligned with your instructional purpose.
Rather than focusing only on where to click, this workshop emphasizes decision-making: when alt text is needed, what information should be included, what can be omitted, and how context shapes an effective description. You will review examples and practice applying strategies you can immediately use in documents, slide decks, PDFs, and course platforms.

Participants will learn about:
•    The purpose of alt text: Understand how assistive technologies interpret images and why equivalent access matters.
•    Determining what needs alt text: Distinguish between decorative and informative images.
•    Writing meaningful descriptions: Create concise, context-driven alt text that supports learning objectives.
•    Common pitfalls: Avoid vague, redundant, or overly detailed descriptions.
•    Applying alt text in practice: Add and edit alt text in commonly used instructional tools.

This session will help you feel more confident and intentional when including images in your materials, ensuring that all students can access the same essential information.

Complex visuals such as charts, graphs, diagrams, maps, and infographics often communicate layered or data-rich information that cannot be conveyed through brief alt text alone. Providing meaningful access to these images requires additional planning and structured description strategies.

This session focuses specifically on the additional steps needed to make complex images accessible. Basic alt text principles will not be covered in depth. Instead, we will concentrate on how to analyze a complex visual, determine the essential instructional content, and provide equivalent access through extended descriptions or alternative formats.

Participants will learn about:
•    Identifying complex images: Recognize when a visual requires more than a short alt text description.
•    Structuring long descriptions: Organize detailed explanations so they clearly communicate key information.
•    Providing data alternatives: Convert charts and graphs into accessible summaries or tables.
•    Placement strategies: Determine where and how to include extended descriptions in your materials.
•    Design considerations: Anticipate accessibility needs when creating or selecting complex visuals.

Recommended preparation: Participants should either attend the Writing Effective Alt Text workshop or review the self-paced alt text training available on the website prior to attending this session. A foundational understanding of basic alt text principles is assumed.
This session will help you approach visually rich and data-heavy materials with greater clarity and confidence, ensuring that essential information is accessible to all students.

Making course materials accessible is an important part of supporting all learners and meeting current expectations for inclusive teaching. This session will introduce practical strategies you can use to improve the accessibility of documents, multimedia, and other course content.

Through a series of demonstrations, we’ll highlight common accessibility issues and show simple ways to address them using tools available in widely used software. We'll also review how to use built-in accessibility checkers to identify potential problems and take initial steps toward improvement.