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Teaching & Learning Resources

CAS Chairs Meeting Notes

Written by

Shannon Hauser

Published on

What to work on now

Our post on “What to Tackle First for Digital Accessibility” encourages faculty to start reviewing their YuJa Panorama course report as a first step. Some additional things to consider as well:

  • Start using the Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Office accessibility checkers as part of your workflow when creating new documents
  • Before fixing a PDF see the “Before You Remediate” section on our Accessible PDFs guide
    • For now the ensure that PDFs are tagged and OCR’d (guidance coming soon)
  • If you are using video content that you’ve created we recommend using ScreenPal to create accessible videos. We’ve recently invested in a subscription that is available to faculty, staff, and students that gives us access to more tools to help with accessibility like AI-powered captions and audio descriptions.

“What about this situation?”

We recognize that different disciplines will experience different accessibility challenges. Specialized tools, media formats, and teaching practices can create unique barriers when it comes to making files digitally accessible. We encourage you to share these needs so we can identify campus-wide solutions and provide guidance instead of relying on one-off fixes.

Professional organizations in your field often offer best practices for accessible teaching, and your engagement with those resources is important. Some changes may require new tools or workflows, but we will do our best to support you in finding options that make sense for your courses while focusing on scalable solutions for the university.

Get Support

To get specific support around digital accessibility to meet ADA Title II compliance you can:

Office of Disability Resources Role

The Office of Disability Resources (ODR) will continue to prompt students who specifically need accessible materials to request them through ODR and they will still pre-emptively reach out to faculty where applicable to get any additional articles or readings (aside from what might be listed under your required course materials) to check and/or remediate those as needed.

Beyond accommodation-specific needs, ODR is not positioned to support instructors in broadly meeting the new Title II and HB 2541 accessibility requirements. Faculty should ensure that any materials they scan, upload, or assign are accessible for all students. Under the updated regulations, if you make a resource available for some students, it must be accessible and usable for everyone. The Title II team will continue to work with ODR to create guidance and best practices around digital accessibility.

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