UMass Boston

Accessibility

Staff and Faculty are here to serve the purpose of educating our students. It is your responsibility to ensure that all of your students have equitable access to your content within the Canvas LMS and that staff and faculty have equitable access to any materials you create for them outside of the LMS. Our Learning Designers can help you design an inclusive community that is accessible to all students, staff and faculty.

Making content accessible is best done proactively by employing best practices in your course design and content development. On this page you will find resources and guides to help you build course content and other materials to benefit everyone.

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Create Accessible Materials

YuJa Panorama (Accessibility Tool)

YuJa Panorama is an Accessibility Platform which gives institutions the ability to assess the accessibility of digital content, provides the means to correct the accessibility issues found, provides alternative formats for users with various disabilities, and provides accessibility reports at the course and institutional level. Panorama integrates seamlessly with all major Learning Management Systems, including our LMS, Canvas. Learn more about Yuja Panorama.

Multiple Means of Access

Providing your course content in several formats improves the course for all students. While YuJa Panorama provides Alternative Formats for your students, you are still responsible for making the original document with accessibility features that you learned about under Creating Accessible Materials. For example, by presenting a lesson as both a recorded audio file with captions and a text file, you’re not simply accommodating blind and deaf students, you’re also giving every student options, so they can choose the learning method which best suits their needs.

Beyond Access

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a helpful framework to rely on for designing an inclusive course, through three basic principles:

  1. Multiple means of representation 
  2. Multiple means of action and expression
  3. Multiple means of engagement.

The important thing to remember is that those multiple means all must be created using accessibility features. Multiple inaccessible means of accessing materials will not be as valuable as one accessible file. Learn more about UDL from The Center for Universal Design in Education at the University of Washington.

Update Your Software

Using the latest versions of software programs to create learning materials will give you more options for accessibility. Visit the Software for Faculty and Staff webpage to get the latest version of MS Office and other software.

Review VPATs

VPATs (Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates) are documents that explain how a product meets accessibility standards. VPATs can help you determine the steps you need to take to ensure content you create is accessible for your students. Learn more on the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template page.