Digital Accessibility | How to make a Brightspace course digitally accessible

This article will provide you with a set of guidelines to make your Brightspace course digitally accessible for students with visual disabilities.

In this table, you will learn about different types of visual disabilities and the guidelines to support these students while designing your learning content. Each guideline is explained in detail in the section that follows.

Disability   Guidelines  
Color Blindness  
  • Use high contrast between text and the background
  • Avoid these color combinations (Green/red, Green/blue, Green/black, Green/brown, Green/gray, Light green/yellow, Blue/purple, Blue/gray) 
  • Use icons and/or symbols with colored diagrams
  • Use textures for representing charts, graphs & maps
Blindness, Visual impairment & Dyslexia  
  • Use alternative texts for images, links & graphs
  • Use a clear headings hierarchy
  • Use descriptive titles for pages
  • Use a proper text font and size
  • Add transcripts for video files

How to make your content digitally accessible in Brightspace through HTML

In order to make your content digitally accessible to students with visual disabilities, please be sure to implement the following guidelines for the HTML pages

  1. Use hierarchical default structure:

Use each of the preset hierarchical style options (headings, paragraph, code, etc.) to differentiate your text. This will help students to clearly understand the structure of the content.

  1. Use default or recommended fonts:
  1. Make sure to have alternative text for images, links & graphs

Click on the image and click on the Image Options icon.  In the Insert/edit Image tab, fill the Alternative description box with the description of the image, or tick the Image is decorative box. Then, click on Save.

This option will enable the digital reader to explain the content of the image to students with visual disabilities.

  1. Use modules and sub-modules to order topics in the course Content (maximum of 3 levels)

When creating sub-modules, please use a maximum of 3 levels of sub-models. A fourth sub-model (as displayed in the image) will be visualized at the same level as the third, which is confusing for students.

  1. Use sufficient contrast between text and background

Click on Select color to open the tab displayed below

Select the color for your text and check the bottom of the tab. A red X displayed shows you that the contrast is too low, therefore a student with visual disabilities might encounter difficulties in reading that part of the text. Please be sure to select colors with large contrast (that displays the green check icon)

  1. Click on the Accessibility check button to verify whether your content is digitally accessible to students with visual disabilities. A new Accessibility Checker tab will appear displaying information about issues with disability access. Please acknowledge and correct the Errors as indicated in the tab.

How to make your content digitally accessible in other tools

Here you can find guidelines, tips, and examples to make your content digitally accessible with the following tools.  

Live CC in PowerPoint Present with real-time, automatic captions or subtitles in PowerPoint - Microsoft Support 
MS Word  Make your Word documents accessible to people with disabilities - Microsoft Support
MS Excel  Make your Excel documents accessible to people with disabilities - Microsoft Support
MS PowerPoint  Make your PowerPoint presentations accessible to people with disabilities - Microsoft Support
Email in Outlook   Make your Outlook email accessible to people with disabilities - Microsoft Support
Websites checker  WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools (webaim.org)
PDF Checker It's not possible to use the Adobe checker right away. A request is needed to install the Adobe Acrobat: Knowledge - Employee Center (wur.nl)

With Adobe Acrobat, you can check the accessibility issues. Here are some guidelines:Create and verify PDF accessibility, Acrobat Pro (adobe.com)

Now you know how to make your content accessible to students with visual disabilities!

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