What Do We Mean By Accessible?

Accessibility can have many meanings; in this case, we are referring to making sure your required and recommended materials are fully accessible -- readable, viewable, perceptible, and usable -- for as many people as possible.

Practically speaking this means that you will want to make sure that your materials are compatible with:

Literacy aides such as Read&Write, which offers help with everyday tasks, such as reading text out loud, understanding unfamiliar words, researching assignments, and proofreading written work;
Screen readers such as NVDA, AppleVoiceOver, or ChromeVox for people with visual impairments; and
Text-to-speech converters, such as the Read Aloud Chrome Add-on those for people with auditory or processing impairments.

The simplest and most direct way to make sure your materials are fully accessible is to use the library's digital versions. Fortunately, the library owns and licenses millions of books, articles, videos, and other information in fully accessible formats.

Sometimes, however, you may be offering materials that are not available via the library. In those cases, our first recommendation is to contact your subject librarian to see if an accessible copy can be purchased or licensed. If that is not an option, then you will want to make sure your materials are fully accessible yourself.

Using Library Materials

As indicated above, we recommend you use library versions of your materials, as the library vendors usually make their sources fully accessible. Here are different ways you can make sure you are putting your students in touch with library versions:

1. Locate the item in the library's OneSearch catalog, searching by name or author.
2. When building your Canvas course, use the Library Course Materials by Leganto function to add live hyperlinks to library resources. LCM is a Canvas add-on that links Canvas directly to library resources using permalinks. Permalinks are stable URLs to full-text library resources.
3. Contact your subject librarian for assistance with either of the above tasks or with building your syllabus.

Using Materials Outside of the Library

The most common accessibility issue with course materials at SJSU is scanned PDFs. When a PDF is scanned, it is essentially an image document and the text is not readable by screen readers, so students who rely on these technologies to access the course content are unable to. Also, with scanned PDFs, the text is not selectable, or able to be copied and pasted. This issue affects a variety of students including students who are blind, have low vision, or are using digital tools to study.

Additionally, poorly scanned PDFs are difficult to read because the text is often grainy or blurred or there are black margins. Most students have trouble reading the content and might become overwhelmed, frustrated, or distracted. We've all been in a class where the text on a required reading is blurry, haven't we?

Ensure Your Syllabus is Accessible

The SJSU Official Syllabus ensures your syllabus is fully accessible by default. For assistance, please view the SJSU Official Syllabus webpage or contact eCampus@sjsu.edu.

Additional Resources

The SJSU Accessible Education Center makes software and tutorials available for students who need them.

Next

Thank you for reviewing what constitutes accessible documents. On the next page, you will learn tactics for remediating files that are not yet accessible.