MBECTEWeb Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

What is WCAG?

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are a set of international standards used to gauge how accessible web content is to disabled users and those using assistive technologies.

The University of Utah aspires to provide students with content compliant with WCAG 2.2 AA standards. When creating new courses or updating current content hosted virtually, our goal as a community is to follow along with these guidelines to ensure all students can access course content easily.

Your WCAG Checklist

To ensure your course is in compliance with the base WCAG requirements, use the following checklist to review your course material:

All images, graphs, & figures included in my course have alternative text available.

I provide official textbooks, high quality PDFs (e.g. text is selectable), and/or text-only documents for all readings in my course.

All videos used in my course have closed captions available.

All colorful content is high contrast, and I do not use color alone to emphasize information (e.g. important text is not indicated by being highlighted in a color).

Modules, files, and links used in my course have descriptive names (e.g. “Assignment 1” or “Week1Reading.pdf”, not "Click Here" or "Thing.pdf").

This is not an exhaustive list of the WCAG 2.2 AA standards. Find more information here:

To-Do for "U"

The rest of this unit will introduce you to some of the tools available to help you update your course files easily, but deciding where to begin is the first step.

Getting started with access fixes can be overwhelming. Break it down into easier tasks to achieve to ensure you succeed!

Try It!

Pick one of the checklist items above, and update all of your Canvas content items to comply with that one.
Update all of the content for one unit at a time.
Set a goal of fixing one issue a day throughout your week.
Schedule a consultation with an Instructional Consultant in MBECTE.