Make your course materials accessible

Language usage

• Use plain (British) English language and instructions to enhance the learning experience.
• Write out acronyms, define terms, either avoid or define jargon, and consider creating a glossary if many specific terms are used.
• Use inclusive language and avoid the use of personal pronouns related to gender as well as inferences to cultural, religious, or political groups. More information can be found in the TUD guidelines on Inclusive Language.

Font styles, font sizes and use of colour

• Make use of standard, legible fonts such as Arial, Calibri, Verdana, or Tahoma. Sans-serif fonts offer better readability on screens/digital display.
• Use headings and bullet points to highlight sections of text, instead of using coloured text to convey meaning.
• Minimise the use of colour. Text should be black on a white background for optimal legibility, but if you must use coloured text, refer to How to use colour friendly palettes.
• Do not underline any text as this may be confused with a weblink.

• Use the 7 x 7 rule for slides; no more than 7 lines per slide and no more than 7 words per line (less is even better).
• Avoid too many colours and images in your slides. Animations, transitions and images should have a purpose, not be used for aesthetic purposes only.
• Images should be captioned or include an alt-text (text alternatives for non-text content) and should be referenced.
• Use solid black dots for bullets, or standardise if a different bullet style is used.
• Use left alignment for text; do not justify, as this makes the text harder to read.
• Only use punctuation where grammatically required and do not use full stops at the end of sentences, to improve legibility.
• Keep slides standardised as much as possible, to set clear expectations.

• Provide captions and other alternatives for multimedia, such as subtitles for videos and transcripts for audio.
• Provide audio descriptions if a video has no audio.
• Transcripts should be downloadable.
• URL links and credits for videos should be provided for students who require viewing on a special device (credit for videos: title, publisher, date when published and duration of video).

Course design, structure and navigation

• In general, standardisation makes content more readable and accessible. Use Brightspace’s default font style and size throughout the course if possible.
• Segmented content is more inviting and easier to navigate and search. Therefore, divide text into sections using headings, paragraphs, and lists.
• More information on structuring your course can be found on the ‘how to create a course structure’ page.

Images and graphics

• Images should be of the same size and positioned consistently on a page and throughout the course.
• All images should be high quality, especially photographs.
• Images must have a caption or include an alt-text (text alternatives for non-text content) and must be referenced.
• Avoid any flashing images and text, and many or quick transitions in slides as these can be dangerous for some learners (epilepsy suffers), and distracting for others
• If possible, include a table in text format as well, as screen readers cannot ‘read’ tables i.e., provide sentences with the exact information contained in the table.

Content and documents

• Ensure that documents have a title that is descriptive of the content.
• Upload documents in PDF format: PDF documents are preferable as they are easily used for text to audio using (for example) Adobe - Verify PDF accessibility.
• Use Microsoft PowerPoint, Word, and Adobe to check for accessibility of documents.
• Numbering should be sequential but kept to a minimum.
• For bulleted lists in documents: be consistent in the structure, grammar and punctuation and do not mix full sentences with single items or phrases.

Links

• Avoid using text such as ‘download the document here’, but instead, have a text that describes what is being linked. For example, ‘Course Syllabus’.
• For links that point to documents rather than web pages, include the document type in the link. For example, ‘Supplemental Reading for Week 1 (PDF)’.