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Every month I get a newsletter from my son’s middle school. It’s a PDF with small print that uses highlighting and color to convey points. I can barely read it without zooming in and scrolling back and forth because of the text size, and I find the colors distracting and sometimes headache-inducing. I suspect some other parents and guardians can’t read it at all.

As a professor, I see students with a wide range of disabilities. For various reasons, not all of them want to disclose their disabilities to the university to get formal accommodations, so I often find myself modifying my course materials and looking for alternative formats on the fly. About a decade ago, however, I learned about the Universal Design for Learning, a philosophy and practice that holds that instructors should strive to make all materials and course activities as accessible as possible.

With universal design, we don’t provide accommodations for students who need them. Instead, we provide all students with accessible materials.

Our students have all kinds of invisible disabilities—and they tend to develop additional disabilities and other challenges as they age. My average student is 27 years old, for example. Many are veterans with traumatic brain injuries, anxiety, and/or PTSD. Others have survived sexual assault and have PTSD, depression, and anxiety. Some are parents of small children. Others are on eldercare duty. Many work full time. Some live in their cars or couch surf.

As a result, my students tend to consume course content and do their coursework in whatever spare moments they can find.

Here are some examples of how my students access materials:

• An exhausted mom whose baby has just fallen asleep after breastfeeding watches course videos in darkened rooms, silently, with captions turned on.
• One has his phone read books, documents, and websites to him as he drives to and from work and school, as well as while he works out at the campus rec center.
• One brings her laptop to every class. She sticks in one earbud and has the computer read assignment instructions to her. (I make sure students can access digital versions of any print documents I hand out in class.)
• Another student prefers to watch videos with captions because they have ADHD and the captions help keep them focused. For them, YouTube’s automatically generated captions are insufficient because the occasional incorrect word, as well as the complete lack of punctuation and capitalization, are distracting.
• One student has an iPad Pro that allows him to zoom way in on text so that he can see it better.
• Another student, who doesn’t have a disability but who is an English language learner, prefers captioned video because captions improve her comprehension, expand her vocabulary, and increase her ability to spell words that are new to her.

So how do teachers make sure digital materials are accessible?

Alas, most teachers aren’t bothering to make their materials accessible, probably because they don’t know they need to. The vast majority of materials I’ve downloaded from Teachers Pay Teachers aren’t accessible. Neither are the mandatory trainings and other professional development opportunities my university requires me to take from various vendors—and the trainings and PD you pursue probably aren’t accessible either, which means some of your colleagues aren’t getting the same quality experience you might be getting if you’re free from disabilities.

(An important note before we go further: It’s impossible to make any content 100% accessible to all people. People and their needs vary, and sometimes one person’s need conflicts with another’s. In some cases, you may need to make multiple versions of the same content. In all cases we should try our best because it’s both required under law and profoundly the right thing to do.)

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of practices, some of them a bit technical, but most of them very easy, that you can adopt to ensure students get the full benefit of the hard work you’ve put into crafting your assignments, activities, and other course content.

It can feel overwhelming. However, there are a handful of practices that will take you 90 percent of the way toward where you need to be.

Creating accessible digital documents

Documents, and especially text-only documents, are the easiest media to make accessible. Basically, you need to prepare your document so that it can be read by both humans and computers. Today’s computers and mobile devices often can read text aloud, but we need to let them know in what order to read things, as well as make it possible for readers to skip from section to section of the document without having to listen to every word. While every piece of software tackles documents slightly differently, the most crucial ones whose needs we need to meet are screen readers used by people with blindness or low vision.

Here’s a demo of Lou Fioritto trying to make sense of a PDF document using JAWS, a common screen reader. The most instructive part is from 6:45 to 8:05, where Fioritto demonstrates that an improperly formatted document can cause the software to miss key information, including links and images.

Here, then, are easy ways to make documents accessible:

Be sure your digital document includes “live text.”

Whenever possible, deliver content in a web browser or in a word-processing document. As you can see in the video above, screen readers can really struggle to make sense of PDFs.

If you can highlight, copy, and paste text from your document into another one, and the text looks clean in the pasted version, your document is likely accessible to screen readers. However, if when you paste the text, the words are missing letters, are weirdly formatted, or if the words show up in the wrong order, you have a problem. Microsoft Word and Google Docs handle this kind of cut-and-paste easily, but copying and pasting from PDFs is harder, as some PDFs save text as images instead of as live text.

Use headers.

Chunk text and use headers. A reader, whether human or computer, should within a few seconds be able to scan your document to get a sense of its purpose and organization.

When you need a title or header, instead of manually bolding or italicizing text or increasing the font size, use the pre-formatted settings in your authoring software. For example, in my version of Microsoft Word, those formatting options can be found in the ribbon across the top of the screen:

Here’s where you can find the formatting options in Google Docs:

If you don’t like how the formatting looks to sighted users in terms of color, font, or size, you can change those in your styles settings.

Be cautious about color and contrast.

Don’t use color or highlighting to distinguish important words or passages. Screen readers don’t pick up on these cues, and colorblind readers may also struggle to see these words or sections, especially if the document background is not white.

Similarly, use bold text and italics sparingly when trying to emphasize a point. Screen readers don’t always pick up on these, either. It’s OK, as I’m doing here, to place some passages in bold face to make the document easier for sighted users to scan, but you want to be sure that any super important pieces are called out in the text itself, not with visual cues.

Use high-contrast text. This means using dark text on a light background or light text on a dark background. Avoid layering color text on a color background. If you’re technically inclined and know the hexadecimal code for your text and background colors, you can check them for accessibility using this Accessible Colors tool. If you don’t know those codes, you’ll need to eyeball the contrast, but to be safe, use black or very dark gray text on a white background.

Format links carefully.

Use descriptive links. Here’s what a descriptive link looks like:

• The Cat Fanciers’ Association recognizes 42 breeds of cat.

You can look at that link and quickly surmise that when you click on that link, you will be taken to a website—likely that of the Cat Fanciers’ Association—that lists or describes 42 breeds of cat.

Here are links that are not descriptive:

• To learn more about cat breeds, click here. To learn more about dog breeds, click here.
• To learn more about cat breeds, visit http://cfa.org/breeds.aspx.

These links are problematic for a number of reasons:

1. “Here” does not adequately describe the destination link. If a user of a screen reader is skipping from link to link, all they will hear is “here.”
2. The first example uses “here” to direct the user to two different websites. That’s confusing. Again, the user of a screen reader skipping from link to link will hear only “here. . .here.”
3. The second example is problematic both because the link isn’t active and because the screen reader will actually read aloud H-T-T-P-colon-slash-slash-C-F-A. . . That’s really annoying, and unless the user knows what CFA stands for, they’re not going to know where the link is taking them.
4. Finally, be sure if you’re linking to the same page in multiple places on the same document, that you use the same or very similar linking text. It can be frustrating for users—sighted or not—to click on different links that all take them to the same page.

Provide alternative text for images.

When your digital content includes images, you need to describe the content of those images for screen readers. This gets easier every passing year, as software companies add to their apps the ability to “alt tag” images.

Alt tags are a bit of an art and are highly dependent on context. For example, a hiking guide might use “photo of western poison oak” as the alt text to describe the photo above. A researcher writing about western poison oak might place the plant’s scientific name, Toxicodendron diversilobum, in the alt text to distinguish it from Atlantic poison oak. However, a professor including the image on a botany exam where she expected students to identify the plant might describe it as “a deciduous shrub featuring shiny green or red leaves in clusters of three” so that the alt text doesn’t give away the answer.

Here are instructions for adding alt text in a few popular platforms:

• Adding alt text in Microsoft Office products
• Using alt text and other accessible practices in Google Drive
• Adding images and alt text in WordPress
• Using alt text in Moodle and Canvas
• Add alt text to images in Blackboard using Ally

You can learn more about images and accessibility via TechSmith, which provides tips on naming images, describing graphs and charts, and what to include in alt text and captions.

Don’t put text in images.

Screen readers can’t translate text in images, such as in the image below, to speech. Use live text instead.

Offer large-print copies of printed materials.

When you’re passing out print copies, include some large-print ones that use 16- to 18-point text at the back of the stack. Instead of forcing people to single themselves out by asking who needs large-print versions, let people know there are large-print ones at the back of the pile. That way people can grab them unobtrusively.

Creating accessible multimedia

Audio

If you share an audio file, such as a podcast or a recording of a lecture, you should:

• Be sure the audio file is available in a common audio format that students can listen to on all platforms. MP3 is a great choice for most spoken-word files.
• Check to be sure the speaker can be heard clearly. Some people, especially those who are middle-aged or older, may have difficulty distinguishing speech from background music or sounds. (Think about trying to distinguish what a friend is saying when you’re talking in a busy, noisy restaurant.) Others may find background music or sound sufficiently distracting to impede their comprehension or learning.
• Provide a transcript of the audio, including any sounds (e.g., a door opening), for students who have difficulty hearing or who are deaf.

Video

Add captions to every video.

Many of the same cautions that apply to images apply to video. However, since video also has audio, it’s important to add captions that accurately capture what people in the video are saying, as well as any relevant sounds that aren’t obvious, such as a door slamming off-screen.

Automatically generated captions aren’t acceptable because, while the artificial intelligence that generates them is getting better, it still isn’t entirely accurate. It also tends not to include capitalization and punctuation, which are essential to comprehension.

Here are the instructions for adding captions on several popular platforms:

• The easiest method is via YouTube, which provides straightforward instructions on how to edit the automatically generated captions.
• If you are in a K-12 school district, college, or university, check with your IT department to see if your district or institution subscribes to an enterprise video platform (e.g., TechSmith Relay, YuJa, or Panopto) that offers automated captioning.
• Vimeo and some other platforms do not offer automated captioning, but you can use Amara to type your own your own.
• If you are technologically savvy and use Adobe Premiere Pro, the Adobe website offers instructions on how to add captions.
• You can pay for captioning from services such as 3Play Media, a service I highly recommend, or other providers. (Rev is another popular choice because of its low cost.)

Captions benefit not only students who have difficulty hearing, but also some of those with ADHD or other challenges focusing, second-language learners, and anyone watching a video who doesn’t want the video’s sound to distract or bother people around them.

Consider adding audio description as well.

Audio description, which describes what is happening on screen to users who are low-vision or blind, is also an important feature to add to videos. In their IT policies, many universities and school districts require videos to meet this level of accessibility, but unfortunately, few provide sufficient funding for this service. While creating an adding audio description is relatively straightforward in a technical sense, good audio description is an art. 3PlayMedia offers an extensive explanation of audio description.

Now you’ll notice accessibility issues everywhere.

Once you realize that not everyone experiences documents and other digital media the way neurotypical, able-bodied people do, you’ll begin to recognize the ways that most digital media is inaccessible in one way or another. Imagine what it might be like use a virtual reality headset, an augmented reality app (such as Pokemon Go) on a smartphone, or play a game on a gaming console if you can’t see or hear, or if you otherwise process information differently from neurotypical folks.

These realizations can feel overwhelming and frustrating. In such moments, remember that you can’t fix the world. You can work on your small part of it, document by document, video by video.

Additional resources

The IDEA Shop within the Center for Teaching and Learning at Boise State University has created an excellent how-to series called Universal Design in a Nutshell. Each two-sided handout in this series offers a simple explanation of an accessibility practice or universal design, a case study of its use, and three tips to get you started. You can browse the site yourself, or go directly to the handouts on these topics:

• UDL in Action
• Captioning Videos
• Universally Designed Assignments
• Universally Designed Course Content
• Universally Designed Learning Activities
• Creating Accessible Documents
• Creating Accessible Images
• Creating Accessible Slide Presentations
• Delivering Accessible Presentations

Note that these handouts are licensed under a Creative Commons noncommercial license, meaning that you can download, share, copy, and modify these documents, as long as you aren’t using them for commercial purposes. Please download and share them with your colleagues or coworkers.

Plan for accessibility from the start

Advocates for accessibility and university design often cite curb cuts—the slope from the sidewalk into the street we now find at most intersections in the U.S.—as an example of how a feature initially designed for people with disabilities benefit people of all kinds, including a delivery person using a dolly or hand truck, a parent pushing a baby stroller, and elderly people who are unsteady on their feet or using a wheeled walker. Those raised dots and bright yellow edging added over the past decade or so? Those are designed to be a visual and tactile aid; when someone who is blind sweeps their cane in front of them, they’ll feel the bumps. Similarly, smartphone users who aren’t paying attention to their environment while walking often, without evening thinking about it, stop and look up when they feel the tactile paving under their feel.

Similarly, as I’ve alluded to throughout this article, all kinds of people benefit from digital accessibility. And just as it’s easier to include accessible curb cuts at the time the sidewalk is laid rather than demolishing the corners and adding curb cuts later, it’s easiest to ensure accessibility if you build it into your documents, audio, and video as you’re creating that media. It can be much harder to add it in later.

If this information is all new to you, choose somewhere to start, like documents. You can create new documents with accessibility in mind, and then revise older ones as you reuse them. It’s not always the most interesting or fun process, but it is important, as it benefits so many people.

Thanks for joining us in embracing accessibility and universal design. This work—your work—matters.