Create Accessible Course Content - Text Content

Ensuring our course content meets accessibility standards ensures that all students can utilize course materials equitably. Moodle provides tools that make it easier for instructors to create accessible content for their students, including a built-in accessibility checker. This article discusses best practices for creating accessible documents, links, and other written content that you may use in your Moodle course. 

Accessible Documents

When possible, documents in Moodle should be creating using the Page or Book resource instead of attaching a file created outside of Moodle. Creating resources within Moodle ensures that they are easy to navigate and compatible with screen readers and other assistive technologies. If you do upload documents that are created externally, it is important that they are compatible with assistive technologies. 

All scanned material should be converted into a Portable Document Form (PDF) and converted using Adobe OCR software before being uploaded into a course. OCR software extracts text from any scanned paper document or image file and converts it to editable text in a PDF, will make the document perceivable for a person using assistive technology. If you are looking to use OCR software to create an accessible PDF, please read the article "Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Accessible Documents."

Word documents and other Microsoft files should be checked for accessibility issues using the tool they were created in prior to being uploaded to Moodle. 

Text

Accessible text should have high contrast with the background color of the page to ensure it is readable by anyone with low vision or color vision impairments. WCAG guidelines indicate that regular text should have a color contrast of 4.5:1 (light colored text on dark backgrounds, dark color text on light backgrounds). Additionally, users should be able to resize text on a page to at least 200% of its original size without losing content or functionality.

Links

Be sure to use descriptive text for links. For example:

• Don't: Click here. 
• Do: To learn more about accessibility in Moodle, read the Knowledge Base article on the topic.

Links that open web pages in a new window should warn users in advance. This practice helps people using assistive technology navigate back to the original page, if desired. For example, you can use the following structure when adding your linked content:

• Elon University website (link opens in a new window)

Headings

Headings should be used hierarchically throughout the page. Moodle uses H1, H2, and H3 headers by default, so you should start with Heading (medium) and then nest the Heading (small) as needed.

• Don't: use headers non-hierarchically. For example:

  • Header 2
  • Header 1
  • Header 3
• Do: use headers hierarchically. For example:
  • Header 1
  • Header 2
  • Header 3

To assign heading levels in Moodle, select your heading text and click the Paragraph Styles  icon in the text editor.  Choose the appropriate heading level.   

Tables

Make sure that you use tables for simple tabular data.  Do not use tables for layout (e.g., to put a picture next to text).  Do not merge cells or nest tables within tables.  A table should have a caption that describes it, as well as a header column, row, or both. To create a table in Moodle and give it a caption, open an activity for editing. 

1. Select Table from the text editor toolbar.
2. Select the number of rows and columns you would like using the table creator window.
3. Under Table Properties, click Show caption. Add a descriptive caption for your table.

In addition to a caption, your table should have either header rows or columns to indicate to screen readers that these cells are table headers. To identify cells as Header cells:

1. Highlight the cells you wish to designate as header cells. 
2. Select Table from the text editor toolbar. 
3. Select Cell > Cell Properties from the drop down window. 
4. Under Cell type, select Header cell. Click Save. 

Equations

Use the built-in Equation editor to construct equations in Moodle.  Equations constructed this way are fully accessible. You can find the Equation editor in the text editor by clicking Insert on the toolbar and selecting Equation editor from the drop down list.