Accessibility Resources for Faculty

BCTC's Student Accessibility Services provides excellent information and support for faculty seeking help about accessibility.  Be sure to  check out the additional useful information at their website.

If a student in your class approaches you about a disabiity, contact Student Accessibility Services right away to get the best possible advice on providing the necessary tools and accomodattions customized for the student.

• Compile summaries of online discussions into a text file and include the text file on your  Blackboard site.

• When creating a web link, use descriptive text; try to avoid using "click here" to indicate a link.

• Provide a transcript for recorded lectures and other audio files; add captions to videos.

• When using MSWord PowerPoint, use the "Outline View" option  to create a more accessible version of the PowerPoint. Open the PowerPoint and go to outline view.  Cut and paste the outline view text into a MS Word file. Edit as necessary. Save and link to the MS Word  file as an alternative to your MS PowerPoint presentation.

• Avoid using  font colors as the only way to convey something.  For example, avoid  pointers such as "The text highlighted in blue is the main idea."

• Keep things simple. When considering whether to present an instructional concept as an animation, image, video, or sound, ask yourself if it is necessary  to use that method or can it be presented via plain text instead? Try to limit the use of  more difficult to access materials or presentation methods. And, if you do use them, be sure to have available an easier to access version as an alternative, as well.

How to create captioning for your own YouTube videos by using / editing YouTube automatic captioning.

How to add captioning to your own YouTube videos by uploading your own transcript file.

1) When creating a MSWord document, use the headings feature  (i.e. Heading 1, Title, Subtitle) to indicate a heading or other divisions within your document. This helps screen reader software read the section divisions correctly:

2) When inserting tables into your MSWord document, use the table tools provided. This allows the screen reader to know that this is a table.

3) Add alt-text to images.  (right click with mouse on a photo in MSWord, then select Format Picture, and then select  Alt Text option. Enter words to describe the pcture, so that screen reader software will be able to read an alternative text description as a text subtitution  for that  picture. For example: "photograph of a siberian husky dog")

If a YouTube video has closed captioning already, you can enable it  while playing a video by clicking on the CC symbol near the bottom of the video. The CC symbol may not show up until you click the play button for the video.

Try Microsoft's Accessibility Checker to see if there are ways to inprove accessibilty in your Word, PowerPoint and Excel course mateials.

 You can use Adobe Acrobat software ( 9 and above) to increase accessibility.  In addition, Kurzweil, including the cloud-based Firefly edition, can be used by BCTC students to convert  PDF documents to screen readable text..