Digital Accessibility for Instruction
Changes to Digital Accessibility in Course Content
The U.S. Department of Justice finalized Title II regulations requiring all digital content at public institutions of Illinois' size to be accessible by April 2027. These accessibility requirements apply to all digital course materials, including documents, media, and external resources.
Why Accessibility Matters
Digital accessibility ensures that all online content, tools, and platforms are usable for our university community. This includes compliance with standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, ensuring content is perceivable, operable, understandable and robust for all users. Creating accessible digital content allows us to foster an inclusive environment for students, faculty, staff and the broader community.
If you have questions about the information provided, please contact Anya Kanevskaya or Rob Bennett, the Engineering IT representatives in the IT Accessibility Liaison program.
What Support is Available?
Engineering IT is here to support you. Email our eLearning team for a consultation, dedicated training, accessibility questions, and more. Engineering IT also has a large group of staff trained through the campus IT Accessibility Liaison program. Liaisons provide local, content-specific advice and guidance—not hands-on content remediation.
What Engineering IT Provides
- Consultations: One-on-one help with a specific course, requested through our Accessibility Support form.
- Office hours: Recurring drop-in time staffed by the eLearning team for questions as you have them.
- Workshops: Workshops with CITL and campus partners, EngrIT Edit-A-Thons.
- Remediation guide: A Guide to Course Accessibility Remediation (GCAR): what to fix first, which tool to use, and how far to take it.
- Accessible templates: Canvas and PowerPoint templates provide accessible starting points.
- Proactive outreach: We contact instructors of high-priority courses, assess needs, and start the work with them.
Accessibility Quick Tips Newsletter
Accessibility Quick Tips is a bi-weekly newsletter, put together to bring instructors bite-sized suggestions on how to make course content accessible. Check out the archive for the previous issues.
What Should I Do as Faculty?
Start small, start now. A completely accessible course space does not exist. We work instead to make, and keep, courses as accessible to as many students as possible —continuously and gradually.
Available Tools
- Microsoft Accessibility Checker: a built-in accessibility checker within Word, PowerPoint, and PDFs to check to errors and alerts with your content.
- Pope Tech: Scans Canvas course content and recommends corrections
- WAVE: Checks self-hosted course websites and HTMLcontent
- Kaltura captioning: Machine captions for media hosted in Illinois MediaSpace
- Grackle Docs: Checks Google Docs, Slides and Sheets inside Google Workspace
- WebAIM Contrast Checker: Tests color pairs against the 4.5:1 contrast standard
- PDF Accessibility Checker (PAC): PAC enables users to make a quick initial assessment of the accessibility of a PDF file.
Campus Resources
Are you ready to transform the way you teach?
Contact Engineering IT’s eLearning team at engrit-help-elearning@illinois.edu to schedule a
consultation, request a training, or ask questions about the digital accessibility of your courses.
Join us in exploration of high-quality instructional technologies that will further enhance the exemplary teaching in the Grainger College of Engineering.