Being a Digital Accessibility Liaison can be a little intimidating, and it can be hard to know where to start. Here are some suggestions for things you can do to promote digital accessibility compliance in your unit:
Basic Responsibilities
Communication and Training
- Refer employees in your unit to the Digital Accessibility Website (webaccess.msu.edu), the basic accessibility checklist (webaccess.msu.edu/basiclist), and the tutorials
- Send out accessibility hints and tips from the liaison meetings to your unit
- Make use of the "Why Digital Accessibility" document, which was created to help liaisons explain digital accessibility to faculty and staff.
- Encourage Faculty and course creators, IT professionals, and Communicators in your unit to take digital accessibility training. Different training paths are listed on that page for each accessibility topic area.
- Be aware of communications your unit sends out and ensure they are in accessible formats. Talk to anyone who emails images of text and ask them to use more accessible formats
- Refer employees in your unit to the Accessibility Review Team if any important materials have been checked for accessibility but need to be double-checked
- Encourage faculty and staff to take prompt action to remediate or report an accessibility issue if a student or other member of the MSU community brings something to their attention.
Relationships
- Make contact with the individuals and teams in charge of your unit's websites, social media, digital content and publications, email newsletters, videos, etc.
- Make contact with any vendors your unit uses to create digital systems or content and emphasize the importance of following MSU's technical guidelines
- Identify a group of people from the departments in your unit who can serve as points of contact for digital accessibility compliance and consider updating the liaisons page to list them if desired
- Consider meeting regularly with the other liaisons in your unit to establish a digital accessibility committee
- Consider joining other meetings, such as department or team meetings in your unit, to promote digital accessibility awareness and training
- Collaborate with unit leadership by sharing metrics from the Accessibility Dashboard and when filling out the Annual Self-Review
Courses
Websites
Videos
- Make sure faculty and other content creators know How to Bulk Order Machine Captions in MediaSpace.
- Encourage video creators to communicate all visual content in the audio track rather than only showing information visually, in order to avoid the need to create alternate audio tracks.
- Videos saved to MediaSpace and YouTube receive automatic machine captioning. Encourage video creators to use a high-quality microphone, speak slowly and clearly, and minimize background noise to improve the accuracy of these captions.
Digital Content
- Keep an eye on web content, emails, videos, and social media posts to ensure they are being sent out in accessible formats
- Encourage the use of native file formats (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) rather than converting documents to PDF
- Encourage the conversion of digital files to HTML pages in your website or in D2L where feasible, rather than hosting documents.
- Encourage the use of digital accessibility checkers in Word, PowerPoint, and Acrobat.
- You can help individuals who need to frequently check non-course documents by creating a development D2L "course" so they can use Spartan Ally.
- Be cautious of advocating for the removal of materials, but it can improve digital accessibility metrics to delete files from websites and courses that are no longer in use.
