Digital Accessibility FAQs

Digital accessibility means designing and sharing digital materials (such as course sites, documents, videos, and online tools) so that they can be used by all students, including those with disabilities. When course materials are not accessible, students may be excluded from learning activities or forced to rely on last‑minute workarounds. Making digital content accessible supports equity, student success, and inclusive teaching, and it also helps ensure that the institution meets its civil‑rights obligations under federal and state law.

From 1990 to 2024, digital accessibility was required under the ADA and other civil‑rights laws, but enforcement was often complaint‑driven – frequently triggered when a student reported a barrier or requested an accommodation. The new regulation (DOJ’s 2024 ADA Title II rule), which takes effect in April 2027, did not create a new obligation to make digital content accessible; instead, it clarified and strengthened existing requirements by: 1) creating an expectation of a proactive approach to accessibility rather than a reactive, complaint-driven approach;  2) formally adopting WCAG 2.1 AA as the technical standard; and 3) setting a compliance date for when public institutions will be evaluated against that standard.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.1, Level AA (WCAG 2.1 AA) refers to a widely recognized set of guidelines that describe how to make digital content usable by people with a wide range of disabilities. The guidelines cover issues such as providing captions for video, ensuring documents work with screen readers, using sufficient color contrast, and making content navigable by keyboard. WCAG is organized around four core principles: digital content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.

All digital course content that students need to access or use as part of a course must be accessible. This includes materials created by faculty as well as materials shared or required as part of instruction. Common examples include syllabi, readings and handouts, slide decks, PDFs and other documents, videos and audio recordings, LMS content, online assignments, quizzes, discussion boards, and instructional websites or links. It also includes content provided through third‑party platforms or publishers when that content is required for the course.

In practical terms, if students are expected to read it, watch it, listen to it, interact with it, or submit work through it, it should be accessible. The focus is on active, instructional content, not every file ever created. Faculty are not expected to remediate all past materials at once, but ongoing and newly used course materials should avoid creating accessibility barriers and be made accessible with available support.

No. Digital accessibility is not an all‑or‑nothing standard – the goal is steady improvement and timely access for students, not flawless content or retroactively fixing everything at once. What matters most is that accessibility becomes part of normal course preparation and that faculty work with available support when issues arise. Accessibility work is gradual and ongoing, with a focus on making active and newly created course materials accessible and avoiding the introduction of new barriers.

Some of the most common accessibility issues in course materials are relatively straightforward and often unintentional. These include documents that are not readable by screen readers (such as scanned PDFs or files without headings), videos without accurate captions or transcripts, and images without alternative text describing their meaning. Other frequent issues include low color contrast, which makes text difficult to read, links labeled “click here” without context, and content that cannot be navigated using a keyboard. In learning management systems, inconsistent organization or unclear navigation can also create barriers.

The good news is that many of these issues can be prevented with small changes (such as using built-in heading styles, choosing accessible file formats, enabling captions, and using accessibility checkers). Addressing these common issues early helps reduce the need for last-minute accommodations and supports clearer, more inclusive learning for all students.

Faculty can improve accessibility by focusing on small, high‑impact practices when creating or sharing course materials. The goal is not perfection, but progress: avoiding new accessibility barriers and building accessibility into materials as they are created or updated.

Initial steps may include:

• Running the Ally accessibility checker on your Brightspace course site and addressing the priority issues indicated by orange or red.
• Ensuring that all images include “alt text” with meaningful descriptions.
• Ensuring that all video content has accurate captions.
• Using descriptive links rather than phrases such as “click here” or full URLs.
• Ensuring sufficient contrast between text and background.
• Avoiding scanned PDF files when possible.
• Using built-in heading styles in Word and PowerPoint documents, rather than using bold text and font size to indicate headings.

Note: Additional information about the steps listed above is forthcoming on this web page.

BMCC provides a range of tools to help faculty create and maintain accessible course materials. These typically include accessibility features built into supported software, which can help identify common issues and suggest fixes. In addition, discipline-specific tools that are not centrally supported may be needed to address some issues. Digital Education staff can help you identify appropriate options.

Tools built into supported software include:

• Ally accessibility checker in Brightspace
• Accessibility checkers in the Microsoft Office Suite (PowerPoint, Word, Excel)
• Adobe Acrobat Pro (available by request to BMCC IRT), which can be used to remediate PDF files

The Faculty CoLab Accessibility Workshop Series offers practical, hands-on sessions to help faculty create more accessible course materials and learning experiences. Workshops cover a range of topics and provide strategies that can be applied immediately in your courses. We also offer drop-in hours where we can answer basic questions about digital accessibility and the available tools for remediation. For additional information please contact Digital Education staff at DEFacSupport@bmcc.cuny.edu.

You may have noticed a score that appears to instructors on their Brightspace course homepage. This score is generated by Ally, an accessibility checker tool that is integrated into Brightspace. The score provided by Ally is a useful metric that can flag some accessibility issues in your course, but it does not offer a definitive assessment of the accessibility of all the content in your course. Ally can flag many accessibility issues and offers solutions for solving them, making it a great place to start remediating accessibility issues in your courses.

• Gives instructors and administrators a report of their course’s accessibility, which is displayed in a widget on the course homepage. 
• Scans materials (PDFs, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, uploaded HTML, image files) for common issues. 
• Displays accessibility scores for individual documents, using a color-coded gauge to indicate how accessible they are. 
• Identifies specific issues such as missing alt text, low color contrast, missing document structure (headings), and non-tagged PDFs.
• Provides guidance in a feedback panel with step-by-step instructions about how to fix these specific issues. 
• Creates alternative formats of documents by automatically generating semantic HTML, audio, ePub, and electronic braille versions of them for students.

• Does not detect all issues
  Some issues, such as complex structural design, screen reader flow issues, and accuracy of captions and alt text, are not detected by Ally and may require human review. 
• Does not scan everything
  Ally generally does not scan external linked content (e.g., files you may have created on Dropbox or Google Docs) or external websites. It also only scans files that are added as stand-alone items within course modules – it does not scan files attached to a Brightspace “Web Page,” otherwise referred to in Brightspace as “HTML.” Many of the files brought over from Blackboard are linked from within such web pages, and are therefore not scanned.
  
  If you see items in your Brightspace Content labeled as “Web Page,” it is generally recommended that you open each, download any linked files to your computer, and upload directly to the module (from module, “Upload/Create”->”Upload Files,” where they will then be checked by Ally (typically within a few minutes).
• Does not fully evaluate video or audio accessibility
  Ally may be able to detect whether videos uploaded to Brightspace include captions and can flag automatically generated captions for review, but it does not provide guidance about how to remediate issues with captions. It does not evaluate other important aspects of media accessibility, nor does it reliably evaluate externally hosted media (e.g., videos hosted on YouTube or publisher platforms).
• Does not automatically fix issues
  While Ally guides users through the remediation process, it rarely fixes complex problems automatically. Such issues require manual action by the instructor.

You can review the Ally accessibility report by clicking on the “Ally Report” button in the widget on your course homepage. The report gives you an overview of the types of issues it has detected in your course materials, indicating the highest priority issues in red or orange. You can click into individual items and Ally will attempt to guide you through the remediation process. For detailed information about how to use Ally, visit the Ally Guide for Instructors.