UCI Resources

At UCI, providing a culture of inclusion and equal opportunity for students with disabilities is a campus wide responsibility and commitment. UCI has a range of accessibility resources that are available to the whole campus community.

UCI Accessibility

UCI Accessibility is a resource that includes information and tools for creating an inclusive culture, such as the following:

• Captions and Transcripts with Zoom
• IT Accessibility Training – Get tailored training modules via UCLC related to different roles on campus.
• Resources for reporting a concern
• Employee Accommodations
• Tip Sheets on topics such as accessible webpages, emails, videos and more.

Accessibility Basics Training

UCI Accessibility Basics is a website intended to be a quick and easy reference for users interested in learning and practicing digital accessibility. It provides an introduction to digital accessibility, with a focus on 5 basics skills: Meaningful Links, ALT Text, Colors and Contrast, Headings and Styles.

Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation (DTEI)

DTEI has resources on Inclusive Teaching for Classroom Equity and a Teaching Accessibility Cheat Sheet.

Teach Anywhere

UCI Teach Anywhere is a resource for UCI instructors, provided by the Division of Teaching Excellence & Innovation and the Office of Information Technology.

• Leveraging features in Canvas, including using Yuja and Zoom
• Tips for Planning, Transitioning, Facilitating and Conducting Exams remotely
• Who to turn to for help with Remote teaching technologies, SmartClassrooms, and Remote exam monitoring
• Providing Accessibility through Canvas

TechPrep Keep Teaching

TechPrep @ UCI – Keep Teaching is intended to help instructors prepare for the tech-related aspects of potential campus disruptions. This is a rapidly evolving resource, so check back regularly for more information.  

• Planning for your online course, including FERPA, Fair Use and other policy consideration
• Using Zoom for live interaction
• Collaborating remotely via Google Apps for UCI

With U For U App

UCI strives to provide an environment accessible to all members of and visitors to the UCI community. If you encounter a barrier to access to a campus program, service, digital content, building, path, please report it . You can submit an ADA Report or use the UCI With U For U mobile app. For access issues related to the UCI Health System (hospital, clinics), contact Patient Experience by emailing  healthexperience@uci.edu or calling 714-456-7004.

Captions & Transcripts

While captions are critical for students who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing, they can benefit many students, regardless of disability. The information here is for instructors who want to increase the accessibility of their content. If you have a student who has Captions, Transcripts, or an Interpreter as part of their accommodation, someone from DSC will be in contact with you.

Described and Captioned Media Program have put together a Captioning Key. This  manual guides captioning practices for entertainment and educational media.

Automatic captions

Automatic captions are generated using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology. Captions produced this way can have errors and miss important details, such as punctuation and speaker identification. Despite their limitations, automatic captions is a step towards creating more accessible content. 

• For video content you plan to reuse, it is especially important to correct mistakes. Yuja – Editing Your Videos & Captions shows a quick but useful tutorial on how to do so. The tutorial mentioned the Captioning Confidence Score, which highlights instances in the captioning that the AI is not sure of.  Otter.ai can also be used to create and edit a caption file. 

Zoom

The Transcripts & Captions section of the UCI Zoom Help Center provides an overview of live automatic captions and how to add captions to recordings after-the-fact. You can review Zoom’s Help Center information on How to access and edit after-the-fact transcripts.

Yuja

If you use Yuja your videos are automatically captioned, and the text can be downloaded as a transcript. The process for generating the automated captions can take time, but an email will be sent once they are ready. Yuja provides the tools needed to make edits in their Video Editor. This can be helpful if you want to correct spelling and capitalization. 

• Automatic Captioning with Yuja
• Downloading Yuja Captions as a Plain text or PDF Transcript
• Editing Captions in the Yuja Video Editor

Google Slides

Did you know that Google Slides provide an option for real time automatically generated captions? These are only available in real-time and cannot be saved as a transcript.  To learn more, visit Present Google Slides with Captions.

PowerPoint

Like Google Slides, Office 365 PowerPoint has an option for real time automatically generated captions. These are also only available in real-time and cannot be saved as a transcript. to learn more, visit Present with real-time, automatic captions or subtitles in PowerPoint.

YouTube

If you are already using YouTube, you may find it easier to use their built in caption creation and editing tools. To learn more, visit YouTube Help: Translate videos and captions.

Designing an Online Course

Canvas Accessibility Design Guidelines

This document outlines some general best practices when designing a course for accessibility concerns.

Designing an Accessible Online Course from exploreaccess.org

This toolkit was developed quickly to assist campuses across the country who are moving online virtually overnight in response to COVID-19.  The following relevant topics will allow instructors to take action towards creating accessible online experiences for all students:

• Share Accessible Documents – MS Word, PDFs, Slide Presentations
• Create Meaningful Links
• Share Accessible Videos – Captions and Audio Descriptions
• Organize Content in Consistent Ways
• Encourage Good Practices when Using Discussion Tools

A Tutorial for Making Online Learning Accessible to Students with Disabilities

This guide provides a path forward in improving existing offerings and designing new ones that ensure that all students can benefit from online educational opportunities.

20 Tips for Teaching an Accessible Online Course

Sheryl Burgstahler has been teaching accessible online courses since 1995. Technology has changed dramatically since then, but the basic principles that can guide the design of accessible courses have not. This resource provides a good place to start when working toward making courses more inclusive of all students.

PowerPoint Slides

Microsoft gives you step-by-step instructions and best practices for making your PowerPoint presentations accessible to people with disabilities.

Microsoft Teams

• Using Microsoft Teams with a screen reader
• Using Live Captions in a Teams meeting
• Changing your viewing settings to high contrast or dark mode

Zoom

The Accessible Zoom Meetings page of the UCI Zoom Help Center offers some helpful tips, beyond captioning, for using Zoom so that your remote online experiences are accessible.

• Tips for Hosting More Accessible Meetings
• Overview of access features
• Closed captioning with Zoom
• Automatic transcripts with Zoom
• Zoom hot keys and keyboard shortcuts

Higher Education

Center for Universal Design in Education
Provides an introduction to universal design and to applications in education.

Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD)
AHEAD is the leading national organization in providing information and most effective methods for working with college students with disabilities.

Inclusive Teaching

DO IT: A Checklist for Inclusive Teaching
The DO-IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology) Center is dedicated to empowering people with disabilities through technology and education. Their Checklist helps instructors go beyond legal compliance to proactively design an accessible course.

DO IT: Creating Accessible Conference Posters
Many conferences, both on-site and online, offer opportunities for researchers and practitioners to present their work. There are steps you can take to make your poster accessible to conference participants who have disabilities. This resource covers tips that apply to both on-site and online posters.

Web Accessibility

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 
These standards cover a wide range of recommendations for making content more accessible.

WebAim.org
WebAim is a non-profit organization based at Utah State University. They are an authoritative source for web accessibility.

Accessibility Checkers

Siteimprove
The UC system has an agreement with Siteimprove to provide quality assurance monitoring for websites across UC locations. Some of the monitoring and reporting features offered by Siteimprove include: Accessibility, SEO, Link checking, and Spell checking.

WAVE
WAVE is a free web accessibility evaluation tool. WAVE evaluations can be done instantly, with the report showing icons and indicators that reveal the accessibility of that page. The WAVE tool is available in both English and Spanish.

Contrast Checker
This free and easy to use tool evaluates the contrast between foreground and background colors. Having good contrast is important when using color combinations other than black text on a white background. It will let you know if colors pass the WCAG 2.0 Level AA and Level AAA requirements. The color picker and visual preview make it easy to use and incorporate into your projects.