ODL, CoreFSU Collaborate on Accessibility

Monday 02/03/2025

As part of a pilot program, the ITS Office of Digital Learning and Academic Technologies (ODL) will be providing accessibility help to instructors who teach high-enrollment face-to-face CoreFSU courses. The instructional development team’s course support specialists, along with test proctors trained in accessibility remediation, will work to improve the accessibility of courses and provide training in accessibility. The pilot will launch in Summer 2025. 

Because CoreFSU courses provide an interdisciplinary foundation for education and are high enrollment, it’s important to ensure course materials are accessible to all learners. For example, the average fall enrollment for a college algebra course is 2,515 students. Improving the accessibility of a single CoreFSU course has the potential to impact several thousand students.

The partnership with face-to-face instructors is new to ODL support specialists, who typically work with online course design through the FSU Online Quality Initiative. For this initiative, ODL support specialists help instructors ensure their online courses achieve Quality Matters (QM) certification. QM-certified courses are easier to navigate, promote student engagement, and remove barriers to learner achievement.

ODL is excited to partner with instructors to ensure accessibility is at the forefront of their CoreFSU courses. Instructional Designer Brittany Wyatt, who is coordinating the pilot program with ODL Course Support Specialist Lead Teodora Abrams, shares her insights below.

How did this project get started?

In Summer 2022, we started a similar project in which our course support specialist team offered accessibility and accessibility training to instructors who teach high-enrollment online courses. Our team has also achieved success in helping instructors in our FSU Online Quality Initiative make their courses accessible. We wanted to branch out and offer these services to more courses so more students can be impacted. With the team’s success in helping improve the accessibility of online courses, we thought it would be great to offer the same services to face-to-face courses. 

What is the goal of the project?

The primary goal is to connect with instructors who teach face-to-face high-enrollment courses. We know a lot of students will be taking these courses, so we want to help improve course accessibility. Our objective is to complete 10 courses during the pilot program. Two course support specialists would work on a course at a time, with an average turnaround time of one week.

What will you and the course support specialists do as part of the project?

  • Train instructors in accessibility principles
  • Improve the accessibility of instructor course documents, enhancing the course Ally score
  • Import the Canvas template and set up Canvas pages
  • Have instructor videos professionally captioned

What types of course content will you work on?

  • Canvas pages
  • Word documents 
  • PowerPoint presentations
  • PDFs
  • Kaltura videos

What tools will you use when working on a course?

  • Ally course report: Identifies the current accessibility level of the course 
  • Microsoft accessibility checkers: Work within Word and PowerPoint to identify accessibility issues within a document
  • CommonLook: Adobe plugin that helps fix PDF tags and checks for accessibility issues
  • ABBYY FineReader: OCR (optical character recognition) tool that converts scanned documents into editable formats

How will this project benefit students and instructors?

  1. Ensuring that a course has accessible content gives all students access to the course material.
  2. If a student with a disability is taking a course that already has accessible content, they do not have to wait for content to be made accessible and risk falling behind in the course.
  3. All students benefit from accessible content, such as captions on instructional videos or headings to help them navigate long documents.
  4. Instructors will have peace of mind knowing that their course content is accessible.

For more information about the pilot program, contact Brittany Wyatt at bwyatt@fsu.edu. To learn more about online course quality, visit the FSU Online Quality Initiative and Quality Course Design pages.