Our objectives in this topic are to familiarize you with the provided resources and give you the background for why we are talking about accessibility in our online courses. This will serve as an introduction to the topic of accessibility.

The goal of our courses is to deliver content and educate the students. The style and structure of our courses should aid and support that goal rather thad detract from it. A good design is one that users do not notice because if they notice it, it typically is due to frustration.

The objective of this topic is to inform you about how structure and page stylings can affect the accessibility of a web page. You will learn what you can do to visually organize the content properly while allowing for proper navigation through the page by assistive technologies. You will also learn how the visual structure can help or hurt students in terms of time spent on a page trying to acomplish their current task, whether that is to get information, or to navigate to another area of your course.

By the end of this topic, you should know:

• What elements affect the read order of assistive technologies.
• How visual elements and structure affect cognition.
• Why this is important for supporting content and how simplicity is bliss.

The goals of this topic are to give you the basic tools and information to construct and evaluate your course pages using the proper accessibility standards. Complying with the proper HTML structure may not mean that the code complies with accessibility standards or best practices. We will see examples of both properly and improperly formed HTML with respect to the accesibility standards.

Our objectives in this topic are to give you a foundation to provide descriptions for images with context in mind. We will give you the information needed to create brief, relevent, and complete descriptions of complex Science, Technology, Engeneering, and Math (STEM) diagrams so that visually impaired students can benefit from that information as well.

The purpose of this topic is to show you the steps that need to be taken to create accessible multimedia elements such as video presentations for your courses. We want to create a basic understanding of these steps so that you know where to go for help and so that the process of creating accessible multimedia materials can a smooth one. This topic will help you know what elements we will need to create accessible multimedia materials and to better facilitate the conversation between the faculty and Multimedia Specialists.

In this topic we will cover the Learning Management System (ANGEL) and course files such as MS Word, PDF, and MS PowerPoint documents. Our objectives are to identify the things we can do with the LMS to create an accessible environment and accessible materials such as disscussion forums, exams, etc. We will identify issues with the LMS and what can be done to either fix or work around those issues. We will also outline the things that can be done to course documents and materials to ensure they will be accessible.