The following instructions outline the basics of what instructors and faculty should do to ensure their uploaded course content meets accessibility guidelines. These instructions focus on documents uploaded to Brightspace or elsewhere online, with additional guidance on personal web pages.
Jump to sections:
- What to know before getting started
- Making documents accessible
- Dealing with PDFs
- Using Yuja Panorama
- Alternative text for images
- Strange and unique problems that make accessibility difficult
- Timeline for assistance and resources
What to know before getting started
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) apply specifically to "web content," meaning pages and items made available on the web, both public-facing and student-facing. It does not apply to material presented in class or material that is not placed online.
The following guidelines apply specifically to web pages and document files (e.g. PDFs and Office documents) uploaded to the web, including Brightspace.
A summary of accessibility guidelines can be found in our , but often you will simply run an accessibility checker that will check all of these items for you. Both Microsoft Office and Google Docs/Sheets/Slides have an accessibility checker and fixer.
There is also a new tool in Brightspace called Yuja Panorama, that automatically scores all uploaded documents for you and provides a menu for fixing some of those issues directly in Brightspace.
In addition to course material, some faculty have personally authored web pages. These can be checked for accessibility by passing them through an automated tool such as (find it and other accessibility checkers on the ).
For a more in depth accessibility audit, faculty can through ITS.
Making documents accessible
Microsoft Office documents
Run the 鈥渁ccessibility check鈥 feature, found under the 鈥渞eview鈥 tab. This semi-automated feature identifies issues and guides the author through the process of fixing them.
Google Docs, Slides and Sheets
黑料不打烊 has subscribed to a similar accessibility checker called Grackle, an add-on for Google Workspace. Find Grackle under the Extensions tab of Google Docs. See the Knowledge Base article on for more detailed info.
Mac applications
Pages and Keynote have no checker button, but Apple has .
LaTeX
There are a number of tools and utilities that can work for certain files. The tagpdf package can produce a PDF with the metadata tags used for accessibility. Utilities like can convert LaTeX to other formats including HTML5+MathJAX.
Some of these tools are experimental or incompatible with certain other packages; if you find that none of these tools work for your LaTeX document, you can instead submit your generated PDF to our remediation service as detailed below.
Instructors generating documents by other software can .
Dealing with PDFs
PDF file compliance is mostly a matter of the document鈥檚 source, from which the PDF file is exported. For example, when a Google or Word document is accessible, it can be exported to an accessible PDF.
When you have the editable source document
To export documents to PDF, do not "print" to PDF (printing removes metadata and produces a file meant for printers rather than humans.)
- In Office, use File鉄筍ave As PDF.
- In Pages and Keynote use File鉄笶xport鉄筆DF.
- For Google Docs, the Grackle sidebar has an "Export to PDF" button.
PDFs without sources and documents that cannot be made accessible
You are not required to edit a PDF directly (for example in Acrobat Pro) to make it accessible.
Generally, if you have an inaccessible document, you can . You should then use your document until the remediated version is sent to you to use in its place.
Using
Upload your documents as you normally would, and Yuja will perform an accessibility scan automatically. An uploaded file will have a Yuja icon next to it indicating its accessibility score. This is visible to the instructor only.
Clicking on the Yuja icon allows you to see a report, including the opportunity to fix some issues directly. For example, a common issue is a document lacking a "title," and you can simply provide a title on the spot.
If Yuja provides a low score because a PDF "isn't tagged," that means that the PDF was printed or scanned or otherwise produced without any metadata. If the instructions above cannot be followed to fix this, for remediation.
If an uploaded document does not show a score, it is because the file type is not one that Yuja evaluates. If Yuja is not working properly, please contact us.
The Yuja score is our compliance indicator. If a document is compliant according to Yuja, nothing else needs to be done by the instructor.
Alternative text for images
A primary concern expressed by faculty regards 鈥渁lt text鈥 text descriptions that must accompany images in accessible documents, and how much needs to be written for image-heavy documents.
How much is required?
SUNY guidelines require that images have 鈥渕eaningful鈥 alt text. As the author of a technical document, you are the domain expert regarding what constitutes 鈥渕eaningful.鈥
There is no requirement that alt text meet any minimum number of words or specified level of detail. There are detailed in the knowledge base, but instructors should use their better judgment for what makes sense for illustrations or figures in the contexts of their documents.
Decorative images
Decorative images do not require alt text (they should be marked as 鈥渄ecorative,鈥) and figures that already have captions in the document do not require that the caption be repeated as alt text (the alt text field can, if it makes sense, simply refer the reader to the caption).
Using AI for alt text
Microsoft Office will automatically generate alt text suggestions using AI, which you can review and edit during the accessibility check. You should always check AI-generated text to confirm its accuracy.
We have an AI-powered alt-text generator with numerous options available at . You must be on campus or the campus VPN to access this site.
How and where to add alt text
Alt text can be added to an image in Word or Powerpoint, Google Docs, LaTeX, and other applications. Yuja Panorama can also add alt text to a document uploaded to Brightspace, if it detects that it is missing.
- In Office and Google Docs, right-click an image to view its Alt Text.
- In Pages or Keynote, Alt Text can be seen in the "Description" box at the bottom of the right sidebar on the "Image" tab.
- In LaTeX, you can provide an alt={text} field to any includegraphics tag.
Strange and unique problems that make accessibility difficult
There is a great diversity in material that instructors provide to students, including everything from sheet music to hieroglyphics, and sometimes this material would appear in a document form that might not make sense to mitigate as described above.
The compliance requirement is not intended to interfere with how classes are taught, or to prohibit you from providing students with course material. The guidelines are only to ensure that web content meets accessibility standards.
If you have any situation in your class where the uploaded material presents a compliance problem, please contact us. In such situations we must document that problem, and determine how the university can provide accommodations for students when needed.
Timeline for assistance and resources
Finally, instructors have asked when they need to update their documents and how. Our primary milestone is April 2026, to have course material accessible starting with Spring 2026 Brightspace courses. We have the following plan and timeline for achieving this:
Fall 2025
During this semester, the accessibility team will provide guidance and support, including presentations to departments. Yuja Panorama will be available in all Brightspace courses, but please note that Fall 2025 courses will be 鈥渁rchived鈥 by April 2026, so there will be no requirement for Fall 2025 documents to meet specific Yuja scores. For the fall, Yuja will be useful for instructors to learn how compliance is achieved for the spring.
Spring 2026
In Spring, instructors can prepare their uploads to be compliant any time before the April 2026 milestone. In addition to the aforementioned tools and instructions, we will arrange additional assistance to help instructors convert documents.
Please note that once a document is brought up to WCAG standards, it does not need any additional modifications: this is a 鈥渇ix it once, use it forever鈥 process, so that much of this will be a one-time effort for this upcoming academic year.