Join COLRS staff at the Illinois Online Higher Education Symposium on November 8th. Registration is free!
COLRS will present at 2:30 p.m. on "Quality Assurance Tools for Accessible Canvas Content."
Links are one of the foundational elements of digital content. They are found on websites, online courses, apps, and email. Accessible links connect concise and descriptive text to a website or file. They make it easier for everyone to navigate and consume content.
Taylor Lester is the program coordinator for the Center for Online Learning, Research and Service (COLRS).
Can you give me a brief timeline of how your career led you to UIS?
Alternative text is a concise description of an image embedded within a webpage’s code. The description is read aloud to visually-impaired viewers using a screen reader. Its primary purpose is to provide context and meaning to users who cannot see the image. Alt text also provides a fallback in case the image fails to load and plays a role in search engine results. (Alternative Text from WebAIM)
The digital accessibility requirements in Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (2024) are broad and impact digital files shared across campus. Given breadth of these requirements, accessibility will become part of our daily work. As we advance in our accessibility compliance efforts, it will be essential for those of us creating shared documents, recording videos, and managing websites to understand the guidelines for producing accessible content.
Join the Office of Digital Accessibility and Center for Online Learning, Research, and Service to learn about the requirements for creating closed captions and how to add captions to a video in Kaltura Media, the UIS streaming video platform.
Join the Office of Digital Accessibility and Center for Online Learning, Research, and Service to learn about creating accessible web links in Microsoft Word and Canvas courses.
The UIS Testing Center is open to in-person testing by appointment at no charge for UIS students, during the day Monday-Friday, and many evenings until 7:00 PM. The Testing Center also continues to offer remote testing via Zoom.
Respondus offers two proctoring solutions, depending on faculty need.
Copyleaks can assist instructors in detecting and preventing plagiarism. Copyleaks crawls the internet for content that is not behind paywalls. It also has an integrated AI detector that is enabled and scored separately from the plagiarism detector.
Remember that AI detection is not foolproof and may produce false positives, especially for students whose first language is not English. Use Copyleaks AI detection results as one data point and a starting point for discussion rather than definitive evidence of academic dishonesty.