When creating video content for your course, accessibility should remain a central consideration. Accurate captioning and appropriate audio description not only promote equitable access to course materials, but will also be required for compliance with the University’s updated digital accessibility policy beginning in April 2026. Proactively addressing caption quality now will help guarantee that your content remains accessible and meets policy guidelines. It is essential to order or edit captions for any video you require students to watch in your course. If you are linking to videos you do not own, take the time to carefully review the existing captions for accuracy, completeness, and timing. Auto-generated captions are often a starting point, not a finished product. If the captions are inaccurate and you are unable to contact the owner to correct them, the video should not be used in your course. Providing content that is inaccessible to some students creates unnecessary barriers ...

  Extra Points contributors are interviewing University of Minnesota instructors working to comply with the updated digital accessibility policy effective April 2026. These blog posts highlight the approach they take as they lean into the challenge of revising their course content to be digitally accessible. This post highlights Dr. Olivia Crandell, Assistant Professor, Center for Learning Innovation, Rochester. Interviewer: When did you first start hearing about digital accessibility?  Dr. Olivia Crandell (OC): I think I first heard a general announcement in the fall of 2024, likely in a campus-wide email. However, I didn't give it serious attention until it was actually brought up in a department faculty meeting. It's been about a year since I have had digital accessibility seriously on my radar. Interviewer: What were your initial thoughts, feelings and concerns about the need to make your course materials accessible? My initial thought was that this would be a lot o...

Extra Points contributors are interviewing University of Minnesota instructors working to comply with the updated digital accessibility policy effective April 2026. These blog posts highlight the approach they take as they lean into the challenge of revising their course content to be digitally accessible. This post highlights Deanna Koepp , Associate Professor of Genetics, Cell Biology, and Development in the College of Biological Sciences , Twin Cities.  Interviewer: When did you first start hearing about digital accessibility?  Deanna Koepp (DK) : I sort of knew in the background that digital accessibility was a thing, but I didn't truly focus on it until last summer. That's when I received a notification from CBS (College of Biological Sciences) about an approaching compliance deadline in April. I went to a workshop by the IT people in CBS where digital accessibility suddenly moved from a vague awareness to an urgent, concrete task. Interviewer: What were your initial...

When creating instructional videos for your courses, accessibility should be a central consideration. This includes ensuring that videos meet visual contrast standards, that captions are accurate and properly synchronized, and — critically — that key visual content is accessible to learners with low vision through audio description. What is Audio Description? Audio description is the practice of narrating key visual elements to ensure that learners who are blind or have low vision can fully engage with educational content. However, its value extends far beyond accessibility for students with disabilities . Consider, for example, a student listening to a video lecture while commuting—without visual access to the screen, they miss important contextual cues. Similarly, a student watching a lecture on a small phone screen may struggle to discern critical visual details. In both cases, audio description can bridge the gap, providing access to integral information that might otherwise be ...

  Overview The University has recently added three new FeedbackFruits tools to its academic technology ecosystem: Interactive Document , Interactive Video , and Interactive Audio . This blog post shares how three instructors used these tools to actively engage their students with course materials and with their peers. In today's diverse educational landscape, traditional lectures and static readings often fall short. Many instructors continue to look for innovative ways to deliver content and facilitate meaningful student interaction with that content. If this sounds familiar, read on to see how FeedbackFruits interactive tools can be used to create dynamic, highly engaging learning activities. Interactive Documents: Transform Readings into Dynamic Conversations If you would like your students to move beyond passively reading assigned texts, the Interactive Document tool can help you turn reading assignments into collaborative workspaces, fostering accountability and deeper com...

This post summarizes the session, Create Accessible Canvas Content, from January 9, 2025. Session facilitators–DM Lavoie, from the Office of Digital Accessibility, and Rebecca George-Burrs, from Academic Technology Support Services–teamed up to demonstrate how to apply the 7 Core Skills of Digital Accessibility in the Canvas Rich Content Editor (RCE). Use the table of contents to navigate to each of the core skills in this article: Use Headings to Format Text Format Accessible Lists Use Accessible Color Contrast Write Accessible Link Text Create Accessible Tables Use Alternative Text (alt text) for all Images Use Accessible Media Overview In order to meet the expanded Title II of the ADA , the UMN community is working to make our digital content accessible. For those using Canvas, the RCE provides tools to create accessible Pages, Announcements, Discussions, Assignments and Quizzes throughout a course site. In fact, the RCE provides ways to use all 7 Core Skills of Accessib...

As a University of Minnesota instructor, you have likely heard about the new accessibility requirement for course materials outlined by the Department of Justice in their clarifications on Title II of the ADA : all content in course sites with student enrollment–such as academic courses, professional development sites, or resource sites your department created– must be digitally accessible by April 2026. This new requirement comes at a time in education where instructors are busy on multiple technological fronts (can we have a blog post without mentioning AI?). Yet here we are at another intersection of technology and teaching. This intersection brings about good for all learners. Research shows that making content accessible helps all of your students, not just those who use adaptive technologies to access content. While the task to meet the April 2026 deadline may seem overwhelmingly large, academic technology staff and the Office for Digital Accessibility are breaking it down in...

Overview Academic Technology Support Services (ATSS) and the Office for Digital Accessibility (ODA) tested the usability of the Canvas: Remove Course Content article text and video with UMN instructors. Participants identified three key findings: time commitment, rationale, and archiving. The project team addressed the findings by making targeted changes to the article. Usability partnership & study process For this study, the Canvas: Remove Course Content article was selected for two reasons:  instructors and staff are preparing to meet the April 2026 digital accessibility deadline ATSS had heard from the academic technology community that some instructors are confused about removing vs. deleting content from a Canvas course With the University of Minnesota Usability Services team, our project team developed a focus question to guide our study: What motivates people to improve the accessibility of their course? We then determined the criteria for participant recruitment, ...

In April 2024, Academic Technology Support Services (ATSS) conducted focus group sessions with UMN instructors. The sessions’ goals were to: understand instructors’ level of awareness about generative AI.  understand how instructors perceive acceptable use of generative AI for their academic courses. learn how instructors would like to be involved with shaping how generative AI is used in education and what support, if any, instructors desired around the use of generative AI. Note: throughout this post, ‘generative AI’ and ‘AI’ are both used to refer to the broad category of artificial intelligence that can produce content such as text, images, video, audio, and/or code. Focus group process ATSS partners with Usability Services to establish the session goals, determine participant recruiting criteria, craft the interview protocol, and set the ground rules for the focus group sessions. During the sessions, the project team takes notes and documents their observations, including di...

In a “flipped classroom” students get the course lecture or learning material before they come to class. Then, classroom time presents an opportunity to engage students in new ways. This strategy is one of many active learning strategies to more fully engage students in course materials.  We ( ATSS ) had the opportunity to talk with Victor Barocas about his experience “flipping” his classes. Professor Barocas, who teaches in the College of Science and Engineering, began by flipping a new class he was scheduled to teach in 2018. The experiment worked wonders. Today, he is working on flipping his third course because this method of teaching has elevated his students' learning and his own satisfaction as a teacher. Read edited excerpts from our interview below. What does your flipped classroom look like? Students watch a recorded video lecture before class. For the recorded video lecture, I talk for 15 - 20 minutes about the concept and then do a problem. Every video for my class ...

The University of Minnesota recently enabled the use of Zoom Whiteboard, a new tool for visual collaboration.  Key features of Zoom Whiteboard provides a large canvas to write, draw, mark up images, insert sticky notes, and connect ideas using lines and shapes  offers space for spontaneous, dynamic writing and annotation combines the collaborative functions and shareability that many of us are accustomed to from tools like Google Drive The Creating and Collaborating with Zoom Whiteboard video demonstrates how to create a Whiteboard and share it with others: Inclusive and Accessible Practices with Zoom Whiteboard Whiteboards are inherently a visual tool so they are an inequitable medium for people with low to no vision. As of this time, people who use screen readers are unable to contribute to Zoom Whiteboards on their own due to technical barriers with the tool. As additional layers, such as sticky notes, images, and text comments, are added to a Whiteboard, it is challenging...