Client Challenge
The university needed a batch of online courses brought into compliance with accessibility standards ahead of institutional review. Course content had accumulated over multiple semesters without a consistent accessibility standard, resulting in a wide range of starting points — some courses were close to compliant, while others had significant structural and content issues. Each course contained between 40 and 100 files requiring remediation, with issues ranging from minor to severe.
My Process
1. Audit: Using the Quality Matters rubric with some custom criteria added by the client, I conducted quality assurance audits that included noting accessibility concerns, as well as AI susceptibility for assignments.
2. Triage: Courses were triaged by the client based on Ally scoring. Issues were categorized from severe to major, and by type (such as images requiring alt text, PDFs with no semantic structure, etc.) In consultation with the client, 60 hours of remediation efforts were allocated to have the greatest impact on usability for the highest enrolling courses.
3. Remediation: Common issue categories addressed across the 9 courses:
- Heading structure & navigation (improper heading hierarchy, non-semantic markup)
- Document accessibility (PDFs and Word docs lacking tags, reading order, or proper structure)
- Color contrast failures
- Images and graphics missing meaningful alt text
Results
Major Win: Lowest course starting score: 58, with 100+ files → all brought to full compliance alongside the rest. All 9 courses were remediated to a 99+ Ally score, with every severe and major issue resolved, on-time and within budget. As part of the remediatoin process, improvements to the user experience were incorporated when documents were redesigned.
Impact
Ally scores are a proxy for real barriers: a low score means students using screen readers, keyboard navigation, or other assistive technology are likely hitting broken or confusing experiences. Bringing every course to 99+ meant closing that gap consistently across the board, not just fixing the easiest wins.
This work also positioned the university ahead of ADA Title II compliance deadlines for public entities, which require web and course content to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
Demo: PDF-to-Accessible-HTML Conversion
Originally a slide-deck-style PDF with various accessibility challenges, this file was remediated into a fully accessible, screen-reader-friendly HTML page.
Demo: PDF Slide Deck to Interactive Accessible Slides Conversion
The example presentation below comes from my own teaching resources but serves to demonstrate a treatment given to an instructor's slide deck collection for the client. Static PDF slide decks were converted to interactive slide shows with screenreader friendly SVGs, embedded resume screenshots were recreated as true text complete with instructive errors in formatting, and in the event the LMS breaks Javascript, each slide would simply appear in one continuous page rather than failing completely.