By Alena Aniskiewicz (CISAH)
This November, IAH welcomed Kevin Henley and James Bender from MSU’ s Educational Technology’s Accessibility Team for an “Accessibility Café.” With a focus on helping instructors prepare to update their courses to meet online accessibility requirements, Henley shared general tips and answered questions. Throughout, he stressed a focus on progress over perfection.
As instructors plan for Spring 2026, Henley suggests we start by updating our syllabi – making sure to use headings to designate content organization, checking to make sure the purpose of a link can be determined from the link text alone, offering alternative text for all visuals, and sharing the document in its native file format.
Many instructors in attendance had questions about remediating inaccessible PDFs – a common issue flagged by Ally Reports in D2L. Again, Henley noted that the best options are to share documents in their native format (e.g., MS Word, PowerPoint, HTML, etc.) or link to the original source. When that is not possible, the Ally automated review on D2L can guide instructors through remediation in the Instructor Feedback Panel.
Recognizing that this is complicated and time-consuming work, Henley pointed to resources across campus – from the Instructional Technology and Development team to Accessibility Coordinators at the MSU Library – that are available to assist instructors as we make progress towards ensuring our classes are accessible to all our students.
Henley provided the attached slides (below) with additional tips and resources.