Three-Part Training Approach
Legal context, institutional obligations, and risk. Understanding why accessibility matters and what CMC's compliance requirements entail.
Hands-on technical skills for PDFs, Canvas course materials, email communications, social media, and web content.
Building empathy for users with disabilities who rely on accessible content to participate fully in academic and institutional life.
Recorded Session
Digital Accessibility at CMC: Practical Implementation
Audience: All faculty and staff. Presented by outside higher-education accessibility counsel, who advises colleges and universities on disability compliance and previously served with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
What the session covers:
- 02:14 — What digital accessibility means, framed through its physical counterpart — ramps, curb cuts, doorways — and who relies on it, including the many people who benefit from captions, contrast, and clear structure without requesting an accommodation.
- 08:06 — The standard itself: a person with a disability should be able to obtain the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services, in an equally effective and equally integrated manner, with substantially equivalent ease of use.
- 09:18 — The elements that carry that standard in practice — document and page structure, keyboard navigation, forms, color contrast, and alt text and captions for images and video.
- 16:24 — The legal framework behind CMC’s requirements: the ADA, Section 504, California law, and the federal government’s adoption of WCAG 2.1 Level AA — the standard CMC’s Digital Accessibility Policy sets for new digital content.
- 20:14 — How the policy works at CMC: content creators supported by ITS, the guides and training available to them, and how to report a barrier.
- 32:39 — Applying the standard in the tools people use every day — Microsoft, Google, Canvas, Canva, PDFs, and video captioning — including reviewing automated captions and AI-generated alt text before publishing, with free ways to check your own work at 49:40.
You will need to sign in. The recording is hosted in Box and restricted to the CMC community. Selecting play opens the Box player on this page; if you are not already signed in, Box will ask you to authenticate through CMC single sign-on — the same login you use for Box every day. A few browsers block that sign-in step inside an embedded player. If you are asked to sign in and nothing happens, open the recording directly in Box and it will play there.
Self-Paced Resources
Four one-page references drawn from this site: an accessibility quick-start checklist, an alt text decision tree, a Canvas pre-publish checklist, and a colour contrast reference.
Open the quick references →Practical, example-driven tutorials from the group that writes WCAG. Covers page structure, menus, images, tables, and forms.
Visit W3C WAIThe authoritative, filterable checklist of every WCAG 2.1 success criterion with techniques and failures. Useful when you need to confirm a specific requirement.
Open the quick referenceMicrosoft's own training for creating accessible Word documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint decks, and Outlook email — the tools most CMC staff use daily.
Start the trainingGoogle's guidance for making Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Forms accessible, including the built-in accessibility checker.
Visit Google supportFree, comprehensive introduction to web accessibility from WebAIM — one of the leading organizations in the field. Covers principles, guidelines, and practical techniques.
Visit WebAIM.orgFaculty Pathway
New to accessibility requirements at CMC? Follow these three steps to get your courses into shape before the fall semester.
Watch the recorded training session.
Start with the legal and institutional context. Outside higher-education accessibility counsel explains exactly what CMC is required to do and why it matters for your courses and materials. Watch the 53-minute recording — CMC sign-in required.
Read the Canvas Accessibility Guide.
Review our step-by-step Canvas guide to understand what accessibility looks like in your LMS environment — alt text, heading structure, captioned video, and more.
Review your Canvas course with the Accessibility Checker — resolve issues before fall.
The Canvas Accessibility Checker scans your Pages and Assignments. Log into Canvas, open each Page or Assignment in the Rich Content Editor, run the checker, and work through anything it flags. ITS can help if you're unsure where to start.
For complex documents — scanned PDFs, legacy course packets, multimedia-heavy syllabi — submit a Help Desk ticket and our team will assist directly.
Staff Pathway
The right starting point depends on the content you create most often. Use this pathway to focus your learning where it will have the most immediate impact.
Identify your most common content type.
Is it Word documents? PDFs? Email communications? Web content? Social media? Knowing your primary format lets you target the right guide first.
Follow the guide for that content type.
Our Accessibility Resource Library has guides for PDFs, Word, email, images, and video — each with step-by-step instructions and screenshots.
Watch the recorded training session.
Building legal and institutional context will help you understand the "why" behind the practices you're implementing and communicate accessibility requirements to your team. Watch the 53-minute recording — CMC sign-in required.
For individual help or to request a one-on-one accessibility consultation, email help@cmc.edu and reference "Digital Accessibility" in your subject line.
Need Hands-On Help?
Our Help Desk team can work with you one-on-one — remotely or in person — to remediate documents, review course materials, or answer any accessibility question.
Contact the Help Desk →