Preparing Accessible Course Materials for Visually Impaired Students
Instructors need to ensure course materials are accessible to students with visual impairments. PDF documents must have proper text layers for screen readers, and scanned handouts that are image-only PDFs are a common barrier.
Workflow
- Identify course materials that are image-only PDFs (scanned documents without text layers)
- Use the PDF to Text Extractor to verify whether existing PDFs have extractable text
- For image-only documents, re-scan at higher quality or request digital originals from publishers
- Ensure all document images have descriptive alt text in the source files
- Use PDF Compression to optimize the accessible versions for download
- Upload accessible materials to the LMS with proper format labeling
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