Each semester, as students request their approved accommodations for your class, a notification is sent to your Cuesta College e-mail address. Accordingly, at the start of each semester you may receive a number of these Faculty Notification Letters with details about your student's accommodations. If you're not receiving DSPS notifications in your Cuesta employee email inbox, please check your Junk Mail folder and mark the sender as safe to avoid missing future notifications.
In addition to receiving a Faculty Notification Letter when the student requests accommodations for your class, you may visit the DSPS Faculty Portal (AIM) for an overview of student accommodations, including the ability to view a student's Faculty Notification letter. Please see our Faculty AIM How-To for steps on how to login and view your students' accommodations.
In order for DSPS to proctor exams with a student's accommodations in place, we require faculty to complete an Alternative Testing Agreement specifying the parameters for an exam. This is required for all in-person classes in which faculty are unable to provide the student's accommodations and are thus unable to proctor the exam.
Before logging into the DSPS Faculty Portal (AIM), please discuss the student's exam accommodations with the student in detail and complete the agreement accordingly. Please view the Faculty Alternative Testing How-To for instructions
Note: Due to our office hours, DSPS proctored exams may need to take place outside of class hours.
To avoid disadvantaging students with a disability, pre-recorded video shared with the class needs to feature captions. For original content, best practice is to edit auto-captions for accuracy. To ensure non-original content is captioned consider using the YouTube search filter or contact the content creators. See the Cuesta College Teacher Community's Captioning Resources page for more information.
In fact, captions as well as transcripts are beneficial for many people, including:
Consider the equity and legal implications of in-class camera use and synchronous class recordings.
Best practices for inclusive online teaching include:
Provide alternatives to online proctoring if necessary for accommodations
Creating accessible documents in Microsoft Word relies on using built-in styles along with additional steps for making links and images perceivable to all users.
Please review the steps below for a quick introduction on how to verify and implement document accessibility in MS Word.
Plan your presentations with Accessibility in mind by recognizing the importance of the following choices.
For detailed instructions, get started with the Microsoft guide on how to make your PowerPoint presentations accessible or review the advice from the American Printing House for the Blind (APH).
For a detailed guide on creating accessible PDFs see this comprehensive checklist for PDF Accessibility. For original content, consider the following.
Mathematical equations and scientific formulas are made accessible either by using special markup (such as MathML, which is automatically created by Canvas' Equation Editor) or by providing appropriate alt text along with an image of the equation or formula. This latter strategy is also available for making charts and graphs accessible.
To learn more about creating properly marked up equations in Canvas review the platform's Instructor Guide. Another option for creating accessible maths is TextHelp's EquatIO extension for Chrome. This tool is also capable of remediating formulas in existing documents and is free for teachers to use.
With regard to supporting STEM graphs and charts with alt text, please keep the following in mind,