Hudson Valley Community College’s best practice for ensuring quality in online course design and accessibility begins with our 7 week Online Instructor Training course. This training series embeds accessibility as a core principle by highlighting key ADA compliance components aligned with each module’s topics—for example, introducing Universal Design when faculty begin exploring the Brightspace environment and learning how to design online learning spaces. As instructors develop their online courses throughout the training, they can easily reference the materials to ensure they are meeting accessibility requirements. At the completion of the course, faculty participate in the OSCQR review process to verify that quality standards and ADA compliance components are in place. Following the success of this training series, we extended the same accessibility first approach to additional workshops, including Brightspace Basics (web enhancement), video creation, and other digital learning tools used across campus.

The college was an early adopter of accessibility standards for web content, and since 2009, Hudson Valley Community College (HVCC) has maintained ADA compliance protocols for developing accessible web materials and responding to accessibility concerns. These protocols require instructional designers to train online faculty and others who use web enhanced learning tools and the college’s LMS in universal design principles that support a wide range of student abilities. In 2015, HVCC’s Instructional Designers revised the Online Instructor Training and Web Enhanced Training courses to embed accessibility by design into all tools, structures, and pedagogical strategies. By adopting accessibility as a core value across all training, we ensured that these strategies were prioritized from the outset, helping faculty recognize their importance in the course design and development process. The adoption of accessibility auditing tools within the LMS further enhanced our ability to support faculty by providing immediate insights into accessibility scores for their course content.

HVCC’s accessibility practices have been effective in raising faculty awareness of ADA compliance requirements and the importance of universally designed, accessible online, hybrid, and web enhanced courses. Our overall LMS accessibility compliance score consistently averages around 88 percent. In addition, any informal accessibility concerns received are resolved quickly through collaboration among the Center for Access and Assistive Technology, the instructional design team, and the faculty member involved.

Our accessibility first best practices and established college protocols have fostered a cooperative and collaborative approach to meeting the updated ADA Title II regulations. We promptly updated our training materials to incorporate new strategies required under the revised regulations and expanded ADA compliance training by offering specialized tool specific and course design workshops. We also added an Accessibility Course Review process and developed an accessible course review rubric. While most faculty understand the importance of meeting the Title II updates, many feel overwhelmed by the work needed to remediate existing course content. However, our consistent ADA compliance practices keep the campus moving forward, ensuring ongoing readiness and continued progress toward full accessibility compliance.

Links to the HVCC Web Content Protocols: https://www.hvcc.edu/studentservices/disability-services/policies-protocols/index.html