Need Assistance?
The Distance Education Instructional Accessibility Specialist is the main contact for faculty assistance for online course materials.
Disability Resources Department (DRD)
DRD assists with accommodation for student needs. The DRD website has information for faculty on the accommodation process, FAQs, and resources.
The Distance Education Department can assist you in developing accessible course materials
- Getting access to the Canvas learning management system
If you are a new instructor, contact the Distance Ed Department to get a Canvas account, or fill out the appropriate forms linked to from the Request Help page.
See the Simple Accessibility Fixes page for guidance on how to create accessible materials in Canvas.
- Scheduling accessibility reviews, consultations, or help sessions
Contact Corrine Haverinen (chaverinen@santarosa.edu), the Distance Education Instructional Accessibility Specialist, to schedule an appointment for accessibility reviews, consultations, or help making your materials accessible. Also, you can book a meeting with the Instructional Accessibility Specialist here.
Reviews are conducted in Corrine's office, Room 4427 of Doyle Library, 3rd floor (in the Center for New Media) - OR by Zoom if you prefer not to come to campus. Reviews typically take 1 hour.
Making PDF and Word Doc files accessible
Contact the Distance Education Instructional Accessibility Specialist (chaverinen@santarosa.edu) to get assistance making your documents accessible. For PDF files, it is usually best to provide Distance Ed with the source document (Word doc, PowerPoint file, etc.).
Distance Education will do this work for you, but you may want to read the help docs on Creating Accessible Word Documents, Creating Accessible PDF Documents, and Creating Accessible PowerPoint Presentations to understand the issues.
Making Multimedia Files Accessible
For all online courses, to comply with federal and state laws, any multimedia files that the instructor requires their students to watch or listen to will need to be made accessible.
Multimedia files that are optional, but on SRJC resources (Canvas), will also need to be made accessible. This means, for example, that audio files must have a transcript and video files must be captioned.
The Distance Education Captioning and Transcription grant (DECT) provides California Community Colleges with funding to create captions and transcripts for online course materials. The instructor will not experience a significant work load in this process.
There are two ways to order captions using the DECT grant:
- Upload your video to 3C Media Solutions. You can order captions through the DECT grant with one click from 3C Media Solutions. See more about 3C Media Solutions here.
- Contact the Media Services Department at 707-521-7927 to help you in procuring a transcript and subsequent captioning. You will need to note:
- the first semester you will be using the file in your class
- approximately how many students will be in the course
- approximate length of video or audio files
- a list of any technical words used in the audio portion of your file
Contact Corrine Haverinen (Instructional Accessibility Specialist at Distance Ed) at chaverinen@santarosa.edu or 707-527-4699 if you need more guidance with this process.
More multimedia help can be found on the DistanceEd: Multimedia Tools Canvas course (open to all). In this course, find information about multimedia creation, uploading to 3C Media, and requesting captions.
