making online courses accessible

The issue: Faculty at Carnegie Mellon wanted to make online courses accessible.

The dream team: A group of three Carnegie Mellon Professional Writing grad students.

My role: User researcher, content designer, and technical writer. I wrote test scripts, built a virtual testing environment, and directed user testing. I wrote instructions for developing accessible Canvas course material and designed the content with InDesign.

The process: We interviewed experts from Carnegie Mellon’s Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation and the Office of Disability Resources to understand best practices for accessible learning environments. We experimented with Canvas, Carnegie Mellon’s LMS, and studied how accessibility principles could be applied to virtual classrooms. We co-authored an instructional guide on building accessible Canvas courses. To test our materials and challenge our assumptions, we conducted virtual usability tests with novice and expert Canvas users to understand user journeys and identify pain points.

The end result: The Canvas Accessibility Guide became an internal resource available to all Carnegie Mellon staff and faculty. In 2021, the project was awarded the Alan & Gloria Siegal Award in Professional Writing.