Other Text Guidelines

Online courses have a tendency to be text heavy, which makes online learning difficult for many learners, including learners with print disabilities. Here are some suggestions for addressing this situation:

• Use descriptive titles to name topics, links, and other content items throughout the course.
  • These titles should be consistent with the language in your course and should make sense in and out of context.
  • Consider adding time estimates in descriptions.
• Organize text content in manageable chunks.
  • Add an extra space between paragraphs for optimal on-screen reading. This will be particularly helpful for learners accessing the course through mobile devices.
  • Use topics to break up modules
• When appropriate, use lists, either ordered (e.g. numbered list) or unordered (e.g. bulleted list), to clearly structure the presentation of your textual content.
  • Use the two list tools in Totara to properly format your lists. Any manually-created lists lack the coding that assistive technologies use and their meaning may be lost.
• Images should be an appropriate size and the text should wrap around the image so there is not a large break in the text on the page.
  • Aligning the text to the left or right make this function work simply.
• Supplement text with illustrations and other elements so that content is represented in ways that meet your learners needs and assist in breaking up content into smaller pieces.