Online Course Accessibility and Copyright Guidelines
Tips for Making your Online Courses ADA Compliant
As many of you are aware, and many of you are involved, small groups of faculty have been
working with an instructional designer to develop/revise your online courses within
programs. As this work has evolved, we have developed a set of criteria (this link should
show up in your preferred browser) that we hope all hybrid/totally online courses will
meet whenever they are offered.
Some of these criteria are internal to the GSE (e.g., meeting the syllabi template
requirements), some are best practices, some are federal requirements. Two of these
criteria are ensuring: 1) that all courses are accessible to all students, and 2) that all
materials meet copyright requirements. In order to address these issues that arise
frequently in online courses, please follow the instructions below.
After extensive course review, we have noticed two major problems concerning uploaded
PDFs, Word files of journal articles, or other documents in hybrid/online courses:
1. Articles that are uploaded to D2L, rather than linked from the Library or PSU's e-reserve
system, are most likely a violation of copyright; and
2. many of the uploaded PDFs, especially if they were scanned, may not be readable to a
screen reading program for visually impaired users (e.g. JAWS).
Please scan through your course content in your online courses. If either of these scenarios
describe your online course/s, there are several ways to easily rectify the problem.
OPTIONS:
1. Find the article on the Internet and provide a link. There is a good chance that the
article might already be posted somewhere, findable via Google or Google Scholar. It is
almost always safe from a copyright standpoint to simply provide a link (as a quick link in
your course content or a link embedded in a document).
Make sure that the article is readable (i.e., it is in html or is a searchable PDF). To tell if a
document is searchable, open it and use the browser controls to “find” or “search” for any
word that appears in the document. If your word can be found, it is searchable, which
means a screen reading program like “Jaws” can read the document.
2. Find the article in a PSU database and provide a persistent and proxied link. If the
article is available through the PSU library, your students have already paid for access with
Revised 2/4/14
their tuition dollars. Linking out to library content is on the safe side and ensures
compliance with copyright law, respects the Library’s licensing agreements with vendors,
and helps librarians collect accurate usage statistics that inform decisions about
collections. If you’re not sure how to find your course content in the Library databases,
contact your subject liaison.
3. If you cannot find the article on the Internet or through the PSU library, your next best
option is to place a copy on electronic reserve. You can either hand deliver a hard copy
or email a screen-readable PDF to reserves@pdx.edu. E-reserves take up to three weeks to
create, so it is best to plan ahead if you need to use this service. Unfortunately, you cannot
link directly to the item in the e-reserve database, but you can link to the e-reserve search.
If you have questions or difficulty with these options, please contact me and I will try and
connect you with the best resource.
PLEASE SHARE WITH ADJUNCT INSTRUCTORS WHO ARE TEACHING ONLINE
Revised 2/4/14