University Leadership

University leadership plays a vital role in promoting digital accessibility across campus. Leaders must ensure their teams prioritize the accessibility of NC State’s digital resources. This commitment makes it possible for all members of the university community, particularly those with disabilities, to fully engage with our programs, services and activities.

Responsibilities include:

• Ensuring compliance with NC State’s Information and Communication Technology Accessibility Regulation.
• Allocating resources (i.e., time, funding) to train key staff on how to create accessible digital content.
• Collaborating with the Office of Equal Opportunity and the Office of Information Technology to ensure digital access across campus.

Teaching Faculty and Instructors

Teaching faculty and instructors must ensure that all students, including those with disabilities, have access to the instructional resources in their courses. This includes, but is not limited to, your course videos, syllabi, publisher resources, textbooks, discussion board and course site.

Responsibilities include:

• Consulting the DELTA Course Accessibility Guide, Digital Accessibility Fundamentals and Resources by Content Type to ensure you create digitally accessible educational material.
• Whenever possible, using course textbooks that are available in both digital and printed formats.
• Ensuring publisher resources comply with WCAG 2.1 AA  standards.
• Ensuring hosted course videos are accurately captioned and transcribed.
• Hosting synchronous, online courses using accessible communications platforms such as Zoom.

Captioning Grant

The Captioning Grant provides funds to support captioning of instructional videos in curriculum courses.

• Proactive Captioning: Grants for proactive captioning are awarded at the beginning of the fall semester. A call for applications will be announced near the end of the spring semester.
• Supporting Accommodations: Grants for captioning to support accommodations are awarded throughout the year. Please submit applications as soon as you know that you will need to caption videos in your course.

Web Developers and Web Content Authors

Web Developers

Web developers develop and maintain the templates, themes, platforms that many of our digital content is built on. As such, they lay the groundwork for colleges, units and departments to create accessible public-facing web resources that can be accessed by all, including those with disabilities.

Responsibilities include:

• Ensuring web templates and themes adhere to WCAG 2.1 AA  standards.
• Adding any college, unit or departmental websites that you oversee to the Pope Tech accessibility scanner for ongoing automated accessibility testing and monitoring.
• Working toward achieving 100% compliance utilizing axe DevTools within your development workflows for web and mobile apps and 100% compliance, or zero errors, using the Pope Tech accessibility scanner for website content.
• Participating in web accessibility trainings and meetings to stay informed of the latest digital accessibility-related updates.

Web Content Authors

Web content authors — anyone who creates and publishes text, images, video and audio — must adhere to accessibility requirements when creating and publishing digital content. By creating accessible text and multimedia, you improve the site experience of all users.

Responsibilities include:

• Ensuring your websites are scanned by the Pope Tech Accessibility Scanner for ongoing automated accessibility testing and monitoring.
• Working toward achieving 100% compliance, or zero errors, using the Pope Tech accessibility scanner for any websites that you oversee.
• Participating in web accessibility trainings and meetings to stay informed of the latest digital accessibility-related updates.

Administrative Faculty and Staff

Administrative faculty and staff oversee critical university operations like the registrar, IT support services, transportation, student health, counseling and psychological services, and recreation. To ensure equivalent access to these support services, it is important these units know how to comply with WCAG 2.1 AA standards.

Responsibilities include:

• Ensuring online resources (e.g., forms, applications) are accessible to individuals with disabilities accessing critical unit or departmental supports and services.
• Ensuring electronic documents (i.e., Google Docs, Google Slides, PDFs) adhere to WCAG 2.1 AA standards.
• Ensuring digital communications (i.e., newsletters, social media posts) adhere to WCAG 2.1 AA standards.
• Ensuring purchase and procurement guidelines are followed.
• Participating in web accessibility trainings and meetings to stay informed of the latest digital accessibility-related updates.

Technology Purchasers

IT purchases over $5,000 must undergo an accessibility review for procurement to ensure the product complies with university standards and follows federal and state guidelines, including digital accessibility.

Responsibilities include:

• Submitting an IT Purchase Compliance form and providing accessibility information about the product you plan to purchase.
• Initiating communication with the vendor if accessibility information is not easily located.

Students

Students play a crucial part in raising awareness when they encounter digital accessibility issues in websites, documents, videos, platforms (e.g., Moodle) and supplemental apps used in class.

Responsibilities include:

• Reporting accessibility-related issues (e.g., image-based PDFs, videos with inaccurate captions or no captions at all) to accessibility@ncsu.edu. Please include the webpage URL, browser used, assistive technology used (if applicable) and a description of the barrier.