It has always been a legal requirement for all organisations to provide reasonable adjustments for all users under the Equalities Act 2010. What 'reasonable adjustments' means in practice was always up for debate until 2019 when the government clarified it for digital documentation/websites etc. They stated it must meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as a bare minimum. Anything that doesn't meet these can be requested to be updated and the organisation has a very short period to fix them - therefore it's better to ensure everything is accessible from the get-go.Canvas LMS comes with an accessibility checker built in as standard, it's the little red man at the bottom next to submit on every page. This only works for the content native in Canvas though, not uploaded documents.

Blackboard has Ally which is an addon give you step-by-step guidance on how to fix them. This includes uploaded documents. They are planning on making the base version of it, not including uploaded documents, available for free shortly.

Microsoft products all have accessibility checkers built in as well that will help you fix any issues.

The issues tend to be very simple:

Colour and Contrast: Is there sufficient contrast between colours used on the page, i.e. Dark on pastel or pastel on dark, not pastel on pastel. Have you ensured that there are multiple things delineating content instead of just colour - e.g. have you labelled the pie chart and put clear lines between segments so someone who is colour-blind can still read it?

Font: Have you used a legible font (this is the reason so many LMSs are strict on what fonts you can use), have you made it a legible size? - ideally 12 for most things, 14 for handouts, minimum of 18 for PowerPoints. Have you used bold and italics rather than just colour to highlight words? Have you avoided using all caps for words?

Headings: Have you used the headings functions to separate your content? Just making something bold and underlined doesn't mean it's a heading. It needs to be using the heading tag found in the style options. They must also be hierarchical Heading 1 for the main section, heading 2 for a subsection of 1, heading 3 for a subsection of 2 etc. then back to heading 1 when it is something unrelated.

Alt Text: Do all images, including graphs and charts have alternative text (usually prompted when you upload an image or found through right-clicking it when building content) that describes what the image is showing, or marks it as decorative if it has no importance? This is crucial for charts and graphs, you cannot make the assumption people can see them correctly so you need to be very specific either in the alt text or ideally in your explanation of what it is showing. Not 'as you can see the point is at x 35, y 10' instead 'the graph above shows a curving line increasing logarithmically and the point we are interested in intersects at x 35 y 10'.

Hyperlinks: Don't insert whole hyperlinks, always use the link tool. This is usually accessed with the shortcut Ctrl + K but will always have a symbol on the editor that looks like a chain link. Do not use 'Click here' for the link text either, always state exactly where it is going, ideally saying what file type and size it is if it is linking to a file.

Videos: Must be captioned or have a transcript available, ideally both. Stream does this automatically and Adobe products come with built-in transcript and captioning tools. Ensure the transcript and captions are also correct, don't rely solely on closed captioning, particularly if you have an accent.

All of these assist those with disabilities, but also massively reduce cognitive load for the rest of your users as well, which is very useful in an education setting. I'm very happy to talk and give demonstrations if you wish. I presented on it at Anthology Together Europe 2023. This is the Accessibility for All Ally (PPTX, 73.8MB) presentation I gave and it has a lot of examples including images to help explain.