Everyone who creates or shares digital materials plays a role in ensuring accessibility — but you’re not expected to do it alone. RIC is building the tools, services, and support you need to make your documents, web pages, videos, and social media posts accessible without feeling overwhelmed. This page helps you take practical steps across platforms and lets you know about the resources available to you across campus.
"You don't need to be an expert. Start small. Every improvement helps real people now and in the future."
You don’t have to fix everything yourself. RIC provides support for common accessibility needs, and more services are being developed as part of our campus-wide accessibility initiative. You can request help in several ways or you can start to take practical steps across platforms.
Please Note: This guidance is meant to support the community, and any required training or changes in job expectations would go through normal institutional governance and labor processes.
View instructions and tools for faculty on creating accessible course materials. Understand accessibility across course components: within the LMS, course design, instructional materials, and the digital tools used across campus. You can also request a consultation.
Need assistance making your Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Form, Sway, or Adobe PDF accessible?
Take Practical Steps Across Platforms
Do you have PDF documents being linked to on our.ric.edu? You may have heard that the web team is handling document management differently, to meet both accessibility standards and current, sustainable web practices. This work involves re-platforming PDFs – which means asking individual offices to work with ITS to get their documents into a SharePoint folder, making those files accessible, and having our.ric.edu point to them.
Ready to talk to the Web Director about your documents on our.ric.edu?
If you maintain a webpage(s) on our.ric.edu, we hope that you'll familiarize yourself with our accessibility checklist. But please, don't feel any pressure to ensure that your page meets all WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards – that work is very central to our Web Team's review process when you submit a page to us. We'll make sure that your page is completely compliant before publishing it for you.
➡️ Accessibility Checklist and Who to Contact with Questions
Use Kaltura to caption all of your Blackboard videos. Auto-captions are automatically added to all files uploaded to Kaltura. Once uploaded, you must then edit the captions to correct any mistakes. If you are using an alternate video platform, you must use the caption editing tool within that platform to ensure captioning accuracy. Need help with Kaltura captioning?
Most accessibility issues come from everyday tasks. A few simple habits detailed in these articles can make a huge difference:
Microsoft 365's Making Documents Accessible Video shows these steps in action.
When editing web pages, small choices have a big impact. Clear structure helps everyone — especially people using screen readers or navigating by keyboard:
Videos and audio must be accessible to everyone, including people who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind, or who process information better through text. This means:
Social media moves fast — but accessibility still matters. A few small habits make your posts more inclusive:
