Digital Accessibility

Instructional Technology and the Division of Information Technology at UMBC offers several resources to faculty and students in support of digital accessibility.

Digital accessibility ensures that everyone — including people with disabilities — can access and use digital content and tools. Building accessibility into websites, documents, and course materials from the start helps everyone. It reduces the need for last-minute fixes, improves usability across the board, and supports a wide range of users — including those with temporary or situational challenges. Accessible design is smart design.

Review available resources on UMBC’s Digital Accessibility site.

The Digital Accessibility Community of Practice (CoP) is a cross-functional group of faculty, staff, and students who are actively engaged in improving digital access in teaching, learning, and administrative environments. The DA-CoP provides a space for members to share knowledge, build skills, explore solutions, and support campus-wide efforts to meet digital accessibility standards.

Follow Instructional Technology on myUMBC for upcoming meetings and events.

Instructors can use Ally to gauge the accessibility of course content.

  • Receive feedback on the accessibility of content through an Ally accessibility report
  • Improve content accessibility with Ally’s step-by-step instructions
  • Create alternative formats for course content

Students can use Ally to create alternative formats for course materials.

  • Choose the type of file or format that best suits individual student needs

Learn more about Ally

UMBC supports transcription and closed captioning to assure equal access to screencast resources that faculty develop. YuJa, and VoiceThread offer automated captioning and these captions can be edited for accuracy. In the event that captions need to be requested, DoIT will provide captions/transcriptions for videos that are less than 15 minutes in length. Faculty may consider breaking longer videos into 10-15 minute chunks to leverage automated captioning features in Panopto or VoiceThread.

Captioning Requests

Please be aware that DoIT is unable to support transcription or closed captioning for materials that are not the intellectual property of the faculty requesting the service.

The following links provide information about accessibility support for technologies used at UMBC:

Other technologies may include:

Get more information about accessibility at UMBC: