SMHS Office of Learning Innovation offers accessibility tips related to campus-wide initiative

Several months ago, the University of North Dakota announced the UND “Strive for 85” accessibility initiative. This initiative aims to create a more inclusive and accessible learning environment by ensuring that learning and support materials are accessible to every student. This applies to all materials that instructors provide to students, but primarily affects everyone who teaches courses in Blackboard. All instructors must ensure that their courses reach an accessibility score of 85% as measured by the Blackboard Ally tool, no later than April, 2026. Read more about this initiative here.

The new SMHS Office of Learning Innovation (or OLI, formerly known as Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship or TLAS), would like to make all SMHS faculty and staff aware of the steps to take in revising online course materials as soon as possible.

Because this is a UND-wide initiative, resources and training related to digital accessibility are being managed primarily through UND’s Teaching, Transformation, and Development Academy (TTaDA). In addition to live workshops and online information, there are extensive training resources from Deque University and Infobase). Please review those resources here.

OLI does not want to duplicate the efforts and resources of TTaDA, UIT, or other UND campus-wide departments, nor do we have the staffing to offer the same level of support. But we would like to offer the following tips to finding and using key accessibility tools and processes that will help most people get to the 85% accessibility score without too much difficulty:

• Check your current Blackboard Ally Accessibility Score in any Blackboard Ultra course by choosing “Books and Tools” from the right-side menu. Then select “Accessibility Report” to view the course’s overall accessibility score and receive suggestions for how to improve it. You can then see where the biggest problems are and start by fixing them to see how they impact your accessibility score. Click here to watch a short video of this process.
• Repair Word and PowerPoint documents with Microsoft Accessibility Checker. Chances are that most of your accessibility issues in Blackboard come from materials that you have uploaded, like Word or PowerPoint documents. In such cases, it is always best to return to the original document and address the issue there. Both Word and PowerPoint can make use of the Microsoft Accessibility Checker. Go to the “Tools menu” and select “Check Accessibility” to start the process, which will then identify the accessibility issues in terms of significance and walk you through addressing each one. We have made short videos explaining each. To see more on how to use the Accessibility Checker, click here for Word and click here for PowerPoint.
• A note about PDFs. Some of your accessibility issues may come from the use of PDFs. While it may be tempting to try to address the issues from within Adobe Acrobat itself, which does have its own accessibility checker, we recommend that you return to the source document (usually Microsoft Word or PowerPoint) and make your changes there. Once you have done so, UND recommends that you replace your old PDF with the new Word or PowerPoint file directly. If you NEED to use a PDF, you can create a new version from your edited Word/PowerPoint document to a PDF, make just one small edit, and reupload that.

Tempted to leverage AI tools? Proceed with care. Outsourcing work to artificial intelligence has become a trend for many. However, while AI may seem like a content expert, it cannot be trusted to generate accurate results, especially when evaluating your materials for accessibility. You are far better off using the prebuilt accessibility tools we’ve described above and for which we have created short instructional videos. If you choose to use AI tools for help with specific accessibility tasks such as image alt-tags, video captioning, or audio transcripts, you must take the time to thoroughly check and revise the results.

Again, UND’s TTaDA and University Information Technology (UIT) are UND’s primary resources for explaining these tools and best accessibility practices, as well as solving more complex issues, but we hope the resources we’ve provided can help as we all Strive for 85.

On February 25, 2026, at 11 a.m., SMHS OLI will offer a virtual panel featuring faculty who have found workflows for tackling complex accessibility issues in their materials. All SMHS and UND faculty, staff, and students are welcome to attend this free session. Watch your inbox and a future newsletter for more details about this session.

For information related to SMHS instructional design, faculty development, and other academic and teaching resources, contact Adrienne Salentiny at adrienne.salentiny@UND.edu or 701.777.4272.