Success Stories

Most faculty design course materials thinking about how they look. But for a significant number of students, how course content looks is only part of the picture -- or not the picture at all....

Here's a quick challenge: close your laptop trackpad, put your mouse to the side, and try to get through the next ten minutes using only your keyboard. Can you navigate to your Blackboard...

Repost from the USM Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation and the USM Digital Accessibility Work Group September 2026 Issue As the fall semester gets underway, accessibility moves from...

You launched the Ally course accessibility report, worked through the flagged issues, and watched your score climb to 85% or higher. Green across the board! It feels like the job is done. But a...

Thank you to everyone involved in our website remediation process! This is a team effort that is actively making our websites easier for everyone to use. Thanks to the hard work of webmasters and...

Blackboard Ally is one of the most useful tools in your course accessibility toolkit. It scans your content, flags potential barriers, and offers step-by-step guidance for fixing them. However, ...

You just finished uploading a PDF - a syllabus, lecture notes, or a set of slides exported for printing. It looks fine to you, but how does it perform for a student relying on a screen reader?...

Picture a student pulling up your syllabus before the first day of class. If they're using a screen reader and your document contains unstructured text, complex tables, and images without adequate...

The USM Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation shared the resources from the Ready, Set, Accessible! Fall Course Prep Day. Held on August 3rd, this half-day virtual event was designed to help...

You've probably uploaded a PDF to your course or website dozens of times without a second thought: a syllabus, an article, a set of lecture notes.  PDFs are everywhere in higher ed. For years...