For most of you, you will bring your own computer to class. If you do not have a laptop or need one with our specialized software, we have Classroom Laptop Kits available for checkout from the Equipment Room before class.
Someone from the technical staff or Equipment Room Staff will be assigned to check in on you before your classes to make sure you are able to connect to the screen, document camera or other peripherals if you need it. Only the technical staff is allowed to install software, plug-ins, special drivers on the Classroom Laptop Kits for checkout
All requests, questions, concerns, or problems should be e-mailed in advance to helpdesk@itp.nyu.edu.
Before Your First Class
Please send your syllabus to us at helpdesk@itp.nyu.edu along with a list of software, plug-ins, and special equipment that will need to be available for use during your class. Please include what the students will need access to during the course of the semester. If you have a week-by-week breakdown of your needs feel free to include that as well.
24-hours Before Each Class
E-mail requests for anything particular that you want to make sure will work on your classroom computer. DO NOT assume that because it worked last week that it will work this week. If you do not let us know your needs until 5 minutes before your class begins we cannot guarantee that that particular program/plug-in/equipment will be set up in time for you to use it in your class. In addition, with enough advance notice we may be able to advise you of any potential problems and suggest alternatives before your class begins.
Contact ITP Helpdesk (helpdesk@itp.nyu.edu) for help setting up an internal blog (itp.nyu.edu/classes), Google site, or re-direct to a URL of your choosing (some instructors host their materials on Github or other platforms) – see below for details, or use NYU’s LMS Brightspace/NYU Brightspace: Creating your course site (Instructors )– all instructors have Brightspace access. The department does not enforce using one platform over another for hosting your course materials – this is entirely up to you!
NYU adheres to the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, Level AA standards. Anyone creating digital content at NYU is responsible for creating content that complies.
This agreement covers websites and content published publicly on NYU’s public websites as well as content posted on Social Media and other platforms (GitHub, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, self hosted, etc) on behalf of NYU for class or other use.
While this agreement does not cover student or faculty personal pages or websites, it does cover work published by students to publicly available course websites such as a blog for a specific course where the students embed their work. If they are simply linking to their own site the content of their own site, that does not need to be compliant.
This agreement does not cover sites or content that are not publicly available such as those behind password protection or otherwise only available to students in a particular class. For instance, material for a class using NYU’s Learning Management System, NYU Classes, is only available to members of that class and is exempt. Therefore, putting materials behind password protection may be a viable short term solution. If this is something you would like to do, please contact us and we can help you work out a way to do so.
We at ITP/IMA are in the process of implementing a theme and installing a set of plugins for use with WordPress that will help ensure that our blogs (classes blogs and so on) meet these standards. If you would like to use our WordPress Classes, please contact ITP’s helpdesk@itp.nyu.edu to help set you up with an account. We will password-protect those sites until we have the theme ready and in-place. Please do ensure that any content you publish meets the accessibility standards (see the Content section below).
The NYU Web Publishing service also has a convenient list of accessibility-ready themes that they have tested, and a list of themes they know are not accessible.
The University of Washington has some great pages on web accessibility. See, for example, this page on creating accessible menus, and see the work of Terrill F. Thompson in general.
Other Platforms
For pages published elsewhere or using other technology, the onus is on the creator or maintainer of the site to ensure that it’s structure is compliant with WCAG 2.0AA standards. NYU has a set of guidelines and testing tools for developing accessible sites. Before you publish a custom site or pages hosted elsewhere please let us know so that we have a record of the site and can do a quick compliance check.
Some platforms that we currently use are already compliant on a site level and we feel confident in their continued use although any content published on these platforms should be compliant (see below).
GitHub
We have checked GitHub.com in general and its interface should be compliant (although any published GitHub Pages will have to be created using accessible standards and should go through the process outlined above).
Google Sites and Google Classroom
Google Sites and Google Classroom have support for screen readers although it is unclear at this moment if they are fully WCAG 2.0AA compliant. We recommend only making these sites or pages available to students in your class rather than public.
Other Platforms
We are evaluating other platforms as needed and will be updating this page with additional information. Please check in with us before publishing using platforms that we haven’t already checked.
For anyone creating content whether it is published on an ITP hosted blog, social media, or elsewhere, needs to be created in an accessible manner. Here is a quick rundown on how to create different types of content that are accessible with links to further resources:
Documents and PDFs
NYU’s Digital Accessibility site has a series of guides on ensuring that documents you create with Google Docs, Microsoft Word, PDFs, and so on are accessible. Please go through these as you create these types of documents for material that is posted online or for classroom use.
In particular, when creating PDFs, ensure that you are exporting as a PDF rather than printing as a PDF from your application. This will go a long way towards ensuring compliance as the text contained in the document will remain text rather than rendered as an image that happens when printing as a PDF.
Images
Images must have accurate “alt-text” when published online. Images should not contain textual information (phone numbers, addresses, names) and if they are info graphics they must contain full text descriptions in the body of the page.
When an image is purely aesthetic or decorative the “alt-text” may be blank (alt-text=””) but must still be included.
As videos are becoming increasingly important in our class use, it is important that we pay special attention to ensuring their accessibility. In particular, we have to ensure that videos have accurate closed captioning. Videos hosted on YouTube can be captioned using their captioning tool manually or automatically. If you use the automated service, these captions must be edited to correct punctuation and do things such as indicating speaker changes. Please review NYU’s Digital Accessibility site for more information on working with Audio and Video.
Training
On NYU’s Digital Accessibility site, there are a variety of resources including trainings and consultations on creating accessible sites and content. We are going to be attending this training as well as organizing sessions for ITP/IMA Faculty and Staff. Please feel free to attend and utilize these resources on your own as well.