Helpful Hints for Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
These disciplines have some really specific challenges: we don’t actually know how to make some materials, like musical scores or graphic novels, accessible. It’s deeply frustrating. We appreciate how difficult it is to manage so many unknowns, and how hard you’re working to manage it all.
We are working closely with partners in SUNY and across the state to get answers. As soon as we have concrete information, we will share it.
In the meantime, keep doing all you’re doing to update what you can. Even in an uncertain landscape, your work toward making materials accessible still matters and still counts.
Protecting your PDFs
A lot of your materials may only be available as PDFs: archival materials, historical texts, open educational resources, publisher materials.
Other materials - syllabi, articles and interlibrary loans - can be made to be accessible. If you own the document, like a syllabus, rubric, or slide deck, work with it as a Microsoft or Google file. Make your content accessible in that format and lock it before you share it. That will keep others from editing it.
If you’ve got a PDF that you can’t edit in another format, submit it for remediation. The Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching’s remediation team is working as fast as they can, and they’ve remediated thousands of documents.
