Digital Accessibility

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The University of Southern Mississippi is committed to making our course materials, documents, and websites accessible to everyone. We want every student, faculty member, and staff member to have a rewarding experience with our digital content, regardless of ability or the technology they use. Below, we explain what digital accessibility means, what the law requires of us, and how you can help.

See something that is not accessible? We ask that you please let us know. Reporting it helps the whole university improve. You can submit our web accessibility issue form. Report an accessibility issue

What Is Digital Accessibility?

Digital accessibility means designing course content, documents, presentations, and websites so that everyone can perceive, navigate, and use them, regardless of ability, device, or connection speed. We want our materials to work for students and colleagues who use screen readers, keyboard-only navigation, captions, magnification, or voice control, as well as anyone working from a phone, recovering from an injury, or learning in a second language.

Accessibility is proactive. Accommodations are reactive.

For years, higher education treated accessibility as something to arrange after a student asked for it. We believe a better approach builds accessibility in from the start: applying a heading style correctly, describing an image in alt text, and adding a caption before a video is posted. When we build materials this way, they work for everyone the first time, including students with permanent disabilities, students with temporary conditions such as a concussion or a broken arm, multilingual learners, and anyone reading on a small screen.

In practice, this shows up in everyday choices we can all make: using Word’s built-in heading styles instead of just bolding text, writing a link as “review the syllabus” instead of “click here,” adding alt text to a graph before it goes into a Canvas module, and checking color contrast before a flyer goes to print.