News 
The new checklist for teaching staff published by Digivisio brings together instructions for making different learning materials accessible. The checklist supplements the previously published quality criteria for digital pedagogy, which support higher education institutions in producing high-quality educational content.
More uniform quality through joint efforts
Accessibility experts from four higher education institutions have created a checklist to use as a guide in the improvement of learning material accessibility. There is a clear need for a checklist: It has been difficult to apply general accessibility guidelines in the context of teaching.
“We, the authors of the checklist, hope that a growing number of students will have access to easy-to-use and easy-to-understand learning materials, regardless of the higher education institution they study at. We also hope that our checklist will inspire learning material authors to explore and develop accessibility,” the authors note.
The authors have also encouraged staff at higher education institutions to use the instructions in the checklist to develop guidelines for their own higher education institution. For this reason, the checklist has been published under an open cc licence.
Accessibility improves everyone’s learning experience
Accessible learning materials improve the learning experience for everyone. Accessibility is critical for students with lacking functional capacity, disabilities, or learning difficulties.
Digital learning materials refer to electronic materials, often produced using office software, such as slide shows, text documents, videos, electronic articles, and immersive VR/360° content. The checklist’s aim is to clarify what should be taken into account when creating such materials so that these are easy for all students to use.
Assistive devices, such as screen readers and tools that facilitate reading, do not work with materials that contain accessibility issues. It is important that the author of the learning materials implements accessibility systematically and regularly in the structures of the materials. This is the only way to make sure the materials are available to everyone. The checklist will guide you in this work.
Checklist to help in making small accessibility improvements
The author of learning materials should integrate improvements to accessibility into their usual routines. A good time for doing this can be when preparing new learning materials or when updating previously created materials for the next study implementation. A tip from the checklist authors: In addition to the checklist, use the built-in ease-of-use or accessibility checking tools in your office software.
The Swedish and Finnish translations of the checklist will be published in summer 2026. The first version of the checklist was published on the Aalto University website in 2025 and it is now being continuously developed.
The members of the working group that drew up the checklist are Suvi Toivonen from Aalto University, Anna-Liisa Mattila from the University of Oulu, Jenni Torikka from Metropolia University of Applied Sciences and Satu Turkka from the University of Eastern Finland. You can reach us by email: firstname.lastname@organisation.fi
The Swedish and Finnish translations of the checklist will be published in summer 2026.
Further information:
The quality criteria for digital pedagogy developed in collaboration between Digivisio and higher education institutions are a tool that supports higher education institutions in producing high-quality educational content.
The quality criteria are a research-based approach, modularity, diversity, accessibility, and usability. The quality criteria are a guideline for producing high-quality educational content, whether informal, non-formal or formal education.
The accessibility checklist complements accessibility criteria and gives the teacher better capabilities to make their learning materials accessible.