Before Deleting Course Materials: Evaluate Accessibility and Alternatives

Removing a course file can appear simpler than repairing it. Before deleting teaching material, consider what students need from it and whether remediation, a better source or an accessible replacement would preserve that purpose.

Triage with the teaching team

Prioritize active assessments, required readings, core explanations and barriers reported by students. Record the owner, intended use and editable source for each item. Identify obsolete or duplicate material separately.

Keeping useful content and making it accessible may be the right approach. Replacing an unsuitable resource may also be appropriate. Deletion should be an educational and institutional decision, rather than a way to hide findings from a scanner.

Do not assume that moving a file into an archive or setting a rolling remediation policy removes an applicable obligation. In US Title II planning, exceptions have specific conditions; DOJ guidance also explains that equal-access and effective-communication duties remain.

Use automation where it delivers a supported result

Aelira Core v0.9.11 is beta. Supported workflows can detect issues, suggest changes and apply eligible partial fixes. Other findings need manual work, and some inputs may not produce a downloadable remediated artifact. Review the actual saved file, its recorded fixes and its unresolved findings. An automated score does not establish WCAG conformance.

Keep the original and open the actual saved candidate. Verify changed descriptions, structure, reading order, mathematical content and other consequential changes. Subject expertise and accessibility expertise can both be needed. There is no published Aelira benchmark showing an 80/20 division of automation and review, or that hundreds of hours become a fixed number of review hours.

Work with publishers and institutional support

Request accessible source material or alternatives from publishers and record the response. Escalate inaccessible third-party resources to the accessibility and disability-services teams. A request alone does not necessarily discharge the institution's obligations, and a third-party origin is not a blanket exemption.

Arrange appropriate access for students while unresolved material is being addressed. Avoid delaying a needed adjustment simply because the wider archive plan extends over several semesters.

Fund review and prevention

Budget staff time for authoring, intake, review, correction and specialist work. Train authors and assistants for the tasks they perform, and provide suitable supervision. Faculty time remains a resource cost even when no extra payment is made.

Create accessible templates, use semantic structure and review captions and informative images when material is first produced. Verify proposed integrations and monitoring in the actual deployment rather than assuming automatic LMS coverage.

Make a measured plan

Test a representative sample before estimating cost or time saved. Include unresolved cases and refused outputs in the estimate, and report the limits of the checks used. The self-hosted software is free and open source. Paid services cover support or managed hosting. Operational allowances, provider charges and service commitments depend on the chosen deployment and written terms; free software does not mean unlimited processing or zero operating cost. Use current US pricing or current Australian pricing, and obtain a written pilot quote covering continuation terms.