Meet Our Student Liaisons

What is Digital Accessibility?

Digital accessibility ensures that all people can equally access and use digital content, such as websites, applications, documents and media — regardless of ability.

At SDSU, it is a shared responsibility. Everyone on campus who creates or shares digital content takes action to provide an accessible experience for all, including individuals with disabilities.

Resources Available to Students
Accessibility: Emails

Reducing barriers to navigation and communication is the best practice.

Accessibility: Emails
Office of Student Accessibility

Accommodations, compliance laws and other general resources are available through the Office of Student Accessibility.

Office of Student Accessibility
Accessibility: D2L

D2L has various built-in options for students with different formatting features, visual content enhancers and other features.

Accessibility: D2L
I used to think digital accessibility was only for people in tech. After learning more about it, I realized it affects almost everyone. Small things like clear headings, captions and readable colors make a huge difference. It changed how I design projects and communicate information.
Darshil Dahal
Darshil Dahal
Tips for Accessibility

"Before submitting any document or presentation, try navigating it using only your keyboard. If it feels confusing or hard to follow, it probably needs accessibility improvements. It is a quick way to catch issues most people miss."

"When I work with the student liaison team, I deepen my knowledge on Excel. I remediate Excel and came to understand on how to write formulas, which I learnt in the classroom and could not understand in depth. This work provides more insight on Microsoft applications and ways of making digital content accessible. I learnt many new things, which is a lifetime skill for me. Working as a student liaison provides significant value to my life to work as a team to accomplish a certain goal."
Emmanuel Nankee
Emmanuel Nankee
Tips for Accessibility

One of the best tricks I have learned while working as a student liaison is to tag scan documents in Adobe Acrobat Pro. I knew how to solve and tag "character encoding failure," which is a complicated process. This process involves isolation of a page that contains character encoding failure in a document and then tagging it separately. A single isolated page undergoes tagging and restructuring of the headings. It is then reinserted onto the original document, which passes the "character encoding" issue.

I didn’t know much about digital accessibility before I started working as an SDSU digital accessibility liaison, but after learning more about it, I honestly find it really fascinating. I’ve realized that digital accessibility is important not just for people who directly need it but for everyone, because it makes digital content easier and better for all people to use.
Mikhael Rai
Mikhael Rai
With tools like Copilot becoming a part of everyday life, properly tagged and structured documents aren't just more accessible to people, they're more readable to machines too. That shift in perspective from just 'accessibility as a requirement' to 'accessibility as good practice for everyone,' human or AI, is something I carry into every project now.
Rashil Shibakoti
Rashil Shibakoti
Tips for Accessibility

For anyone whose PDFs almost always start life as a Word document, getting the accessibility right in Word first makes everything so much easier down the line. My approach is simple: I start by writing out all my headings before I write a single paragraph. Just the skeleton. Then I arrange them into a proper hierarchy and keep an eye on the Navigation Pane until the structure looks exactly the way I want it. Once I'm happy with that, I add a Table of Contents and only then do I go in and fill everything in with actual content. It sounds like extra steps, but it saves a lot of fixing later, a lot.

When I came to SDSU, I had no idea about digital accessibility. I only thought accessibility was an 'in-person' thing. I appreciate all the things this office does and encourages everyone to put accessibility first.
Sakchham Thapa
Sakchham Thappa
Tips for Accessibility

When you're recording a video, the biggest thing I recommend is speaking clearly so that captions and transcripts can be interpreted easily.

During this last year at SDSU, I sustained a spinal cord injury that required major surgery, affecting every aspect of my education. During this period, I came to deeply appreciate the value of accurate transcripts for recorded lectures, clear and readable syllabi, and lecture slides that were easy to follow. The disabled community is unique in that anyone can become a part of it at any time. Until I personally faced challenges that made digital accessibility essential, I underestimated its true importance.
Shayla Rundberg
Shayla Rundberg
Tips for Accessibility

My primary responsibility is remediating lengthy handbooks. If you're working on a document that could benefit from a table of contents, I recommend using the Table of Contents tool under the References tab in Microsoft Word. This feature offers both automatic and manual options, as well as a range of styles to suit your document best.

Honestly, I didn’t know much about digital accessibility until I started paying attention to how different people use technology. Small things like captions, headings and readable colors really do make a difference for everyone.
Shreya Paudel
Shreya Paudel
Tips for Accessibility

I try to avoid using ‘click here’ in links now because descriptive links are much clearer and more helpful for users.

As someone who is on the autism spectrum, being able to understand digital content without captions is extremely tricky. Digital accessibility changes that and allows me to understand audio content much more quickly and allows for the processing time I need.
Vivienne Beveridge
Vivienne Beveridge
Tips for Accessibility

Different types of screen readers function for different projects. NVDA is the most accessible and is approved by the university, allowing for all screen and visual content to be accessed by everyone, regardless of their level of vision. For students who get distracted by visual content (such as myself), using Immersive Reader on Word allows me to understand all content without the extra noise!