Here's a quick challenge: close your laptop trackpad, put your mouse to the side, and try to get through the next ten minutes using only your keyboard.

Can you navigate to your Blackboard course? Open a Google Doc? Reply to an email? Move through a PowerPoint presentation?

If it feels frustrating or impossible, you've just experienced what many of your colleagues and students navigate every day. The #NoMouse Challenge is a global awareness effort that invites people who create digital content -- websites, documents, slides, course materials -- to experience the web and their own tools the way users with disabilities often do. People with physical disabilities, low vision, or motor impairments frequently rely on keyboards, screen readers, voice recognition, or other assistive technologies to do their work. When the content we create isn't designed with those tools in mind, we accidentally close the door on them.

Here's how to take the challenge -- and what to do with what you learn.

1. Try it: Navigate without your mouse

Pick any digital space you use regularly and try it keyboard-only for a few minutes. Here are good places to start:

• Your Blackboard course or organization

• A Google Doc, Slide, or Form you've shared with students or colleagues

• Your department's myUMBC page or a UMBC Sites page

• Your email inbox in Gmail

Use these keyboard shortcuts to get around:

• Tab -- move to the next link, button, or form element

• Shift + Tab -- move backward

• Enter or Space -- activate a link or button

• Arrow keys -- navigate menus, dropdowns, or slider controls

• Escape -- close a dialog or menu

As you go, ask yourself:

• Can I reach everything on this page or in this document?

• Can I tell where I am at any point?

• Can I operate every button, slider, or control?

You may be surprised by what you find -- and what you can't find.

2. Think about who's on the other side

Accessibility isn't just a website issue. Every piece of digital content you create -- a syllabus, a slide deck, a course announcement, a shared Google Sheet -- is a potential barrier for someone if it's not made thoughtfully. Consider a few examples:

• A colleague with a repetitive strain injury relies on keyboard navigation. If your Google Doc doesn't support Tab order correctly, they may not be able to complete it.

• A student with low vision uses screen magnification and browser zoom. If your Blackboard content uses images of text instead of real text, the content becomes illegible when enlarged.

• A student who is deaf or hard of hearing cannot access audio unless it's captioned or transcribed. If your video announcement in Blackboard isn't captioned, that student misses the message entirely.

• A student with dyslexia uses a text-to-speech tool to read course documents. If your Word doc or PDF doesn't have proper heading structure, the tool reads the page in a jumbled order -- or not at all.

The methods for creating accessible content are well established, and in many cases, they take just a few extra minutes. The barrier is usually awareness, not effort.

3. Make one change

The challenge doesn't end with the experiment. After you've tried keyboard-only navigation, pick one thing to improve in your own digital content. Even small changes make a real difference.

• Add alt text to an image in your Blackboard course or a Google Slide.

• Apply heading styles in a Word doc or Google Doc instead of just bolding and resizing text.

• Review the captions on a video you've posted and correct any errors.

• Check that the link text in your next email announcement actually describes the destination -- "Visit the Digital Accessibility site" rather than "click here."

Not sure where to start? UMBC's Digital Accessibility site has quick guides, tutorials, and resources tailored to the tools you use every day, including Blackboard, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and myUMBC.

Ready to take the challenge? Put down your mouse and see what you discover. Then share what surprised you with a colleague -- awareness is contagious.

NoMouse.org is a project of The DO-IT Center at the University of Washington, and is adapted and reused under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.