As I reflect upon accessibility for all of my current and future students, I will continue to rely on a two key iNACOL standards to help continue to guide my lesson planning for all of my classes. Standard E (the online teacher models, guides, and encourages legal, ethical, and safe behavior related to technology use), Standard F (the online teacher is cognizant of the diversity of student academic needs and incorporates accommodations into the online environment), as well as the activities in module 2 have opened my eyes to the world of accessibility. Prior to module two, I relied on Apple’s Accessibility options, and assumed my students with disabilities (or their SKIA/Para-Pro) would utilize this on their own. Now, I realize it is both ethical, and my legal duty to make my class content accessible to all students as soon as they open my website or watch a video I have posted. After watching the video of the three students with disabilities and their plea for equal accessibility, I realized I have to make this change immediately for all of my current and future students… which will take some time considering I have a lot of video tutorials on YouTube, our school WebDav server and locally on student computers.

I decided to upload a video tutorial I have been using for a while with my students. As soon as I started to transcribe it, I realized the benefit of writing a script prior to recording. In addition to now including captions and a downloadable transcript for all of my videos, I will make an effort to speak/teach in a more concise and grammatically correct way… less ‘gonnas’, etc. that fly by as we teach ‘on our feet’.

I was impressed how easy and accurate YouTube‘s closed caption option was. Although, I am planning to learn how to do it in iMovie as this is how I prefer to edit my videos and I would like to save my videos with the caption already completed. I may also look into downloading video from YouTube with the captions depending on the quality of the download. I also need to remember to title my images clearly, and include video headings that are thorough and accurate as well. Through this and other modules, I have changed how I create new music technology lessons and video tutorials, for example, most of the Google Suite apps and add-ons make it very easy to make every document ADA compliant with proper headings and text size. I have also committed to writing out a script prior to shooting any video tutorial footage, and I have also simplified my text links on my websites, and documents online.