An Overview of Accessibility

As instructors, we have legal and ethical obligations to ensure that our courses are fully accessible to all learners, including those with disabilities. We use digital resources in our courses because we believe they enhance learning. However, unless carefully chosen with accessibility in mind, these resources can have the opposite effect for students with disabilities, erecting daunting barriers that make learning difficult or impossible. For example, consider the accessibility challenges students described below might face.

• Students who are deaf or hard of hearing are unable to access the contents of a video presentation unless it’s captioned.

• Students who are blind or visually impaired use assistive technologies such as audible screen reader software or Braille devices to access the content of websites, online documents, and other digital resources. They depend on authors providing alternate text that describes the content of images as well as headings, subheadings, lists, and other markup that helps them understand the structure and outline of the resource.

• Some students who have learning disabilities such as dyslexia use assistive technologies that visibly highlight digital text as it’s read aloud, and are therefore dependent on text being readable (as opposed to a scanned image).

• Students who are physically unable to use a mouse are unable to use interactive web and software applications unless these applications can be operated with a keyboard.

• Students who are color blind may be unable to understand content that communicates information solely using color (for example, a bar chart with color as the sole means of differentiating between the bars).

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, provide an international standard that defines accessibility of web-based resources. The principles of WCAG are applicable to other digital assets as well, including software, video, and digital documents. The Center for Teaching and Learning at UNM goes over Digital Accessibility Standards. The University of Arkansas also has a useful web resource for creating accessible online sources.

The rest of this module provides tips for ensuring that the resources you’re choosing for your course are accessible to all learners.