ACCESSIBILITY AND UNIVERSAL DESIGN

Faculty are required to ensure that the teaching materials we use are accessible to all students. Applying a universal design approach to your curriculum allows you to improve accessibility for all learners.

Universal design is the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design

- Ron Mace

Ron Mace and colleagues at North Carolina State University coined the term Universal Design (UD), with the understanding that designing to meet the needs of disabled people benefits everyone. For example, a curb cutout, designed to accommodate wheelchairs transitioning from sidewalks to streets, also benefits people with strollers, bike riders, and people who may have depth issues.

What does UD mean for learning and curriculum design?

Universal design means that we design courses that are the most useful to the most different types of people. A proactive approach improves accessibility for all students. For example, although closed captions are added for deaf students, many students may use them when watching online videos in the library or if they are learning English. Using a UD framework makes our courses more user-friendly for all learners.

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) 2.1, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, provide an international standard that defines accessibility of web-based resources. The principles of WCAG 2.1 are applicable to other digital assets as well, including software, video, and digital documents. The DO-IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology) at the University of Washington has a wealth of resources available to instructors on universal design in the classroom and in digital resources. Their Accessibility Checklist can help anyone creating or choosing digital resources to understand the accessibility requirements related to the features and functions of those resources.

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

CHOOSING AND USING ACCESSIBLE VIDEO

When selecting video, be sure to choose videos that include accurate closed captioning. Closed captions provide a text version of the spoken audio and other critical sounds, displayed in sync with the video.

Closed captions make video accessible to students who are deaf or hard of hearing but also benefit many others: they help second-language students understand the spoken audio; they help all students learn the spelling of the words that are being spoken; they make it possible to search the video for specific content; and they can be repurposed as an interactive transcript, which is a great feature for everyone!

Captions are supported by all major video hosting services including YouTube and Vimeo. If a video is captioned, it will have a CC button on the video player.

Additionally, when selecting audio files (like a Podcast) be sure the file also has a full written transcript available.

RESOURCES

The following resources provide additional guidance for creating accessible documents, particularly in PDF, and on evaluating whether PDFs are accessible and if not, fixing their accessibility problems. Additionally, reach out to staff at your institution, such as Instructional Designers or an accessibility support specialist, for help and guidance.

• • Affordable Learning Georgia: Accessibility

  • Adobe: PDF Accessibility Overview

  • WebAIM: PDF Accessibility

  • BC Campus Open Education Accessibility Toolkit

If you find an open textbook that is perfect for your course but is not accessible, contact the author and talk to them about accessibility.

ATTRIBUTIONS

Information for this module was consulted and adapted from

"Open Washington Learn OER - Module 9: Accessibility" by Open Washington is licensed under CC BY 4.0