6 Cooking with Accessibility
Elliott Stevens
The Storytelling Part of the Recipe: Some Background and Setting
Digital accessibility works best when it is incorporated at the design and development stage. This means that, if we want to build accessibility into multimodal projects, then it’s important for instructors to plan for digital accessibility early on – like when they are drafting lesson plans and assignments – and it’s crucial for students to be aware of and get some training in digital accessibility before they embark on their work.
As an English Studies & Research Commons Librarian at the University of Washington, Seattle, I am not an accessibility expert, but I do help instructors and students out with multimodal assignment design and projects, and I firmly believe that featuring accessibility in these contexts isn’t just preferable or a good idea but essential.
Over the years, as I’ve learned about accessibility and how to bring it into assignments and the classroom, I’ve found that there are at least a couple times when instructors and students seem to need accessibility training the most: when instructors are planning assignments and before students start their projects.
In this recipe, I’ve included an agenda for training instructors about accessibility and a lesson plan for training students about accessibility.
The Ingredients and Method of the Recipe: A Workshop Agenda, a Lesson Plan, and Some Framing
Agenda for Training Instructors:
In the Program in Writing & Rhetoric at the University of Washington, quite a few instructors teach multimodal assignments that often come in the form of multimedia like video making, podcast making, and digital publication. In fact, there is even a course designation – English 182 – that specifically focuses on multimodal composition.
Some instructors seem to be comfortable with teaching multimodal assignments right away, often because they already have experience with such things, but others are more curious and would like to learn how to get started, while others still are curious and maybe even a little afraid of designing, teaching, and grading a multimodal assignment.
In order to provide some guidance on multimodal media making – and to also allay some fear – I’ve worked with Stephanie Kerschbaum, the Director of PWR, and Kimberlee Gillis-Bridges, the Director of Computer Integrated Courses in the Department of English, to put together a workshop series for graduate students. In this series, we’ve used the first event to focus on getting started with assembling podcasting or video making assignments, the second event focuses on the accessibility of those assignments, and the third is all about Copyright/Creative Commons/Fair Use as well as the online safety and privacy of student authors.
For video-making assignment and accessibility workshop that we ran in Winter 2024, we used this agenda and these slides.
For both the agenda and the slides, our focus was not so much to lecture instructors, to command them what to do, or to present them with long checklists of accessibility points that they should hit in assignments. Instead, we often first ask instructors what they think about accessibility itself or how it could be incorporated into an assignment, a project, or grading. (Questions like “Is it possible to make a fully accessible assignment?”) Or we ask them what tools they might want to use (iMovie? Adobe Premiere? WeVideo? Clipchamp?) and whether or not those tools have any accessibility documentation online. If they don’t know about accessibility documentation – or how to look for it – then we start looking for it in the workshop.
But even though our plan starts with questions, inquiry, and activity, Stephanie, Kimblerlee, and I also make sure that we have plenty of answers or examples that we can provide for any of our agenda items or slides.
Agenda for Training Students:
Aside from the Program in Writing & Rhetoric, I’ve worked with the Comparative History of Ideas (CHID) Program. In CHID, the undergraduate students are expected to work on a culminating Senior Thesis, and though these theses are often long pieces of scholarly writing, they can also take the form of digital project, like videos or websites.
Over the years, the CHID instructors have heard me speak about accessibility with regard to library resources, like databases and ebook platforms, so they asked me if I’d be able to put together a one-shot session of instruction in which students could think through the accessibility of potential digital Senior Theses.
I settled on this agenda for this session.
One thing that’s marked by this agenda is that it starts with a series of questions for students – questions that the students can speak about, if they choose, or write about in the Google Doc if they prefer to contribute that way. I decided to start with questions because, in the past, whenever I happened to ask students about accessibility in a class, I always noticed that at least a few of them had a lot to say, especially about things like alt text, captions, and headings. In these CHID sessions, the students definitely didn’t disappoint and proved that they already knew a lot about accessibility.
In this agenda, I also decided to have students read portions of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Though some of the students already knew a lot about accessibility, none of them had ever read WCAG documentation. The WCAG documentation, to me, can be very technical and hard to understand, but its Abstract and Background are quite short and written in a clear, direct way. I thought those portions would help us to chat about digital accessibility in a grounded way, and that proved to me true.
Finally, in the agenda, I could have focused on dozens of digital accessibility recommendations, but instead I chose to stick with seven things:
- Headings
- Link Text
- Color Contrast
- Captions
- Transcripts
- Alt Text
- Testing Document Types (like PDFs or things made with Canva)
That short list was inspired by some work that my colleague Lauren Ray, the Open Educational Resources Librarian, and I did in putting together accessibility guides for the digital publishing platforms Pressbooks and Manifold.
The Comments Section of the Recipe: What Needs Modification or Improvement:
There is much room for improvement in these instruction plans for instructors and students, but the most pressing needed change I’ve noticed is that accessibility needs to be investigated during the drafting stage of a digital project, too. In the methods above, I’ve focused on instruction before an assignment is given or before a project is embarked upon, but I think the assignments would be all the more accessible if instructors were able to workshop them for accessibility and get feedback, and the digital projects of students would be far better if accessibility were a component of their draft workshop.