8 Accessibility Expectations for Teaching at UW and in PWR
PWR Accessibility Statement
July 2021
The Program in Writing and Rhetoric is committed to accessibility across instructor, student, and administrator experiences. This commitment begins with recognizing that all of us have bodies and minds with various needs and preferences that matter to how we navigate the various physical and virtual environments in which we teach and learn together. Our social identities and identifications also shape how we move together and thus influence how and whether spaces are accessible. Thus, this statement works in concert with the Statement on Antiracist Writing Pedagogy and Program Praxis in asserting that classroom and pedagogical accessibility also means considering the ways that BIPOC people, LGBTQIAA+ people, disabled people, and multiply marginalized people are affirmed and supported in being fully present within a space.
Administrators, instructors and students who compose materials for PWR courses should, from the outset, maintain accessibility principles, including those forwarded by the Disability Resources for Students (DRS) office for making online course materials accessible. In addition to these guidelines, we also seek to explore the accessibility of physical classroom spaces as well as of the materials and interactions we use to support instruction and instructor/student learning.
Finally, accessibility is not just about transforming spaces and materials, it is about developing new ways to move and recognizing possibilities for enabling different kinds of presence. In “Universal Design: Places to Start,” Jay Dolmage offers a long checklist of possible ways to move. We commit to experiment and engage with these possibilities to support all members of the program.
UW Digital Accessibility Guidelines
Please check out the Center for Teaching and Learning’s Accessibility Tool Website, which features a rich set of resources and suggestions for ensuring that your course materials and Canvas sites meet accessibility expectations as well as compliance with a digital accessibility law set to go into effect in 2026. It contains accessibility strategies for a range of course materials, from syllabi, readings and materials, assignments, Canvas pages, videos, slide decks, and more.
To this web resource, the CTL’s Mihaela Giurcia has distilled a few key priorities for supporting digital accessibility in your courses.
- Put syllabus and assignments on Canvas (preferred) or Word 365, which (along with Powerpoint) have built-in accessibility checkers. Google products do not have accessibility checkers. Too, Learning Technology services (available by emailing help@uw.edu) are best equipped to help instructors with materials on Canvas, with more modest help with Microsoft 365; they are not supporting Google docs.
- As much as possible, use .html formats for electronic readings. Pdfs are not recommended, as it’s difficult and cumbersome to tag them. Now is the time for instructors to work with the UW libraries if you need them to acquire/find material to use in .html format.
- Videos and films should be at minimum captioned or subtitled. Eventually, the ask is to also provide transcripts and audio descriptions.
Top 7 Things for Digital Accessibility Handout
Elliott Stevens (UW Libraries English Liaison) has created a terrifically helpful handout featuring the top 7 things to do to support digital accessibility in your course, assignments, and/or activities. Check it out at this GoogleDoc.