1 Teaching with Accessibility

Overview

In this section, you will learn about accessible teaching practices that can be implemented in the classroom through connecting with campus resources, designing assignments with universal usability in mind and with existing instructional tools that you already use.

Working with disability centers on campus

Your campus is likely to have one or more disability centers available for students and staff. At UW, Disability Resources for Students (DRS) works with thousands of people on the UW campuses. Your interaction with DRS might be limited to copying and pasting their language about accommodations into your syllabus–or perhaps you’ve partnered with them and worked closely with them on establishing accommodations for yourself or others. When we sought to learn more about DRS, we connected with a DRS Access Coordinator to learn about strategies instructors can use to make media assignments more accessible. In response, they suggested one very simple yet often overlooked strategy:  make it clear in your course description that assignments will include or require media design and development. This small callout in your course description can provide disabled students the information they may need to know before even registering for a class.

Other areas of campus that you may want to consider for your own edification are areas that offer resources or tools for access technologies (some units also offer consultations for improving the accessibility of their departmental resources), centers for teaching and learning that promote inclusive learning and universal design, and departments that provide opportunities for professional development in the area of accessibility and disability-related issues.

More information: UW Disability Resources for Students, UW Seattle Course Descriptions, UW Access Technology Center, UW Center for Teaching and Learning and UW DO-IT

Consider the course and instructional materials

If you have an assignment that you regularly teach, you should consider all the ways that it is accessible or inaccessible. For example, if you require students to make a short video or podcast in your class, you should consider whether or not people who are blind or low vision, people who are deaf or hard of hearing, people who do not use a mouse, and people who use screen readers can complete the assignment. If your assignments are inaccessible, you should also think about alternatives to those assignments and whether or not those alternatives are reasonable, appropriate, and creatively invigorating.

Take some time to evaluate your learning materials as well. For example, let’s take a slide deck of presentation content and consider how it may be accessible or inaccessible. Do your theme’s colors provide enough contrast to be readable by those with color vision deficiency? If you choose to include images, is there a way to relay the information shown in the image to someone who cannot see the photo?  If you have video or audio included in your slides, how can you provide the same information or experience to someone who is deaf or hard of hearing?

Remember that accessibility is a shared responsibility. Fairness and equality in education extends to the design of your assignments and learning materials as well. It is with this notion that we attempt to design our materials for learners of all varieties, experiences and backgrounds through what is known as universal design for learning. This means providing for multiple means of engagement, representation, and action & expression. The above scenarios incorporate how perception, language & symbols, and comprehension may play a part in assignment design. But as instructors, we should also consider how students may choose to express themselves or communicate with others. It is with this idea that we circle back to considering alternatives that are reasonable, appropriate, and creatively invigorating for students.

More information: ADA Regulations, Access Board, What are accommodations? and CAST Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Guidelines

Creating born accessible resources

Considering accessibility from the beginning of your document creation process is a great way to ensure your files are born accessible with little to no remediation required. And while it’s important to develop skills in universal design, it’s also good to know there are tools built into the platforms you already use to help with accessibility. Microsoft Office products have a built-in accessibility checker that looks at your content to identify if people of all abilities can read or continue editing your files. Google Docs has options for accessibility through screen reader, speech-to-text and braille reader support. Even learning management systems (LMS) like Canvas and Blackboard have tools for teachers to check for course accessibility.

At the University of Washington, we use the Ally accessibility tool to provide feedback about accessibility issues to course developers. This tool also provides all students with the ability to download files in alternative formats. For example, an assignment you upload to the course as a .docx file can be downloaded by the student as HTML or ePub file. Students can even download BRF files, which are for electronic braille displays, or MP3 files, which converts text on your documents to speech and saves it as an automated audio recording.

Websites, course sites, videos, and many, many more resources incorporated into your teaching can be inaccessible. This is often a direct result of the designer or developer of these resources not considering how all users might access the content. Or, the designer or developer may not have enough time to incorporate accessibility into the creation of these resources. We argue that this philosophy is intentional and that most design decisions have intentionality behind them. By not considering accessibility, or not building enough time to incorporate accessible practices, you are making an active design to exclude users from engaging in this content. Instead, think about how you could rework your design and development workflow to make your resources more accessible? And think about how you might start making small steps to revisit past resources to improve their accessibility.

More information: Canvas Ally, Creating Accessible Documents, Microsoft Office Accessibility Checker, Creating accessible Microsoft Word documents, Creating accessible PDFS in Microsoft Word, Making your Outlook Email accessible and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Guidelines