Key Takeaways


1.  Universal Design for Learning as a course design strategy ensures maximum broad accessibility, and benefits all students—not just those requiring accommodations.




3. ADA (Americans with Disabilities) Compliance Checklist.

4. Contact Accessibility Services office to have your videos transcribed.

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Many instructors become aware of Web accessibility needs after receiving a disability accommodation request. Historically, the way to ensure that students with disabilities had equal access to education was by providing accommodations and retrofitting changes.

The concept of universal design, however, has shifted this focus from “special features for a few” to “quality design for many.” Just as we would never dream of constructing buildings without sidewalk ramps, or only choose to add them on later whenever an individual in a wheelchair would like to access the building, we could strive to make all course content accessible to everyone starting with the design phase.

While universal design benefits students with disabilities, there are benefits for others as well. For example, using captioning for videos ensures access for a student who is deaf, however, captions can also benefit nonnative speaking students, students with learning disabilities, or students that are watching the video in a loud environment.

It is unrealistic to expect instructors engaged in Emergency Remote Teaching to become familiar with and implement full accessibility standards during a crisis situation. However, it is still important to consider student needs (even if a student has not made a request), and below is a link for ten simple steps toward meeting common accessibility needs. Once you begin to refine your online course, or move it online for an upcoming term, designing for meeting accessibility standards, and even better, using universal design principles, can greatly improve the student learning experience (and even save you time later, should an accommodation be required).

In addition to these design considerations, here is information related to our Accessibility services webpage. 


Beginner

Implementing the principles of universal design in online learning means anticipating the diversity of students that may enroll in your course and planning accordingly. These ten key elements will greatly enhance the accessibility and usability of your course for students with and without disabilities.

Intermediate

This comprehensive Accessibility Toolkit is a compilation of helpful resources and tutorials for diving deeper into the key aspects of accessibility including the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), creating accessible documents, closed captioning and transcription, and commonly used accessibility evaluation tools.

Advanced

Optimize Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a specific framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. The UDL Guidelines from CAST offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.



Last modified: Monday, July 6, 2020, 12:19 PM