Designing with Accessibility in Mind
Accessibility - Who Needs It?
For many of our students, the typical online curriculum is booby-trapped with roadblocks to learning—things that make their online course experience so difficult they are either unable or unwilling to continue.
I hear instructors say, and you may be thinking,
“But I don’t have any students with vision, hearing or mobility challenges in my class so I don’t need to worry about it, do I?”
A perhaps startling statistic is that 1 in 10 undergraduates report having a disability, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics. Beyond the fact that Section 508 compliance is a legal requirement. . .you don’t necessarily know if you have a disabled student in your online class.
And you almost certainly don’t know how many differently-abled students may have registered, taken a look at your course materials in the first day or two and then dropped because they realized it was going to be too hard to get through since proper accommodations weren’t in place.
Accessibility Features Benefit Everyone
We want all our students to have a great learning experience, don't we?
Another unhappy piece of data: According to the U.S. Census, just 13 percent of adults with a disability have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 32 percent of non-disabled adults.
Designing with usability/accessibility in mind will help students with disabilities be successful in your course. As an extra benefit, adding usability features gives ALL students the opportunity to learn more effectively. For example, video captioning is clearly of great help to students with hearing impairments—and it's also is beneficial to:
- students who are learning English,
- students who are struggling readers,
- students with attention deficits, and
- even students working in a noisy location (on the bus or in Starbucks).
Yes, it can be kind of a hassle to do the things that go into making your course fully accessible but at the end of it all is a student who's just trying to learn and improve their life.
What We'll Be Covering
This course follows Section D of the OEI Course Design rubric and is intended to give you an introduction to the main usability/accessibility enhancements you can easily address right in Canvas:
- Heading Styles
- Descriptive Links
- Lists
- Alt Text (for images)
- Tables
- Color
We'll also share some easy-to-use resources and teaching aids that can support you after you've completed this course.
This course is organized in a Module format. To begin, click the Start Here button below OR click Modules in the sidebar navigation.
Self-paced courses do not award badges
