Designing for Accessibility

Students may be represented in your classroom as coming from a variety of backgrounds, ages, languages, and learning styles. Similarly, you may experience a need to provide accommodations for a student with a disability such as blindness, low vision, hearing impairments, mobility impairments, learning disabilities, and health impairments. Students and instructors share the common goal of learning. So how can instructors design courses that maximize the learning of all students? The field of universal design (UD) can provide a starting point for developing a model for instruction. Universal Design and accessibility are teaching practices that make course concepts educationally accessible and skills attainable regardless of learning styles, and physical or sensory abilities.

Blindness or other visual impairments

Those who are blind and cannot interpret graphics (such as photographs, drawing and image maps) unless text alternatives are provided. Some learners may use a computer equipped with screen reader software and a speech synthesizer or a text-based web browser. Those who can see only a small portion of a web page at a time can use special software to enlarge screen images. Individuals who are colorblind cannot easily navigate when distinguishing between colors is required.

Links to activities

Vision Simulation See what color blindness and cataract looks like. Please note: high speed internet access is recommended.

A low-vision simulation. Requires that you update Shockwave on your computer.

An interesting low-vision simulator that uses videos (need new resource) demonstrate the examples.

Hearing and other auditory impairments

When resources include audio output without providing text captioning or transcription, a student who is deaf is denied are inaccessible. They may also be unable to participate in a telephone or video conference without special accommodations.

Links to activities

Hearing Loss Simulation Discover how sensorineural hearing losses affect hearing.

A simple hearing loss simulator

What hearing loss sounds like, a good eLearning module.

Speech impairments

A student with a speech impairment may not be able to effectively participate in interactive telephone conferences or video conferences. Chat features, discussion boards or email are valuable alternatives.

Links to activities

Voice disorder simulator (need new resource)

Using Universal Design to build accessibility

Principles of Universal Design

Universal Design is in use all around us, by architects, product designers, engineers and educators. Below is an excerpt from the Principles of Universal Design, developed by The Center for Universal Design at North Carolina State University (1997) and modified by the Center on Postsecondary Education and Disability at the University of Connecticut (2001). From the original nine principles, seven included in this list apply directly to Universal Design for Distance Education. Principles 6-7 apply more appropriately to the face-to-face classroom.

The guide covers a wide range of design disciplines including environments, products, and communications. While not applicable in every situation, these nine principles may be universally applied to evaluate existing designs. The principles are intended to guide the design process and educate both designers and users about the characteristics of more functional environments.

Principle One: Equitable Use Instruction is designed to be useful to and accessible by people with diverse abilities. Provide the same means of use for all students; identical whenever possible, equivalent when not.

Principle Two: Flexibility in Use Instruction is designed to accommodate a wide range of individual abilities. Provide choice in methods of use.
Principle Three: Simple and Intuitive Use Instruction is designed in a straightforward and predictable manner, regardless of the student’s experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level. Eliminate unnecessary complexity.
Principle Four: Perceptible Information Instruction is designed so that necessary information is communicated effectively to the student, regardless of ambient conditions or the student’s sensory abilities.
Principle Five: Tolerance for Error Instruction anticipates variation in individual student learning pace and prerequisite skills.
N/A Principle Six: Low Physical Effort Instruction is designed to minimize nonessential physical effort in order to allow maximum attention to learning. Note: This principle does not apply when physical effort is integral to the essential requirements of a course.
N/A Principle Seven: Size and space for approach and use Instruction is designed with consideration for appropriate size and space for approach, reach, manipulations, and use regardless of a student’s body size, posture, mobility, and communication needs.
Principle Eight: A Community of Learners The instructional environment promotes interaction and communication among students and between students and faculty.
Principle Nine: Instructional Climate Instruction is designed to be welcoming and inclusive. High expectations are espoused for all students.

Source: Principles of Universal Design for Instruction, by Sally S. Scott, Joan M. McGuire, and Stan F. Shaw. Storrs: University of Connecticut, Center on Postsecondary Education and Disability. Copyright 2001. http://www.udi.uconn.edu/index.php?q=content/nine-principles-udi%C2%A9

Building Accessibility into your course

When designing your course within D2L, you can go a long way towards making your class and web-based materials accessible to the majority of your audience by employing some simple methods, such as utilizing their built-in tools and HTML page builder. You can view D2L’s accessibility tools documentation at the Help! link in the toolbar on the My Home or Course Home page and search under Faculty Documentation/Accessibility.

Design – General guidelines for improved accessibility

As you are aware, designing a course for the online environment can be quite different from designing for a face-to-face course. When implementing the principles of universal design, keep your instructional methods and approaches simple, keeping in mind potential barriers to access. Below are some guidelines to consider when designing an accessible course:

- Keep the design simple, clean, and uncluttered.
- Use alternate text tags for images. For example, you can add alternate text when you embed an image from the web. Doing this will mean that people who use a screen reader to read aloud the contents of a web page will hear an auditory description of the image.
- Rather than pasting in raw URLs, link to words that describe the link destination. Again, this will help people using a screen reader understand where the link will take them.
- Use other formatting besides color (bold words, different size font) to distinguish between important items in your course. Changing the font size rather than using different colors will benefit those people who cannot differentiate colors.
- Advocate the use of CTRL+ and CTRL- or CMD+ and CMD- to resize the text in the course for the visually impaired.