Barry Dahl dot com

This is the first post in a series of twelve posts intended to help you improve the accessibility of your online courses.

During this series, the word accessibility is used in the context of making your online courses better for students with various disabilities. To help set the stage for this series of posts, let’s start with a couple of videos.

Portland Community College: To Care and Comply

Portland Community College (PCC) created this 11-minute video in 2015. PCC employees talk about their web accessibility guidelines and how supporting students with disabilities is a shared responsibility across the college. Tips and techniques that faculty and staff can use to improve their online course materials to make course components more accessible are also included. It is embedded below, or you can open it separately in YouTube.

These things jump out at me from the PCC video:

• The intro examples of navigating online courses with assistive technology
• The various students’ stories about their needs for accessible learning materials
• Mission of PCC, and there is no success without access (10:30)

You can learn more about the various accessibility resources provided by PCC at their website.

University of Washington DO-IT: IT Accessibility: What Campus Leaders Have to Say

I also highly recommend a second video, this one from DO-IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology) at the University of Washington. DO-IT provides many excellent resources for educators and students. They also have an excellent Center for Universal Design in Education. This video highlights the importance and strategies for making Information Technology accessible on a campus-wide basis. Open DO-IT video separately.

Highlights for me in this video include:

• Notice that the video is audio-described (AD).
  • Learn more about AD from Digital.gov
  • Also, this Perkins School for the Blind article: How to Create Audio Description for YouTube with YouDescribe
• At 1:37, Tracy Mitrano clarifies that making an accommodation was a good starting point, but only the start of the conversation about dealing with accessibility.
• At 2:32, Pablo Molinda states that just like privacy and security, accessibility needs to be designed from the initial conception, not an afterthought.
• At 3:58, Gerry Hanley shows that his state system requires all vendors provide equally effective access to the services provided by the vendor.

In the second post we’ll look into the importance of a VPAT and what you can learn from them. In the remaining posts we’ll focus more on the question of how to improve the accessibility of online courses. I thought it was important to start with this post dealing more with the question of why improved web accessibility is important in online learning.

The PCC video is shared with express written consent from PCC, and the University of Washington video is shared under the license of Creative Commons Attribution. The accessibility keyboard graphic is shared under Creative Commons Attribution by creator Poakpong.

Directory to posts in this series:

1. Improving Accessibility of Online Courses – the why
2. What do Educators Need to Know about VPATs?
3. Alt Text for Simple Images in Online Courses
4. Complex Images – Going Beyond Simple Alt Text
5. Finding Videos with Good Captions
6. Captioning Videos for Your Online Courses
7. Improving the Accessibility of your HTML Content Pages – Part 1
8. Improving the #A11y of Your HTML Content Pages – Part 2
9. Making Word Documents Accessible for Online Learning
10. Making PowerPoint Files Accessible for Online Learning
11. Using Web-based Tools in Online Learning – #A11y
12. Six More Tips for Making Online Courses Accessible

Filed under: accessibility | Tagged: a11y, UDL |