Making Course Content Accessible to Students with Disabilities

Copyright EASI 2007

(This information is taken from a narrated PowerPoint presentation making its style conversational. It is part of a series of multimedia modules demonstrating simple steps to create accessible content for online delivery which will be available in 2008. For information on these modules contact Norman Coombs norm.coombs@gmail.com)

Why should I make my courses accessible to students with disabilities?
Electronic curb cuts
How do people with disabilities access information technology?
    Students with visual impairments
    Students with visual processing impairments
    Students with motor impairments
    Students with cognitive impairments
Relevant disability legislation
How do you actually create accessible content?

Why should I make my courses accessible to students with disabilities?

That question is frequently asked by professors. And when you never have any students with disabilities in a class, it seems like a legitimate question to ask. Put yourself in the shoes of a student with a disability. If you know there is someplace that people don’t want you to go, frequently you won't bother going. If you know that there is someplace that when you go, it's going to be much more difficult for you to handle than for anyone else, you're likely not to go either.

So when we have content that isn't accessible for such students, or not very accessible, we don't have students using the content, we have a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's a catch-22. Now when you make it accessible, you still may find that not many students with disabilities are using it, maybe for years there will not be many students with disabilities taking your courses.

However, it doesn't mean you've wasted your time. You can go out on the street in any city in the United States today where you will find sidewalks with curb cuts. They were put in there for people with wheelchairs and you may stand on the corner for two or three days at a time and never find anybody with a wheelchair using it. You wonder, “Why did we bother?” However, I bet you notice it being used. Sometimes people may walk through the curb cut, but frequently you find people with bicycles or strollers or roller blades, people pulling suitcases with wheels, workers pushing heavy carts. There are a lot of people without disabilities that are using them. And now what we call electronic curb cuts is that by making electronic content accessible, it’s going to serve many other people in ways we don’t think about and may never notice.

Electronic curb cuts

Now that all information is becoming digitized, it is possible to create the most level learning space in history for students with disabilities. How can that be? Digitized information is displayed independently, they can be displayed as visual letters on a screen, it can be read through a speech synthesizer and spoken. The letters on the screen can be made larger or smaller, the whole bunch of different ways, it can be output through a printer for hard copy print, it can be output through a Braille embosser for hardcopy Braille so that when information is digitized it is no longer frozen in print, or frozen in one format. It is possible to display in a variety of ways, and so for students with disabilities particularly for those with print disabilities, they are no longer necessarily handicapped, disabled, or challenge because they cannot access the print content, information in digitized content with a little thought and care can be made in ways that are accessible to them, and left them have full access to learning spaces as never before.

How do people with disabilities access information technology?

You may wonder, or you may already know, how do people with various disabilities actually access information technology. WE will not go into it in any depth just cover it briefly.

Students with visual impairments

Students who are blind access a computer and everything that can be displayed on a computer usually through the use of screen reading software that looks at what is on the screen, sometimes looks at the code behind the screen, and speaks it to the student. It also can be displayed on little pins on the keyboard which is what we call refreshable Braille, it can also be put out through a Braille embosser and that is what we call hardcopy Braille. Students with limited site or low vision, will often time use screen magnification software, a special software that will let them magnify the size of the letters on the screen. And yes part of what was on the screen is off to the side and top and bottom, so they have to use a pointer or mouse to move the focus around to see what is on the screen, but they can enlarge the content from two to 16 times. They can have it so that there is a little lens looking at a magnified view of a portion of the screen, that is sitting on top of the normal screen so it gives them a focus of where they are. So screen magnification makes the display of a computer available to such students. This software also has the ability to speak that text simultaneously with a synthetic voice.

Students with visual processing impairments

Both screen readers and screen magnification are used by students with learning disabilities. Although they have no trouble seeing what is on the screen as such, they have trouble processing that information. Sometimes they see material backwards or jumbled. So the less content that is on the screen at once the easier it is for them to handle it so screen enlargement software helps them to control their environment.

Students with motor impairments

We don't think as students with motor impairments as being print disabled however if you cannot hold a book and turn the pages you have a problem reading print. Odds are that with special software you can use special switches and things to control a computer. You can control a computer if you can control one muscle and blink an eye signaling to the computer what you want it to do. You can also control a computer through voice recognition software. So it is possible for someone with a motor impairment who cannot hold a book or turn pages to control a computer and read information on a computer.

Cognitive impairments

Cognitive disabilities cover many different conditions and generalizing about them is dangerous. Whether a computer is helpful for someone like that depends a lot on the specific situation. If they use special software that helps them organize their lives, keep track of their schedules, it will also assist their learning. Again for them like for those with learning disabilities, having less content on the screens may be helpful.

In this short summary, we are talking about print disabilities mainly focusing on people who are visually impaired. However in education we are using more and more multimedia, this presentation itself not only has visual content but it has my voice, how would a deaf person know what I'm saying. Now you have to provide a transcription a caption, just like when you are watching the evening news you can turn on the captioning and see the text of what is being spoken. It is possible for us to provide that type of functionality for course content.

Relevant disability legislation

There is legislation that talks about the need and requirement for accessibility. We're not going to spend time talking about the law here, but just to familiarize yourself with what legislation may relate to what you are doing. Section 504 of the rehabilitation act requires that education be made accessible for people with disabilities. Section 508 of the same law was updated recently and requires the government to provide electronic information in accessible formats and it defines what that is and how to do it. It is not that clear on whether 508 applies to schools or not however, while the school is making education accessible to students with disabilities under section 504, if a judge or some office of civil rights is trying to figure out whether your stuff is accessible or not how is she going to define that. The standards of section 508 has become a nice yardstick to use. So whether the law applies or not frequently the guidelines or standards are being applied under section 504. The Americans with disabilities act usually title II is the one that is referred to it requires that information be made accessible and available in alternative formats, and at the equally effective rather than second rate information and it be timely. Timely in the modern age is getting to be sooner and sooner, particularly if you are putting information into an electronic format, the tendency is timely means now. Copyright laws and disability rights commonly conflict, people with disabilities want access to information the copyright holder wants to protect his information. If you let somebody with a disability have it how can you be sure it is protected. The Chafee amendment gives schools the right to take information and provide it for their disabled students and the special exception trumps the copyright laws, that doesn't mean you can do it for free, you may need to buy a copy of the book. The other thing that is happening is that people who are making materials for people with disabilities are making special arrangements with publishers and managing to put a lot of protection into the software so that it cannot be used by anyone other than the person designated to use it. Normally what goes by the name of watermarks although we do not want to get that much water into our computers. A number of states have come up with legislation that relate to this as well, New York state has some items relating to the requirement to provide material in alternative formats, so that is another provision meaning that we do have to do it. And finally campuses have policies sometimes they do change but your campus will have policies that will relate to this to some degree.

How do you actually create accessible content?

Whether you want to create accessible content because you want to help the students, or whether you want to do it because you want to keep out of trouble. How do you do it? This is really where most faculty get stuck is how do they do it. And how much work is it going to be. Until recently it did take a lot of work. You had to learn a lot of computer skills and a lot of stuff that was arduous, and we understand why faculty ran away from it. Increasingly what we can find is that it is possible using software that you are already using, with a little know-how and forethought to come up with accessible content that you can put into your course. EASI is developing training in its online courses and in its Webinars to show how faculty using common tools like Microsoft Office and using its structure and format features will create content that will frequently solve many of the content accessibility problems.

Finally, aside from the technical aspect of how you make things accessible, and make them technically accessible with the right kinds of formats and outputs. There are some general principles that will help with accessibilities and will probably be useful for all of your students. The underlying principle is keep it simple, whatever you are doing keep it simple. For example, try to use simple language, in academia we tend to be pedantic and go on with long drawn out sentences and explanations, long paragraphs, fill up time, it seems like we are trying to be obscure. Whenever possible keep sentences short, keep paragraphs short punchy and use active verbs. There is nothing wrong with using long technical words when necessary, but explain them in common words. Don't use four syllable words and all that stuffy stuff that we professors use. When you are designing the actual material to be put up, use good page design, don't crowd too much stuff into a space. Use color contrast so it is easy to read, the more you use curly queue design the harder it is to read. Use white space on the page so that your eyes can rest. Not so much busyness. It is helpful for everyone especially those with low vision. Also these tips are very useful for students whose English isn't their first language. When talking about Web pages avoid eye candy. There's nothing wrong with making your page attractive and nothing wrong with having images as long as they are properly identified. It does not have to be playing dull text you can make it attractive and jazzy. By eye candy I mean pictures that are there just to pretty it up, but don't contribute to your content. If you're doing fancy things and putting in pictures be sure they move your topic forward that they focus on your main point. Have everything including all of your images including decorative images reinforce the main point that you are trying to make. Don't put in too many rambling irrelevancy's or irrelevant pictures. To put it in simple terms use universal design principles.

EASI provides a number of online resources to help content designers with accessibility. EASI resources are designers who are not technical experts. We aim our content to reach people who want to focus on design and not on the technology of that design. Our resources include Podcasts, Vodcasts, both public and fee-based Webinars and a series of courses that lead to the Certificate in Accessible Information Technology. You can access these resources at: http://easi.cc

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