NOAH PEARSON: Thank you all for joining today's session, Accessible and Compliant Course Design. My name is Noah Pearson. I use he/him pronouns. And I'm on the marketing team here at 3Play Media. And I will be moderating today's webinar. And with all of that taken care of, I'd like to welcome today's speaker, Sheryl Burgstahler. And I'll pass it over to Sheryl, who has a great presentation for you all today. Take it away, Sheryl.
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: Again, my name is Sheryl Burgstahler, and I go by she/her. And I'm from the University of Washington. I actually retired from the University of Washington in 2024, but I didn't retire from my career. [LAUGHS] I just don't have to do all the work in my job back then.
So one of the things I do is give presentations. I do a lot of writing, and then I teach a couple of online courses myself. And that's a perfect retirement for me. Have a lot of extra time for grandkids. Don't have the administrative responsibilities, but can just do the parts that I like.
So I'm going to talk about accessible and compliant course design. You'll see I'm going to really zero in a bit on, what do I think accessible is, and what do I think compliant is, what those words are usually used for. Sometimes they're used interchangeably. And so that's what we'll be talking about.
On the screen, I still have my identification. And I am still an adjunct professor at the University of Washington, but also City University of New York. And that's where I teach online. And I continue to speak and give consulting on a couple projects, and that's about right for me.
I'm going to read my email addresses. They're on the screen, and you will have access to the slides after the presentation, but I'll just read them in case anybody wants to write them down. My first one is kind of long. It's sherylburgstahler-- all one word-- S-H-E-R-Y-L B-U-R-G-S-T-A-H-L-E-R @outlook.com. And my UW address is sherylb@uw.edu. You also have those in chat right now, so that's probably a better way to get them.
So let's get started on this topic, near and dear to my heart. When I think about a course that we're talking about designing here in this presentation, I think ideally for any course, my three things are anybody who meets the requirements to be in that course, like this presentation. Anybody can sign up, basically. If it's an academic course, they meet the requirements to be in that class, with or without accommodations is encouraged to attend.
Everyone feels welcome once they get there. For example, not feeling welcome is teaching an online course where your introductory video is not captioned. And so that would be a very unwelcoming course to a student who relies on captions, which might be somebody who is deaf, but also people that-- maybe not totally rely on them, but really benefit from seeing the captions for spelling and so forth, and grammar.
And also, they're fully engaged, so they can do everything. Once in a while they might do things in a little different way, but students with disabilities can do everything in the class. And it's an environment that's accessible, usable, and inclusive. So I had a couple other words here-- usable, inclusive-- on what we're talking about today.
So what I think we need-- and some of us have already done it in our own life, but more people need to buy into a paradigm shift from excluding groups of students who should be able to participate to including them. And that's students with disabilities.
Some faculty will say, well, I'll do anything a student asks me for. If they need something, they just need to tell me. Well, that's a little late if they're already in your class and they show up on the first day, and everybody else has access to the video introduction, everybody else has access to the printed syllabus or the online syllabus, but you don't. So we need to think proactively in order to fully include someone with a disability that might require some adjustment in that way.
OK. So we want to move on the design for the average student to design for everyone. When I design a-- I have to admit, I think of the average person. Who's going to take this class? If there's professional development or it's an academic class, who do I expect is going to be here, and what are they going to want to learn?
But then as I start putting my course together, then I think, what are the broad categories of who might take this class? The one I teach at the university is on digital accessibility, how to design IT in any organization to make it accessible to individuals with disabilities. And so I think about the people taking that class.
And one of the things I agonized a bit when I developed the class is I am going to recruit some people that have high-level technical skills, maybe they're software engineers, some in niches like usability designers and testers, and then some who have very little technical expertise. Maybe they're administrators and they want to learn about accessible design because they have IT people that report to them. And so throughout the course, I would be thinking about these different people who are taking the class.
I develop my page of content, and then I think of these different categories, and I adjust accordingly. But one thing I came up with was when we talk about a different-- when I talk about a topic like accessible web design, I give the basics that they need to know and then I have-- to learn more about this. And so those that maybe want a deeper dive, they have plenty of courses to go to. But I don't cut out the people that maybe aren't ready to get into that level of specificity as far as technology.
And we want move from reactive reliance on accommodations, this idea that, well, we'll just wait until they'll show up, and then they can ask for accommodations, to a proactive, universal design approach so that our courses are accessible and usable and inclusive. The course itself in design, any top technology we're using in the course, the environment as far as discussions and so forth, and any services that might be involved that support the course.
So we actually already did this, and we did it in the physical environment where we have curb cuts in sidewalks now. That wasn't always the case. It was back in the '70s that people started putting curb cuts in sidewalks, and now it's acceptable design. The best practices of design of sidewalks include having curb cuts in them.
So we've learned this before, maybe not quite as complicated as online courses, but they're there. So we're going to talk about legislation, because we're talking about compliance a little bit, and what an accommodations-only framework looks like compared to a universal design framework as far as creating classes, and tips for the universal design of online courses, of course, and then a little bit of a recap, and then we'll have resources and Q&A.
So legislation. Some people are really surprised to learn that Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 requires that we make our online courses accessible to people with disabilities. You might think, well, you didn't have online courses then.
Well, it's Civil Rights legislation, and so it doesn't talk about the specifics, but it talks about making whatever we're doing, we have to make sure that we make it accessible, usable for people with disabilities. And so before-- so it wasn't designed when we were using IT for the delivery of courses, but it covers what our legal obligation is.
Later legislation, and more well known is the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and then with the 2008 amendments, very similar to 504, but it has expanded the applications to include transportation and other things that aren't in 504. But the same basic idea, Civil Rights Act that requires that we make our technology, whatever we're doing, accessible to people with disabilities so they are not locked out of activities that they're eligible to for participation.
You might want to look at state laws too. We have a state law here in the state of Washington on accessible IT. Many states do. It's very similar to the ADA requirements, except it does have standards specified, where in the ADA, standards are not specified. So it doesn't say how you can measure how accessible your applications are.
So then the Department of Justice came along, and it came up with a rule. This was just a short time ago, a couple years ago, after a great deal of work to come up with a rule that was accessible and acceptable to various constituencies. And it's on digital accessibility. So just like there are rules about architecture-- architects have to make their facilities accessible, but they also have some standards, how wide should the doors be, and so forth.
So now we have standards that we didn't have before because of the Department of Justice ruling. So the standards we are talking about are not in the ADA, but they are the standards that can help measure whether you're compliant with the ADA.
So it basically clarifies these obligations. It applies to state and local governments, which includes all educational institutions, K-12 and post-secondary, that are public institutions. But many of the private ones are looking at this guidance as well.
So there's a deadline to comply. This next-- oops. This is supposed to be-- yeah. 2/24 for 2026. And then there's one for February 26 for 2027. The first one's for large institutions, like 50,000 people or so. And then small organizations is the second one. They get an extra year to comply.
It ensures that no person with a disability is denied access to the government services, the programs, the activities that we're offering. And it mandates that you meet a technical standard. Now, the technical standard is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG. They've been around for a long, long time. They're international standards for many organizations, but again, there's guidelines for others.
And so we used WCAG 2.1 level AA-- there are different levels of compliance-- as our standard here at the University of Washington, and actually in the state of Washington. That was adopted years ago. But now that's what's selected.
Some people are surprised because WCAG 2.2 is the current version. And the explanation that's been given to me is because 2.2 was so new when this came out, they wanted to just step back and give people a chance to just comply with 2.1. It's not like there are major differences. So that's the rule.
So that's how you measure compliance, so that was easy. [LAUGHS] We have a good measure of that. Oh, by the way, the ADA still applies in that you have to provide accommodations as needed. So some people think, well, if I complied with all of the requirements in this rule, then I'm done, right?
Well, no, because there might be a person with a disability that is still unable to use whatever you're offering, and you'd still have to provide an accommodation for that person. But the guidelines, the standards give us a place to look for guidance. And if we follow that guidance, then most of-- by far, the majority of what we're offering will be accessible to people with disabilities.
So rather than disability, I like to think about ability on a continuum. All of us have a level of ability on whatever we're talking about, whether it's ability to see or to understand English, social norms, the ability to hear or walk or read print, the ability to learn, to manage physical/mental health, tune out distraction. You might think of disabilities, if you look at that list, like the ability to see, you might think of, oh, blindness or low vision.
Well, if you look at this continuum, if you have really good sight, well, you'd be way over on the right-hand side. If you're not so good at sight, you'd be over on the left-hand side. And if you're blind, then you'd be way over on the left-hand side.
And so we could do a little poll here today, which we're not going to do, but we'll each measure where we fit on this scale. And somebody might rate themselves low, let's say, on social norms. And it might be because of a disability, but it also might be because they're from a different country and they're still learning the social norms in the United States.
Similarly with the ability to understand English, that might because-- might rate yourself low because English is your second language, or it might be because you have a learning disability that makes it difficult to understand English. So the idea here is that everybody has abilities in every category, but not everybody has a disability in those categories.
And those of us that are not working in a disability studies or services program or we're not working in a medical situation, I think it's more useful just to think about abilities and assume that everyone in your class will have a level of ability in these different areas. So you have to address all of those. So it kind of reminds you of the great diversity in our institutions.
A couple other notes about that. Most disabilities are not obvious to the casual learners, or the faculty or whoever's in their presence. And so even in a Zoom room, you can't tell if a person has a disability for the most part. And even in person, most disabilities aren't visible, like learning disabilities and attention deficits and so forth.
And so this is also true of other characteristics like race, ethnicities, gender identity. They're just not obvious in many cases. So we can't just wait until people with disabilities are in our presence and provide accommodations or make our course accessible to them, because they may not disclose their disability. And that's certainly their right. But I think we'd all agree we'd like them to have full access to our course. I think that's the goal of most instructors.
And consider intersectionality, and that complicates things. People might have multiple disabilities, and they also might have a disability plus some other characteristic of a group that's been underrepresented, like their race and so forth. So we've got to think about that. That complicates the issue.
The other thing that complicates the issue is that many students with disabilities do not even disclose them. Most of them don't. The estimate is about 1/4 to 1/3 of students at post-secondary campuses that actually disclose their disability. That's often shocking to some people, but I've worked with quite a number of people with disabilities, and they have all kinds of reasons for not disclosing.
One is simply they don't think they need an accommodation. You can have a disability like a missing arm, for instance, that might be considered-- people would consider you as having a disability, but it doesn't mean that you have to have an accommodation. So that can be the case. And it's not reasonable, it's not appropriate to ask a person if they have a disability. If they don't bring it up, even if it's an obvious disability, you shouldn't comment on it.
So another thing that's important is campuses primarily provide accommodations for disabilities, and that's after they've demonstrated or they've revealed their disability to the disability services office. And so you can't count on knowing who these people are and providing an accommodation quickly. So they show some disadvantages of that accommodations framework that I mentioned where you're just thinking about accommodations all the time, after the fact.
And now let's just take a look at online courses, particularly once the pandemic started, what some of the most common accommodations were they're providing students with disabilities. So what are they having trouble with in your class?
And one of the main ones is reformatting inaccessible documents to make them accessible. And that's mainly reformatting PDF files. PDFs can be made accessible to people with disabilities, but it's harder than making an HTML page, which would mean your content page in your learning management system or on a website.
Also, it's easier to make, let's say, a Word document or a Google document more accessible than it is to use PDFs. And so often, I recommend avoiding PDFs. You can't always avoid them, but as much as possible not to use them. They're harder to make accessible. And then if you revise those documents, like it's a syllabus or something, then you can lose that accessibility as you're making changes, and so forth.
And the other one is captioning videos. Some people are surprised to learn this, because a lot of our videos are on YouTube and other platforms, and they have computer-generated captions. Well, our disability services office, like yours as well probably, has to take those YouTube videos and others and re-caption them, because those videos were captioned by a computer, and often they don't have punctuation, they misspell words, and so forth.
I really appreciate those captions that the computer provides when I create a video and I put it up on YouTube, but I also know that's just a draft. And so I need to go in and put the punctuation in, correct the words that are misspelled, and so forth. And that's very valuable to students, of course, who are deaf, but also students where English is not their first language, and other groups of people.
And so anyway, a lot of work goes into re-captioning videos that are not captioned. There are ways to caption videos that are commercially available somewhere else too if they don't provide the captions, but that's hard too. So that's some common ones.
Now let's go to the universal design framework as a contrast. So in universal design, we're trying to design your products, your environments in your class, in our case, to the greatest extent possible-- to be usable by the greatest-- [LAUGHS] to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design. So we're trying to minimize the number of accommodations that students with disabilities might need.
So what do we look at as far as the characteristic of universal design? If we compare it with accessibility, which is in the title of my course, I use the term accessible-- and others do too in this context-- as kind of technically accessible to a person who has a disability, particularly individuals who are blind, for example. And people who are blind are using screen readers that read aloud the text that is presented on the screen if they're in a text format. So to make them accessible, you have to have access to that text, not just embedded in an image.
We have an image on the screen right now, and I have alternative text for this graphic. And so a person who's blind using a screen reader, if they have access to the PowerPoints, can get this image described to them. And so that's making it accessible.
But we also expect usable. I have a person who used to work for me. He still works at the university. And he is blind, and he evaluates products for accessibility. And often, he'll run into a product that was designed in kind of an inaccessible format. And then they add a bunch of shortcut keys for him to use if he wants to access all the features. Well, there can be tons of them.
And so that particular product, because it wasn't originally universally designed, they just add Band-aids on accommodations, kind of like, and it's not very usable to him. It's technically accessible, ADA-compliant, except it's not meeting the guidelines now, [LAUGHS] the standards. But it's not usable. He's not getting the usability that someone who has sight is getting.
And inclusive, which means basically that we want to offer in our courses assignments and stuff in ways that everybody can use the same instructions. And so we build in accessibility into the assignment.
For example, I teach an assignment-- I offer an assignment in my City University course where they're supposed to go out and look for an image of something of this facility that is employing universal design characteristics, like there's a ramp or the furniture's arranged in a way that's accessible to wheelchairs, and so forth. And then they have to report back to the group.
Now, I realize that if I have a student who's blind, they're not going to be able to do that on their own probably, because most images are not-- do not have alternative text, and so forth. And so they'd have to have a sighted person help them.
So I put an alternative to the assignment. And their alternative is they can describe to the group a facility they've been in that they consider has universal design features, like ramps and so forth. So I don't have to do anything special for the blind student. It's already built into the assignment. And other students then can do that as well.
So here's an example of the early days. I mentioned earlier about the ramps. This is on the first page of The Daily, which is our student newspaper here at the University of Washington. And a young man on the back of his wheelchair has capital letters, "Ramp The Curbs, Get Me Off The Street." So he's basically shouting that out.
And back in the '70s, they didn't have the curb cuts that we have today, so that was a big undertaking. This was 1970 this article appeared. But universities and other institutions use curb cuts now when they design the sidewalks, and so it isn't such a big undertaking. It doesn't add a lot of cost.
I also want to emphasize inclusivity by giving you an example of a physical space. In the left-hand side, we have an entrance, and there are two steps going up to this entrance to this building. And then we have a typical ADA-compliant ramp on the left-hand side of that even has handrails and leads up to the platform where you get into the building. So that's a facility entrance that is accessible, and it's quite usable. But it's not inclusive, because I would walk up the steps and my colleague might go up the ramp.
Where on the right-hand side, this is another building at the University of Washington. It's a very gradually sloping ramp into the building, and it's quite wide. It's the main entrance to the building. And so my colleague and I could go in there together, me walking and maybe she is using her wheelchair, continue our conversations, and go in the building.
There's even enough room on the ramp that people can pass us going the other direction. There are plenty of steps in this building, so it doesn't replace steps if you want steps. [LAUGHS] But it makes the accessible version the one that is used by everybody.
So I'll give you some resources at the end that go into detail about this framework for universal design, and it's specifically on Universal Design in Higher Education, UDHE. And it tells about the scope and the definition, principles, guidelines, practices, and process. So we're not going to have enough time to go into detail. We already talked about the definition, though, so let's just talk about the scope for a minute.
And when I think about what are some aspects of the scope or kind of what you're applying it to, or applying it to an online class. But it's also, who's going to-- you're addressing the diversity of people. Race, ethnicity, cultural background, sexual identity, socioeconomic level, age, marital status, religious beliefs, values, academic interests, even work experiences and specific abilities people have. So think of Diversity with a capital D when we're making our courses accessible to everyone.
Also, think about the applications. We can just think of all applications in education to apply universal design to. Like I said, we're applying it to instruction. But there are also guidelines that you can find for applying it to services or technology, just the technology, or the physical space or projects, and conference exhibits and presentations and professional organizations. And I'm going to give you a resource at the end that has those types of guidelines.
So let's think about technology for a minute, as we use technology in online learning, certainly. And ideally, technology would build in accessibility features. We don't need to go any further away than our smartphones that talk to us maybe too much sometimes. But also, you can change the font size. You can go from black to white to white on black, and all kinds of features. And they're just seamlessly built in, and they're used not just by people with disabilities, but a lot of people that use those features.
But the other aspect of a universal design technology is that it ensures that it's compatible with assistive technology. For instance, a blind person might be using a Braille device. And so ideally, if it was a universally designed product, it could interface with a Braille device, and so that would provide the accessibility part.
If we look at videos-- we already talked about this a little bit, but it benefits people who can't hear, but also people who are English language learners. But also those in a noisy environment like an airport, we see the captions all the time, and so we use them. In a noiseless environment like a library. My husband likes to watch a lot of sports, and I'm somewhat interested, but not as much as he is. So sometimes, I'll look at a video on my computer just having the captions turned on so I can be part of the audience for the sports event, but not exclusively.
People that have slow internet connections or want to know the spelling of words. That's an important thing in education, certainly. And then if you want to search through the captions, there are ways to do that if they are in a text format.
So back to universal design. There are three sets of principles that support universal design in an online class or a regular class. And there are a lot of others out there that support physical access, and so forth.
So these three-- first one is there are seven principles of universal design, basic principles that are really useful in designing the physical environment. So if your course is offered in a lab, it'll deal with things like using adjustable tables and making enough room for people who are left or right-hand users, things like that. And they can be applied to anything.
But there are tons of specialized principles that have come to pass over the years for specific applications. So there are three principles for universal design for learning, specifically applying to learning, making sure that you offer things in multiple ways. And then there are four principles that underpin the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
And so the main principles, and then you have the ones that support learning activities, and then you have the technology ones. Now, you can go through if you're interested in looking at all of those, or you can just accept my summary.
In a nutshell, to make our courses and the curriculum and everything accessible and usable and inclusive, we need to provide multiple ways for participants to learn. So let's say you're teaching using a video. You have the students look at the video. It's really ideal if you have some content related to that as well. The DO-IT videos-- I used to direct the DO-IT Center.
But our videos are always captioned, but then they're also accompanied by a printed document, because when you offer things in a video, it's in a different way than you'd write that content. And some people are better at reading than getting the video presentation, and some people opposite. But a lot of people benefit from both ways, and so that's an important thing to do, just multiple ways to learn, multiple ways to demonstrate what you've learned.
So in my class, I have discussions, and they're there for credit, and so I can see they're learning something there, often applying what we've been talking about. But also, I do have some assignments that are a little bit larger than a discussion, and then two larger projects. So I have multiple ways for people to demonstrate what they've learned in my class.
And then multiple ways to engage. And so for instance, in my online classes in the syllabus I say, if you'd like to meet with me one on one to discuss the course or whatever, then send an email to me to request a certain time, but also how you'd like to meet. And they can choose Zoom, or they can want to meet using FaceTime or email or whatever. And that's giving people choices on how to interact.
Ensure all the technologies and the facilities and the services and the resources and the strategies are accessible to individuals with a wide variety of disabilities. There comes that accessibility there, really zeroing in on focusing for people with disabilities, knowing that some of those methods will benefit other people as well.
So when you're developing the course, you consider the characteristics of students who might attend and the assistive technology that they might be using, or you can take a shortcut here. I'll show you three people that I-- three people that I know that if you make it accessible to these three people, your course is going to be pretty-- four people-- be pretty accessible to other people as well.
And so we have the four people. On the left-hand side, I have a picture of Zayn. And Zayn is deaf. And so I can ask myself, does she have access to all of the audio in my class? And I can say yes. I only use videos that are captioned already. And luckily, my course is on disability, so a lot of the videos I might want to show, they do caption them.
But I've run into some videos that aren't adequately captioned, and so I just don't use them in my class. And so I have a little introduction video in my class, and I just make sure that I've edited the captions when I post it on YouTube, and so Zayn then has access to everything in the class.
So let's think about Anthony for a minute. He has cerebral palsy, but you don't really need to know that diagnosis. I just throw it out there. But what you need to know is he doesn't have full access of his hands. He doesn't have a usable voice. And so what he needs is a lot of assistive technology, which he has to provide. If the student is going to use assistive technology, that's usually provided by the student, not the institution.
And so he has his technology. He has a large print screen because he does have some use of his hands, and so he can push the buttons on the touch screen. He has a system that will speak what he's typing on the screen, so that output can be used when he's using his phone. He has a nice interface to his phone.
Because Anthony provides technical support, mostly by phone, to people who are using assistive technology, or their children are just getting introduced to assistive technology, often very similar to what he uses himself. So he has all this technology. Very cool. You can learn about it. But really, there's only one thing you need to know about it. Of all this technology that he has, he can't fully operate a mouse.
And there are ways to work around that, but typically, people work around it by using arrow keys on a keyboard. And so if you have a pull-down menu on a website, you've just got to make sure that even though most people might be using the mouse to pull down that menu, you make it possible for Anthony to access that using his arrow keys to select what he needs to select.
Now, that's not really hard to do if you're somebody that's already a web designer and you know how to do the technical part of that, just one little extra thing to think about. And so it's amazing sometimes when a person can have very severe, multiple disabilities, but it doesn't have a huge impact on what you have to do as an instructor. If you're going to have a meeting where people are going to be able to speak up, he might need some extra time to compose his thoughts, so you should consider that as well.
Jesse, she has multiple learning disabilities. She has a hard time putting her thoughts down on paper or even through the keyboard. And so she uses dictation software, and then the text just appears on the screen as if it came from the keyboard, and she can edit it from there.
She also has trouble reading, and so she does her editing and whatever. So she likes to have even her email read back to her so she can do some editing. But also in the case of a document, she would like to have her text-to-speech software, kind of like a screen reader, but not all the bells and whistles. And so she needs to have access to the text.
So she's someone that will have to have all of those inaccessible PDFs reformatted for her to use her text-to-speech software if they have not been designed in an accessible way. And so that's very important. That's a big deal.
Hadi is blind, and he also has difficulty accessing images and content in PDFs that are basically scanned in images sometimes. But he needs more things than that. When he's reading a document, unlike Jesse, he can't see the heading structure. She can look through a document and she can see how it's organized, where he can't, unless the person builds in to that document extra features that provide formatting, like the alternative text I already mentioned, ability to read alternative text for images.
But also, he can learn the heading structure, so-- structure. So when you're learning the management system on your content page, if you have heading 1, heading 2, heading 3 for your structure, his screen reader will tell him about that. But if you just select the text and bold it and maybe increase the size or something, then it's just all like-- the whole thing is just all one big paragraph to him. So that's important.
And so he can make things-- you can make some things accessible to him if you follow accessibility guidelines, all provided in WCAG. So these four people, if you think about them when you're teaching a class and designing for them, it's going to be accessible to almost everybody else.
So I'm employing some universal design features today in giving my talk. I've used PowerPoint. PowerPoint is easy to make accessible. Some other systems are not as featureful, and so I use that. And I use a template that promotes accessibility.
I designed it. It is an accessible document, so I've used a text format throughout. I structured the headings. H1, H2, and so forth. And any lists that I might have are structured like right on here. Hadi would hear that what's following is a list of five items, because I used that formatting tool, the list tool, tables, and also formatting tools within the PowerPoint.
So I also use the accessibility checker to make sure I've found everything, and so that's what I did. I also have uncluttered slides. I have a plain white background and lots of contrast with the text. For those with attention deficits, you can really make things difficult when you have complicated images that aren't really necessary, background and so forth. It's not making it very accessible to them.
If you're teaching a course, you do a lot of other things. So pointing students to specific resources is important in my class. I tell them on the first day where they might go to get some resources for using Canvas at the University of Washington and then Brightspace over at City University of New York.
Now you might think, well, why do you do that? Because there are all kinds of resources. And I said, well, that's because there are all kinds of resources. And I can point them to the things I think they should look to first to make sure they know how to use the learning management system.
And so in other cases, linking to things where people can get more practice with math or whatever you're teaching, that can be very useful, and making it optional. Recognizing and avoiding cultural ability and other assumptions, and using examples in assignments that are relevant to a diverse audience. I'm from a generation where all the science books, there are just little boys in those books, not little girls in the science labs.
Offer multiple ways to learn, to demonstrate learning, and engage. That's the old universal design for learning that we talked about. And then of course, captioning your videos, making them accurate.
Avoid long lectures and huge slide decks. See if you can break it into smaller chunks and make it easier to access that content. And then organize with headings. And so you really-- if one person went through and looked at all the headings like Hadi might want to do to get-- he can tab through the headings. He can get that structure. So if you haven't looked at it through the lens of not being able to see your headings, you might come up with a better way to organize it for Hadi.
Simplify things, breaking down images. Also tables. Sometimes we have nested tables that are very complex. And ask yourself if you can break it down more into whether you have to have all of those things in there. And so that can benefit a lot of students.
And avoiding strict cameras-on policy. Being on a camera the whole time can be a little nerve-wracking for some of us. And I understand as an instructor, I always want to be able to see my audience. But because it creates anxiety, I will indicate my preference. And I say, well, if you're comfortable with it, I'd prefer that you stay-- you have your video on in the course, but don't require it.
Use clear instructions and expectations. That's probably the biggest complaint I hear from students when they're talking about difficulties in learning in their classes. And so really looking for those instructions.
When I have instructions in my class, I think they're pretty clear. But every time I get a student questioning the instructions, I always pause and try to understand why they were confused by them. And almost always, I'll think of a way to reword those instructions a little bit better so other people won't have that same problem in understanding them.
And also, the expectations. You're asking your students to do x, y, and z. What are your expectations about that? I have the students in the course at City University of New York. It's a course on universal design in higher education for disability studies majors. And there are-- one section is on technology. It's just one section, because I cover a lot of other things.
And I want them to know something about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. But it's not a technical course, and so I tell them, go to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines at this URL and spend at least 20 minutes and look for these things, and then there'll be a discussion after that. And so it's very-- my expectations are clear. Rather than just send them out to this very technical set of guidelines, I tell them what my expectation is.
Providing adequate time for practice and activities. One way I provide some extra time is I give in the syllabus a description of all of the assignments in the class, even the final project due on the last day.
Now, I encourage my students not to get overwhelmed by all this, but to look at it as a way that they can look ahead and see what the assignments are going to be, and maybe get started early if they anticipate they're going to be gone on vacation or they're just going to take a lot of time. Thinking about the final project you're going to do when you get started in class and think, oh, here's an idea I came up with earlier in the class. And then giving feedback on parts of large assignments and corrective opportunities so the student doesn't get too far down the path, and then it's not even meeting the requirements for your assignment.
Use a small number of technology tools. If you're like me, I find these new tools and I think, oh, this is so cool! But really think seriously about whether you're going to use them in that class. I have stuck to-- both the classes I teach now at these two institutions, I stick to the technology that is supported by the learning management system and add-ons the university provides so that students don't have to learn something new.
And that can be difficult for students with disabilities. Often, new technologies, especially smallish products, are not fully accessible, and so you avoid any problems. But basically, it's just eliminating the confusion by having a lot of technology they have to learn.
Avoiding PDFs. I use no PDFs in my class, and I don't miss using them. Sometimes I'll use PDFs-- I'll have students link to them, of course. And I'll check to see if they're accessible, and sometimes they're not. But I've been pretty impressed with the number of PDFs that I find that do have an accessible format. If you search around on the internet a little bit, you might be able to find an accessible one.
If you can't link all of your PDFs to accessible ones, at least avoid inaccessible PDFs your first week of school so students that need alternative text can make arrangements to that office. Because that office will look at your course and look ahead and make things accessible to them. Particularly when you're thinking about the syllabus, make sure your syllabus is accessible.
The way I make it accessible is I put it in the learning-- I develop it in Word, and then I cut and paste it into the learning management module page, the page that they're going to read. Because that's an HTML, and that's the most accessible way to deliver it.
But I provide an attached version in Word. The reason I do that is I tell the students to take this syllabus and edit it for your own use. There's some information about resources on campus. You maybe don't need that in your syllabus anymore. I have the deadlines for things when they're due. You might want to make a little timeline for yourself on how you're going to make that deadline. So I want them to have that, download it to their desktop.
And use small number of technology tools. I already had that. Avoid the-- OK. [LAUGHS] Accessible HTML in content pages. And now the last one here is use descriptive wording for hyperlinks for alternative text and images.
So the most common thing I see in looking at learning management pages that instructors have developed or websites in general is they'll have the practice of taking their hyperlinks and making them all click here, click here, click here, or something like that. Looks kind of nice on the screen.
But Hadi's screen reader can read through and tab through all of the hyperlinks on the page. So when he goes to a web page, he can skim through and see what the web page is connecting to, because it'll say, do it, website. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, descriptive text. And so he knows whether he wants to go there.
If a person has put "click here" for all the descriptive text, then his screen reader reads to him, click here, click here, click here. And he has to go back and read the surrounding text in order to access-- to decide if he wants to access that particular link, what's at the end of that link.
And alternative text then for images. Again, that'll help Hadi. In these days, like in Microsoft Word, it creates using AI a descriptive text for the images, but you can't rely on them. They're your rough draft, because you want to describe in your alternative text the context of your course. What does that person need to know what's in there? Where computer-generated, they don't know what the context is, and so you really want to go back and edit those. I'm happy that they have that feature, though, the automatic captions, because a lot of people don't caption their images, and so at least they're getting something.
I like this cartoon. And it shows-- reminds me of Minnesota. And it shows a man that's shoveling the stairway into a building, and there's a ramp just on the left side of that. And so what is happening here?
The person towards the left part of the screen is in a wheelchair. And he said, could you please shovel the ramp? And the person shoveling said, well, all these other kids are waiting to use the stairs. When I get through shoveling them, then I'll clear the ramp for you. And the person in the wheelchair said, but if you shovel the ramp, we can all get in.
So the person who's in the wheelchair is talking about universal design. Let's take the entrance that's most accessible and worry about that. Whereas the person shoveling is thinking about accommodations. Oh, people with disabilities, they need this special thing, and so I'll do that special thing after I've done this general thing. So anyway, that kind of says it all about universal design.
So when you think about universal design, you can think of it as an attitude. And the attitude is just basically, I'm trying to make my class as inclusive as possible. I'm not maybe doing everything all at once, but every accessible practice that I'm employing, it's making it better.
It's a framework. I started to share that framework with you. It's a goal that you'll probably never possibly reach. There'll still be people that need an accommodation. I have to say, in my classes, the only accommodation students need is for extra time. I try to build in extra time for other students as well. And if I do that, then it's not an accommodation. It's for everyone. But sometimes they want more time, and so that's an accommodation.
And so it is because they have a health impairment, or whatever. But documents are all accessible. Videos are captioned. My assignments-- each assignment is made accessible like the one I pointed out to you.
So universal design also promotes best practices. It's not about lowering your standards. It's just making it inclusive of everyone, leveling the playing field. It's proactive-- you're thinking ahead-- and can be implemented incrementally so you don't have to do everything all at once.
It benefits everyone. At least, it's designed to do that. And leads to legal compliance and more. So universal design goes beyond your legal obligations to be thinking about other characteristics people have.
For instance, color blindness. That's not a disability. But making sure that your colors that you're using are-- if they're there-- that you don't require a person can distinguish between two colors is an important practice in universal design.
And so you'll find other things that can benefit people that have a low reading level, but they don't have a disability. Goes back to that double arrowed image that I gave you in thinking of ability. We all have this range in abilities rather than just the disability.
And it minimizes the need for accommodations. Don't forget accommodations. People still may need an accommodation. And then you just make sure you're ready to provide it. Even if you know that there are some students that aren't going to be able to access that PDF, making sure that you're ready to make sure that they can get the accommodations they need.
So let's go back to the title of today's talk about making your courses accessible and compliant. And so what did we learn, just as a little recap here? Well, compliance. What do I mean by that? To me, that means that you're compliant with the Section 508 and ADA laws.
Luckily now, you can measure your compliance because you have standards. And that's the Department of Justice rule that points to WCAG 2.1 AA as your standard. And then be sure that you're also providing additional reasonable accommodations when needed.
So what about the accessible part, the first word in my talk title? Well, accessible, I put this in quotation marks because it can be used in different ways. But when I'm using the word accessible, I'm thinking about making it technically accessible to the four people and others that have disabilities, that slide from a while back.
But I think we need to go beyond accessibility and make the course usable. And so it's not just technically accessible, but it really is usable. It's usable for everyone. So keep making your courses well organized, and chunking things up, and having headings, and so forth, that makes it usable.
And then inclusive. And so I do as much as possible to create my courses to be inclusive. I don't have-- well, oh, if somebody's blind in my course, I'll give them an accommodation. I try to think, how can I make this assignment fully accessible to a person who's blind? And that's what we mean by universal design, actually. So it's universally designed. So I suggest making your course universally designed, and then be compliant along the way.
So I'll go back to one of my original slides, that ideally any course you're teaching, anyone who meets the requirements with or without accommodations is encouraged to attend. If you have publicity for your presentation or your course you're teaching, to make that seem like they're welcome, put on there if you need an accommodation, content, whatever. So that's clear that you expect people with disabilities to attend your offering. They should feel welcome and be fully engaged in accessible, usable, and inclusive activities, in other words, universally designed.
So I promised you some resources, and so here they are. And you'll get the URLs in the slides. But the University of Washington Center for Universal Design in Education, that goes into this framework. And I put up the UW Accessible Technology website. There are many around the country. You might have them on your own campus, but that's one that you can really count on. And then I put an image of my book, Creating Inclusive Learning Opportunities in Higher Education, A Universal Design Toolkit. So I have my email addresses again there. So do we have any questions and-- have any questions come up?
NOAH PEARSON: Yes, we did get some questions. We just have a few minutes left here, so we may be only able to get to one, but this is a good one. What are your recommendations for getting faculty support in adopting accessibility best practices?
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: Oh, that's a tough one. Getting them adopted? I think, number one, provide resources. And number two, present some tips like I've been talking about today, and encourage them to implement them gradually.
By resources, what some of our departments have done is business school, they caption all the videos for faculty. So you know now today, you need to have them accurately captioned. It doesn't necessarily mean you need to do it. And the School of Social Work, they will remediate all their documents for the faculty before they-- it's not a disability services thing. It's just that they will remediate them. So look at resources you can provide, and try to create a situation where you can just get them to maybe take one or two things to work on per semester or quarter.
NOAH PEARSON: Awesome. Let's see. It looks like we have time for one more quick question here. What are the most common accessibility issues you see tied specifically to LMS tools or third-party platforms? And how should we vet tools before adoption?
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: Ah. OK, learning management tools used to be a big deal. We spent a lot of time working with these vendors years ago. But now the ones that are commonly used are accessible very well as far as accessibility, so you can find that.
It's the other tools that you might want to do as add-ons that you can't count on. First of all, take a look at their website. If they're not bragging about their accessibility, they haven't thought about accessibility, so forget it.
[LAUGHTER]
Also, you can email them or otherwise contact them to ask them about accessibility. Again, they should be versed in that. And then you might find on campus you have some technology, like we do here on our campus, and technology experts can do the testing.
NOAH PEARSON: Awesome. Amazing. Well, that is all the time we have for today. Big thanks to Cheryl for sharing such great information with us. And thank you for our audience for joining in, asking questions, and sharing some great information in the chat as well. If you'd like to continue learning about accessibility and disability inclusion, definitely check out our resource library. Thanks again, and I hope everyone has a great rest of their day.
