Speaker 1: This video on accessibility considerations for distance and online learners was created to help assist you into your journey in distance and online learning. It's important to start with the idea that nothing is perfectly accessible, so we try to get at what we can that will support the most learners. We want to design for accessibility from the start, because that way we don't have to continually go back and fix things up upon request, or when we find out that maybe we did something that we shouldn't have, and then it needs to be revised. Designing for accessibility from the start helps save time, and as you'll see, it's actually better for all of the learners in your course. You may find that designing for accessibility ends up solving a number of the issues that you were having previously, so if you didn't know what to do before, you will very soon. Accessibility isn't just for students with disabilities, it's actually for all learners, and will help to improve your learning outcomes. As we design for accessibility, we want to provide students with disabilities the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, enjoy the same services as students without disabilities, with substantially equivalent ease of use. POUR stands for Perceivable, giving students the ability to see and hear what is there. Operable, the ability to interact with what is there. Understandable, making sure that the language is clear and easy to follow. And robust, works with all devices. Keeping these POUR principles in mind will help all of your learners engage with your materials. Check the resources in this slideshow to find more in-depth information on the POUR principles. Aside from what you may think of as a typical learner, there's actually a large diversity of needs that exist across the learning community. You want to be able to address learners who struggle with learning disabilities, visual impairment, hearing impairments, mobility issues, neurodiversity, and mental health. Designing for accessibility helps you reach all of these categories. So aside from the fact that it's the law to design for accessibility and make all of your content accessible and avoid lawsuits, it is less work from the start, saving you time. Keep in mind that empowerment begins with inclusion. Creating accessible learning environments inspire confidence and encourages independence. It is important to recognize that students would rather go without than stand out. Many students won't ask a question, they won't ask for help, if they think it's going to make them stand out in a group of learners. They'll often do without and struggle with the material and perhaps even avoid it altogether. Designing for accessibility helps make sure that these learners are included from the start. For educators, the advantages of designing accessible learning materials improve student learning, reduces the work associated with arranging individual and specialized accommodations — more on that later — and may improve student engagement as it reaches a broader audience. Students benefit by having less time spent on figuring out individual accommodations and more time focusing on your content. I would always rather have students spending their time in my course engaging with the materials instead of figuring out how to access them. Students are more likely to stick with a course when the materials include them and are easy for them to access. When learners see accessible learning materials, they know that they've been included from the start and that it's not some accommodation that was created for them because that they are different. So what are the characteristics of accessible education? It isn't just about students with disabilities, we want to take into account a variety of student characteristics. Making accessible content and making accommodations does not compromise the academic rigor. This is about a proactive and inclusive way of teaching your courses. You're removing barriers to learning before they can actually affect anyone, but reducing the need for specialized accommodations. You'll see more on that later as well. It also helps you maintain focus. It identifies and clearly expresses the essential course content. It's consistent with universally recognized principles of good teaching. We'll take some time now and focus on some specific aspects that can help you deal with visual impairment. If you'd like to know what it's like, try to open up a new browser tab and navigate to your course materials. Turn on the screen reader, if you know how, and navigate through your course that way. Were you able to find everything? Millions in the United States are blind or visually impaired. Nearly half a million of these individuals are of school age, making it everyone's responsibility. This is more than just an issue for the blind and visually impaired. Historically, we've relied on BVI specialists to help make our courses accessible to students. We'll have them take our paper materials and put them into accessible files, or have a braillist transcribe them for us. Using content in a digital curriculum or a learning management system has often complicated the issue. It seems counterintuitive. We'll talk about why in just a minute. In the district I work in, we had a BVI specialist supporting a student in a district where she was customizing around 40 inaccessible files per week. That was time taken away from actually interacting with the student and teaching her the skills that she needed. A lot of that time would have been better spent working with the student, teaching her how to access the material, what to do with it based on assignment requirements. But updating file types then that ultimately don't go in and get replaced to make the courses better moving forward, it just seems like a lot of wasted time and effort. Making sure that students can navigate consistently throughout a course is also an accessibility issue. If a student has six or seven courses in a day, even if the teachers are using the same learning management system, that might mean that things are still left up to teacher presence in terms of how they set up their course. We want to make sure that the navigation pathway is consistent throughout all of a student's courses in a day. That reduces the amount of cognitive load on that student and allows them to navigate the same way they would in any of their classes. When we're using images in courses, we want to make sure that we are providing sufficient alternative text. Alt text should be used when an image is conveying information. So if you're just using an icon or something decorative, we don't want to give it alt text because that just adds more work for the end user. Using a screen reader and then having it stop to describe a decorative image that isn't actually teaching anything, it's kind of a waste of time. So then we would use something called a null tag. There may be some challenges when it comes to describing things like charts and graphs or math equations, but we do provide support for that as well and have an additional slideshow walking you through what some of those items might look like. The description must be sufficient to convey the same amount of information as someone would get just looking at that item. Infographics can be great and convey a lot of information, but the fact that so many of them are just screenshots of text makes them challenging to use in an online environment. So feel free to use them. You just want to make sure that the information that they are presenting also appears somewhere else within that page or in that course. They could be considered supplemental resources. Or teaching students how to use applications like OneNote allows the user to take a little bit more control over their own learning experience. Those pictures of text or equations can be pasted into OneNote, which can then use their immersive reader tool. When you're looking for a way to include alt text, each application that you use might have a separate method for doing that. In a Google Doc, for instance, you can right click on the image and select Alt Text from the menu. Then you can add your description. If you're adding it into an application like Moodle, there's an option to check in a box if the description is not necessary, if the item is simply decorative. That will insert the null tag for you. Additionally, providing the description right inside the editor makes it easier for those who don't want to mess around with HTML settings. When you're looking to enhance the user experience using a learning management system, that's great. But consider what this looks like for the end users. We talked about what it would be like navigating through a course, even within the same platform, if you have six or seven courses and each teacher has a different preference for how they organize their materials. You want to get together with the people in your program or district and make sure that you're consistent in your layout, making sure that file names are descriptive, making sure the navigation is the same, making sure that you're naming conventions for your pages and assignments and the process for which students submit is all similarly equivalent. If you're in a program that's using multiple files, even making sure that the file design themselves is consistent. This means that users can spend time working with the content itself and not figuring out how it was set up and how they can best access it. For a long time, tech integrationists have been out there recommending tools for teachers to use that would be fun and engaging for students. I myself was part of this problem. What we would do is find these amazing new Web 2.0 tools, push them out to teachers without any consideration for the accessibility features. This caused a massive wave of development in content that is no longer suitable for all learners. So when you're looking to incorporate a new tool, who is the one suggesting the tools? If it's a vendor, have you asked for a demonstration of accessibility features? One of the interesting things that I've seen is that if you ask a vendor during a sales pitch if their materials are accessible, they all say, of course they are, that's the law, that's how we do things. But asking for a demonstration of accessibility features yields somewhat of a different response. They'll often hum or haw and say something like, we'll get back to you on that, and they'll need one of their accessibility employees to come on and provide a demonstration of those features or to show you where they fall short and what they're currently working on. Holding them accountable before you purchase their products is a good way to ensure that your materials will be available for all learners. Think about the problem that you're trying to solve with the new tool that you might be using. What are we asking students to do versus what we want or need them to do? If too much of that answer has to do with how they get to the thing itself, we might want to select a different tool or simplify the approach. If you're using a learning management system like Moodle, there are accessibility features that are embedded right into the editor itself for you to do some checking. You may also have the ability to customize roles and features based on individual student need. Those are things you'll want to ask your learning management system administrator about so that you can utilize all of the features effectively. For instance, if you're using Moodle, consider displaying only one topic section per page. This cuts down on the number of links that users have to go through to get to content. If they're in a semester course and all of the topics are listed out for the entire class, that's potentially over a hundred times a user's going to have to hit tab to get to where they left off. If we do it like this, where the topics display in a condensed summary, there's far less tabbing they'll have to do to get to where they left off. We want to use role customizations and permissions to support learners. For instance, we have roles for students that will ignore time limits on quizzes if that's something that's written into their IEP or 504 plan. We can change group or grouping settings to allow access to support materials that other students may not need to use. If you're teaching a course synchronously where all your users are at the same place at the same time, consider moving your topic blocks that are the current ones up to the top of the course. That's less work for the user to try to get to where they need. And instead of uploading files for users to download and then access and do something with, could it be something that's just sitting within the learning management system itself? Copying and pasting those resources or embedding videos and audio keeps the user in one place and makes things a lot more efficient. I mentioned that Moodle has some accessibility options right in the editor itself, so you can check on those and see if the content you've uploaded for your course is suitable. There may be a lot of unnecessary items in a course or options for users. We can eliminate those from even showing up on a user's experience if we just simply edit the permissions or visibility settings. There's no reason to show people more than they're going to need. Using proper naming conventions will help users navigate through courses and know where they've left off. We've done a significant amount of work creating some presets and styles for things like columns on pages so that we can break up the text. Or if we want to make an accessible table, not using tables for design but to display information and data, these table presets allow you to start with a table that's going to be accessible from the start with proper row headers or column headers or both. Or simply paste in your data into the accessible table where it belongs. Here's a reason why you might want to think about using something like a column preset in Moodle. Wide blocks of text can be difficult for users to read. It can often be difficult for your eyeballs to track from one line to the next if they're moving across the screen. We want to shrink the width of the text so that it's faster and easier for students to read. So just with a simple HTML tweak, we can condense that into something that is a little bit more readable into an optimal line width. If you're using Moodle and one of our presets, simply choose the template for columns and paste in your text and it will look more like this. When you're uploading content to your courses, make sure that you're providing sufficient context to the link so that the learners know what they're supposed to do when they get there. We don't just want to give them a list of items to access and then figure out what they're supposed to do with them. Classroom teachers are great at providing context just by default. They're always talking about what the learners are going to be doing as they're accessing. For some reason, when we put our materials into a digital format in a learning management system, sometimes that additional context is what gets left out. I recently saw an example where a 7th grade science teacher was linking to a primary source document that was a study on genetics. When I clicked on the link, I noticed, aside from the fact that there was no additional context, that you would need to be working on a graduate degree in genetics to be able to understand most of the vocabulary in that document. It's not really realistic to expect 7th grade students to go there and review the document for any kind of information. Let's be realistic about what kinds of primary sources we need our students to be accessing. When we look to upload files to our courses, make sure that the file names are descriptive so that the users know what they're getting and can find it easily on their devices. Sometimes teachers will want to use webquests in their courses, but that means providing sufficient descriptions for how they're supposed to navigate through those materials. Some of them might have different tabs and features for navigation. A user might not necessarily know that a tab called Video or a tab called Audio might take them to completely different content instead of just providing video and audio versions of the text they had just read. Students will miss out on a lot of additional information if they're not clear on what they're supposed to do from the start. If you're taking in assignments from your students and asking them to do peer editing, make sure you're teaching them proper so that they can start making accessible learning materials right from the start and not have to unlearn any of those habits later on. If you're like me, looking at this slide feels like somebody's screaming into your eyeballs. While I'd like to say that this kind of practice is uncommon, it really isn't. We see it more frequently than we would like. Providing sufficient color contrast, part of your instructional practice, will help assist your learners so that they won't be distracted by something that they can't see or something that looks annoying on the page into something that just is seamless with the rest of the material. Providing sufficient color contrast in your text and your backgrounds doesn't just assist users with blind or visual impairment issues or color blindness issues. It makes it easier to read for all learners. As more and more programs and teachers are turning to social media to connect with their students to create more of a social presence in the courses, it's important to know that those platforms as well have been adding accessibility features. By going into your Twitter account settings, you can check on accessibility and make sure you've enabled the check compose image description options. When you upload an image to a tweet, then you have a little more text you can work with to add a description for that image and make sure it's suitable for all learners. Here's an example from the Monterey Bay Aquarium where they're participating in a meme that was spreading around one day with their own content. You can see that they followed up their series of tweets with a description of what the tweets were conveying. This helps users who navigate through Twitter using screen readers. Facebook now also has more options to make their content more accessible. When you're uploading an image, make sure that you complete the extra step of clicking on edit to add your caption to that image. Facebook now also allows for dark mode and putting text in bold. When you're making a post to a page or a group, there are also some paragraph tags, header tags, list, and quote tags that you can add to your materials. This also aids in screen readers' ability to identify content for users and makes it clearer for all users to read. There are lots of steps to accessibility and making your content suitable for everyone. Let's just look at a few of those tips now. Making sure that your menus are more compact so that users can skip through items and get to main content quickly if they use something like keyboard navigation. Make sure materials can be available for offline use for users who may not have a connection. The use of a style guide is particularly important for consistency between classrooms and teachers. If you don't have the time to update your captions from an auto-captioning feature on something like Screencast-O-Matic or YouTube, you can use a service like Rev.com who will inexpensively provide you with a caption file for the video that you've shared with them. Making sure that you're using your text presets doesn't just help organize content but is also an important feature in accessibility for screen readers. You want to make sure not to skip heading levels just for the sake of design. Making sure that your descriptive links open in new tabs. That way when a user is done with that information and they click close on the tab, they haven't lost the place where they were in the course. While this is becoming less and less of an issue, we want to avoid proprietary types of file formats so that we can make sure that things are going to work for all users regardless of the device or the software that they use. If you're uploading your materials to something like Google Drive or YouTube, this is less of an issue because it will automatically display the material in the format best accessed by that device. And whenever possible, focus on that relentless pursuit of simplicity. We want to reduce the number of steps to access materials. Embedding if possible is best because that way there's no additional places or steps. Everything fits into where it is referred to and that is fewer chances for somebody to get stuck or into the wrong place. I do want to take a few minutes and talk about potential accommodations and modifications. While we list a lot of these resources on our website, it's important to know that doing a lot of these doesn't just support those students who have a particular need based on their IEP or 504, but again, this is good for all learners. So what are the needs? Let's take a few moments and consider what some of the most commonly requested accommodations are for students on IEP or 504 plans. So as you're thinking of those, we'll see if some of them may pop up on the screen while you're thinking of them. All of the features listed can be done from the start so that when a student comes in and has one of these needs, it's not really a big deal and you don't have anything to go back and fix because you've done all of that by default. And again, there's nothing on here that would be bad for any learner, even the ones that are already high performing who don't need any kind of assistive technology or device. When we look to improve all of our learning materials, we want to do things like making sure that we've broken up our content into distinct units of information. We're using appropriate heading levels, using bold or italics, not just decorating our lists to call them out, but making sure that we're using the appropriate presets and style guides to create these ordered lists. Clear specific directions is one of the best ways to make your content easier for students to access. And again, if a student isn't going to need something, they shouldn't have to see it. Make sure that your permissions allow students to only see the content that they're required to see. There are a wide range of additional resources for accessibility, suggestions, video tutorials, all linked in the slideshow. It can be overwhelming to look at them all. Try to focus on a few ideas that you might have that would immediately make some of your course materials more accessible. As always, reach out for help, focus on those few things that you can, add layer upon layer after time, and make sure that you're collaborating with others to make sure that we're meeting the needs of all of our learners.