Speaker 1: Hi, this is Rochelle Daniel, the Instructional Designer for Klamath Community College. And in today's presentation, we're going to be going over three topics, what accessibility is, why accessible design is important, and how we can improve course accessibility. So the first question is, what is accessibility? What that means is meeting the needs of all individuals through accessible design with specific consideration for people with disabilities. This is also going to involve minimizing potential barriers that may impair individuals' ability to access products, services, and or locations. The second question that we need to address is, why is accessible design important? Accessible design enables educators to minimize barriers for students and reduce the need for accommodations. Everyone benefits from accessible design. And for institutions that receive federal funding, it's the law. You can see Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act for more information. And please know that if accessible design is not possible for a course, just be prepared to make accommodations for students when appropriate. The third and final question is, how can we improve course accessibility? You can bring accessible course design to life with CPR. The C stands for Create With Intention. The P stands for Prioritize Revisions. And the R stands for Review With Others. An important reminder with this is that accessibility checker tools alone cannot ensure complete course accessibility. Some examples of this are language choices or organization techniques, which should be examined by individuals. Also, images with poor or inaccurate alternative text or that were incorrectly marked as decorative will not be flagged by accessibility checkers, however, they are still considered inaccessible. Lastly, captions or transcripts must be accurate and timed correctly, if applicable, to meet accessibility standards. To elaborate on the C in CPR, Create With Intention, when you create course content, you should be focused on how you can remove barriers to accessibility. Ask yourself questions like these. How would someone with vision or hearing impairments interact with what I created? How can I better serve a diverse population of students? You can also use templates to promote course organization and consistency. And remember, accessible designs take time, however, you will save time in the long term and create better content for students. The P in CPR stands for Prioritize Revisions, and really this has two different meanings. It's going to be focusing on continuous improvements, but also deciding on which revisions are most important. A challenge for this is to create a list of specific revisions and rank them in order of importance based on the presumed impact on student learning. You can then complete revisions in that order to stay focused. An example of this would be the first thing on your list being to replace all PDFs in a course that have text that cannot be selected or searched. You could then move on to creating closed captions or transcripts for all instructor-created videos and follow that up with adding appropriate and consistent headings to module introduction Finally, the R in CPR stands for Review with Others. Instructors, especially those who design their own courses, tend to be quite familiar with their course setup and content. As such, they may have expert blind spots or issues that are not clearly visible to them. To reduce blind spots, try this. Stop courses with another instructor, preferably one who is unfamiliar with your content, or request help from an instructional designer. Ask the individual to walk you through the course using a student's perspective. You could also request student feedback or perform a formal course review, for example, a quality matters structured review. There are several ways that you can minimize barriers to accessibility. Some examples include providing closed captions or transcripts for audio clips and videos, organizing course content clearly and consistently with headers, using appropriate color contrast for all content, writing clearly and using appropriate font size, formatting tables using captions and header rows or columns, ensuring that websites and learning management systems used in the course are accessible, providing alternative text for images or marking them decorative when appropriate, and allowing students to access all materials electronically rather than only hard copies. Thank you for watching my presentation. Here are a list of references that were used to create the presentation. For more information, please feel free to contact the Klamath Community College Center for Teaching and Learning. Thank you.