Marking the most recent Global Accessibility Awareness Day, it’s important to remember the benefits of more accessible spaces often ripple out much further than originally imagined. Watch foot traffic for a moment next time you’re sitting at a coffee shop. Parents pushing strollers, workers delivering supplies on a hand truck, children riding scooters. They all are benefiting from safer and more usable spaces. The Americans with Disabilities Act prohibited discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, prompting municipalities to incorporate accessible design features. The same is true on campus and in digital classrooms.
More accessible content is more inclusive, empowering every learner to use content in a way that fits their preferences and helps them meet their own goals. The benefits of digital content designed to be inclusive are as clear as they are far-reaching. As those engaged in this work on campuses around the world do too, that it’s a journey. The team at the University of North Dakota has compiled a few key lessons learned to help other institutions.
“All of the above” engagement strategy
The University of North Dakota is engaging students, faculty, and campus leaders across multiple fronts, both from the top down and the bottom up. It has connected with faculty and staff groups, college deans, and department chairs to help build awareness. A campus-wide book read on Academic Ableism with a kick-off event, small group discussions and a panel discussion generated a lot of thought-provoking conversations about accessibility around campus. In March, UND Today detailed how UND teams are joining forces to engage the entire campus community in making campus more inclusive for all.
Broad awareness matters. At a recent Department Chair’s leadership meeting, the ability to share department-wide accessibility scores and methods from our accessibility solution Anthology Ally to incorporate accessible content development were discussed. After the meeting, two chairs requested analytics from the solution for their departments and sought advice on ways to improve their content. Similarly, a department embarked on a widescale review of their content after a student with disabilities requested accommodations through UND’s Disability Services for Students office. Instructional Designers and DSS staff visited with department faculty to create awareness, share strategies, and offer support. While this started initially as a reaction to a need, it also motivated instructors to be proactive while building accessibility into their course content moving forward. Building these relationships with faculty helps drive awareness and cultivate accessibility champions who can motivate and encourage other instructors. These relationships provide a critical stepping stone in making progress and expanding reach.
UND’s Campus Accessibility Working Group is comprised of students, faculty, and staff from across campus and has been instrumental in drafting a digital accessibility policy for the campus. Digital accessibility is just one piece of the puzzle and the working group’s focus has expanded to a much broader scope, including physical accessibility, assistive technology, employee education on best practices, and universal design for learning.
Technology and digital environments have changed immensely over the years and will continue to be even more central to creating an accessible and inclusive environment. UND is in the process of expanding opportunities for employee education about accessibility best practices. With a vision of advancing an equitable culture of academic excellence, our Teaching Transformation and Development Academy (TTaDA) has developed workshops on Universal Design in Learning, general accessibility and the differences between accessibility and accommodations, and ways to make course documents more accessible.
For example, a workshop for the Political Science Department focused on using the university’s accessibility solution to identify the overall accessibility of courses and to identify and remediate common accessibility issues in course documents. Additionally, leadership at the university is also working on revamping our accessibility website to make it more navigable and provide more effective tutorials to help faculty and staff improve their digital accessibility.
The university also experienced a surge in campus construction projects, both new buildings and renovations, our facilities departments have been more intentional in designing for accessibility as well. Staff from Disability Services for Students and the ADA Coordinator’s office are consulted to choose finishings and furniture that are accessible for a wide range of people.
Go everywhere, support everyone
Being present for instructors and providing the support they need to make progress along their own accessibility journey takes many forms, large and small. We have extensive resources available online for instructors to improve their understanding of Universal Design in Learning, tools such as our accessibility solution and screen readers to help identify accessibility challenges to correct them. Anthology Ally is integrated with Blackboard Learn, our Learning Management System, providing real-time guidance to our instructors to identify and improve the accessibility of course content.
Having the resources is one thing, using them is another. Breaking down technological hurdles for instructors is essential. We are currently creating an accessibility lab, where instructors can bring their questions and material for one-on-one support with accessibility experts and instructional designers as well as use computers with Adobe Acrobat Pro installed. Providing as many doors in as possible is crucial.
The impact
Sometimes it can be hard to see how progress along this journey is moving the needle, but the payoff is happening all around us. UND’s self-paced enroll-anytime online courses have a requirement that instructors meet with the program coordinator and instructional designer before any development work begins on a new course. Creating accessible courses and utilizing universal design practices are two main themes in the initial development meeting. The quality and accessibility of these self-paced online courses are impacting teaching and learning across campus. For example, a student who primarily takes enroll-anytime courses and is also a member of the Senate Online & Distance Education Committee advocated for all courses at UND to follow this same process for quality and accessibility. As a result, one of the largest colleges (Arts & Sciences) now includes course accessibility as part of the faculty review process.
In the classroom, when instructors are proactively incorporating inclusive design into their courses –making PowerPoint slides accessible so students can more easily take notes or providing videos with captions – learners can more easily engage with the content, their peers, and the course. This high-level engagement pays off as it motivates everyone to keep moving forward. And we see that mentality emerging around us. During an accessibility panel discussion, faculty noted how incorporating more accessible content improved their learners’ engagement and understanding. According to instructional designers within the TTaDA, this is a big milestone. We frequently heard responses from faculty like, “I don’t have any DSS accommodations in my course this semester, so I don’t need to worry about that now,” or “our program doesn’t have deaf students, so my videos don’t need to be captioned.” We don’t hear that from faculty anymore. They have begun to recognize that Universal Design in Learning and creating accessible courses/content from the beginning benefits all students.
Ultimately shaping a more inclusive campus is a shared responsibility, extending to every person. The work to move institutions forward along the digital accessibility journey is critical work that is improving the experience of far more students than any of us may even know.
Contributing to this article were: Donna Smith, Assistant Vice President for Equal Opportunity and Title IX at UND; Dr. Sara Kaiser, Director of the Office of Student Rights and Responsibilities and Disability Services for Students at UND; Dr. Beth Valentine, Equity Compliance and Education Manager for Equal Opportunity and Title IX at UND; Diane Lundeen, Academic Application Administrator and Learning Space Coordinator at UND; Dr. Kristi Embry, Senior Instructional Designer at UND; Dr. Elizabeth Becker, Instructional Design Coordinator at UND; Catherine Olson, Self-Paced Enroll Anytime Coordinator at UND; and Dara Faul,Associate Director with TTaDA.