Starting with Accessibility: Reflections from an Online Math Instructor

Image by Денис Марчук from Pixabay

Accessibility is an important part of teaching online and, at times, it can benefit students, as well as faculty.  Early on in my career at MiraCosta, I recall watching a colleague photocopy problems out of the book, cut the problems from printed pages with scissors, and tape them to a new piece of paper to create the problems. He would make a handwritten note or use whiteout to modify a problem. He had files of these tests in his office - decades worth. But he never used the same test twice and this process would continue every term. His process was time consuming and, at times, frustrating to students who struggled to read the problems. Imagine being able to save your own time and help students too! 

Most faculty use typed exams but may not spend time thinking about how these materials create challenges for some students. While it is common for math instructors to spend time adjusting font size, making itemized lists for parts of a problem, and producing handouts to increase understanding, it is less common that we think about students who rely on screen readers, accessible technology devices used by people with vision impairments.  

Many faculty also make videos for their students, even short videos like the one above. If posted to YouTube, the captions are created automatically – but be careful! Those captions are pretty good, but aren’t perfect. Imagine a video where you described a new algorithm for “sub track shin” or “Polly know meals”. If you’re a math teacher, the intent was ‘subtraction’ and ‘polynomials’ but those misconceptions will confuse students who are following the automatic captions. It is time well spent for all students to update the captions by adding punctuation, capitalization, and fixing these incorrect translations.  Learn how to edit your YouTube captions for accuracy (a 7-minute video by Katie Palacios). 

Making Accessibility Part of Your Course Content Workflow

In the video embedded above, which is just over 200 seconds, I share some quick tips to save you time while making documents, PDFs, or Canvas pages accessible to students who use screen readers. It takes a lot less time to format pages with lists automatically rather than typing them manually. I will also show how following accessibility guidelines helped when a student who was blind needed a Braille version of the course materials. We were able to provide this quickly and without much additional work (it even included Braille graphs) because the content was made with accessibility guidelines in mind. 

When We Empower Students to Become Experts

Join Chelsea on a tour of this assignment in the 4-minute video above.

How might you blend research, group work, video creation, and friends and family into an empowering and equitable learning experience for your students? In the 4-minute video below, Chelsea Cohen from Laney College, will show you!

Chelsea’s students, who are English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) learners, engage in a multi-stepped project, beautifully scaffolded into managing meaningful chunks. Each step of the way, students collaborate and increase their knowledge of a particular topic. Chelsea will demonstrate how extending discussions beyond the classroom or Canvas and into a students’ circle of family and friends can foster more diverse dialogue that situates a student as an expert. Can learning get more meaningful than this?

3 Steps to Becoming an Expert

  1. In groups, create a video using Adobe Spark based on your research paper.
  2. Share and discuss your video with friends and family (Extension: share the videos with your Twitter communities).
  3. Reflect upon the experience with your classmates in our class discussion. Summarize the ideas that came up with your friends and families and how it felt for you to facilitate the conversation.  

Accessibility tips! If you have a student in your class that uses a screen reader to navigate the web, you will need to provide an alternative to Adobe Spark Video. Also, if you have a student with a hearing impairment, have at least a few students caption their videos before sharing them with the class. To caption an Adobe Spark Video, download it from Spark, upload it into YouTube, and edit the auto-captions.

We suggest surveying your students in week one to let them know about your multimedia project plans and ask if they will need any accommodations. They'll appreciate your efforts to support them!

Making Your Tables Accessible--In 15 Seconds (or Less)

Tables can be a useful way to organize certain types of content visually. But tables add an extra layer of complexity for students using a screen reader device which means it’s imperative your tables are formatted properly. Never fear! The Canvas Accessibility Checker is here to save the day.

When We Talk About Accessibility

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When you hear about accessibility, what comes to mind? In community colleges, do we think of accessibility as a core individual value, a fundamental aspect of how we enact our roles as educators? We take pride in being the people’s college, democracy’s college. We can more closely approach this ideal if we embrace accessibility as a core component of what we do individually.

Be honest, though. When you hear about accessibility, odds are that you think of legal requirements: format your syllabus with styles, add alt text to images, caption your videos.

Of course, this view of accessibility focuses on designing our classes so that all students can learn, including those with disabilities. If you take the @ONE course, Creating Accessible Course Content, you’ll learn that accessibility “refers to the ability of everyone, regardless of disability or special needs, to access, use, and benefit from everything in their environment.”

Sure, accessibility is important because it’s the law and because of the numbers: in US higher education, the percentage of students who report having a disability is 11%. In the California Community Colleges, just under 5% of the student population registers with disability services.

However, accessibility is more than a set of legal requirements and statistics. Accessible means something that is easily reachable, approachable, or understandable, something that affords access.

Community colleges pride themselves on being open access institutions, with no admissions requirements. Mission statements refer to serving “all who can benefit,” or “our entire community,” or “learners everywhere.” By design, we provide access to the top 100%.

We also find access used by research institutions, for example to describe Open Access publishing. Open Access describes the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Many leading institutions choose Open Access to share research with the public, for example, the University of California and Harvard University.

Online educators talk about learning anytime, anywhere. If you walk the halls of the Online Teaching Conference, or browse the forums of an introduction to online teaching class, you’ll hear people proclaim that online classes might be the only way for some people to access higher education. It’s a joy to discover that you’re teaching someone who would never have been in your physical classroom – a single parent who works the night shift, or an active duty service member. In this way, we expand access to our teaching beyond the walls of our campuses, by design.

Nevertheless, I’ve seen exclusion, if not by design, then by omission. I’ve been a part of more than one conference planning session that goes like this: “We should have sessions about accessibility,” one person offers. “Of course we should, but nobody ever comes to those sessions.” In different venues, I’ve heard it said that a college doesn’t intend to discriminate against those with disabilities—but why doesn’t anyone tell the college how to achieve this mysterious state of accessibility? Also, I know social justice crusaders who connect virtually with fellow crusaders, but who choose a communication tool that excludes those with visual or hearing impairments.

Turning back to our own choices as educators, how do we intentionally make accessibility a default choice? The next time you attend a discussion of student equity or guided pathways, recall that Title 5 tells us one of the groups that must be a focus of our student equity efforts is the disabled. Have we invited everyone to the table? When we discuss equity, diversity, and inclusion, do we choose to see, let alone include, the 5% of our students who identify as disabled?

When we talk about accessibility, we’re talking about more than regulations and statistics. We’re talking about our choices to exclude or include, to deny or provide access, to divide or unify. We can come closer to our shared ideal of open access education by design.

Resources

Check Your Links!

Hate getting messages from students about broken links in your course? With Canvas’ link validator tool, you can verify what’s working and what’s not before you publish your course each term. It’s a great way to save time now and headaches later. Very nifty!

Drinking From the Fire Hose… Or Making it Real: In Support of Accessibility in Online Education

Hello! We are Liezl Madrona and Jayme Johnson, and we support faculty with accessibility in the Online Education Initiative. We are happy to bring you the first in an ongoing series of blog posts about accessibility in online education. It is our hope to build awareness and provide support so that all students can benefit from online instructional technologies.

Where to Begin?

The question of accessibility in online education brings up so many different issues and concerns that it can be a bit difficult to know where to begin. Whether you're a content creator seeking guidance or you're an accessibility specialist trying to provide guidance, the number of different considerations surrounding accessibility in online education can be overwhelming. However, there is good news in that we are not alone, and that there are growing numbers of people learning ever more about accessibility and usability. With this increase of interest comes greater understanding and more helpful resources for everyone.

'tis the Season for Captioning!

While the holiday season is upon us, we also know many faculty are working on their online courses, adding content and making adjustments based on their experiences in this last term. This is a great time to create your welcome videos for the new term, to curate and create new instructional videos, and to get them all captioned for your incoming students.

Here are some other incredibly helpful resources to support your accessibility needs:

 

In our work with the Online Education Initiative there is one common necessity that drives our efforts - the ultimate usability of the information and resources we provide. We appreciate your attention and effort, and it is our sincere hope that we can assist you in your efforts to ensure that all students have the same opportunity to benefit from online education. Please follow our blog for more accessibility support, updates, and news!

Thank You!

Liezl & Jayme

Video Captioning Conundrum

Captioning instructional videos can be a time-consuming process.  But it doesn't have to be! Here are a couple of "What if..." scenarios with some solutions to help you create an inclusive learning environment.

What if I...need a YouTube video captioned that is not mine?

  1. First try contacting the author who posted the video via the Comment section in YouTube. (Note: You may not receive an answer quickly or none at all, but being able to edit the existing captions would be the path of least resistance! Also - we know the link below is non-descriptive, unfortunately YouTube captions do not allow us to hyperlink. Also, make sure the link below if updated and working before using as YouTube may update their resources.) You may want to adapt this template: “Hi, thanks for posting this video! I’ve been using this in my ____ class, and for educational purposes, we’d like to provide captions to create an inclusive environment for all students. Do you have a captioned version of this video? If not, may my institution caption this video? To help our students out, you can easily turn on community-captioning contributions: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6052538?hl=en  Thank you and hope to hear back soon!”
  2. Use Amara to caption the videos.

What if I...need a video captioned that I created?

  1. If the course is part of the California Community College system, faculty-created videos used for instructional purposes can be uploaded to 3C Media Solutions to be captioned for free! All you need to do is create a free account to get started.
  2. Is the video short, and are you feeling proactive? YouTube has a couple of features that can help:
    • Have YouTube auto-generate captions to get you started. However, you must check captions for accuracy, and add in punctuation. Click here to learn how to edit auto-generated captions in YouTube.
    • Have a script of your video? You can copy and paste your script into the caption editor in YouTube, and YouTube will time-sync your words to your video in the form of closed-captions. 
  3. Amara offers a crowd-sourced solution that you may use to create captions and a transcript.

Hopefully these solutions can help you as you curate new (or have existing) instructional videos that need captioning. What are some other resources or strategies you use to help you caption your videos? Please let share your experiences and resources! We're interested to learn how you caption your videos!

Accessibil-IT: Who Wants Free and Personalized Accessibility Support?

Accessibility Help Desk website screenshot

 

If you said, “I do!” Sean Keegan, Director of the California Community Colleges Accessibility Center, and his team can help. Implementing accessibility can be a bit difficult sometimes. Keegan elaborates in his TechEdge blog, “Changes in technology capabilities, including that of assistive technologies for students with disabilities, can create confusion and uncertainty as to what is considered accessible or the best practice for ensuring access.” Fortunately, the California Community Colleges (CCC) Accessibility Center launched the Accessibility Center Help Desk in October. Help is here!

 

What Type of Accessibility Questions May I Ask?

The Accessibility Center Help Desk can answer accessibility questions such as:

 

How Can I Get Started?

To get started, users need to sign in to post questions. To register, you may create a new account, or use an existing Google or Facebook account. When you join, you receive the benefit of joining a community of learners who are just as committed as you are! Learning in isolation is difficult, and takes a tremendous amount of dedication and time (something we all have limited of!) Learning in a community is much easier, especially when it is your first time taking a deep dive into implementing accessibility. You can learn and share strategies to address accessibility in different scenarios, and have meaningful discussions with others.

 

Help! I Need Somebody

Help is in the form of a community-based forum that allows you to ask questions publicly, or privately by checking the “Post this Conversation Privately” option. The conversations are monitored regularly, which is helpful when you need assistance. Once answers are posted, you will conveniently receive an email notification. No need to wait on the phone or follow-up via email, your answer will be automatically delivered into your mailbox. In addition to the convenience, you receive support straight from an accessibility specialist versus searching the web for the answer!

 

Learning More Via Browsing the Conversations for Answers

Is there a question you would also like to know the answer to, but it is still awaiting a reply from an Accessibility Expert? Use the Follow button, and this will notify you of any updates via email. Curious to learn more about strategies to implement accessibility? You can subscribe to the Help Desk to receive newly asked questions and updates.

Example screenshot of question asked in Conversation.

Learning how to apply accessibility elements such how to effectively describe images with alt text is like driving a car for the first time. Initially, it may be overwhelming as there are new ways to format your document or Canvas content page. With practice, time, and gaining additional knowledge, accessibility becomes easier to apply. When I was initially learning more about accessibility, I spent a lot of time researching. I browsed articles and forums, watched many videos, and taught myself how to use several screen-readers. Luckily, learning more about accessibility is a lot easier as faculty now have this convenient resource to provide prompt and helpful answers.

Take advantage of this free resource!

For more information, read Sean Keegan’s Accessibil-IT: Get Help From Accessibility Help Desk.

One More Canvas Tool to Make Your Life Easier: Accessibility Checker!

Good News

Spring is around the corner and you are developing your course. Need something to speed up course design and improve the student usability experience in Canvas? Here’s a nifty tool to help create an inclusive environment for all students: the Canvas Accessibility Checker.

Accessibility Checker in rich content editor

Located in the bottom, right-hand corner of Canvas’ rich content editor is a button with a picture of a stick figure. Its arms are spread wide with pride – finally, Canvas has integrated a built-in accessibility checker! Faculty, fret no more - the Accessibility Checker is here to help.

Accessibility Checker accessibility rich content

 

Inclusive environment for all students? Yes please.

Student usability is essential in online course design. How we build the course, from using colored text, to applying heading styles, to adding meaningful URL descriptions, affects student usability:

I like to say, “Save time and build with accessibility in mind.” Retrofitting a course for accessibility can feel like tearing a home down, adding a new foundation, and then building it up again. It takes time. Now imagine needing to retrofit a course in the middle of a semester – no thank you, right? Designing courses is not an easy task, but the Accessibility Checker can help streamline the process.

Accessibility Checker - verifying common accessibility errors such as:

Try it in your course!

The Canvas Accessibility Checker has great potential to support accessibility efforts in course design. Here is an action screenshot of the Canvas Accessibility Checker:

Canvas Accessibility Checker accessibility support

The screenshot above shows the Accessibility Checker report tell us what we need to focus on and why it is important to remediate. In this instance, for example, the Accessibility Checker notifies us which picture needs alt text, and why we need to add alt text to a picture. Instead of manually checking each Canvas content page after page, we have a tool that gives us an extra pair of eyes.

Remember that automatic accessibility checkers need an extra pair of human eyes to make sure all accessibility elements have been addressed! Similar to using the Microsoft Accessibility Checker or the Accessibility Acrobat Checker, these checkers offer valuable guidance. For example, accessibility checkers will let you know if a document or site is formatted with accessibility elements, for example, if you have added headings. Though accessibility checkers cannot verify if the heading levels are in order or if the headings are effectively structured to help connect related ideas. This is where you come in!

In course design, we need all the support we can get - try the built-in Accessibility Checker today! Learn more about how to use the Canvas Accessibility Checker.

Chunking Content & Using Headers

Accessibility can be an overwhelming topic for online instructors. Kim Pippa-Tonnesen, who teaches English at Columbia College, learned a few key accessibility strategies through her experience in the OEI Online Course Review process. In the 7-minute video below, Kim reflects on the importance of designing pages in Canvas with short "chunks" of text and ample white space. When pages are designed with these principles in mind, students are less likely to feel overwhelmed and more likely to process the content. Kim also demonstrates what header text is and explains how it supports students with vision impairments who use screen readers.