If you use technology in your courses at all, one of the things that must be considered is accessibility. It’s a legal issue that aims at making sure that disabled students are not discriminated against and accessibility should be taken seriously. A few of the most common disabilities are impaired speech, vision, and hearing. When developing course content, or considering using an emerging technology for instruction, accessibility needs to be one of the main considerations, not an after thought. Read the following article from Inside Higher Ed for more on accessibility.
Here are two basics in creating content that is accessible to all students.
Don’t put text in images.
Reason: Screen readers, software that audibly reads text in documents and in web browsers for visually impaired students, can’t read text if it’s embedded in an image. This makes any textual content in an image inaccessible for the visually impaired. And that’s what we are trying to avoid. A general rule of thumb: if text isn’t select-able using your mouse, it probably is not accessible to screen readers, and therefore discriminates against the visually impaired.
Transcribe Audio and Video.
Reason: Hearing impaired students may not have the ability to hear audio in podcasts, music files, or videos, making that content inaccessible. This discriminates against the hearing impaired. Transcripts allow those who are deaf or have hearing loss the ability to read what is being said audibly. A transcript does not have to be overly fancy. It can be a simple PDF or Text file. Transcripts do however need to make sense when read straight through and they need to contain the same content that is audibly spoken. If you type one up yourself, be sure to let the reader know every time the person speaking changes. The transcript may not make sense to the student reading it if you don’t communicate who the person speaking is.
Live closed captioning can be provided inside of Elluminate and Adobe Connect with a third-party CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) provider. Rebecca Tuerk, Director of Student Disability Resources & Services can provide more information about using live closed captioning.
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