Why Accessibility?

Initial Considerations

This chapter introduces instructors to the motivation behind accessibility. Granted, creating accessible instructional materials adds an extra layer of work to designing and developing course materials. Why should instructors put in the additional effort?

Definitions

It is not if, but when, you will have students who have disabilities in your courses. Not having any students with disability-related access needs does not excuse us from ensuring that our courses and their materials are accessible. We present the following definitions to orient you to your widest possible audience, which includes students with disabilities.

Disability

Many definitions of disability apply throughout modern society. For example, different laws, social assistance programs, and organizations may have different definitions of what it means to be disabled. The most overarching definition of disability in the United States comes from the federal government in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). According to this law, a person with a disability is someone who:

• “has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities,
• has a history or record of such an impairment (such as cancer that is in remission), or
• is perceived by others as having such an impairment (such as a person who has scars from a severe burn).”^[1]

The US government considers learning one of the “major life activities.”

In an educational setting, a disability is any physical, visual, auditory, cognitive, mental, or emotional condition that limits a student’s access to learning. For example, a student who is deaf or hard of hearing might not be able to access the information in a video that does not have closed captions.

The social model of disability argues that disability is a social construct consisting of societal and environmental barriers that limit a person’s ability to participate fully in a given life activity. In the above example, the barrier to the student’s learning is not limited hearing but rather the lack of closed captions. This model of disability places responsibility for remediating or eliminating the barrier on society rather than on the individual. People are not broken. Often, that with which they interact is.

Therefore, in the present context, the instructor bears the responsibility to provide an accessible learning environment. It is not the student’s responsibility to figure out their own workaround.

Accessibility

Accessibility, in the context of higher education, means structuring the learning environment, including course materials, such that students who have disabilities can participate and learn without undue burden. In the above example, the video needs to have closed captions when it is first posted to or linked from a learning-management system. The student should not have to bear the extra burden of having the video captioned.

Accommodation

In the United States, laws protecting students with disabilities, such as the ADA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (commonly referred to as Section 504), require that learning institutions make Reasonable Accommodation to provide access to otherwise qualified students. In the present context, Reasonable Accommodations are changes and/or exceptions we make in our course delivery so that students with disabilities can access learning alongside their peers. For example, we often allow extra testing time for students who have anxiety or who must test using an alternative format that takes longer to process, like Braille. However, it would not be a reasonable accommodation to simply give the student an A on the test.

“Otherwise qualified” means that the student must meet the same standards as other students when being considered for admission to a college, university, course of study, or individual course. For example, if you are teaching a course that requires a grade of C or better in a prerequisite, you should not be required or expected to admit a student who has not yet passed the prerequisite as a reasonable accommodation for a disability.

Avoid the Retrofit

The main idea behind accommodations is barrier removal. But, they involve a retrofit. When we make an accommodation, we go back and change or fix something upon request. The better idea is not to receive accommodation requests because our learning environments are already accessible.

Equality versus Equity

At this point, some readers might be thinking “Just treat all students exactly the same.” However, equal treatment does not necessarily correlate to equal effect. In other words, there is a big difference between equality and equity, and we must balance these when interacting with our students. The notion of equity here has the same connotation that it does in real estate–value. Students with disabilities may not receive the same value of learning if they are treated just like everyone else. For example, let’s say you typically forbid your students from recording your lectures. Permission to record is a common accommodation we make for neurodivergent students who may have difficulty focusing in class, such as someone who has ADHD. You could argue that not allowing any students to record your lectures constitutes equal treatment, but this argument would be invalid because the student with ADHD who needed those recordings would, in fact, not experience equal treatment in that their learning outcomes–the value they get out of your course–would be less than that of their peers. In sum, we want to aim for equity–the equal value of outcomes–over literal, inflexible equality for its own sake.

Universal Design

Universal Design is a recent concept that primarily applies to the built environment. The main idea is barrier-free construction. For example, a building with automatic doors, plenty of elevators with Braille buttons, and no outside steps incorporate the tenets of universal design.

Another fundamental premise of universal design is that the accessibility affordances benefit everyone, not just people with disabilities. For example, a completely level entryway with doors that open automatically upon approach is not only wheelchair accessible but also convenient to those who may be carrying heavy loads.

Universal Design for Learning

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) applies the essential motivations behind universal design to the learning environment. If we make the entryway to learning barrier-free during development–during course design–we improve the experience and potential outcomes for all of our students. For example, if we create a lesson module that is accessible to students who use screen readers, then that module will also work in the read-aloud mode now available in so many applications, such that a busy student who is commuting can listen to the lesson while driving, especially in circumstances where they would otherwise skip the reading altogether due to lack of time.

Assistive Technology

According to the Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA), assistive technology is any item, piece of equipment, software program, or product system that is used to increase, maintain, or improve the functional capabilities of persons with disabilities.^[2] ATIA notes assistive technology can be either low-tech (including highlighters, colored overlays, or handheld magnifiers) or high-tech (such as specialized braille notetaking devices or digital video magnifiers). It is important to note assistive technology is not explicitly something designed for the use of disabled individuals but can be any product, system, or solution that promotes equitable access for disabled individuals (as is the case for a word processing document that can facilitate communication between someone with hearing and an individual who is Deaf or the use of a voice assistant to complete various tasks on a cell phone). For this text, we will typically refer to assistive technology in the context of screen reading and magnification (used primarily by individuals with visual impairments), text-to-speech (primarily used by those with learning disabilities or who experience barriers with reading or visual processing), and speech-to-text (primarily used by those with physical disabilities). With a broader push for accessibility support in many mainstream and off-the-shelf devices like phones, tablets, and computers, assistive technologies like those noted are commonly offered as standard features and can be used by anyone to support access or simply improve one’s general experience.

Digital Accessibility

Similarly to the ways we design for and address barriers in the physical environment with ramps, curb cuts, push buttons, and braille signage, we must pay the same careful consideration and care to the digital spaces, resources, and materials we promote, publish, and post to ensure they are fully accessible to individuals with varying needs. Several guidelines and standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)^[3] and the PDF/UA guidelines from the International Organization for Standardization^[4] offer direction for ensuring digital experiences and content promote equal access for visual, auditory, physical, and cognitive needs. Digital accessibility includes apparent considerations like sufficient color contrast or video captions but also includes other less apparent considerations such as alternative text for images (or image descriptions), appropriate heading structures, and keyboard access for all navigable controls. It is important to remember digital accessibility throughout all points in the design, development, and distribution process. Much of good digital accessibility happens when we are purposeful and proactive by considering guidelines and standards during planning and initial development. We should also take care to evaluate, verify, and remediate any and all issues before publishing or promoting resources. This text will address accessibility considerations throughout the design, development, and distribution cycles of content, along with techniques and tools to verify accessibility along each phase of the life cycle.

Reasons (Ethical, Rhetorical, and Legal)

Like using inclusive language in teaching materials, making sure that your materials don’t exclude certain students or put stumbling blocks to academic success in front of certain students, is the only ethical option. Students should be able to access whatever they need to succeed in their courses, and instructors, as much as possible, should help with that. Materials that are designed to ensure that all students can use them and learn from them, regardless of any individual barriers is the right thing to do, and that should be reason enough.

With that said, however, there are rhetorical reasons to ensure accessible materials as well. Consider imagining the class you are teaching as an argument that your field is making. If you want to persuade students that they should be interested in the field or that they would be welcome in that discipline, then you need to be sure your materials don’t start by excluding certain sections of the population from the beginning. In addition, many of the ways that materials are made accessible make them more accessible to everyone — not just people who have specific disabilities. For instance, closed captions in a video would allow someone to watch a video while traveling on a bus, without disturbing the surrounding passengers or having to use headphones. Alternative text may be useful for someone with a slower internet or unreliable data connection who may not want to spend the data on downloading images. While styles help documents to be more accessible, they also assist writers in preparing documents with consistent and/or professional-looking designs.

Finally, Institutes of Higher Education are required by both State and Federal Law to ensure that all teaching materials are accessible to students with disability. For instance, title II of the ADA applies to institutions of post-secondary education with public funding (universities, community colleges, and vocational schools), and Title III applies to private institutions. ^[5] To be in compliance with the law (and to save you work when you eventually have a student with disabilities in class, as you very, very likely will), your materials should be accessible from the beginning.

Overall, plan for your instructional materials to be accessible as it is the practical, ethical, rhetorically persuasive, and legal thing to do.

Begin Course Design with the End in Mind

In his groundbreaking 1989 book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey advocates as his second habit to begin with the end in mind.^[6] This habit stands out as the fundamental best practice when designing accessibility into any writing project. Building upon this habit requires that writers consider carefully the needs of the widest possible audience. The main goal is to build accessible affordances into a document during its development instead of retrofitting a completed document. Drawing from the above definitions, this approach requires building as much accessibility as possible into a document to minimize the need for accommodation later.

Although developers may be tempted to streamline the drafting process by writing straight through and putting words on the screen as fast as possible, digital humanities research shows that applying accessible affordances becomes inconsistent at best or absent at worst when refitting a completed document for accessibility. For example, it may seem efficient to batch-load all images into a document with the good intention of adding alt text later. It is deceptively easy to miss an image or produce rushed or inadequate alt-text when working this way.

This book is organized to help writers identify, understand and plan for the needs of audiences who may face visual, auditory, cognitive or physical access challenges.