Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is an attempt to reduce barriers in the learning environment; it goes beyond access. It was inspired by the idea of universal design that applies to physical spaces and products. For example, look at the following two images of two different types of door handles we see everyday: knobs and lever handles. Initially the lever handle had been designed for the people with physical disabilities who had limited ability to grasp a door knob. But today it is widely used because it is also useful for others - for example if you were carrying a large box and could not spare one hand to open the door. So this lever door handle is a product that provides maximum benefit to all types of users.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) approach is more proactive than providing accommodations. If we correctly follow UDL principles we design learning for all learners; so we may not have to provide individual accommodations as the learning content is accessible by all learners.
Principles of Universal Design
Equitable Use
Flexibility in Use
Simple and Intuitive Use
Perceptible Information
Tolerance for Error
Low Physical Effort
Size and Space for Approach and Use
Universal Design Networks
Universal Design Networks encourage multiple means of representation, engagement and action and expression.
Affective Network
This is the motivation for learning and it plays a big role in learner's engagement with the learning. Why? what is in it for me? are some of the questions that affective network needs to answer to keep the students engaged. Strategies can be recruiting interest (information that do not get learners attention is inaccessible - can try allowing choice or by personalisation, help make connections to prior knowledge); self-regulation (if learners do not see their progress they will not keep at it - self assess checklists, clear evaluation criteria, feedback); sustaining effort and persistence (short and long term goals, varying challenge levels).
Strategic Networks
How learners demonstrate mastery or competency of what they have learned is shown in strategic networks. It is the 'how' of learning; how can you express your mastery of learning. Providing them with multiple means of action and expression is a way to support this. Provide choice (allow learners to show what they know in different forms/ways) and support (allow small group discussions, detailed directions, rubric, check list, feedback).
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. -Albert Einstein-
Recognition Networks
This is about how learners understand information. It relates to presenting information in the course - providing multiple representations of information: auditory, text, visual, demonstrations etc. It is the 'what' of learning. A great example used in #AccessMOOC was giving directions to a driver. If someone told me take north exit I may not get very far. If they related it to a landmark or draw a map it may be easier for me. It would be very good if I had Google maps (voice and map) with me to find my way. It shows that for various learners, in this case person finding their way, different ways of representing information is useful. Supporting means could be provide options for perception (text, audio, visual - ways to customise say change font size, colour); provide options for language mathematical expressions and symbols (glossary, key notations); provide options for comprehension (chunk content with key learning points, ask for previous knowledge and relate).
This blog post is based on what I learnt in #AccessMOOC week 3
I am working through the MOOC "Accessibility: Designing and Teaching Courses for All Learners" offered by Buffalo State University on the Canvas platform and this is how they have defined "accessibility" and "accommodations" in the course. It took some time for me to understand the difference between these two and hence I am writing this blog with some examples to clarify it. This is the #3 of my accessibility blog posts. Other blog posts so far can be found here.
Some of the examples and quote are from the course "Accessibility: Designing and Teaching Courses for All Learners" I am following at the moment.
Accessibility
"In education, accessibility is a proactive approach to ensuring that learning experiences are as free from barriers for students as we can make them. Accessibility is giving forethought to how you design your courses. It is applying pedagogical approaches such as universal design for learning principles and technical standards such as section 508 and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. It helps us meet the requirement that our courses are accessible “out of the box” and reduces the time students may have to wait on us to provide accommodations. Accessibility helps the students achieve independence and provide as equal of an experience as possible for them." From the material presented in the "Accessibility: Designing and Teaching Courses for All Learners"
Accommodations
"Accommodations are things we do during instruction to meet a specific and unique need of a student that we can’t do ahead of time. For example, if the learning objective of an online music course requires a student to listen to a classical piece and identify by ear key aspects of that piece, then an accommodation for a student with a hearing impairment would be more appropriate than altering the assignment as it is being designed. However, if an objective required students to visually identify written lyrics, then during design we may ensure that the blind student can access the content by using a screen reader and no accommodations would be needed." From the material presented in the "Accessibility: Designing and Teaching Courses for All Learners"
accommodations to a course should be reasonable. That is they do not reduce the course standards, do not fundamentally change the nature of the course, or do not pose an undue burden.
Accessibility Tips by Brian Suda available from https://www.flickr.com/photos/suda/8078201695
Examples
For example, in an online course a student with disabilities including learning difficulties and or mental disorders may request a periodic phone call with the instructor. This does not mean that the instructor need to call/meet with the student daily or weekly as it an undue burden. What is reasonable is biweekly or monthly meeting when this accommodation is approved.
Another example can be approving extended time for quizzes for students with learning difficulties.
What happens if a student requests to do an oral presentation instead of a written report that the course work is asking for? Then the disability services office will have to work with the faculty member to determine whether demonstrating the mastery of course content using the conventions academic writing (referencing, the way of presenting, building up an argument etc) is a learning objective in the course. If so, an oral presentation would not be reasonable hence a different way to accommodate the student's needs would have to be searched for.
In my view, an accommodation is how a course can be adapted or (individualise) to meet a student's disabilities. While accessibility deals with making courses accessible to most students. Something important to note is accommodations are only for the purpose of allowing the student access to the course and not in any form to give the student undue advantage of success in the course.
So why thrive for accessibility why not accommodations as and when required?
Not all of our learners disclose their disabilities. If the student is on an online class for example, you may not know about their disability that becomes a barrier to accessing the course. On the other hand, fixing something that is already created to accommodate accessibility is much harder than designing for it up front. So my advise will be to thrive for accessibility and be prepared for reasonable accommodations to provide individualise support.
Watch this space for my next blog on Accessibility.
Assignment required us to explain why accessibility is important; provide examples of ways in which disability may impact students and their learning; and provide examples of assistive technology and technological barriers.
Why Accessibility?
I have discussed this in my previous blog Web Accessibility #1 that it is the right thing to do.
It is important that we treat everybody equally, differently-abled too are human beings worthy of respect and opportunities just like you and me. If a building does not have a ramp access, this prohibits a wheelchair user accessing that premises. Suppose this was a hospital or a bank it would mean that the wheelchair users will not be able to access these services.
In order to make sure that they are treated equally, governments around the world have enacted laws and regulations that prohibit discrimination due to disability. Should an organization or an individual found to be violating these, (that is - they discriminate against disabled) they will be punished according to the law.
Disability and Access
Visual
Disability can be either invisible or visible. Invisible disabilities are mostly due to mental health issues, dyslexia, dyspraxia and others. There are permanent disabilities (lose of a limb) as well as temporary disabilities (due to accident hand in a plaster caste).
Visually impaired or blind learners can have lot of difficulties in accessing visual materials. If for example, the learning materials are not made with accessibility in mind, even the assistive technologies may not be able to support them. For example, if the college VLE does not support tabbing through to the menu, the visually impaired learners will not be able to 'see' the content in the VLE.
Colour blind learners may find it difficult if for example red text is presented in a green background. For example, if the feedback for a quiz is provided as a green star for correct answers and red star for incorrect the feedback will be not meaningful to a colour blind user.
If the font sizes are small or contrast between foreground (text) and background is not sufficiently distinguishable learners who are visually impaired will not be able to use these materials.
So there are different visual impairments that can affect the learner's access to materials.
Audio/video
If closed captions are not provided for podcast or video deaf learners will not be able to access this content. If there are background music playing while the narrator speaks such content will be difficult to be accessed by people hard of hearing. If the videos provided audio descriptions and close captions these will be accessible to blind learners (audio) and deaf learners (captions).
Physical
If for example, there are drag and drop material in the learning content that can only be operated by the use of mouse, blind learners or learners with physical disability will not be able to access these materials.
Textual
If the textual content used is of very complex sentence construction, this may not be accessible to learners with dyslexia.
Therefore there are various disabilities to consider when learning content is produced.
Assistive Technologies
Assistive technologies to me is a term used to refer to technologies that help people with various disabilities to support, improve or maintain their functional capabilities. These can include assistive, adaptive and rehabilitative devices, software or products.
Some examples of assistive technologies are:
Screen Reader
Screen reader is a software that reads out the information on the screen. Screen reader narrates the menu options reading them out aloud to the user. Screen readers are useful to the blind as they can hear the menus being read out aloud to them which helps them navigate. There are many screen reader softwares available. Some of them are proprietary while some others are open source and free to use. The video below from YouTube shows a screen reader being used. I tried ChromeVox and to be frank I found it very frustrating. But for the blind users screen readers provide a valuable service. However, for the screen readers to be useful we have to use accessibility supporting features such as heading styles (rather than bold, large font text), correct tab order, alt text for images etc.
These software converts speech to text (for example Siri on iPhones and iPads). This may be a tool that can be helpful to both people with and without disabilities. If you cannot use a keyboard due to a disability or need faster typing dictation software can be a solution.
Some software programs are easier to use than other but they may work well with some programs but not with others. For example, in the course one interviewee said that her Windows 8.1 built in text to speech program works well with Microsoft Word documents but not with other formats. So she has to copy and paste emails into Microsoft Word for her to be able to 'read' them.
Many screen reader software take a snapshot of the screen and reads it to the user. But now a days we see websites with lot of dynamic content. For example Twitter feeds and Facebook feeds. However, the screen reader user will not see these unless the web programmer had correctly used WAI-ARIA live region to set up the dynamic content.
When using screen reader software one has to tab through the items. However, some materials produced with various softwares may not allow tabbing and in some instances the cursor gets stuck. If the site is not designed with accessibility in mind, there can be items that are not tab accessible. Thus not accessible to the screen readers.
Another issue is with images. Screen reader only reads the alt text that is allocated to that image. But if the web developer (or document creator) has not populated this with a meaningful caption, the screen reader will read the image file's name (for example img_1007_23_1.jpg), which is not useful and can be quite frustrating if all images are read out that way.
Thus it is important to take accessibility into account when creating materials and adhere to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (currently in WCAG 2.0 version) outlined by the W3C.
Watch this space for my next blog on Accessibility.
Having been the lead facilitator of Begin Programming:Build your first mobile game MOOC we heard from learners that had various difficulties accessing content. Some were due to infrastructural issues (eg. slow internet connectivity) while some others faced physical disabilities (eg. hard of hearing, colour blindness).
In my new role as the Chair of the Online Learning Research Center at the University College of Estate Management I am looking into making our online content more accessible. I am working in a small team looking at guidelines, best practices and adapting our learning content to be more accessible.
I have learnt lot of things about accessibility from the "Professional Web Accessibility Auditing Made Easy" course. I am going to do a few posts on Accessibility and I will be using my blog as a reflective tool to reflect on my learning in this course.
The first thing you need to ask is why do you need accessibility?
It will be clear if you watch these videos why we need to provide web accessibility.
Apart from it is the right thing there are many other reasons why organizations should make their web sites accessible. For example, if one is physically challenged in getting to shops, they are more likely to rely on the internet to do their shopping. So if an organization's website is not accessible they are losing customers who are differently-abled. There are laws preventing discrimination on the grounds of disability and not giving access to your services provide via the internet is a form of discrimination! So organizations could be sued under the equality laws.
In Europe, there are various accessibility laws implemented in different countries. However, the EU parliament had passed a law in 2014 that requires all public service websites and private sector providers offering public services to confirm with WCAG 2.0 Level AA.
In the UK, currently there is no specific act governing the web accessibility but The Equality Act's section 29(1) requires those who provide services to the public must not discriminate against any person. So effectively if a non accessible website prevents a person from accessing a service on the web it could be counted as discrimination. Section 20 and 29(7) of the Act too makes it an ongoing duty of service providers to make "reasonable adjustments" to accommodate people with disabilities.
So accessibility is important from this point of view too.
Watch this space for my next blog on Accessibility.
