 Equal access, universal design of an academic department. The student population at universities and colleges is becoming increasingly diverse. Both students and staff need equal access to courses, facilities and all aspects of campus life. Yet people with disabilities still find inaccessible websites, course materials and facilities. One solution is the implementation of universal design. Architect Ron Mace defined it as the design of products and environments to be usable by all people to the greatest extent possible without the need for adaptation or specialized design. The value of universal design is that it's simple and it's easy and it will be able to impact all of your students. It suggests that rather than designing departmental offerings for the average user, design them for people with a broad range of abilities, disabilities, reading levels, learning styles, native languages and other characteristics. Universal design is really a goal. It's a way to approach education so that you maximize the number of people that are benefiting from the education. Planning and policies. Campus stakeholders need to think about planning and policies. Ask yourself if people with disabilities and members of other underrepresented groups are on your staff, faculty or student body. In looking at developing policy at a university level, I think it's important to recognize, first of all, gathering the right collection of folks to have that discussion and not just include faculty representation, but also includes folks that provide services, students of the recipient of those services, students that are in those classes, people that will be a part of the design of what's going to be then the effect of the policy. When courses or services are being evaluated, be sure to include items that ask about the experiences of those with disabilities. I think if an institution, a college, and a department is going to be friendly to people with disabilities, I think it's really a cultural aspect, a social normative attitudes and beliefs that's prevalent and pervasive throughout the institution and colleges and into the departments. Facility and environment. Campus facilities should be accessible and welcoming. Ensure physical access, comfort and safety for visitors with a variety of abilities, racial and ethnic backgrounds, genders and ages. A great place to start assessing your accessible facilities is in the parking lot. You should make sure that you have a sufficient number of accessible parking spots and they should be well marked. Routes from the accessible parking to a building should be well marked with large, high contrast signs. A front door should be for all users, whether they're in a wheelchair or are walking up to the front door. A front door for one should be a front door for all. Students need to know where they are. Signage needs to be plentiful, really accurate, high contrast. It can't blend into the facade of the campus. None of this lovely brushed silver nickel stuff that blends into the building. It has to stand out. As far as elevators go, I think that the most important thing for me is having the controls at the lower level so that I can reach them. Restrooms should be wheelchair accessible with well marked signs. Counters and desks in student service areas should be accessible from a seated position and aisles should be wide and clear of obstructions. So faculty who require students to use labs on campus to complete coursework have to also be mindful of if a lab itself is accessible. So yes, can they get in the building? Yes, can they get into the lab itself? But within the lab, there's features that they may not think of. So is there adjustable height workstation for someone who may need to move the table up or down? Other Zoom text or screen readers on lab stations within it? If there's somebody who is there to help desk, can someone go and ask a question? And is that an accessible desk or area? Or are there things like printers or phones that might need to be used? All those things still need to be accessible to a student with a disability. Before faculty brings technology into classroom, they definitely need to be aware of what it is and not just use it because it's the new hot flashy technology on the market. They have to really know how to use it and the pros and cons of how accessible it is or how it will impact the student's learning environment. It's also important to consider computing equipment and software and to provide access to assistive technology for those who need it. And software can range from text to speech, voice recognition software, screen enlargement can be used in the classroom, outside of the classroom and really benefits a wide variety of users. I believe we should have at least a minimum accessibility requirement checklist so we can ask the campus to follow that. So if we are going to provide a product or develop a product, we have to ensure those minimum accessibility checklists are met. Websites are a very interesting place for a department to start because where else does a student go to find out basic information or even their initial information about an academic department they are looking at? So if a student with a disability cannot find out how to contact you, what you do, how are they even going to be able to get more information or pursue you as a program? So I personally think it should be the responsibility of their respective web developers or webmasters to ensure that first their own framework, their own application or websites are accessible and at the same time they have to provide training. They just need to consider accessibility as important as say security and privacy. Courses. Faculty members should deliver courses that are accessible to all students and accommodations must be provided in a timely manner. Make sure that video presentations used in courses have captions and where appropriate audio descriptions. Captions allow a wide variety of people to understand content and captions can often be searched to accelerate access to information. By doing so we're reaching a large number of individuals and those include of course deaf and hard of hearing people who would get nothing out of a video that's not captioned. Individuals whose English is their second language. Individuals with ADD and LD for example may help them focus more on the words as they see it go across the screen. I don't think that we totally understand how people take in and use information so the more ways that we can offer it up the better we all are. As an instructor in a course you can make your material accessible, you can make sure that the student isn't excluded and so even if you can't in a short amount of time change the policy on a university you can change the policy in your own classroom. I always feel like if I have a student that has an accommodation that I as a teacher have to give a little too. I can't just do everything exactly the same way. So we have to be a little adaptable as a professor so they can reach the most students and that's what I practice. Speaking as both a student and an instructor assessment really needs to be flexible. We focus as instructors on exams but there are many ways to assess student learning. Problem sets, exams, projects, writing. Accommodation requests. Although applying universal design minimizes the need for accommodations for students, faculty and staff with disabilities it's also important to have a plan in place to respond to additional accommodation requests. And so the way that we ensure timely and effective accommodations is by planning our policies and planning our practices that include our academic departments. We have to do it faster. We have to do it with fewer resources and we have to do it for a broader range of the population and we're all under the hook for that and we should be. For more information consult Dewitt's Center on Universal Design and Education www.uw.edu.coite.com This video is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number HRD 0833504. Any opinions, findings or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Copyright 2015 University of Washington. Permission is granted to copy these materials for educational non-commercial purposes provided the source is acknowledged.