 Welcome. What we're going to talk about today is teaching an accessible online course. So I hope that's something you're interested in because that's what we're going to talk about. My name is Cheryl Bergstahler. My e-mail address is s-h-e-r-y-l-b at u-w.edu, which means that you're welcome to e-mail me after the presentation or any time with questions or comments or even suggestions for making this more productive. I direct two units as part of the Accessible Technology Services Unit, which is part of UW-IT. And so we have two units within this. The IT accessibility team, that's the group that's sponsoring this presentation, which started, actually our effort started in 1984. They were pretty minimal at that time. We were talking about adaptive technology for an Apple II computer most of the time. But anyway, we were providing some service to make sure that technology is accessible to faculty, students, staff here on campus. And we still do that, although we have to talk about websites and application software and all sorts of technology, even documents that are presented electronically. How can we make those accessible? So much more of a broader scope that we're addressing and more staff, of course, to go with that. That's all funded by the UW. But many people know me and people who work for me as part of the Duet Center that I direct, which is a center that started in 1992 with grant funds. So now it's currently supported by federal, state, corporate, and private funds. Duet stands for Disabilities, Opportunities, Internet Working, and Technology. And so we've been operating a lot of projects over the years, taking a more holistic approach to helping people with disabilities be successful in their college courses, graduate school, and careers. And we continue to do that with funds primarily from the National Science Foundation, but from other organizations as well. We even have a Duet Japan program started in 2007. You can look at their website. If you don't know Japanese, you're not going to be able to understand most of it. But they do much of the same thing that we do here in the Duet Center. And we started the Center on Universal Design and Education in 1999 through one of these grants, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Education. So we take kind of a student-centered approach and with taking a look at all the various stakeholders like you that can contribute to the success of students with disabilities. Of course, working with students with disabilities is important. So they're prepared. You see them over in one of these little boxes on this wheel. Family members and so forth and their peers and near-peers, adult mentors, all these people can play a role. Community groups, special programs, service providers, like disability resources for students, K-12 teachers. And then we get to post-secondary administrators, faculty, and staff. And so I think everyone at our class today is in that broad category. And so the question is kind of what can we do? And especially when it comes to online learning, they can contribute to creating a level playing field for students with disabilities who are in our classes. And then there are employers, technology vendors, legislators, policymakers, and funding agencies. All of our projects, the DO-IT projects, deal with at least two of these different groups. And so today, we're going to think a lot about what faculty members can do to either erect barriers for students with disabilities or make students more successful because they can access the resources and activities you're presenting in online education. Our basic approaches within DO-IT and actually within the IT accessibility team as well, is when we're working with the individual students, we're really focusing on self-determination. Broadly understood as the many skills and knowledge and the skills, the knowledge and networking that you need to be successful of whatever you're trying to do. We help them do that. And then we work with faculty and staff, institutions, technology companies, and there we promote universal design. So you can hear a lot about universal design as a foundation for these practices I'll be talking about. So what are we shooting for? Well, I think an inclusive environment could be the whole campus, could be your course, but has three characteristics. First of all, everyone who meets the requirements with or without accommodations is encouraged to participate. That would be anyone that's in your online course because they were able to register for that online course. But then it's also important for them to feel welcome. If you have a video, an opening video, I teach online and I have one of these little five-minute videos introducing myself. But if your opening video is not adequately captioned, then that's very unwelcoming to some students that would include students who are deaf, but also English language learners who rely on accurate captions in order to understand content. And then everyone is fully engaged in accessible and inclusive environments and activities. And so making sure when you have small groups or even you have people communicating on the discussion board that you ask questions in such a way that everyone can participate. Today I'm just going to talk a tiny bit about history and legal issues. Then I'll talk about the accommodations only and the universal design approach to providing access to students with disabilities, including online learning. And then principles and examples of practices for creating your inclusive online course and resources. And then we'll have some time for questions and answers. My course here is an overview. And so you're not going to hear a lot of details about how to make a document accessible or whatever. But we have a series of presentations on Thursdays, one a month. And you can get that through the accessibility website where you may have heard of this course in the beginning. And I'll give you that URL on the last slide. So I'm just going to give a one-minute history lesson as far as the evolution of responses to human differences that takes us to where we are today. We have a long history with human beings of eliminating, excluding, segregating people that we feel like don't fit in, including people with disabilities, which is unfortunate. The middle of the last century there was a big leap forward as far as curing and rehabilitating and accommodating people with disabilities. Particularly the curing and rehabilitating, it was possible because of medical developments. And then came the GI Bill after World War II and the veterans when they returned. Many of those veterans came back with multiple disabilities that they would not have survived in earlier wars. But they also had this GI Bill, which paid their college tuition. And so guess what? A lot of people with disabilities, all veterans, showed up on our post-secondary campuses. And that gave us a big boost to think clearly about accessibility. But the focus was on accommodation. Okay, let's see if this person can participate in this exercise that had not been developed with them in mind and see if we can make good enough sort of thing. Now we're in an age of universal design, which I'll define in a few minutes, followed by accommodations. But in short, it means that we're focusing more on design, at least we hope people focus more on design. And then there may be some additional accommodations, but not quite so many. The legal basis, there are two primary federal laws. We have some state requirements as well. But one is the section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. And many people are surprised when I bring this up, because we didn't have an internet back then. So how could we have requirements to make our online courses accessible? Well, this is a civil rights law. And as a civil rights law, it basically says that when we're making offerings, if you're a covered entity, which the University of Washington is, then you need to make sure that you provide accommodations for individuals with disabilities so that they can participate. Then there's the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and it's 2008 amendments. Most people have heard about this. It's very much like section 504. It applies to more units at the University of Washington. What we have to do is pretty much the same as we did for section 504. So we've been doing this in 1973. And one of the things that 504 required is we have a disability services office, and our office is disability resources for students. I think for a group like this, where you're not actually providing the resources in DRS, that it's more helpful to think about abilities rather than disabilities, and to think about the idea that everyone in the course has a range of abilities in different areas. Everyone doesn't have a disability, but we all have abilities. And so I have a double-edged arrow here from the left, not able to the right, able. And we could all rate ourselves right now on our ability to, say, understand English. You might rate yourself low in this category, because English is not your first language. Or it might be that you have a disability, a learning disability, that makes it difficult for you to understand written material in English or any other language, perhaps. So it's not necessarily related to a disability that you might be rating yourself low. Similarly with social norms. Students on the autism spectrum often have difficulties understanding social cues. People from other cultures, same thing. And they would all maybe rate themselves somewhat low in this category. And so the idea here with this image is that everyone can rate themselves at different levels for different abilities, but we all will have our unique profile. So we can follow up by rating ourselves as the ability to hear, the ability to hear, see, or walk, the ability to read prints, to write with a pen or a pencil, to communicate verbally, to tune out distraction, to learn and to manage physical and mental health. And you probably could name some disabilities that are related to these. But memorizing disabilities in the medical diagnosis isn't all that useful when you're designing your class. You just need to think about this great variety, which we'll talk about a little bit more in a minute. So another thing to think about is most disabilities are invisible. And so you really can't tell if a person in your class, whether it's on-site or online, might have a disability. That would include learning disabilities, attention deficits, a lot of these disabilities. Most students with disabilities, you'd not be able to tell that particularly a casual glance. And then adding to that, there are fewer than a third of students with disabilities that report them to the disability services office. That's our DRS. Many people are shocked by this. But students with disabilities do not have to report to that office. They only report to that office that they think they're going to need an accommodation. And some students don't report. I'm often asked why by an audience like this. And that's personal information, so I can't answer for any particular person. I can say in talking to students with disabilities over the years, what usually comes up is something along the lines that they're worried about being discriminated against. Or they're worried about being embarrassed about it. They don't want their faculty member to know because they might, the faculty member might not think they're qualified to be in the class, things like that, which is unfortunate, but is the case, but it's good for us to know. And disability resources for students offers accommodation. It doesn't do a lot as far as making your course more accessible from the get-go to make it more accessible. So all of these things combine and kind of complicate the issue. It's not enough just to sit and wait until you get a letter from DRS to provide accommodations for a particular student. There are other students that might need assistance as well, but aren't asking for it. And maybe there's a way that you could design your course, so you'd be helping them out too, and still providing extra accommodations these other students might need. So a couple of common accommodations in online courses here on our campus and others is making inaccessible documents accessible. Mainly those that are in PDF format are the ones that are the most problematic. PDFs can be made accessible, and Gaby on our staff teaches one of these Thursday sessions on how to do that, so you can look ahead to that schedule. But it's going to take a little bit of work. It's going to be harder than Microsoft Word. It's certainly going to be harder than making your content page accessible if you just put the content within the page within the canvas. And then captioning videos. Some people are surprised by that too, because like for instance, if you save your video as a YouTube video, it automatically captions. But I think we all know that those computer-generated captions are not very accurate. No punctuation, mispelling of words. And when you think about it, that's kind of a mean trick, trick for someone who's deaf or someone who's an English language learner if you give them inaccurate captions that don't have proper punctuation. So that gives us a chance to talk about universal design. So universal design is the design of products and environments that could be an online course. That would be the materials and the resources that you use and the activities that you create to be unusable by all people to the greatest extent possible without the need for adaptation or specialized design. So we might need to make some adaptation or some accommodations, but with universal design, you're trying to minimize that was the idea. I'll give you a quick example that kind of indicates the process of universal design and how you have to start at the beginning. An image on the screen right now shows a plastic name tag holder with a name tag in it with my name on it and it's attached to a lanyard. Lanyards, I have been told by different conferences, are the most popular way for people to display their name tag. I'm not a big fan because I think it hangs down too low, so it's hard to see it and sometimes it flips over and it's blank on the other side and so forth. I really like a pin so I can pin it to whatever I'm wearing or I can put a clip on my collar. And so our staff years ago when we were doing onsite programs, it seems very long ago, I'm sure it does for you too, we said about to universally design a name tag. And so we start with the purpose of the name tag as you always do with universal design, giving the name of the person that is wearing it. And so we made that the first name important part of the name tag. So it's very large. My first name Cheryl is very large and the other text is smaller. Also, if we put the do it logo or some other information about the conference, we keep that small too, because that's not mainly what the name tag is for. Most people know what conference they're at. They want to know what name of the person is that they're looking at. And to solve that problem by flipping over and having a blank on the back side, that's easy to fix. We just put the name tag on the back too. So it has a front and the back. It doesn't matter what side is showing. So if you look a little closer to this, the lanyard has a ring on it at the end, a metal ring, and it attaches to a clip which is on the plastic name tag holder. And so I, because I don't want the lanyard, I will take that off. I immediately unclip it and I'll clip the name tag on my collar. And if I'm already a sweater without a collar, then you can notice here that there's a safety pin that goes through that clip. And so I have a pin there as well. And so we provided three ways for people to use this name tag holder and fix some things like making the name on both sides and making the name large and so forth. That's universal design. It's kind of thinking through a little bit more. How can we please as many people as reasonable or possible? I'm sure some people would come up with a better idea for themselves personally, but these are three options rather than just giving people one option. So rather than taking a vote on which is the best one, you say, well, can we build in this, this flexibility? So applying universal design, make sure materials and your, your activities in your course, technically accessible, and I'm using the word accessible, I mean, related to people with disabilities, that people who are blind can access those materials, people who have mobility impairments that are using assistive technology to access the keyboard can use those materials. But it also means that it's usable. And the difference there can be explained by little example from a potty who works for me, who happens to be blind. And he was talking about a software package that he was evaluating for accessibility. And it was rather focused type of software wasn't a big general, you know, huge installation. And he, he said that it was technically accessible, but the way they made it accessible was to design it initially as an inaccessible product. But then they made a couple of quite a few shortcut keys, you know, commands that you could use to access all the functions in the software. And he said there are about 100 of them. And so for a blind user using a screen reader like he does, which reads a lot of the text on the screen, he would have to kind of memorize 100 different ways to do things. And this is a new package. He wasn't even sure what the features were, or maybe keep have a braille printout or something. Anyway, that was a pro program, a software program that was technically accessible, but was not usable. We can't use it easily. And that applies to everyone that you should be able to get through your online course. Think of your online course, think of, go through it as if you've never seen it before. Can you find various things? Do the student have to hop around back to the syllabus, back to the content page? Do they know when to give a discussion? In my course, I have these different modules as most do. And within there, I'll have a couple of lessons. But then when it's time to go to the discussion board, I have a little notice to tell them to go to the discussion board next. And so that'll kind of drag them through the course. And then inclusive. Inclusive means that all students are using the same materials that are flexible for everyone to use, and that they can participate in the activities that we've created. I came up with this quote from a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, and I thought it was all about universal design, particularly of a course. When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame lettuce, you look for reasons it's not doing well. It may need fertilizer, more water, less sun. And so that's the way we should look at our courses. When our students maybe are having difficulty understanding an instruction that we've given them, like a description of a project, and they're asking you questions about it, maybe multiple students, think about why they're confused. Because it might be that you can rework that assignment and describe it in a way that everyone would be able to understand what it means, or at least more students than currently can. We've done this, universal design, in another context, in the physical environments. For example, the universal design of sidewalks. On the page right now on our screen, there is an image of a young man in a wheelchair, and he has on the back of his wheelchair a sign that says he clearly shouted because it's all caps. Wrap the curbs, get me off the street. This was in 1970 on the front page of, you name it, the Daily, the University of Washington student newspaper. Well, back then they didn't have curb cuts in sidewalks, at least not very many. And administrators back then at post-secondary institutions thought it was just going to be too expensive to redo all those sidewalks. And the key word here is redo. It's not all that expensive to put a curb cut in a sidewalk when you design it from the beginning, but it can take a lot of work to put the curb cut in later. And now we see that curb cuts and sidewalks are just standard. I think if we had someone complain about a curb cut, not being able to be someone pushing a baby stroller or someone trying to skateboard, so it wouldn't necessarily be a person with a disability. So that's an example of a full adoption of universal design in a particular application. But back to technology and online learning, thinking of technology and making things accessible and unusable and inclusive, technology has built in accessibility features. Back in the olden days, when I was talking about the Apple II computer, you couldn't press two keys at the same time with one finger or a stick in your mouth or a user that does not have use of their hands. And so you had to have an additional hardware to add to the Apple II computer that lock those three keys so a person could do shift in a number or a letter sequentially. Well, that is built in. It's called sticky keys. So we built in the mainstream technology as much as is reasonable, including our course. Make it as accessible as is reasonable. But it should also be compatible with assistive technology that people might be using. And so our course should be compatible with screen reader technology. I mentioned that how to use this and for with adaptive keyboards and so forth that they might be using. And the beneficiaries of universal design are many. In the case of videos, we talked about this a bit already, but the captions benefit people who are unable to hear the audio. People who are English learners, who are in a noisy environment, like an airport or a noiseless one, like they're trying to watch a video in the baby's room and the baby's sleeping, people who have a slow internet connection, people who want to know the spelling of words. That should be everyone in your class and people who need to find content quickly and can search through that content with the player. You can allow you to do that. So one thing that we should think about is instructors should consider the characteristics of students that might be in the class. So this is proactive. So if we think about who might be in my class and the assistive technologies that they might be using when you're developing the course, think about those things. Well, I'll give you some examples. These are four pictures of people that I know. One of them you already know, Hadi over there on the right. We'll get to him in a minute. But if you design your course so it's accessible to these four people, it will be accessible to most everyone. The first one is Zane and Zane is deaf. So she's a good reminder that you need to make sure that you're, that you have captions and that they're accurate. Anthony is next. He has multiple physical disabilities and he does not have a usable voice. So he has tons of assistive technology and he can, you know, he uses an adaptive keyboard that he can operate and so and some switches and so forth. He interfaces with a telephone. So he can use his computer to generate a message that can be read aloud on his telephone so he can operate a telephone and make telephone calls and so forth. But the main thing that you need to know as a person developing a course or IT online is that Anthony can use that technology and any other assistive technology, someone with disability similar to his to operate the keyboard, he can emulate the keyboard completely. He can do anything that other people can do using the keyboard but not necessarily the mouse. And so if you're developing a website, for instance, to share resources with your students to make sure that there are any features that a person would use a mouse like a pull-down menu, that they also could reach those features by using, say, the arrow keys on their keyboard. So it's fairly simple idea anyway. It's not always easy implementation but webmasters, for instance, around campus, we tell them to make sure that the keyboard alone can operate the website and you still have the alternative to use the mouse. Then we have Jessie. Jessie has multiple learning disabilities which make it difficult for her to get her thoughts down on paper but also into the computer. And so she narrates rather than typing to get her messages in but she also has difficulty reading and spelling words. And so she uses a text-to-speech software package which will read aloud the text on her screen. Not as many capabilities as Hottie's because she can actually see the screen but does that reading for her reads aloud. What Jessie needs is, remember I talked about those PDFs earlier, she needs to make sure that those PDFs, if you're using them at all or any other document, can be read with her text-to-speech software which means she has to have access to the text. Many PDFs, for instance, are scanning images and her system would just wouldn't be able to read those words on the screen. And so you need to format them in a way that she can read them. The last person on the screen here is Hottie. He's probably not going to find him as a student in your class but he's been an instructor of online classes and faces some of the challenges that blind students might face. But he uses a screen reader and that screen reader needs access to the text as well just like with Jessie. And so he needs to make sure that that PDF, for example, has text. It's actually text in the document. It's not saying there's an image. But he needs a little more than that because he needs to know the formatting of your document. So if you structure your document with heading one, heading two, heading three, heading one again, like we do rather than just, you know, bolding letters and calling that a heading. Hottie wouldn't see that as a heading as those with sight would. And so you just use the heading structure. Could be in your content management page in Canvas, for example. Could be in your Word document or your PDF. But you need to use that formatting capability that's built into the software. Similarly, there are ways to format your tables, your lists, and so forth. So he can be alerted what's coming up. Like I said, there's a bulleted list with seven items. And that gives him a lot of help in understanding that document. He also needs, if you're creating a website or even in your content management page, your web content pages, if you have a link, it's helpful for Hottie. If you have that link text to be descriptive, rather than just be consistent, say, well, I'm just going to say click here, click here, click here. I might have a page in my class of that, me five links in it. And I put descriptive text so that you'll know this. This is the do it website. This is to the University of Washington or whatever. Because if a student wants to go back, they need to read that descriptive text, their screen reader can click from link to link. So blind students then could go back and we look at those web pages that they linked to at one time, rather than having to read all the surrounding text in order for it to make sense. That's an easy thing to do. Kind of like the curb pets, though, if you put click here, click here throughout your course, it's going to take a little bit of work, a little bit of time to go back in and change into descriptive text. So Hottie doesn't have to hear click here, click here, click here. And so he needs the formatting as well. So think about these four people when you create your class and you'll be a long way towards accessibility. I'm quickly going to tell you about the sets of principles that have a play in all of this. There are three sets of principles that have the foundation of universal design. They're the basic principles of universal design, seven principles that apply to physical environments, to commercial products initially, but then to technology and even to online learning and other applications. But two other sets of guidelines are helpful too that build off of universal design and give you more specifics. One is the three principles for universal design and learning. And the other one is the four principles that underpin the web content accessibility guidelines, the technical specifications on how to make your website, but also all other IT accessible to people with disabilities. Now we're not going to go through these, but I can give you a little cheat sheet here. If you do apply all of them to your online learning course, it's really going to amount to two things. First of all, you're going to provide multiple ways, different ways for participants to learn and to demonstrate what they have learned and to engage. For example, if you're teaching a concept, you might have students look at a video, but have that content, similar content in a written form as well. Some students would choose one over the other. Many students would benefit from both and so they can hear it and see it and read it and so forth. And then have different ways to test your students. So it's not all just on, you know, two large tests, but you might have a portfolio, you might have assignments where they can show what they've learned in your course and apply it in different ways. I have two big assignments in my class that I'm teaching now, and one of them is very specific about what they're supposed to do, step, step, step, step, step. And then the last assignment is really open-ended for them to take all the content in the course and to create a webinar or write a paper or whatever they'd like to do. So they can take that. In the second one, they get to use their skills to their best ability and also consider their interests to present their project. And the first one is just very specific. And then to engage. At my syllabus, I tell students that if they'd like to meet with me, I used to say, you know, I used to say they could come to my office or they could email whatever. Now I say, well, you can email me or we can meet by Zoom or Skype or whatever technology you'd like to use. So the idea here is you give your students some agency and choose how they want to communicate with you because it's really about them and what they're comfortable with. It's not really my, my, my, my, me to say that, well, I like, you know, what do you, what do you want? You're the student. And then if you've done those things, then the second principle then is to ensure that all the technologies, so your PDF documents and your content management system or learning management system, which Canvas is pretty accessible by the way, facilities, maybe you teach a hybrid class and you're using a makerspace for some of the activities, is that accessible? The services, the resources, and the strategies are accessible to individuals for a wide variety of abilities and other characteristics. And so you have the first one in multiple ways of doing things and then making sure everything's accessible, particularly to students with disabilities. We'll quickly go through some tips. I put together a 20 tips for teaching an accessible online course. It's only to help instructors get started. And most people that are here in this presentation are just getting started. But you'll see some things on this list that you're already doing. And I'll point out why it's so important to students with disabilities. And then you can add maybe some things to do gradually. Because in universal design, you can apply the practices incrementally. You don't have to do everything at once. So you can decide, well, I'll start with these two or this one. Just do that for now. Or you can maybe think, well, I'm going to focus on the first week of school so that my introductory video and the materials I use are fully accessible. Because I might have a student with a disability that needs to talk to the disability services office. And so I'll give them some time so they won't get behind the very first week of school. It has in the handout, I'll give you the URL at the end. It has in has how-to references. And so it'll tell you how to do each of these things. It also comes with a tutorial. And so it describes each of the 20 tips. And so you might prefer learning in that way. And developed from research or a lot of articles. As some of it was research to practice articles and reports of online instructors. And we work with a lot of students with disabilities and often they're on panels and they share their experiences online and what they found most difficult in their online courses. So here we go. I'm just going to share some of them. So presenting your content in multiple ways. And using multiple ways to communicate and demonstrate learning. Those that's from that list number one and that list of practices. Be sure that your videos are captioned. And so that's good. YouTube has an editing feature as some other platforms do as well. And so you can go and edit your captions. Or you might have resources on campus. One of these Thursday classes is on captioning. So you can learn how to do that. Audio description is good too. And it's where you get additional video or audio content in your video presentation for someone who's blind. If you're creating your own video like that introductory video I mentioned. You won't need audio description if you make sure you have spoken all the content that is being presented. You don't say look here or over here. That sort of thing. I'm doing that today. I'm demonstrating that today to describe whatever is important on the screen. There might be an image once in a while that I don't consider to be all that important for someone to know that that image is there if they can't see it already. Be sure you have clear instructions. This is one of the number one things that students with disabilities telling where they're frustrated in their courses, both online and on-site, is the instructors are not clear. So think about that. And see if you can improve your instructions. Sometimes when we give instructions we forget that these are less experienced students than we are. But also they're not familiar with the content to the same degree we are. And so we need to be really clear about those. And other things students with disabilities point out in this list of most important considerations is consistent layouts and organization. When we went online in about a minute and a half I think back in 2020 I was very empathetic to faculty on our campuses and elsewhere. When I teach an online course it's very different in developing it even if the content is the same than on-site. And so faculty members had to throw what they had you know PowerPoints and handouts and things that they had. And one of the problems that resulted is inconsistent layouts and organization. For some students with disabilities this really throws them off if the thoughts are different, if the format is different. And so that's important to consider. We always talked about PDFs. PDFs you can just avoid them but that's what I do. I know it's going to be harder to make them accessible and when I want to edit my syllabus let's say if I put my syllabus in PDF then it might be tricky to get it back accessible again. And the rules for doing so can be different on a Mac and a PC and so forth. But if you want to learn about making PDFs accessible then by all means use them. We have a PDFs on our website actually but we have about a hundred handouts small handouts on our do-it website. And we have if you go to those handouts you get into the HTML version which is the most accessible but we have a separate version you can link to which is an accessible PDF. And so we link to the most accessible one and then we provide a PDF option mainly for people that want to print them out. Back in the olden days when I talked to conferences in person I always like to have a handout. People could take notes on let them know where the accessible one is as well of course. But I would just avoid them unless you want to take a workshop and learn how to do it right. And then don't use scanning images PDFs. Faculty ask me all the time yeah but I'm not creating an accessible PDFs. First of all can I tell if it's accessible? Well unless you take the go to the presentation or take a workshop on it you probably can't but one quick way to see if it's not accessible is if you try to select the text with your mouse collect some text like you can copy and paste and you can't do that selection. That means you're not looking at text you're looking at an image of text. And so Hadi would not be able to use his screen reader to access that content. And so that's one way to look at them. The PDFs that you use that other people create you can if it doesn't it doesn't appear to be accessible learn about enough about it to be accessible. Sometimes you can Google the name of that publication and you'll find another version of it that is more accessible might be an HTML version or whatever. But the other and then you can work with our staff to help you learn how to do the PDF for your for your classes to make them accessible. But another thing you can do is decide at least don't use an accessible inaccessible PDFs the first week of school. Because again a student with a disability who needs them remediated will need to use the services of the disability resources office and you don't want to cut them too short on time to do that. And that it is a reminder to that you may not be able to do everything on this list but at least you can do some things using the text format that's we've talked about again structuring headings talk about that and lists and tables use descriptive text for hyperlinks and make sure that you have descriptive text for your images. You can access this PowerPoint on our website. We'll put up a recording of it and this these PowerPoints and you'll see you can look and see if you look under tools says accessibility. You can look there and look at the state of accessibility. And one thing it checks for is whether you have an image that doesn't have descriptive text or alternative text. And so if I have an image on the screen very easy and in PowerPoint and other applications to click on that image and then add that alternative text. Who is that for? Well that's for Haughty. And so he can tell there's an image there and he doesn't know if it's just a little flower or something insignificant or maybe there's some real content in that image that he should know is there. And so you should put that in using alternative text. So using large bold sans serif fonts can be helpful like I'm doing today. Uncluttered pages, plain backgrounds, high contrast color combinations and don't rely on color alone for our students to understand what you're saying. If you had two buttons on a screen that one was red and one was green and they were both round, there are some people who are colorblind that would not be able to distinguish those colors. And so you should have at least another way to tell those distinguished between those buttons and maybe make the green one a triangle and the red one a circle or something. Use plain English spell and define acronyms. Oh acronyms. It's so easy for us to use them and think everyone knows what they mean or even other phrases that everybody understands. And make sure your examples and assignments are relative to a diverse audience. So this is more, this includes a ability level but also people from different cultures, genders, ages and so forth. Offer outlines and other scaffolding tools that would be useful to your students to help them get started even in an assignment, making sure that they understand the very pieces in the assignment and maybe give them tips on how they would organize their time and answering that assignment. Make sure there's adequate time provided for activities and projects and tests. One way I deal with this is in my syllabus I give very specific directions on all of the major assignments for the class. So that means in a project that isn't due until the last day of the class is well-defined for anybody in the class. And so they can judge how they want to organize their time and maybe save time initially. That could use time initially to do some of that assignment to be prepared. Perhaps because they have a health impairment and they're not always sure how much energy they're going to have or they might even be in the hospital at times. And so they can organize around their issues but it also helps students that have different holidays that they celebrate or are going on vacations. And so they can get that work done early rather than waiting until late. And then provide feedback on parts of assignments and then corrective opportunities. And so a big term paper you might have them turn in the short description and an outline or something for you to review before they actually go further in that paper. So I've got two more things. I don't want to just make it 22. So this is just a bonus. And so in order to use the accessibility checkers in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Canvas, other products. Now that you know just as much as I've presented today, you'll know what some of those directions are they're giving you. Like in Canvas when it tells you your PDF document is not accessible. It doesn't tell you how to do it though but it just can highlight some things. And then a lot of things in this list that any checker wouldn't be able to understand. Like whether you spell out acronyms or whether your modules are really organized well and so forth. And another thing to point out is when you're choosing the IT tools that you're going to use, like something maybe outside, particularly the Canvas system, you can check for accessibility page on their website. That's one way you can kind of get a hint on whether that tool is accessible to students with disabilities. If they don't have an accessibility page on the website for the product you're using, there's a pretty fair chance that they haven't thought about accessibility in many companies that haven't. Most IT is not fully accessible. So you can check for that. You can also check for a VPAT which is a voluntary product accessibility tool used by the federal government. You can search online to find those. And the vendor may have filled one of those out. Now, again, underline the word vendor. You know, sometimes they kind of gloss over things but they would say something about accessibility in there. And then you can also join a list. And I recommend AFIN, A-T-H-E-N, discussion list, which is for people that specialize in assistive and accessible technology at post-secondary level. And often they'll be post-on there about how accessible is this product or whatever. And there's some archives so you can look back and inform yourself whether that question has already been asked. And also, as I mentioned, you can check and make sure it's operable with the keyboard alone. And so those are a couple of things to think about. Now, this is very, very general. This is the list that I've given you. And you can look at the rest of it online. And there are a lot of very specific questions. And you can find resources online. One of the problems with Googling some of these questions, of course, is you get a lot of different answers. And they don't always agree with one another. But there's one source that we in the Dewitt Center have where we have over 700 articles. And they have to do with access for people with disabilities. And there are questions and answers and promising practices and case studies. And you'll see questions and answers along this line. Are there guidelines for creating accessible math? Yes, we're not talking about that today. But if you're a math teacher or using those types of symbols, there are some guidelines in making that happen. How can I create math and science documents that are accessible to students with visual impairments? With a lot of images and so forth, it can be difficult. But there are guidelines out there for doing that. And our short Q&A will give you a short answer and then link to some of the resources that we find that we can trust. And so, you know, describing images and particularly when they're very complicated tables and images, sometimes the guidance is to separate them into smaller chunks until you can present whatever the content is you're trying to present with those images. How do I create online math content that is accessible to students who are blind? What are some techniques for creating braille math materials? So there are a lot of very specifics if you go to the knowledge base. And so, back to universal design, it's a framework. It's an attitude. I kind of think of it as much as an attitude as anything else. It's thinking about, like with the name tag, it's thinking about what is this for? What is my course supposed to be teaching? And how can I do it effectively for students with a great diversity with respect to culture and race, ethnicity, gender identity, ability and so forth? It's a framework. It's a goal that we probably never reach. We'll never make our courses fully accessible with any particular student that might enroll in our class. And it's a process. We talked about that with the name tag. It values diversity, equity and inclusion and even is used as a platform for designing DEI efforts around the country at post-secondary institutions. We've used it at UW IT when we went through and addressed some issues as far as DEI. It promotes best practices and does not lower standards. If you're lowering your standards by making your course accessible, then maybe talk with the disability resources for students' office and see how you can maybe, you know, accommodate students without lowering your standards. It's proactive, can be implemented incrementally, benefits everyone and minimizes the need for accommodations. And that's about what it is in a nutshell. So who should do what is another question? I often hear from faculty that, well, this is a long list. How can I be expected to do all this? I'm already short on time with all my other duties as a faculty member. And I get that. And I'm not saying today that you should necessarily do all these things, by the way. We have the disability resources for students' office. They do their part and it's very specific. It's accommodations and they're serving the student, the student him and herself. And so they are providing accommodation for a specific student in a particular class. But who else could be involved? The IT accessibility team? Well, that's us here today. Look at our website and you'll see other offerings like consulting one-on-one and with small groups. And we have a general showroom. If you want to see a wide range of assistive technologies, students with disabilities are actually using. You can visit that. But anyway, I encourage you to go to that website. So we're doing things that kind of benefit anybody on campus, in this case, teaching an online course. But we're not the only ones that could provide support. Colleges, schools, they provide support for the instructors as well. And sometimes they assign a particular instructor to help other instructors. And so you can look to different departments. We have a department on campus that has a person that and probably some assistants as well, but who remediates PDF documents for their faculty. We have a department, probably several, that will do all the captioning of videos that you might be using. And there are ways to caption videos that are commercial and don't have captions. If the publisher doesn't have a captioned version, you can actually do that. But they have people that would do it for you. And so, and then we have a department that spends quite a bit of time even teaching their presentations like this to their faculty. And so they can work in small groups and so forth. And the Teaching and Learning Center in their programs and their resources on the website provide things as well. And so you can think about it. If you think, well, I don't think I should have to do this. Well, think about whether your department or your college or your school should get involved too. And so that's back to that stakeholder model I showed at the beginning of the presentation that it's not all about you. There are just all sorts of stakeholders that could make an impact on teaching accessible online courses. And so the resources that I want to share and the URLs will be in the chat. So you can look there. UW's accessible technology. That is the accessible technology website for the University of Washington. And if you click on accessibility at the bottom of the University of Washington homepage, you will find a link to this page. And it has information about events that we're sponsoring and services, but also specific instructions on how to make your PDF documents accessible, your your PowerPoints, and so forth. Then we have the do it website. Remember, that's the second group that I direct. And it has a website as well. And that's where you can find the knowledge base. But it's also where the Universal Design and Education Center is housed. And so you'll find all sorts of applications to various activities and products in that education arena in that area. That's where the 20 tips publication is located. But we also have another one called Equal Access, the Universal Design of Instruction. And it's much longer and it really goes into more detail about specific practices you can employ in your class to make it more inclusive. And so much of that applies to online learning. The 20 tips, you'll all find those that all those will be in there too. But that's only the small part of that particular publication. You'll also find a book. And that's about creating inclusive learning opportunities in higher education, a Universal Design toolkit. And so that was published in 2020. And so you can find information about that there. But also that tutorial for 20 tips and other handouts that can give you a lot of this content. And not as much detail as in the book, of course, but you can get a lot of this content. So I'd like to open this up for any questions. If anybody's posted any questions in chat or you'd like to now, I'll see if we can entertain a couple of questions. Hi, Cheryl. So Dan and I have been covering the chat. So we're pretty much caught up there. But if anyone has additional questions, we're ready to take those. Yes. I'll tell you one, one question I often get is, well, where do you get started with all this stuff? It seems like a lot to do. And it is. And I would say that two approaches, potential approaches might work for you to pick one thing like, well, I've got these videos I've created and they're not captioned, just do that for a round or improve your organization or your instructions or something. Or you can start on the first week of materials and make sure that those are more accessible and inclusive. So the disability services officers have to get involved and remediate. So another thing I get if we have a longer workshop, we talk about individual assignments. And that's really an interesting discussion. How can you make it accessible? I'll just give you one in my class. I have a lot of discussions in my class. And remember, it's on universal design and higher education. So kind of related to what we talked about today. And one of the assignments when we're talking about universal design and physical spaces is for the students to go out and find an image of a physical space that is applying universal design features, but it's not labeled as such. It can't be on some universal design website like ours. And then to just to attach it to the, in the discussion board, so and explain why you think it's universally designed. And I say then right after that, I say, I thought at the time, you know, who would this not be accessible to? Well, obviously someone who's blind. Okay. Unless they're their images that have enough description, which isn't going to happen, probably. Well, anyway, so I said alternatively, you can just describe a physical space that you've been in and and describe a feature that you call universal design and why. And then for those that use the image, that first part of the assignment, I tell them they have to describe their image to the audience as well. And so the alternative is particularly thinking through a blind student, but rather than make it available to a student who's blind only, I make it available to the whole class. And there are always students who I don't think are blind, although the class is pretty accessible, you could be blind, I wouldn't know it. But they use that second alternative. And I think it's because I guess in the cases where it's come up, it's they just were excited about something they saw the other day, you know, or they thought about a grocery store and how you can walk up to the door and the door is open automatically and so forth. And so universal design is about building that in. It can be built into the assignment rather than waiting for a student who's blind to the role in your class and then providing accommodation for that one student. It benefits everyone. They all get that opportunity. And so universal design just makes your course more inclusive of a very broad audience and hopefully will level the playing field. So everyone can participate equally. Thanks for joining me today. We do have a couple of thank yous for you too, Cheryl. This was great. Thanks so much. And thank you, Cheryl, for the great presentation. I have to run to another meeting, but very helpful information. Okay. Well, thanks for joining me. Look at the accessibility website.