Accessibility Requirements
What online materials need to be made accessible?
All required web-based materials (including content in Canvas, HTML files, PDF files, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, video files, audio files, images) for use with online, hybrid, blended, or face-to-face classes must be made compliant. Textbooks may also be available in a digital format for all students.
This includes:
- content created by the instructor within your college's course management system
- files uploaded by the instructor to your college's course management system
- material created or controlled by the instructor, but hosted on another server
- content used as course material provided by educational publishers and other third-party websites
Although accessibility is an ever-evolving topic of consideration, ensuring the accessibility of educational content is required by law. At the federal level, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA; Higher Education and the ADA Links to an external site.) and other legislation are in place to provide protection for students with disabilities. At the state level, California Government Code 7405 Links to an external site. requires that the California community colleges meet the accessibility requirements of the Section 508 standards discussed below. Guidelines are regularly being updated and revised, often based on technological advancements or legal findings. It's important for you to do your best to stay informed.
Accessibility and Universal Design
In 1945, Jack Fisher was an intrepid attorney working in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Fisher had deep empathy for the many injured veterans returning from WWII, as he was, himself, an injured vet who had difficulty finding employment after his discharge from the service. Fisher found renewed worth in working on behalf of injured vets and knew many of them would be better off with jobs, but he also recognized that many simply could not maneuver around the city to get to those jobs.
Fisher petitioned the city of Kalamazoo and then worked with city planners to design and install curb cuts (a ramp cut into a curb), ramps, and safety rails at corners so veterans using wheelchairs and crutches could more easily navigate. What was, at the time, a minimal outlay of less than $1,000 for the city of Kalamazoo resulted in unprecedented gains for the veterans. (Read more about Fisher's work to make the city of Kalamazoo accessible. Links to an external site.)
At the heart of the Kalamazoo curb cut story is the principle that poor design limits use, while smart design broadens use. In fact, the curb cuts in Kalamazoo did not just aid veterans and others with mobility issues, they allowed better access for bike riders, parents with strollers, and travelers with luggage. In the ensuing decades, laws emerged that mandated access to public buildings, but alongside those mandates — which ensure access, but not usability or functionality — arose tenets of design in architecture and city planning that had a drastic impact on the way we design public spaces. These are the tenets of Universal Design.
Curb cuts are now part of cities across the world, and the benefits are innumerable. With such a brilliant example of the benefits of Universal Design, why is online education slow to embrace this philosophy? We're going to cut right to the heart of the issue: Accessibility gets a bad rap. Faculty avoid, fear, and resist making their courses accessible for two main reasons:
- They report that they feel overwhelmed by the technical details.
- They feel that they are jumping through hoops on the rare chance that they will have a vision- or hearing-impaired student in their course.
Right now, you may be nodding your head in agreement — accessibility (at this point!) may seem overwhelming, with few benefits for the time invested. There are many reasons that these myths about the difficulty of achieving accessibility need to be confronted. But let's discuss this one first: It's the law.
Federal accessibility legislation
There are two major pieces of federal legislation that provide the foundation for our approach to accessibility in California, the Americans with Disabilities Act Links to an external site. and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 Links to an external site.. This legislation provides the underlying mandate for designing courses that are accessible to students with visual, auditory, and physical impairments, as well as students with information processing differences.
In 2011, The California Community Colleges Distance Education Task Force compiled the Distance Education Accessibility Guidelines. In many ways, these guidelines are the foundation and framing for what we will do in this course. Please review the guidelines before moving forward in this course. In fact, we strongly recommend you download this document and retain it for reference.
In upcoming sections of the unit, we'll explore how these guidelines play out in practice, but before moving on, we'd like to provide context to help you dive into this course with the right frame of mind.
Teaching is a dynamic field that is constantly changing and evolving
If the practice of teaching did not change over time, we'd all be standing on the steps of a public building in the civic square lecturing to the city's elite — well, at least the men would be! But it does change, and one of the agents driving this change is the desire to teach more effectively to a broader range of students. In essence, we've been accommodating student differences for decades, honing our presentation skills, assessment techniques, and learning activities to engage students in critical thinking and learning. In fact, many of the skills we use to accommodate differences are so ingrained, we are not even aware we are doing them — they are a normal part of the everyday practice of teaching.
We hope that, by the end of this course, the skills and techniques you will learn to make your course more accessible will become an invisible, routine part of your day. In other words, we're going to tackle the two major myths of accessibility by walking you through the technology in easy-to-follow steps, and by helping you see the myriad ways this approach to design will help all of your students.