Accessibility and Accomodations

Many faculty and staff are accustomed to providing accommodations and understand the basic procedures in doing so. You may have had students who require additional test time, a note-taker, or special textbooks. However, ensuring learning experiences are accessible from the start, including those that use technology, is often new territory for faculty and staff. Understanding the balance between accessibility and accommodations and the roles of different faculty and staff are important.  

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.

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. 

Example of an Accessibility Process

Kathlene Stone

Listen to Kathleen Stone from Empire State College talk about the process they use for ensuring accessibility of online courses, the various players involved in the process, and how it is different than making accommodations. (7:08)

Download Transcript for Accessibility Process Example mp3.docx

Example of an Accommodation Process

Kelly Hermann

Listen to Kelly Hermann describe the typical accommodation process used at college campuses today and two examples of how accommodations may need to be implemented even with a fully accessible course. (8:35)

 

Transcript: Download Accommodations.docx


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