Activities and Assessments

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The Standards

Section 508 Standards:

WCAG 2.0 Guideline:

What do the Standards Mean?

The standards and guidelines above relate to two recommendations for creating activities and assessments: allowing for extended time and eliminating sensory details in assignment instructions. Both will be explained in detail.

Time-Sensitive Activities and Assessments

The first recommendation relates to how time constraints can be an accessibility barrier to many individuals. For example, individuals who use assistive technology may struggle with timed activities. While technology can open many doors, it does not eliminate all barriers. It may take longer for individuals who use assistive technology to get through the content or to complete activities or tests than it would for students not using assistive technology. To get an idea of what it is like to use assistive technology to navigate web materials, watch or read the transcripts of the assistive technology videos in Week 6 of this MOOC. These videos are intended to provide insight into what the learners who use assistive technology may experience when reviewing the content.

The best way to meet these standards and guidelines is to not have any time limits for your assignments. Alas, if a time limit is non-negotiable then make sure to provide a way for learners to extend that time. Another way to help is to allow for a way to stop features that might interrupt the learners’ workflow; for example, automatic updates, refreshing RSS feeds or advertisements.

Instructions with Sensory Details

The second recommendation is about eliminating any sensory-dependent instructions in your assignments. Of course, this recommendation is important to keep in mind when creating assignments; however, it is also applicable to step-by-step guides or screencast videos used to demonstrate software.

An example of an inaccessible instruction would be “click the red button.” This is inaccessible because not everyone can see the color red.  Individuals with visual disabilities may be able to identify buttons on the web using screen reader software, but the software cannot tell them what the button looks like. Alternatively, the creator should identify the button by its correct label. Instead of stating or writing the instruction using sensory details, use the instruction “click the submit button.” If that button is correctly labeled as “submit” in the code then the screen reader will tell the user which button is the “submit” button.

Sensory-dependent Assignments

On a similar note, try to avoid constructing activities and assessments in a way where learners have to be able to see or hear something to complete the assignment. An example of an inaccessible assignment would be one where students have to examine, analyze and answer questions about an image. Even after reading a long text description of the image, this particular assignment is not ever going to be an equitable experience for students with visual disabilities. Of course, complying with this recommendation is going to be more difficult when the content itself relies on sensory information (e.g. artistic fields, musical fields).

A common misconception is that people have an excuse to ignore accessibility guidelines when working in fields that may seem inherently inaccessible at first glance. The truth is that it is not up to other people to decide what individuals with disabilities can do. Even for sensory-dependent subjects, educators have a moral obligation to make the course as accessible as they can make it.

When faced with an inaccessible assignment, it is tempting to fix the problem by adding an alternative assignment to the inaccessible assignment just for the students with disabilities. Alas, the ideal solution to accessibility barriers is to make all of the content accessible to everyone from the beginning because “separate” assignments are almost never equitable experiences. 

Resources

Information on this page is from the following resources about activities and assessments:

  • CAST Universal Design for Learning Links to an external site.. Retrieved December 30, 2015.
    • CAST is the nonprofit educational research and development organization that helped create Universal Design for Learning.
  • WebAIM Cognitive Disabilities Links to an external site.. Retrieved December 30, 2015
    • WebAIM is a non-profit organization associated with the Center for Persons with Disabilities at Utah State University. It is one of the leading resources for information on accessibility.
  • W3C Enough Time Links to an external site.. Retrieved December 30, 2015.
    • This website, w3.org, is the website for The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is a community of individuals who develop web standards. The guides on this website include extensive recommendations, examples, related resources and other helpful tools.
  • United States Access Board. Retrieved January 13, 2016
    • This page contains the Section 508 standards as of January, 2016. This does not contain the refreshed standards proposed in February 2015.  
  • Quick Reference Guide to Section 508 Requirements and Standards. Section 508.gov. Retrieved January 23, 2016.
    • This page contains the Section 508 standards as of January, 2016. This does not contain the refreshed standards proposed in February 2015.

 Estimated time: 11 minutes