Accessibility

Accessibility is about removing barriers to participation and engagement. It is usually used in the context of disability, but it should apply to everyone. In this instance technology can be seen as a useful tool in enabling access, but it creates barriers as well.

The anticipatory nature of legislation requires us to have a wide knowledge of disability and to adjust our practice accordingly. This is a shift from Individual Education Plans (IEPs) created when a student seeks support, to a Universal Learning Design (ULD) approach to educational planning and delivery, although individual students may still require some individual support and adjustment.

Accessibility also includes staff, and we should be sensitive to the need to produce educational management materials in formats that follow best practice. 

Content

Legislation in the UK

Aside from the ethical and good practice reasons for designing accessible materials, there is now a legal imperative:

Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) Links to an external site.

• Part 1 defines disability: “A person has a disability for the purposes of this Act if he has a physical or mental impairment which has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on his ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities.”
• Part 2 Outlaws discrimination in Employment
• Part 3 Outlaws discrimination in other areas (service provision) although education not included.

Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Act 2001 (SENDA) Links to an external site.

• Became part 4 of the DDA
• All services provided wholly or mainly for students are covered, including learning materials and assessment.
• The institution is responsible (and accountable) for ensuring the accessibility of any products or services it procures.
• Although people talk about ‘SENDA Compliance’ it has no legal definition … we should use the term ‘DDA Compliance’.

Disability Equality Duty 2006 (DED) Links to an external site.

• This requires all public bodies to actively look at ways of ensuring disabled people are treated equally under the DDA. Universities are required to publish a Disability Equality Scheme to demonstrate they are meeting DED requirements.

The Equality Act 2010 Links to an external site.

• The Equality Act 2010 brings together, harmonises and in some respects extends the current equality law. It aims to make it more consistent, clearer and easier to follow in order to make society fairer.

Legislation elsewhere

Use the 'cork board below to let us know what legislation (if any) governs the preparation of learning materials in your country. Just click anywhere on the board and fill in the 'post-it' note that appears. You can drag your note so that it is near any others from the same country:

 

Accessibility in practice

When producing online learning and teaching materials and online activities, what do we need to keep in mind?

Technology

If you have a particular audience in mind, such as when you are delivering eLearning course material to a specific group of students, it is important to understand the technological limitations they might have. For example, I am currently repackaging course materials and activities we currently deliver to Singapore, for delivery to Sarawak where the bandwidth available constrains what we are able to deliver successfully. This is more tricky with a MOOC since, by definition, you will have no idea what technical constraints participants might have. Generally though, course content should be platform and browser agnostic, and available on mobile as well as fixed devices. This means no Flash-based materials, so choose embedded tools (like the 'cork board' above), which are HTML5 based.

Interestingly, the Canvas platform does not meet these requirements since it does not work on older versions of Internet Explorer. It also strips out some Java code when embedding tools and video streams. This has caused us some difficulty here in the UK where our National Health Service (NHS) still uses older versions of Internet Explorer, and they are our primary target as a School of Health & Social Care.

Design

Designing for accessibility includes choosing san serif fonts, trying not to italicise or underline for emphasis since these are more difficult to read, but using bold text instead. Keeping all text in the same font and using font size to distinguish headings.

Use colours that have clear contrast (like black on white). Colour wheels can help you choose appropriate colour combinations. In reality students generally prefer black on white, especially with modern LCD screens.

Use 'white space' to help differentiate segments on a page. Although we want tp prevent too much scrolling to reach content, good signposting and white space will help students find what they are looking for. Equally, it is important not to compress the font size too much just to 'squeeze' more text into a smaller page.

Labelling for screen readers

 All images should have the 'alt' text field populated so that students using screen readers get the full impact of the learning materials.

For diagrams and illustrations I tend to use a more meaningful label, although that cannot replace the impact of an image. If I want to include a table from an article I will rebuild it rather than copy it as an image, since the screen reader will then be able to read the table to the student.

Tools

Padlet Links to an external site. is a free Internet application that allows people to express their thoughts on a common topic easily. It works like an online sheet of paper where educators can put any content (e.g. images, videos, documents, text) anywhere on the page, together with anyone from any device. It does not use Flash or Javascript, which makes it reasonably universal.

Resources

UDL Universe: Universal Design for Learning Professionals Links to an external site.

National Centre on Universal Design for Learning Links to an external site.

Gay, G. (2014) Accessibility in eLearning: What you need to know.  Toronto: OCAD University Download Gay, G. (2014) Accessibility in eLearning: What you need to know.  Toronto: OCAD University