My students can tell you that I like for there to be a good answer to the “so what” question; in other words, if I’m going to teach about a concept, my students should know what I’m asking them to learn, why they should learn it, and what they should be able to take away that can be applied to other disciplines or areas of their lives. This post has to do with the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, of which I’m a member, and the “so what” behind their Accessible Document Specialist credential.
Let’s be honest: the number of people with recognized conditions that need some type of assistance to make electronic documents more accessible is increasing by the day — and it’s not just older people, either. What I’ve seen as a college professor is that more students are needing a modification so that they’re able to listen to their textbooks as opposed to reading them. Whether it’s because of dyslexia, or for other reasons, I’ve had as much as 10% of my class with the documented accommodation of audio versions of books.
I started to investigate how frequently others have had the same experience of having more students needing aural accommodations. I haven’t found the data yet, but I suspect it’s increasing. Regardless of why someone needs a good text-to-speech experience, it’s important to find a reasonable way to accommodate a student’s learning. Yet most professors know little about accessibility, or if they do, it comes under the umbrella of universal design. Don’t get me wrong: universal design (UDL) is important. I believe in it. Unfortunately, we haven’t done a very good job of it at the college level, and more often than not, professors run screaming because they think it’s too hard. Most of the academics in the field of universal design and accessibility typically work in information technology or perhaps in centers for teaching. I’m fortunate to have taught at two universities that have valued teaching centers. It’s just that most professors (myself included) don’t take advantage of those opportunities nearly as often as we should. And my worry is that we’ve basically shunted UDL into the corners of schools of education, accessibility services, and information technology, and not made it mainstream. But there are exceptions. Mohawk College in Canada has a good “why UDL” on their website, and other universities are making it a more central part of their learning.
I looked through the list of Accessible Document Specialists (and am still waiting anxiously for my name to pop up on the list), and I didn’t see any at first glance who were primarily professors. That’s in part why I’m writing this post — it’s for my fellow faculty colleagues.
Part of the “so what”: Although I’m a department chair now, I still teach two classes a semester. I get what a faculty member does because I am one. And most professors honestly don’t have the time or inclination to think about accessibility unless it directly impacts them — and even then, there’s a push to have others do the work. But let’s face it: accessibility offices are busier than ever, and in some cases, have pushed students to do much of the requests for their own accommodations. But I think that with a few modifications, we as professors can pretty easily modify our workflows so that we can do much of the work ourselves without adding to already full plates. And I’m happy to be at the forefront of this movement that we’ll look back on someday and say, “Why didn’t we bother do to this work before?” Let me give two relatively easy examples.
Example 1: Most of us have templates for our syllabi that we have to follow. We often start by copying and pasting the syllabus from the last time we taught the class. [1] And if we’re being honest, our students can tell, particularly when we forget to change the years. 🙂 My contention is that it’s probably not going to be too hard for most professors to take their syllabi and make them a little easier for a screen reader to interpret. How? Using styles in Word will do quite a bit of the heavy lifting in making a document more accessible. Newer versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and even Outlook have accessibility checking built in. Using styles makes it easier to make adaptations to a template, and makes it easier for the screen reader user to hear what’s most important.
So you say you don’t know how to use styles in a syllabus? Jocelyn Ireland from Mohawk Valley Community College will teach you in less than 6 minutes. [2] Bonus: It’s also closed-captioned! If you want more details, then go to Heather Caprette’s chapter on using Word Styles in Best Practices in Accessible Online Design. What I like about Caprette’s chapter is that she has screenshots that will show the table of contents of headings for your document, which is key to how a screen reader will interpret the document. Kansas State has accessible guides for Word and Canvas, and as a bonus, their syllabus encourages you to think about different course objectives at the same time!
Example 2: Many of us have printed PowerPoint slides with room for notes next to them. But here’s a nasty little secret: PowerPoint takes that text and converts it to an image without alternate text that tells the screen reader what that image represents. So as far as a screen reader is concerned, that text doesn’t exist. The screen reader user will literally hear nothing. [3] True story that happened to one of my former students. It’s arguably better to send the student the actual PowerPoint file, which is more likely to be accessible. But if there are pictures or graphics in the file, then all it takes to raise the accessibility level is the addition of alternate text for the pictures. That will take at most 15 seconds per image. It takes us more time to find and create the images that we use than it does to add alternate text.
I could go on and on. And I likely will in future posts. But I think it’s a reasonable ask to try one new thing each semester, and I’ll help do my part by highlighting easy (and maybe not-so-easy) ways of making documents more accessible.