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Author Topic: Universal design for online classes--Do you do this? Are you expected to?  (Read 2377 times)
_touchedbyanoodle_
is not worthy of a moniker resurrection.
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« on: March 26, 2011, 03:01:18 PM »

Question for those of you teaching online or using a lot of online supplements to your classes:

Do you follow universal design principles, to make your courses accessible from the get-go for students with visual, physical, and/or hearing impairments? If so, what set of principles are you using? And, are you doing it because your college expects you to, or because you believe in the principles of universal design?

For a variety of reasons, I've made it a personal teaching goal to employ universal design principles in my online courses from fall semester forward, and I have to admit, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed.
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"Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist." -George Carlin
dept_geek
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through a glass darkly....


« Reply #1 on: March 26, 2011, 03:15:32 PM »

Within the confines of the course management system, yes my sites are accessible. I do it because I require my students design their applications to be accessible. I am a lot of things, but generally not a hypocrite. I believe in accessibility quite strongly. My principle is this : do as much as you can with the tools you have and try and learn one more technique for next semester.

When writing (X)HTML: make sure your code is validated under the W3C validation rules. That will get you very close. You may also wish to download or use an online accessibility checker (e.g. Firefox Accessibility toolbar, WAVE, Cynthia Says, etc)

Physical - I make sure all my on-page actions are accessible via a mouse and keyboard. Not hard, but can be a little tricky depending.

Hearing: All my videos are captioned either with closed or open captioning. I use Camtasia (the Windows version has a pretty good speech to text module that makes this a little easier) but there are others. Alan started a good thread some time back that talked more about this.

This biggest drawback will always be the CMS. Most claim to be accessible to some degree.  Good luck - some of your students will appreciate your effort. 

Happy to help over PM if there is a specific thing you want to work on.


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_touchedbyanoodle_
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« Reply #2 on: March 26, 2011, 06:04:00 PM »

Thanks for the response, Dept_Geek. I just may take you up on the offer for a PM. I had bookmarked Cynthia Says, so I'm glad to see you recommend it. I am discovering that there are a number of features in my LMS that are not accessible. Rat bastards.
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"Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist." -George Carlin
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