Accessibility and Universal Design

Why does accessibility matter?

Take a few minutes to answer this question on your own — in your notebooks, a laptop, or a spare sheet of paper. You won’t have to share this writing with anyone, but we will discuss a few of the group’s ideas together.

What are we already doing to ensure accessible classes?

(While you’re writing, here’s the DRC’s mascot, Cori!)

Accessibility matters because…

  • Compared with their peers in the general population, completion rates at 4-year colleges were lower for students with disabilities than for their peers, the National Center for Education Research found that only 34% of students with disabilities graduated within eight years.
  • In the Writing Program, we hold as a pedagogical principle to value diversity as a strength, and to create a classroom culture of acceptance, kindness, and respect.
  • #whydisabledpeopledropout illustrates that these principles make a huge difference in the college success of students with disabilities.

Universal Design for Learning

  1. Multiple means of representation, to give learners various ways of acquiring information and knowledge,
  2. Multiple means of expression, to provide learners alternatives for demonstrating what they know,
  3. Multiple means of engagement, to tap into learners’ interests, offer appropriate challenges, and increase motivation.

Some UDL Resources

UD: Places to StartThis wiki includes a long list of UDL suggestions, organized according to some of the different modes of “delivery” or styles of teaching in higher education.
DRC Traning and Resources
FIU's Disability Resource Center has created excellent training modules about UDL, as well as service animals, and disability sensitivity. The Faculty page from their website also includes helpful advice about syllabus statements, and ways the DRC can help us ensure accessibility in our classrooms.
The Accessible Syllabus
This website is dedicated to helping instructors build a syllabus that plans for diverse student abilities and promotes an atmosphere in which students feel comfortable discussing their unique abilities.
The Center for UD in EducationFrom the University of Washington, The Center for Universal Design in Education (CUDE) develops and collects resources to help educators apply UDL.
Practices for Accessibility StatementsThis page has useful advice about how to demonstrate your commitment to accessibility in the syllabus. An accessibility statement invites points of contact for students with disabilities to disclose their accommodation needs.

Let’s reflect on our practices of accessibility.

How does a focus on a checklist of accessibility practices hinder full accessibility?

  • A checklist gives a sense of grounding, of crystallizing a vague lack of knowledge into recognizable themes: how to check in, language to avoid, perhaps some individual accommodations. But that crystallization process is also, inevitably, a reductive process. – Wood, Tara, et al.
  • A checklist of UDL features could become simplified to reductive formulas. As educators, consider Universal Design as a “place to start” towards more critical, problematized and active forms of engagement.- Dolmage, Jay. 
  • Think of accessibility as a constant state of reflection and renegotiation. To create more inclusive teaching, then, instructors both plan for diversity in the classroom and adapt to the immediate needs of students – Womack, Anne-Marie.

Reflecting on Practices of Accommodation
– From Dolmage, Jay. “Mapping Composition.”

Consider the ways that your daily teaching practices may function as steep steps (a barrier to learning) or a retrofit (an accommodation that does not change and challenge the mainstream) or may be reimagined to be fully inclusive.

  1. Make four columns on a sheet of paper. List three or four teaching practices vertically in the left column — one example might be having students read their drafts aloud out in small peer response groups.
  2. Label the next column “steep steps,” and list in this column students who may be excluded by this practice – for example, a deaf student.
  3. Label the next column “retrofit” and list here accommodations for those excluded.
  4. Finally, label the fourth column Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and imagine re-designing your practices to be more inclusive of all kinds of student learners.

References