Basics of Inclusive Design for Online Education

Overview

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This course provides instruction and strategies to support you in developing a course that is inclusive to students with a wide range of abilities, including students with disabilities. We cover effective practices to increase inclusion and avoid some of the common accessibility issues that can arise in an online course. In particular, Basics of Inclusive Design Online covers course organization, the accessibility of Microsoft Office and PDF documents, making course instruction pages accessible, captioning of videos, making images accessible, and designing for learning differences. We also discuss how inclusive course materials can help all students, including students without disabilities. This course will appeal to those who want both a broad overview of the range of accessibility considerations and also a step-by-step guide of how to check documents for accessibility, caption a video, or prepare course content for non-visual users. Course logo credit: "web accessibility word cloud" by Jill Wright (https://goo.gl/xyUoeU). Copyright - some rights remain. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Syllabus

Week 1: Introduction to Course, Demographics, Universal Design

Welcome to the first week of Basics of Inclusive Design! This module will review the structure and logistics of the course and then introduce the issues that affect course accessibility. The topic of course accessibility will include an interview with two students who use Assistive Technology to access digital material. The assignment will allow you to learn more about the issues that students with different backgrounds and abilities face when taking a course and for you to offer your own solutions for addressing the needs of students who may need special adaptations for accessing course material.

Week 2: Accessible Documents

Following a review of online accessibility issues, in this week we will explain the steps to create and remediate course documents in MS Word, PowerPoint, and Adobe PDF documents. The assignment will provide you with an opportunity to apply these skills to actual documents.

Week 3: Complex Images, Tables, Graphs

Week 3 will focus on creating appropriate text alternatives for complex images and other more complex material, such as data tables and graphs. The assignment will provide you the opportunity to add alternate text to images.

Week 4: Captioning

This week, we will introduce the topic of captioning, discuss its accessibility and Universal Design benefits and then provide step-by-step instruction for captioning videos using a variety of tools. The assignment will provide the opportunity to caption a video.

Week 5: Uncovered Topics, Resources & Review

This final week of the course will cover topics not covered in earlier lessons: keyboard accessibility, color contrast and the accessibility of Learning Management Systems (LMS). The assignment will ask you to use a resource we have covered and one discovered by you to address one of a number of accessibility scenarios.