Celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)
This guest post is by Tainá Hanno, Inclusive Pedagogy Specialist at the Center for Teaching and Learning.
May marked the 13th Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). The event is usually observed on the third Thursday of the month. The purpose of GAAD is to promote and raise awareness about accessibility in both digital and physical environments as well as to raise awareness regarding inclusive approaches that can benefit over one billion individuals with disabilities or impairments, which can be invisible to many people, and invisible disabilities or impairments may not require accommodations or the need for an assistive technology (AT) device.
As a result, we would like to share a few reminders that can help you meet the minimum expectations of faculty here at the Bloomberg School of Public Health regarding digital accessibility. These reminders apply regardless of the mode of teaching you may use.
Working with Realistic Goals while Removing Barriers and Supporting Students
It can be daunting to think about digital accessibility when considering its broad scope and only from a problem-based perspective. However, to make digital accessibility less daunting, consider taking incremental steps. Some aspects may require more technical expertise, while others may only need updates to habits and practices. When engaging with digital accessibility practices, the overall positive impacts derived from removing barriers (Edmonds, 2004) ultimately outweigh any initial apprehensions you may have regarding such practices.
For these reasons, setting realistic goals is vital when reviewing faculty expectations. Recognize that guidelines across the university have required that new instructional material to be digitally accessible as of January 1, 2021. This expectation relates to all materials authored by faculty and distributed to or otherwise shared with students. However, the longer we wait to address digital accessibility issues, the longer students struggle with inaccessible materials.
To illustrate, one realistic goal you can set for yourself or your instructional team is to tackle one best practice per term, such as ensuring that all non-textual content (e.g., pictures, images, graphs, tables, icons, etc.) includes alternative text (alt text). As a subject matter expert in your field, you have tremendous knowledge regarding the information that should be included as an alt text. This practice translates well to multiple tools you work with because, conceptually, once you learn how to add alt text in Word, you know how to do it in PowerPoint, and even CoursePlus.
A different goal would be to explore best practices by tool. If you and your instructional team use PowerPoint frequently, perhaps exploring the use of templates for your live lectures might be another reasonable approach and goal to strive toward. Within this goal, you can break digital accessibility tasks associated with the tool itself, including adding alt text to non-textual content or reviewing the color contrast ratio of your slides, for example. These practices translate in one way or another to multiple contexts and tools.
Will you become an expert? It is unlikely. Rest assured that you are not expected to become one. There are complexities involved with digital accessibility that you may never need to look into. Still, the basics delineated in the Accessibility Checklist for Johns Hopkins Faculty are a great place to start.
Conclusion
There is truly no right or single way to “do” accessibility. The only fundamentally wrong way is to ignore it completely and only to consider it from an accommodation perspective. These are some reminders of things you can start doing so that all students can thrive!
If you want to learn more about ways you can improve the digital accessibility of your instructional materials, please contact Tainá Hanno, Inclusive Pedagogy Specialist, or CTL Help. We are available to help you!
References
Assistive Technology Industry Association (AtiA). (n.d.) What is AT? Retrieved May 10, 2024 https://www.atia.org/home/at-resources/what-is-at/
CTL Teaching Toolkit. BSPH, The Johns Hopkins University. (n.d.). Creating Universally Accessible Materials: Expectations of Faculty. Retrieved April 30, 2024, from https://www.ctltoolkit.com/expectations-of-faculty
CTL Teaching Toolkit. BSPH, The Johns Hopkins University. (n.d.). Lecture PowerPoint Template. Retrieved April 30, 2024, from https://www.ctltoolkit.com/lecture-ppt-template
CTL Blog. BSPH, The Johns Hopkins University. (2020, November 12). A Beginner’s Guide to Authoring Universally Accessible Materials, Part 3: Alt Text. Retrieved May 9, 2024, from https://ctl.jhsph.edu/blog/posts/author-accessible-resources-part3/
Edmonds, C. D. (2004). Planning for Accessibility and Usability in E-Learning. Journal of Interactive Instruction Development, 17(1).
Noah, T. (2023, September 15). Mistakes I Used to Make in Digital Accessibility – and How to Fix Them. Edudopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/creating-accessible-digital-content/
WebAIM. Web Accessibility in Mind. (n.d.). Contrast Checker. Retrieved April 30, 2024, from https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/