Accessible teaching is pro-active. Rather than waiting for students to take initiative, secure accommodations, and come to you, you can include measures in your day-to-day teaching that will help your students before they have to ask. 

Accessible teaching is also about removing barriers and creating multiple ways for your students to learn and demonstrate their learning.  Limiting access to materials and activities, making them available only at certain times and in certain formats, will always result in fewer learning opportunities. No instructor can force students to learn in one specific way, nor should they. 

Here are some simple things you can do to reduce barriers for your students.

Allow Devices

A simple smartphone allows students to take notes, leave themselves reminders, record audio of the class for later study or transcription, and more. Some faculty still ban such devices in class for fear of students becoming distracted by checking mail or social media, but in doing so they remove a vital tool for learning and staying on track from the hands of learners.

A student doing something with their hands is not always distracted. Indeed, that may be what’s necessary for them to stay focused on the class. While it’s perfectly reasonable to expect students to pay attention in class, and many students can benefit from your guidance on study skills, you should not assume that you know better than the students what tools they need to learn most effectively.

Enable Captions

Any instructor who uses slides has a built-in way to live-caption their lecture segments. Both Powerpoint and Google Slides will auto-transcribe your speech. Turning this on at the start of each lecture segment helps ensure that the greatest number of students will be able to understand without requiring anyone to disclose personal details–or ask you to repeat yourself again and again.

• Turn on live captions in Powerpoint

• Turn on live cations in Google Slides

Captions are also automatically produced for any auto-released Lecture Recording videos. If you are only sharing Lecture Recording videos by manual release, remember to go to the “Captions” tab under the “Edit” option and generate captions. The Captions tab will also allow you to download a text transcript of the captions, once they’re generated.

Post Your Lecture Slides and Transcripts

Not all students find it easy to remember and process information audibly, and slide visibility in large lecture halls is a perennial problem. Making lecture material available in additional formats not only ensures that those students will have an easier time learning the material, but also increases the learning opportunities for the whole class.

Lecture materials should be made available in your Canvas course site, including your slides and text transcripts whenever possible. Having slides available for review, and ideally to follow along during lecture, helps prompt memory and clarify specific points. They can even be made available in a collaborative platform such as Google Docs, Hypothesis, or Harmonize for collective annotation, note-taking, and Q&A by the class. A text transcript is the thing most easily converted into other forms (read aloud, ingested by a braille converter, font increased or decreased, colors altered for specific contrast levels). A text or slide file is also much smaller and easier to load over a slow connection than a video file. 

The timed-release function of Canvas modules can ensure these materials are only available from the start of lecture, if that is truly a concern, but consider the benefits of making them available for the entire term. Many students need to return to new information several times before it really settles, and limiting their access to the instructor’s own preferred pace and format does not allow that to happen.  Again: reduce barriers, increase access.

Eschew PDFs

It has become common practice, over the years, to make many course documents available in PDF format. Unfortunately, this trend has reduced the accessibility of vital course materials.

The Portable Document Format (PDF) was created as a container that could hold many types of content. It could collate scanned images into page order and preserve the visual formatting of a text document with complex layout. The fact that it is very difficult to edit was considered a feature, not a bug, for instructors who wanted to maintain firm control of course documents like syllabi. All these features make PDFs one of the least accessible document formats, though. Even a PDF created from a well-structured text document with alt text for every image and correctly tagged data tables becomes less accessible the moment it is saved as a PDF. Information that went in must be extracted again before it can be rendered as audio, braille, or even in a large-text format, and there is little guarantee even now that all the original document information and metadata can be extracted again.

Instead of wasting time on the extra step of “save as PDF,” instructors can simply post syllabi and so forth as text files. You can copy and paste the text into the Syllabus page of your Canvas site if you wish to have it in one easy to find and easy to update location. Slides can be posted in the original format rather than in PDF form. Collections of images can be embedded in Canvas site pages, where alt text or descriptions are easy to add and edit.

When it comes to articles for your class, instead of bending the rules of Interlibrary Loan, consider liaising with our librarians, who are all powerfully dedicated to making learning materials available and accessible, to create online course reserves. ILL is intended to provide materials for individual use, and while there are provisions for making ‘loan’ copies in various accessible formats, PDF is the standard in part because it uses the same process as the old paper copies did (a staff member with a copier/scanner). Our librarians will be happy to work with you to make your course reserves more accessible.

If you would like to discuss how to make your teaching more accessible, feel free to request a consultation with the Learning and Teaching Consultants.