Dive Brief:
- Colleges and universities can develop fully accessible online courses if design teams keep best practices in mind throughout the research, development, design, and implementation phases.
- Campus Technology reports that faculty should meet with representatives from the Office of Disability Services, IT, and the library as soon as they start researching a particular course, and during the development phase, an accessibility statement should be added to the syllabus and course documents should be written only in accessible fonts, colors, and sizes.
- During the design phase, accessible navigation and captions/transcriptions for all video/audio becomes key, and conversations with learning management system hosts can confirm content can be accessed from a screen reader, for example.
Dive Insight:
Chief information officers are often tasked with considering accessibility of online platforms. Unlike one of their other key problems — cybersecurity — web accessibility is a solvable problem. There are clear best practices, and court cases over accessibility have consistently required institutions receiving federal funding to live up to the same standards. While an update to the ADA is expected in the next administration, colleges and universities should not wait to develop internal capacity for creating accessible courses.
A team of accessibility advocates at the University of Montana capitalized on a 2012 Office of Civil Rights complaint to get traction for their recommendations. The fact is, most online courses will be offered to at least one student with a disability. And the law says schools need to accommodate them.