Presentation Summaries
Accommodations and Universal Design
Sheryl Burgstahler, University of Washington
The UW’s Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology (DO-IT) Center promotes the practice of (1) applying universal design (UD) to create inclusive educational and career opportunities and resources for people with disabilities and (2) providing effective accommodations for people with disabilities when opportunities and resources are not fully accessible. This dual approach is consistent with all of the projects the DO-IT Center undertakes, including AccessADVANCE, which is funded by the National Science Foundation to increase the successful participation and advancement of women with disabilities in STEM faculty careers. AccessADVANCE has the following objectives:
- For Institutions and Projects: To increase the engagement and capacity of ADVANCE1, INCLUDES2, and other programs that promote women in STEM and their host institutions to make institutional changes that make academic STEM careers more welcoming and accessible to women with disabilities.
- For Individuals: To increase the interest and success of women with disabilities in pursuing academic STEM careers through outreach activities.
- For the Entire Community: To expand an online Knowledge Base and other resources to share Q&As, case studies, and promising practices regarding institutional steps to increase the participation of women with disabilities in academic STEM careers.
In an inclusive environment, everyone who meets requirements, with or without accommodations, is encouraged to participate; all participants should feel welcome and be able to fully engage in accessible and inclusive environments and activities. Historically, people with disabilities have been excluded and segregated. Most recent efforts to achieve access for this group focus on rehabilitation and accommodation. Increasingly, we are now moving towards a society where all people are included; looking through a social justice lens, universal design (UD) provides a reasonable framework to achieve this goal. Ability exists on a continuum, where all individuals are more or less able to see, hear, walk, read printed material, communicate verbally, tune out distractions, learn, manage their health, and undertake other activities in life. Most disabilities are not obvious and reported for a variety of reasons; thus, in our current climate, many products and services are made accessible to individuals with disabilities through approved accommodations for those who request them.
If we instead look to improve the designs of products (e.g., websites and environments (e.g., online learning opportunities) through the application of UD principles, guidelines and practices, they will be fully inclusive of more people and reduce the need for accommodations. UD is defined as the “design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.” A UD approach can benefit people who face challenges related to socioeconomic status, race, culture, gender, age, language, or ability. For example, captioning a video provides access to people who are unable to hear the audio, are English learners, are in a noisy or noiseless location, have slow Internet connections, want to know the spelling of words, or need to search text to find content quickly. Applying UD to information technology builds in accessibility features and also ensures compatibility with assistive technology that individuals with disabilities commonly use. A universally designed website, for example, would have text alternatives for graphics, include captions or transcripts for all video and audio content, ensure that all content and navigation can be reached with the keyboard alone, and spell out acronyms. In a nutshell, UD provides multiple ways for people to learn, demonstrate what they have learned, and engage, as well as ensures all technologies, facilities, services, resources, and strategies are accessible to individuals with a wide variety of disabilities.
In summary, UD is an attitude that values diversity, equity, and inclusion. It can be implemented incrementally, focuses on benefits to all people, promotes good teaching practice, does not lower academic or career standards, and minimizes the need for accommodations. For more information on UD, consult The Center for Universal Design in Education.
1 The NSF ADVANCE program aims to "broaden the implementation of evidence-based systemic change strategies that promote equity for STEM faculty in academic workplaces and the academic profession.”
2 The NSF INCLUDES program aims to "to improve collaborative efforts aimed at enhancing the preparation, increasing the participation, and ensuring the contributions of individuals from groups that have been historically underrepresented and underserved in the STEM enterprise.”
Accessible Meetings and Events
Brianna Blaser, University of Washington
Whether in person or online, there are concrete steps that ADVANCE projects and STEM departments can take to ensure that their meetings, events, and presentations are more accessible to a wide audience. Begin by thinking about who might face barriers to an event. These may be disability-related barriers for individuals who are blind or have low vision, deaf or hard of hearing, have mobility impairments, or have other disabilities. Also consider whether events are accessible to non-native speakers of English, individuals connecting to virtual meetings via phone, or other groups.
For virtual meetings and events, consider whether the software that you are using is accessible. Many options do not easily interface with screen readers or other assistive technology used by people with disabilities. Some may not support captioning or sign language interpreters. Become familiar with accessibility features of your software and share relevant details with your participants. If your software supports automatic captioning, consider turning it on.
When you are announcing a meeting, make it clear how to request accommodations and respond promptly to requests that you do receive. For example, approve requests from deaf or hard of hearing attendees for sign language interpreting or live captioners to ensure equal access even if automatic captions are available. A common request is for access to presentation slides; in this case, be sure the slides you offer are designed in an accessible format. For in-person events, you may receive requests related to navigation of an event space and dietary restrictions.
Ideally, share accessible versions of the agenda and presentation materials ahead of time, and provide materials to interpreters and captioners. Designate someone separate from the presenter to manage an online meeting. Mute all participants as they join the meeting. Work with presenters to ensure they are well lit and encourage them to use non-moving backgrounds, headsets for high quality audio, and presentation visuals with large fonts, uncluttered pages, high contrast color schemes, more than color coding to communicate information, simple graphic images, and captioned videos with audio description if available. Encourage speakers to incorporate a variety of presentation methods, including polls, breakout rooms, and/or discussions in chat. Remind them to speak all the content on their slides and verbally describe images or graphics since some participants may not have access to content on the screen. Share links to resources mentioned in the presentation within the chat. Let participants know the best way to ask questions or engage and encourage them to voice their names each time they speak.
After the meeting, follow up with URLs, resources, and action items. Consider recording virtual events to allow participants asynchronous access after the event. Gather feedback about accessibility on any evaluation that you conduct. If you are collecting demographic information about participants, ask whether they identify as having a disability. Make adjustments to future meetings or events based on this feedback.
For more resources on this topic, read DO-IT’s Accessibility and Universal Design of Online Meetings and SIGACCESS’s Accessible Conference Guide and Accessible Virtual Conference Guide.
The Mind Hears Blog Provides a Mutual-Mentoring Forum for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Academics
Michele Cook and Ana Caicedo, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Deaf and hard-of-hearing academics face a lot of challenges in their work as well as challenges in advancement through academia. Over 14% of the working age adult population have significant hearing loss. However, due to academic ableism and lack of support, only 4% of faculty are deaf or hard of hearing. These faculty members often feel isolated and like they are constantly reinventing the wheel—we personally felt we needed to create a community to learn from each other, network, and share solutions and experiences.
Our blog, The Mind Hears, was launched in September 2018. We create original posts, which are articles that share our frustrations, solutions, and a variety of other topics. We also share writings and art from other deaf and hard-of-hearing authors and artists, as well as profiles of deaf and hard-of-hearing academics. Our biggest challenges include getting the word out and finding colleagues, the variances of representation and experiences of hearing loss, and the fact that this project is all based on volunteer efforts.
Our society often sees disability as a deficit—however, our disabilities also give us strengths, provide skills, and make us better people. Our blog showcases the work and accomplishments of deaf and hard-of-hearing people as well as creates a network and community.
ADVANCE FORWARD Women with Disabilities Task Force
Canan Bilen-Green and Cali Anicha, North Dakota State University
This presentation focused on the steps North Dakota State University (NDSU) took during their NSF ADVANCE-funded Institutional Transformation project designed to recruit, retain, and advance women, including women of color and women with disabilities. They began educating themselves and the campus community about disability in general, while also learning more specifically about how disability manifests in academic workplaces. They prioritized identifying barriers experienced by women faculty with disability and looked for ways to address those barriers. A report that reviewed practices at other universities was followed by the establishment of a Women Faculty with Disabilities Task Force and a Faculty Survey on status of disability awareness and policy/practice on campus. The task force held Faculty Forums to discuss results of that survey and to gather additional input. Based on those findings as well as other research, the Task Force promoted policy changes for tenure clock flexibility and accommodations requests processes. The Task Force and the broader campus community benefited from the insights and strategies shared by visiting scholars and cross-disciplinary disability awareness programming. Visiting scholar Margaret Price (University of Ohio) presented and provided working meeting sessions on the multiple facets of essential functions of faculty positions, during which collegiality was discussed as a construct that can create barriers across academia for some faculty. Tammy Berberri (University of Minnesota Morris) provided a series of universal design presentations and workshops for faculty and for students.
The Task Force’s work showcased that it is the status of physical and social environments rather than an individual’s physical or health status that essentially disables and marginalizes people. Similar to any marginalized identity group, faculty with disabilities and other marginalized identities bring a rich diversity of perspective and skills that are (still) too-often missing or undervalued. From a faculty survey and follow-up faculty forum, the Task Force learned that physical and cognitive/emotional disabilities were seen by NDSU faculty as fundamentally different. One comment in that regard was that in academia, your mind is your primary tool, thus there is an additional taboo related to cognitive/emotional disabilities. In sum, the Task Force learned that academia is missing out and that we all need to continue (un)learning disability stereotypes and working to develop and implement meaningful policy and practice changes to create truly accessible, inclusive, and equitable workplaces for faculty with disability.
Enabling Inclusive Access for All Students with Virtual Reality Chemistry Labs
Maria Gallardo-Williams, North Carolina State University
Underrepresented students may not receive equal access to an instructor's time and attention. An instructor's own biases determine the nature of their interactions with students, and even well-meaning instructors can be not inclusive or demeaning. This often prevents students with disabilities from having access to the class materials or fair treatment. This is an insidious problem, which may or may not be recognized in peer and student evaluations, and an issue that might go unnoticed even by educators committed to diversity and inclusion. This subject can be difficult to navigate, as it is generally based on perceived biases, which can be a complex dynamic between educators and students.
Virtual reality provides an avenue to generate materials that can be used to enhance or replace classroom instruction. Our approach at North Carolina State University was to design virtual reality labs that were as inclusive as possible. We worked with students that represented a broad range of race, gender identities, and ethnicities. These realistic simulations offered the advantage of minimizing instructor bias (since the instructor generates the material before meeting their students) while offering students who might struggle with the instructor in a one-on-one setting the opportunity to still learn from the instructor. Analysis of the data collected in a user study of virtual reality materials created for organic chemistry labs offers insights into the way that students interact with virtual reality instructors. Comments provided by underrepresented minority students point to the perceived impartiality of the instructor, ability to engage with the material independently, and remote access as some of the desirable features of the experience.
Accessible Learning Management Systems: Making your Online Course Accessible for Everyone
Gaby de Jongh, University of Washington
Considering the creation of an accessible online course is a good place to learn about information technology (IT) accessibility, as similar steps need to be taken across an institution to ensure that their IT resources are accessible to people with disabilities, including faculty. These steps include
Structuring content using headings,
Creating alt text for images,
Captioning and audio-describing videos,
Uploading accessibly-formatted content, and
Using accessibility checkers to find barriers to accessibility.
Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle are all examples of Learning Management Systems (LMSs). All LMSs have options for accessible courses, as described below.
Headers provide an outline of the content so users can understand how the content is structured. Screen readers identify headers and provide the ability to skim content topics. Headers can be easily applied through the rich-text editor on the content creator part in your LMS.
A screen reader can’t interpret an image, but can read alternative text, or alt text, that a creator has provided with the image. Alt text should be limited to 120 characters and provide meaning or information. Decorative images should be marked as such. Within your LMS, you can use the rich-text editor within each page of content to click on an image and provide alt text.
Captions provide textual information for those who can not access the audio, whether due to a disability, their environment, or other reasons. Having the option for audio descriptions provides context in videos for content that isn’t spoken out loud. YouTube and other video sources often provide automatically generated captions, but these usually aren’t fully accurate and need to be edited.
Accessible content is created in a way that communicates structure to assistive technology. Microsoft Word allows for this by offering styles, which should be used instead of manually making visual changes to text. Word also provides options for alt text, formatted tables, meaningful hyperlinks, and updated document properties. Microsoft PowerPoint has these features as well, including accessible built-in templates. Provide unique slide titles, large font sizes, captioned videos, and grouped images to make sure your presentations are accessible. PDFs must feature tags, correct reading order, and have appropriately formatted tables. PDF does provide options for accessible forms using Tooltips, but not accessible STEM mark-up.
Accessibility checkers can help find barriers or identify where barriers might be. They usually alert the user to correct heading structures, unique slide titles, missing alt text, issues with tables and lists, missing language attributes, limited document access, and appropriate reading order. However, these are not always correct and require a user to double-check most of these features.
For more information about IT accessibility, consult the UW Accessibility website.