Note: Technical guidance on how to make individual elements of digital content accessible is linked to within this guide, but it is not the focus of this guide. This guide contains advice on how to institutionalize the practice of making digital content accessible. For advice on institutionalizing accessibility programs in general, see our companion guide, Starting an accessibility program: A guide for Higher Education Institutions

 

Introduction and Background

The problem with introducing brand-new technologies

Ever since the pen was taken over by the computer, education has been relying on digital content. Digital content, once a rarity in the classroom is now moving towards ubiquity:

“The classroom I sat in every day had no computers, but once a week we would all queue up and march down to the computer room to spend an hour using them. [..] Now, 30 years later, my son is attending prep at a school that boasts a 1-to-1 computer policy. Every student in the school is expected to have a computer, and in later classes every student is equipped with an Apple iPad.”
—Michael Cowling, The pen is mightier than the sword, but the computer is mightier than both, theconversation.com, 2015.

In the early 1990s, if you were a blind student, you would have to attach a device to a PC to have the computer talk. By the late 1990s almost all PCs had integrated sound cards, and you no longer had to buy a device, but you still had to buy speech output software. Later on, in the 2000s, free screen reading software was available for use with any PC. Thus, all computers had sound, and free software was available to make computers accessible to blind users.

Then, in the mid 2000s, a new wave of devices were introduced, designed just for reading text. Collectively known as ‘e-Readers’, such devices had several advantages over PCs, but their main advantage was that the screen quality closely resembled paper/print quality, enabling more effective visual reading than on a traditional computer monitor. They had one significant drawback though: no sound capabilities. When universities started to adopt e-Readers as a primary means for students to get access to textbooks and other digital content, blind students were left out. Essentially a computer that you could hold in your lap, e-Readers may have been a mighty leap forward in screen design, but they were useless for blind persons.

This particular story of technology evolution (or to some, devolution) has a lot more layers of complexity, but it serves to illustrate a very common occurrence: brand new technologies—and especially disruptive technologies—are very seldom designed with accessibility in mind from the get-go. In the case of e-Readers, higher education institutions and the makers of the devices ended up in the courts as the result of the experience of exclusion for blind students.

The problem with using established technologies

The problem of brand new technologies not being accessible has been prevalent and persistent. But what of existing, well-established technologies? Once mainstream technologies are ensconced in the marketplace, they typically get worked on by third parties—or sometimes the technology manufacturers themselves—to make them accessible to people with disabilities. Such has been the experience with computers, websites, telephones, ATMs, ticket machines, and cable TV boxes. After some initial period of time (months or years), the technological means to make something accessible is achieved and rolled out. In the next wave of innovation we might reasonably expect, based on prior experience, that when the day comes that the first truly self-driving car goes on sale, it won’t have an interface that blind people can use, and the paperwork for buying the car won’t be accessible either. There will be a lag-time and we would expect that blind consumers will initially have to wait in order to own and operate self-driving cars.

For most technologies applicable to higher education and digital content, the lag-time has long since gone by. With almost all established digital content delivery systems, accessibility solutions have been engineered and applied. The application is by no means universal, but for any type of content delivery mechanism technological accessibility fixes are available to be procured and implemented at a reasonable (if not zero) cost. However, just because a technological solution for accessibility is implemented in any given institution, this does not automatically mean that all content created and delivered via that technology will be accessible. What we see in practice is often a big gap between the technological solution’s implementation and it’s use in everyday practice to create content. So, while the technological means and accompanying technical guidance for developers and content authors (for websites, office documents, and e-Reader content) has existed for years, a large number of higher education institutions have gotten into legal trouble by not requiring and/or ensuring that new digital content is formatted according to the available guidance.

Digital Accessibility; and Universal Design for Learning

This guide is for organization-wide implementation initiatives to make digital content accessible on a regular basis. First though, we need to provide some definitions on what constitutes ‘accessible digital content’:

• Digital Accessibility is about making content that works for people with disabilities using technologies as-is, or in conjunction with assistive technologies (devices and/or software) commonly used by people with disabilities;
• Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is about providing content and delivery in flexible ways to meet the needs of diverse audiences.

The terms are not synonymous, although the practices are mutually supportive. UDL meets the needs of a large range of people, a subset of whom include people with disabilities. (A more detailed explanation of the above definitions is provided by the University of Cincinnati.)

Note: For our purposes in this guide the term ‘accessible’ is used to encompass the principles of both digital accessibility and UDL.

“The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn.”—udlguidelines.cast.org

Designing for individuals in the margins—through the application of accessibility design principles— also provides inclusive opportunities for all individuals/learners. There is an advantage to going beyond the subset of students who self-identify and have “approved” disabilities. One-size-fits-all learning is steadily being replaced: it used to be that you had one choice of sitting in a classroom to attend a lecture; now you can sit at home and take a course that’s being delivered from the other side of the World. New research shows that there is no single optimum way to learn, and that taking account of differences can have wider benefits for all:

Guidance for making content accessible (Good news and bad news)

Guidance for accessibility has overlap with regular best practices on professional writing, technical writing, editing, etc. As such, we can regard accessibility as just one facet of creating easy to use content for everyone. This is good news for authors. For accessibility program administrators, the other good news is that sound guidance is already available for each type of digital content. There are a number of resources that have collected and published such guidance, including:

• Concise resources for getting started with making accessible content, in the form of NCDAE’s ‘Cheat-sheets’
• CAST’s Universal Design for Learning Guidelines and UDL on Campus guidance.
• The ‘Create Accessible Digital Products’ guides and checklists from the General Services Administration.

There are many other sources of guidance available from higher education institutions, state and local government agencies, and elsewhere. This brings us to the bad news, which is that wading through the available guidance—to assess how useful each option will be to your institution—can take a very long time. Furthermore, while there is no definitive agreement in the accessibility field as to what constitutes the ‘best’ guidance, there is a need to make a definitive institutional decision as to which guide you will follow / implement in your own program (more on this in Step 2, below).

It isn’t an impossible journey

When you start out looking at digital accessibility across a campus, you quickly realize that there are lot of players (stakeholders), including:

• University wide communications, publishing, and website development
• Authors (professors, educators)
• Books and other external content
• 3rd party software (e.g., examinations, online content delivery services, etc.)

The perceived ‘grand scale’ of the situation can seem daunting. For individuals working in institutions where the only previous digital content accessibility solutions were applied sporadically and/or in piecemeal fashion—such as providing accommodations to individual students on a case-by-case basis—the idea of implementing a new program whereby all authors are responsible for making accessible content as part of their regular work may appear at first extremely difficult to achieve. This guide provides an outline for taking things one step at a time, and in such a way that the bulk of the work involved is shared out among staff and faculty in the whole institution.

“It is relatively easy to sell the general idea of UD [Universal Design];
the biggest challenge is to put UD principles into practice.”
—Sheryl E. Burgstahler, ‘Universal Design in Higher Education’ (2nd Ed., 2015), p.287