As instructors, we should do our due diligence to develop ADA-compliant courses. Below are some simple strategies for creating accessible courses and demonstrating due diligence. 1. Hyperlinks To support ADA compliance in online courses, we recommend beginning with ensuring all hyperlinks are text within a sentence to foster readability.
May 03, 2017 · Below are some simple strategies for creating accessible courses and demonstrating due diligence. 1. Hyperlinks. To support ADA compliance in online courses, we recommend beginning with ensuring all hyperlinks are text within a sentence to foster …
This document includes information on designing ADA (Americans for Disabilities Act) compliant content for online courses. It is a work in progress put together by a group of instructional designers at Engineering-LAS Online Learning (ELO). Its primary audience includes …
May 03, 2017 · Tips for Designing ADA Compliant Online Courses 1. Hypertext links. To support ADA compliance in online courses, we recommend that you start by ensuring that all... 2. Text …
Jul 07, 2015 · About This Online Course. The Teaching Learning Center has an exciting new offering for all of CCD—a self-paced, online course on how to create ADA compliant materials …
Among the most common accommodations made for students with disabilities in online courses are the addition of captions to videos for students who are deaf and the remediation of documents to make them accessible to students who are blind and use screen readers to access content or who have dyslexia and other learning disabilities that make reading easier when they can see printed words and listen to them spoken at the same time. Proactively developing, procuring, and using accessible software, websites, videos, documents, and other IT reduces the need for accommodations.
I taught the first online learning course at the University of Washington in 1995. My co-instructor, Norm Coombs, is blind. We designed the course to be accessible to students who had a broad range of challenges, including those related to vision, hearing, learning, attention, and mobility. We employed the latest technology of the time — e-mail, discussion list, Gopher, file transfer protocol, and Telnet. All online materials were in a text-based format, and videos — which were mailed to the students — were presented in VHS format with captions and audio description.
Providing multiple ways for students to gain knowledge, demonstrate knowledge, and interact goes a long way toward making a course accessible to all students, including those with disabilities. It is also helpful to know a bit about the thousands of assistive technologies that people with disabilities might use to provide input to the computer and gain access to the output. You do not need to be familiar with all of the capabilities of these devices, but it is important to know how they are used and understand some of their limitations.
Address a wide range of language skills as you write content (e.g., spell out terms rather than relying on acronyms alone, define terms, avoid or define jargon). Make instructions and expectations clear for activities, projects, and assigned reading.
Department of Education or the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Although the University of Washington has not received a civil rights complaint of this type, that has not stopped us from applying lessons learned from the cases involving other colleges and universities.
At the federal level, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), as amended, is an anti-discrimination statute designed to ensure equal access to opportunities, programs, and benefits for qualified individuals with disabilities in education, employment, and other areas.
For colorblind users, the visuals can be tested by converting them to grayscale. As long as visual elements have hierarchy, they should be comprehensive for those individuals. Check “ Colour Blind Awareness ” website for more in- formation regarding the use of colors in your website.
Websites should be designed so they can be viewed with the color and font sizes set in users’ web browsers and operating systems.
Email the ELO Design Team at elodesign@iastate.edu with your suggestions for improvement.
There are state and federal laws requiring the University to assure online material is accessible to current and prospective students and employees. This document deals with ways to make online courses accessible to all people, regardless of their impairments or situation.