Hello @may24b-cohort ,
I want to remind you that we’ll be meeting tomorrow, Tuesday, July 9, from 1:00-2:30 p.m. Central for our next session: Accessibility and Inclusive Design.
Here are some key links for the session:
See you tomorrow!
Thanks for the reminder; however, I have a doctor’s appointment that I can’t cancel for tomorrow. I will review the information and discuss with my cohort.
Thanks,
LaTonya
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Hello @may24b-cohort,
Thanks for a great session yesterday! As usual, here’s the chat transcript. We had a lot of great discussion this week around accessibility, inclusive design, and how to apply these concepts to your OER projects and workflows. Here’s a recap of the session and the homework activities for Week 6.
Recap
Accessibility is often thought about as just being for students with disabilities, but as we see it, accessibility benefits all. It’s about reframing accessibility as a proactive approach to designing inclusive teaching resources and experiences which are rooted in principles of care, humility, and social justice. Inclusive design, or the practice of inclusivity, is the belief that the design of a “thing” – whether it is a piece of technology, an activity, or even information itself – should be mindful of a broad range of users, their variable abilities, their variety of environments, situations, and contexts.
Access is one of the fundamental principles of the open movement broadly. Given OERs’ digital-first nature, this is all the more relevant as resources should not only conform to web accessibility standards, but they should also be designed with the human users in mind. In this way. we will think of technical accessibility, content accessibility, and even how this can extend into the accessibility of your human teaching interactions.
While no teaching technique or practice will ever be universally accessible for all, an inclusive education lens can be integrated into any and all approaches as long as you think about accessibility as an ongoing process that has you repeatedly cycle through the following three stages:
- Anticipating barriers and
- finding ways to mediate these barriers
- to enhance access for all.
We took a look at examples for the three dimensions of accessibility, namely:
- Technical Dimension:
- BCcampus Accessibility Toolkit as a guide to help non-technical users make content accessible, including images, links, tables, multimedia, formulas, font size.
- Accessibility Assessment: To communicate to your users the results of an assessment undertaken towards the end of completing an OER.
- Content dimension:
- Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies chapter 5 communicates outcomes and aligns the Iearning activities with the written content. As you will clearly see, the content Is informed by different social and cultural perspectives.
- Business Writing for Everyone offers flexibility within every chapter, explaining to readers key takeaways and different methods to read the resource.
- Human dimension:
- Building Democracy for All: The introduction to this text will show you how Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles have informed its design and Active Learning opportunities were incorporated to further engage the learners in unique ways.
- Students and instructor users in the course/material/program evaluation and development processes, e.g., through adoption and user feedback surveys.
With forethought and flexibility, accessibility is built into the process of publishing. Try not to be overwhelmed. Take small steps because these small steps will go a long way. And remember you are uniting your efforts with other people within your teams, within this cohort, within your institutions, and beyond. If everyone chips away at a small task, you’ll bring the resource leaps ahead. Ultimately, it’s about giving your resource the best chance to make an impact and difference for people.
Let me know if you have any questions or concerns. I’ll see you next week for our session on Content Creation!
Can you please provide the link to the recording for this session? I was not able to make it and would like to watch it.
@eburns, all the session recordings are posted in the Events and Milestones document once they’re available.
