During the last decade, the number of learning institutions offering online course options has rapidly grown and this has been catalysed by the recent outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic. It is estimated that 1.2 billion students were displaced from their traditional face-to-face learning environments during the pandemic (Li & Lalani, 2020), causing learning institutions to rethink their digital strategies and shift many of their traditional face-to-face classes over to blended and fully online models of instruction.
At the start of the pandemic, many instructors rushed to create online learning environments from scratch or to further develop existing online classrooms that they luckily already had in place. A plethora of different online platforms and learning management systems can be used to create online learning environments, such as:
- Seesaw (https://web.seesaw.me/)
- Showbie (https://www.showbie.com/)
- Blackboard Learn (https://www.blackboard.com/teaching-learning/learning-management/blackboard-learn)
- Canvas (https://www.instructure.com/en-gb)
Creating accessible online content will not only help students who have undergone a medical examination and have been granted accommodations and modifications for their learning. By spending extra time ensuring that online content is created so that it is accessible will help all of an instructor’s students. It is much harder to see barriers that students may experience when accessing their learning in online learning environments unless they are flagged directly to an instructor (Massengle & Vasquez, 2016). In many countries, it is also a legal requirement to take accessibility into consideration when creating digital assets (Web Accessibility in Mind, n.d.). All learning institutions should be aware of any laws that they need to abide by in their countries so that they do not leave their instructors, instructional designers, or their institutions liable to legal proceedings (Cifuentes et al., 2016).
As the new academic year approaches, many learning institutions will still offer blended and fully online options to their students – but are these online environments accessible to all students? And where can instructors go for guidance to make their online content accessible? A variety of useful resources has been collated and can be found in Table 1.
Table 1
Useful Accessibility Resources
| Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Framework | A set of guidelines that can "improve and optimise teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn" (CAST, 2021, section one) | https://udlguidelines.cast.org/ |
| Microsoft Accessibility Website | One stop shop to find accessibility products and services offerd by Microsoft | https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility |
| Apple Accessibility Website | An overview of the accessibility features that are built into various Apple products | https://www.apple.com/ae/accessibility/ |
| Web Accessibility in Mind (WebAIM) Website | A great website that provides a wealth of information and resources | https://webaim.org/ |
| The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Website | You can find a wide variety of online accessibility resources on this site, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2 | https://www.w3.org/ |
Creating accessible content should be "an institutional mission and campus-wide commitment" (Huss & Eastep, 2016, p. 4). I would recommend that practitioners raise the issue of accessibility within their learning institutions and use resources such as the UDL framework (CAST, 2021) to guide their discussions surrounding this important topic. Ensuring that online content is accessible to all is not a one time task - accessibility needs to become part of the ethos of the learning institution and all stakeholders need to work together to ensure that their online content is accessible to all their learners.
References
CAST. (2021). The UDL guidelines. https://udlguidelines.cast.org/
Cifuentes, L., Janney, A., Guerra, L., & Weir, J. (2016). A Working model for complying with accessibility guidelines for online learning. TechTrends: Linking Research & Practice to Improve Learning, 60(6), 557–564. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-016-0086-8
Huss, J. A., & Eastep, S. (2016). Okay, our courses are online, but are they ADA compliant? An investigation of faculty awareness of accessibility at a midwestern university. I.e.: Inquiry in Education, 8(2).
Li, C., & Lalani, F. (2020, April 29). The COVID-19 pandemic has changed education forever. This is how. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/coronavirus-education-global-covid19-online-digital-learning/
Massengale, L. R., & Vasquez III, E. (2016). Assessing accessibility: how accessible are online courses for students with disabilities? Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning, 16(1), 69–79. https://doi.org/10.14434/josotl.v16i1.19101
Web Accessibility in Mind. (n.d.). Introduction to web accessibility. https://webaim.org/intro/