Transcript: Designing for Accessibility

Building flexibility into course design can seem daunting at first, but all members of our community – students, faculty, and staff – can benefit. Providing options from the start can help reduce the likelihood of students getting stuck in anxiety/procrastination “loops” when a potential barrier to learning arises. Students often feel guilty or anxious when they are starting to struggle or first miss a deadline. They may try to avoid those stressful feelings by skipping classes or assignments, falling further behind; they may throw themselves into counterproductive and frantic bursts of activity to “catch up,” then burn out. Providing clear channels of communication and alternate paths to completing course requirements can encourage students to reach out and proactively deal with an issue before it is compounded by further delays, absences, and/or missed coursework.

Flexibility, like many accessibility interventions, has far-reaching benefits. Building options and allowing for difference in our course design helps us support a wide variety of diverse student needs, which is why accessibility is fundamental to Universal Design for Learning. Many of the standard accessibility commitments we now offer to support students with physical or perceptual disabilities benefit students with other barriers to learning, as well. For example, captioned video helps support students who are Deaf or hard of hearing, but also supports students who have attention or audio processing issues, students learning in a language that is not their first language, students trying to study in a noisy shared-living environment or while commuting, and students who just feel they “learn better” when they can read along with the audio. Addressing the physical barrier of complex images with non-selectable text by using descriptive captions or simplified list formatting helps support students who use screen readers and other assistive technologies, but it also helps support students who find the complex layout difficult to interpret or cognitively overwhelming.

Similarly, addressing the cognitive barrier of anxiety by offering a variety of assessment options, or grade-weighting options like dropping the lowest score at the end of the course, can also help support students with chronic physical illness flares who might be ill on an exam day, students with long commutes who might face an unexpected transit delay, and students who might have unexpected family emergencies – and it also potentially spares the instructor from having to write and administer whole separate make-up exam or take-home alternative on the fly.

If the idea of building for flexibility still feels overwhelming, please remember that optimizing for accessibility does not take the place of supportive accommodations for students with disabilities who have registered with the Centre for Accessibility. But with a little care and planning, we can provide better initial support for more students, ultimately reducing wait times and stress for everyone in the UBC community.