What is your role at UBC, and how have you applied UDL to your work and approach?
I’m a Producer at UBC Studios, which is the central media production unit for UBC. We provide high-end production services for most departments and faculties across UBC, and also support staff and faculty that are making their own media through workshops and DIY media production studios. I often work with faculty on the production of educational materials, which can be used in the classroom or asynchronously, as well as producing training content for UBC staff and faculty. Our team at UBC Studios also play a key role in creating communications content for both internal and external audiences. In all of our work, we strive to stay up-to-date with available resources and strategies to enhance the accessibility of the media that we produce for a diverse range of audiences.
Why is it important for faculty members to think of accessibility and UDL when developing educational media?
In addition to adhering to BC’s accessibility legislation, we need make sure that we are providing the best possible service to students, facilitating their learning, and enhancing the overall student experience. In order to create resources that reduce barriers to teaching and learning, it’s crucial that we put accessibility at the centre of our work.
Something that we were pleased to discover early on, and I believe it’s important for faculty and staff to be aware of, is the power of the universal aspect of UDL—that is, when you work to support a particular group with accessibility, you end up supporting many other groups by default. A good example is captions for videos – initially designed for hearing-impaired audiences, captions provide support to a variety of audiences. Often our audiences are viewing videos with their sound turned off for various reasons, so captions become important for accessing key spoken content. ESL (English as a Second Language) students get great benefit from captions, and all audiences benefit from the effective learning design strategy of experiencing the content in a variety of formats with simultaneous spoken and text format presentation of the content. This is the case with any development toward accessibility – it supports a wide range of audiences, often supporting the entire audience.
Why do you think UDL and accessibility are important in your work, and what makes UDL personally meaningful/important to you?
My role at UBC is to support learning and communication. Anything we do to support universal design, learning strategies, and accessible tools and strategies increases the accessibility and effectiveness of learning content. This applies not only the media production we produce as a unit, but also as we assist faculty and staff in creating their own media. It has a real-world impact on students’ learning, and it means a lot to me to see that positive impact.
What accessibility and inclusion barriers have you noticed in your own experience or in the experiences of your UBC colleagues?
I’ve noticed that poor production quality can make it difficult to learn and retain information from training and educational content. I’ve personally experienced this challenge—distracting production quality in training videos can make it hard to focus on the material.
What motivated you to engage with the UDL Fellows program and start incorporating UDL principles in your practice/media?
My involvement in the UDL Fellows Program is to provide consultation and information to program participants and Fellows. I have given presentations on accessibility in media and assisted the program’s faculty with media creation. Our day-to-day work at UBC Studios, which includes figuring out tools and strategies around accessibility and UDL for media, motivated me to get involved in supporting the UDL Fellows program by sharing those learnings. We at UBC Studios had to learn a lot of things the hard way, such as how to incorporate Sign Language Interpretation into videos or exploring concepts like descriptive video or colour contrast for colourblind audiences. As I watched faculty members attempt to address these issues in their learning materials, I was excited to have the opportunity to save the Fellows effort and time by sharing some of the lessons my team had discovered through research and practice. My motivation stems from incorporating UDL principles into my media practice, with the aim of optimizing learning materials from both a technical and creative and aesthetic standpoint. UDL practices accomplish that by reducing barriers to information and developing materials that are more engaging and more easily understood and retained.
Did you experience any challenges with implementing UDL, and how did you overcome them?
Our biggest challenge is determining what we can achieve with the limited resources and time we have available. An example is Sign Langauge Interpretation, as it is a very resource-intensive process, so we currently can’t provide it for all videos at the university. The challenge is how to be strategic with these resources to ensure their optimal use and efficiency for the largest number of individuals. To tackle this challenge, we are constantly exploring new technological advancements. Accessibility is one area where it seems everyone can agree AI is playing a positive role. Whether it’s creating transcriptions and captions or designing aspects such as keeping contrasts and proportions correct, AI is making it easier to provide accessibility across a lot of content. AI has also been used to improve audio filters to a surprising degree, which can help to make audio content more easily understood when there is a lot of background noise that the filters can mitigate.