14 Part J: Humanizing as Accessibility
“One person may learn more effectively by seeing words, while another might benefit more from hearing them, but neither visual nor aural recognition is superior. One person may best express their knowledge in the form of an oral story, while another might prefer to write in a linear manner. These differences should be understood, respected, and planned for so that no particular way of learning is valued or devalued over another.” – Alise de Bie and Kate Brown, “Forward with Flexibility”
When accessibility is an afterthought, it is not humanized. If a student has to ask for a format, it isn’t humanized or accessible. If someone has to ask for an accommodation, then arguably it isn’t accessible or humanized. But if we all start from the social model of disability, in which disability is a design problem or a mismatch between an individual and design decisions that are made within their environment, then we lose the bias that it is something only those in need require. We all benefit from multiple formats, flexibility, and choice. This is central to humanizing learning. Every decision that is made within teaching and learning is a design decision that can enable or disable participation and access. Accessibility must be a value and never a task. It isn’t ever completed.
In practice, this can look like:
- Have a plan to accommodate students before classes start and before you are asked. If you can create course policies that reduce the number of emails you get from students asking for special accommodation or favours, many more students, who never would have written to ask, are supported. There are many ways to do this:
- take home, open internet tests and assignments
- recordi synchronous class time and make it available after for students who missed a class or two
- use closed captioning for all your classes, even if you are in-person and not using slides (you can still project a screen that does captioning)
- Providing and detailing a list of available resources allows you to establish from the very outset of the course that you’ve given such circumstances considerable thought, and can potentially mitigate a student’s ‘jumping through hoops’ by, if not being the solution, acting as a facilitator.
- Conduct or request an accessibility review of your course prior to launch. Every institution has either accessibility specialists or teaching and learning professionals with expertise in accessible teaching practice. Use these individuals to your and your students’ advantage. To help you get started, here is an accessibility checklist from Cambrian College. It is openly licensed and up for modification.
- Inform TAs which students require accessability accomodations, and how they are expected to provide those accomodations. It is frustrating for the student to repeat themselves to TAs, professors, and lab demonstrators (and everyone else involved in the class). This information needs to be transparent for all instructors. This should be done before the first lab or TA time.
- Discuss accessibility with TAs before the course begins.
- Approach accessibility as something that is embedded in every aspect of the course, from course design to assessment design and activity choices to course materials.
- Make documents (slides or other resources) available ahead of time and design documents with accessibility in mind.
- Scaffold assignments with activities that support learning.
- Make media accessible through captions, alt-text, transcripts, and colour contrasts.
- Think about the EdTech tools students have to use for the course and make sure they are accessible.
- Clearly outline expectations for the day and summarize your time together at the end of the day.
- Define jargon.
- Face students when you are speaking to them.
- Watch your speaking cadence, which especially important if there is an ASL/LSQ interpreter or CART.
- Use the microphone when available and ask for one when one isn’t available.
- Provide breaks in class.
- Give students time to reflect on what is being said or done in class.
- Design the course using the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework.
- When planning for tests or assignments, try to take a UDL approach and think not only about the student with documented accommodations, but how there are others that would likely benefit from those accommodations. For example, if a test should take 2 hours, you can consider giving everyone 3 hours to complete it.
- Become part of a Community of Practice to share ideas and bring back those ideas to your colleagues.
- Have open conversations with students about accessibility so that they understand what it is and why it is important. If you have them submit text-based assignments with images or complete a video assignment, you can teach them about AODA and ask them to ensure their deliverables comply.