2 AODA at St. Clair College

St. Clair College is committed to adhering to identifying, preventing, and removing barriers to accessibility as outlined within AODA (Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act). The AODA sets out specific accessibility standards in five primary areas:

• Customer Service
• Information and Communications
• Employment
• Transportation
• Built Environment

This guide provides instructions and support for faculty in the area of Information and Communications. Part of our responsibility as faculty is to provide learning materials such as images, documents, and videos in ways that support a student’s ability to access the learning material regardless of disability.

This can include, but is not limited to, students who:

• are blind or have low vision
• are deaf or have impaired hearing
• are neurodivergent
• have a learning disability (such as Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, Dyscalculia, Auditory processing, Language processing, Nonverbal learning, Visual perceptual/visual motor)
• cannot hold publications or turn pages because of a physical disability

Students may use assistive technology to support their learning such as text-to-speech, speech-to-text, screen readers, and document conversion (print to electronic text, braille, or large text). We can support our students by taking care when creating our learning materials to ensure our materials can be easily used with assistive technology and can be converted into usable formats. Attention paid to how we create our learning materials helps all students as it provides greater flexibility and choice in how all students can interact with our materials.

The government of Ontario provides additional information about how educational institutions can fulfill their obligations. This documentation lists types of accessible formats that individuals with disabilities use.

The following video provides an explanation of educators’ responsibilities under AODA and gives some examples of how instruction can be created to improve accessibility for all.

You may also like to explore Microsoft products that can be used by individuals with a variety of disabilities as assistive technology.