Accessibility in Online Courses

 

Hello everyone! Today we’re going to talk about accessibility regarding online learning. So, accessibility is always important. Just like we have to make sure that all of the content that we’re teaching is accessible in an in-person class to all of our students, we need to do the same with our online classes. Roblyer & Hughes (2019) makes a point of stating that, in stating that, we have to make sure that the online courses are accessible to those individuals that have the visual impairment, the hearing impairment, the physical impairments to ensure that there is Universal Design for Learning. So, it is very important to make sure that we follow through with that as well. In my department, as many of you may recall from viewing other of my videos I work with the Department of Public Safety with law enforcement, and in my department we recently moved over to the Canvas online learning system for all of our online learning. And what’s really nice about that is that there is a feature when you’re creating a page, creating the content, in Canvas that you can actually click that checks for accessibility. It checks to make sure that the font isn’t too small. It checks to make sure that you don’t have too light of a color font on your white background, etc. So, that’s a really nice feature, but one thing that I noted as we were preparing a class, just the last couple of months actually, we had several videos that we had decided to include in the content, and they were all, they’d all come from YouTube, so they have closed captioning on them. But then I noticed one day that two of the videos did not have closed captioning. So, what I ended up doing is I went online and found there are a lot of different sources out there where you can go and download, and upload a video and have it create the closed caption and download it. And then you can upload the video into your course at that point. So, that’s one way that we have found to make sure that our courses are accessible to all of our students because we do have a couple of deaf employees that need to be able to have the written text there instead.

 

Roblyer, M. D., & Hughes, J. E. (2019). Integrating Educational Technology Into Teaching (8th ed.) [E-book]. Pearson Education, Incorporated.