Universal Design, Digital Accessibility, and the ADA

Before we begin today, we first need to cover some basic definitions. The three terms you are most likely to encounter when accessibility is discussed are: Universal Design for Learning (UDL), digital accessibility, and ADA accommodations.

What do they have in common?

UDL, Digital Accessibility and Accommodations all:

Make course content easier for students to use and navigate.
Apply to the design or presentation of material, not the curriculum or content.
Can be utilized for any discipline, course delivery method, or audience.

But, however much they have in common and however often they intersect, each principle and resulting action can have unique applications. The definitions of each term give us a clue as to what those principles and actions are.

What's Different - Universal Design

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework that provides a flexible blueprint for creating instructional goals, methods, materials, and assessments that work for everyone. When utilizing all three UDL principles, a course would offer multiple ways for students to engage in the content, represent the content in multiple ways, and provide multiple ways for students to interact and express their understanding. This includes accessibility, but also considers how content is presented structurally, and the context in which material is presented, which is why you’ll often hear about UDL principles as they relate to instructional design and culturally responsive teaching as well.

A common example of UDL is the use of closed captions and transcripts for video and audio content.

Closed captions allow students to engage with content if they literally cannot hear it, but it also helps students who are second language learners, those who have any kind of audio processing issue, or the (deeply relatable) scenario of trying to pay attention to something with loud children or animals in the background. And we know that when we can see the words being spoken at the same time we hear the words being said (or any two channels of information processing) that information is better retained in our long-term memory (read up on Richard Mayer's work in the area of Multimedia Learning if this subject interest you!)

What's Different - Digital Accessibility

Digital accessibility is the practice of intentional, inclusive design to support interaction and access to various types of digital content. For you as educators, this includes Canvas content, documents, videos, images, audio, ebooks, and other digital courseware and academic technology. Essentially, if you are interacting with it in a digital space, it qualifies as digital content, and therefore, digital accessibility principles apply to it.

Standards for digital accessibility are set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which was founded by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994. Berners-Lee was (and is, he's very much still alive!) an early pioneer in Internet development. He created HTML, which made the Internet functionally accessible to the general public. He co-founded the W3C in recognition of the growing importance of the Internet and the need for universal standards to ensure accessibility and usability for everyone. This led to the establishment of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which are now the accepted standard for making web content digitally accessible.

While WCAG focuses on web content, it is relevant to digital content beyond traditional web pages. For instance, if you are using Canvas, whether it’s a document, PowerPoint, or video, it is considered web content, and thus, WCAG standards apply.

Specific practices of digital accessibility would things like the use of Heading styles, appropriate color contrast, and software being able to be operated solely by keyboard.

What's Different - ADA Accommodation

An ADA Accommodation is one which seeks to remove a barriers that cause ‘substantial limitations’ for students through the modification of the presentation or delivery of content. These are specific to an individual with a documented disability as required by ADA Title II Part 35: Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability in State and Local Government Services.

The accommodation process is always individualized and involve direct assessment by Disability Services staff. When a student is approved for an accommodation, regardless of what that accommodation is, it triggers a series of interventions and support planning between them, support staff, and their faculty to ensure those are being met.