Module 3 Book: Formatting Course Media So It’s Accessible: Topic 3: Why is this important?

Topic 3: Why is this important?

Now you might be wondering why you should be concerned about accessible and inclusive course media especially if students do not come forward with needs requests. Well, if we take a minute to think about how we walk about in our cities we will realize that curb cuts are a common example of the relationship of accessibility, inclusivity, and usability. Can you remember a time when there were no curb cuts? It was around the same time we were using payphones. Curb cuts do not only help those with mobility issues they help parents. They allow a person with mobility issues and a person pushing a stroller to cross the street with ease. Curb cuts really do make crossing the street better for everyone. Thinking about accessibility and inclusivity at the content creation stage prevents inaccessibility. Accessible media helps to create a more inclusive and equitable classroom for everyone.

Listen to Jamie’s story about her struggles in the classroom and her first experience with captions (length 5:42)!

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Jamie Drozda:

First, I want to share a little bit about myself, so you understand why my first experience with captions is such a big deal to me.

At six years old, I lost 98% of my hearing in my right ear and about 10% in my left ear. When this happened, I was moved from my desk near my friends to the front of the classroom, and I remember hating it. I remember all throughout elementary school my mom would inform my teachers that I was hard of hearing, and I would instantly be moved to the from my desk near my friends to the front of the classroom and every time that happened, I was embarrassed and humiliated, I was often teased for having to sit at the front of the class. But back then I was not able to tell anyone what I was feeling probably because I was young and did not how to put those feelings into words, but I could, and I did put my feelings into actions.

What actions did I take well I simply remained a sick kid, I never wanted to go to school so often I would tell my mom that my ears hurt, and she would keep me home those days. If she took me to the doctor, I would be diagnosed with an ear infection and that would get me a few more days off school. Funny thing though I can remember being surprised that I actually had an ear infection because hurting ears were just an excuse to get out of school. If I did go to school, then often I would tell the teacher I was sick so they would let me call my mom to come pick me up. One time in grade 4 my teacher told me I could not call my mom and go home; she said I had to stay at school. I remember being upset but I turned around and went back to my desk then I threw up on it then she let me go home. The odd thing is I don’t remember actually being sick until I was told I could not go home.

Now things actually became worse in high school. I went from a class of about 15 students with mixed grades and a whole school population of about 60 students to a school with hundreds of students and each classroom was very full. In high school I remember walking out of the classrooms into the hallways which were packed with yelling teenagers, my heart would race, I would become clammy, and I would leave. I will say I think I was pretty good about leaving, I would call my mom from the payphone, yes, a payphone, and tell her what I was doing before I left, then I would sign out at the office with some odd excuse. Most often I would pop a brace off one of my teeth and say I was going to the orthodontist to have it glued back on and I actually went to the orthodontist and had it glued back on.

Every day when I came home from high school, I would beg my parents to let me quit and eventually much to my parents dismay I got a full-time job and dropped out. Back then, I think, anxiety, disability, accessibility just was not recognized, and I hope if I were a child and teenager now it would be much different.

I will say things were much better when I returned to school as an adult, harder because by then I had 3 girls aged 12, 11, and 8, better because I was an adult and could properly stifle my anxiety. I think here it is important to say that it took until I was 35 years old to have the confidence to state my needs in the classroom and even at that I have only ever done it once. Then and now it is embarrassing to speak of my hearing impairment and right now even though I am sitting here alone I can feel that my face is red because it is hot.

My takeaway from my experience is don’t wait for students to come forward with their accessibility needs instead try to design classroom experiences the best you can to meet the needs of all students. Even in University teachers have power over students. Many students are not comfortable coming forward to state their needs and rocking the boat. Even worse than that many students cannot afford an official assessment and diagnosis if it is required.

Let’s skip ahead to my first captioned movie, it was the Girl with the dragon tattoo, and I watched the Swedish series. It was amazing I did not miss anything; I should also note that the captions were in English. Honestly though, I was hooked I made Blair watch the rest of the movies in the Swedish series. I kept telling him it was so much better to read the screen and he kept saying that we could turn captions on if we watched the English version, but I was happy and I felt like we were even so to speak so Swedish it was.

This is a little aside but two years ago I was finally able to get hearing aids, technology finally caught up. I will say the learning curve was steep, I sat in my living room with everything shut off and listened to the noises around me. It was crazy, I had no idea the dogs’ nails clicked on the hardwood, it definitely explains the scratches on the floor. I also had no idea how loud cars are when they drive by. And when we were watching TV, I heard someone at the door so I went downstairs to see who it was, a few times, I got up to answer the phone, a few times, until finally my daughter said Mom what are you doing so I told her and we all had a pretty good laugh because it turns out I had never heard those sounds from the TV before. I should also note that I still have captions turned on for all entertainment and instructional videos. I find it a lot easier to fill in the gaps by reading the screen because even with hearing aids it is hard to hear especially when there is background noise.

“Inclusive design acknowledges the essential nature of accessibility and proactively seeks to provide user-friendly experiences for people with and without disabilities.”

(Phillips & Colton, 2021)

Listen to Brenna Clarke Gray discuss thinking a little differently about how accessibility and accommodation function (length 5:24).

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Brenna Clarke Gray:

Before we start, I want to say that my thinking today is informed by lots of people, but most recently, maybe the easiest threads to link my thinking back to would be Ben Mitchell's TPC talk last week about accommodations and accessibility, particularly for neurodivergent students, and an article I was reading this morning in the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics called Universal Design in Apocalypse Time: A Short History of Accessible Teaching Excavation by Sarah Madoka Currie. I'll link that in the show notes.

In both cases, these thinkers are giving me a reason to think a little bit more, a little bit more critically, maybe just to think a little differently about how accessibility and accommodation function. The broad brush strokes difference between the two ideas: Accommodations are things that we do to our course in order to allow specific learners to have needs met. It might be, you've all seen the letters you get from Accessibility Services. It might be extra time on an exam. It might be the ability to type instead of handwrite an exam, whatever it is. It's an accommodation, when it's granted, to one or a small handful of students within the course, but everybody else is doing the sort of like, quote, unquote, mainstream assessment.

Accessibility is a lot broader. Accessibility is like trying to anticipate the potential needs of our learners and meet them, without having to give special accommodations to individual students, and without those individual students having to request it. It's trying to imagine like, "Where are the barriers to learning in my class and how can I manage those ahead of time? How can I think about access at the course design stage?" It might be that you don't have timed exams at all, so individual students who require additional time on the exam don't need to be accommodated in your class because that's not a particular issue of your course.

That's, in broad brushstroke, the difference between accommodation and accessibility. We tend to think of them in the same breath, often, but they're actually really, really different. The main difference, I think, is that the university, and I don't mean our university, I mean the university as a structure. The university is really good at accommodation because that's like a legal framework. I can already hear friends arguing with me about the really good at accommodation part. I totally get it. Accommodations are often difficult to access for students. There's all kinds of problems around the requirements for documentation. I guess what I mean by really good is that there's an existing framework and a process for accommodation.

We often talk about the institution being accessible when what we mean is that the institution grants accommodations. The problem with an accommodation framework, whether it's for disability, whether it's for remote learners, whether it's for, well, any kind of reason that students might have exceptionalities or atypicalities that create different needs for them in the classroom, the accommodation model, A, requires students to self-identify the institution, but it also requires documentation. Documentation can be really, really, really expensive. Especially in the case of a learning disability or a neurodivergence that isn't diagnosed in childhood, getting that diagnosis in adulthood can be really, really expensive.

Then there's also familial and cultural reasons why someone might not have had access to that kind of care, or might not want to access that kind of care. Now, the problem with accommodations is that they're, by definition, exclusive to students who know how to access them, and they don't necessarily cover all the kinds of needs that we might see. Accessibility is something different, broader, larger. It's more like an ethos, more like a way of approaching your course content from the perspective of wanting the most number of people to have the best possible experience.

I get uncomfortable sometimes when I hear conversations about accessibility that seem to place accessibility up against rigor or difficulty. I don't think ... Well, I don't really care about rigor as a concept to start out with, but I also don't think there's any reason to believe that a place where everyone feels a sense of belonging and can access the materials, I don't think that those things get in the way of whatever notion of rigor that you hold, unless the idea of rigor is just that fewer people can access it.

It's not a sign of rigor if course materials are not in an accessible format or can't be read by a screen reader. That's not rigor. That's just exclusion. I guess, the reason why I'm thinking about this is because I want us all to think more about accessibility and less about accommodation, which isn't to say that I don't want students who need accommodations to have them granted. Of course, I do. As we work towards a more accessible institution, that's going to happen faster, slower with greater and lesser sense of willing in different areas of the institution. I'm not arguing for the dismantling of the accommodation system, though I would read a persuasive argument about it.

What I am suggesting is that if you've thought about access beginning and ending with the act of accommodation, I'm warmly inviting you to think a little bit broader about what it means to allow accessibility for your course to your learners.

Here is a link to the full episode: You Got This! Season 3, Episode 13: A Bit of a Pickle, ft. Emilio Porco.

Reflect

Think about how an overcrowded classroom can hinder a student with mobility issues. Sure, your classroom might have a very nice accessible desk, but it does little good if a student cannot get to it because the classroom is overcrowded. Similarly, a perfectly edited video or audio file does little good if students cannot access it or if they do not have the cognitive capacity to process it.

By including accessible and inclusive media in your courses you can improve learning by allowing students to have flexibility and control over their learning. Breaking videos down into “smaller segments and allowing them to decide when to continue” (Fiorella, 2021, p. 489) helps to prevent extraneous cognitive load especially during a complex lesson or when students have low prior knowledge (segmenting principle). Also, allowing students to view content outside of class increases class time for application, discussion and other in-class learning activities.

If we think about UDL or inclusive design, allowing students to view course content outside of class provides a safe space for them to learn and increases engagement. When we think of the diversity of ourselves and our learners (those who need more time to process information, have memory difficulties, are hard of hearing or English language learner) then we understand the importance of being able to learn and relearn outside of the classroom walls. When we can pause and rewind videos and audio the benefit of the redundancy effect (putting key points on slides or videos) is virtually eliminated. We have all likely created digital content without considering the needs of others but we can do better.

Think about it:

“We all jumped in a car 20 or 30 years ago, and just started producing tons of digital content. And then we realized halfway through the trip that we forgot to grab a few people and bring them with us.”

Ryan Knott

Topic 3: Why is this important?

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Reflect

Think about it:

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