Accessibility in the Classroom

As a teacher our primary goal is for our students to learn the content we teach, but develop a desire to learn on their own in the process.  Did you ever think that your actions might actually be hindering learning even though you aren't doing anything that is necessarily wrong?

I guess I should clarify a little bit.   What I am referring to is more along the lines of a lack of action on our part.  Until recently I had not really fully considered some of these issues and what I could do to assist in these areas.  In a nutshell there are some tips and tricks we can apply to our digital content that can increase the number of people that can successfully use our resources.  I want to share with you some of those tips and tricks that you can use to benefit your students, parents, guardians, administrators, faculty members and any other stakeholders that access your materials.  This will be a topic that I will come back to over the next several weeks because it is something that you will want to put into practice. 

I recently facilitated a professional development session over Seven Steps to Accessibility in Your Classroom.  So to begin with, I want to list those steps for you, but I am going to cut it down to five.

Step 1: Know Your Audience. Who needs to access your materials and what issues do they face?  Is it just students? Parents? Faculty? Grandparents?  Each of these groups may have different issues they face.  Some of these disabilities may be outwardly visible, many are not.  They could be visual, hearing, cognitive, mobility, neural or cognitive. 

Step 2: Work With What You Have.  You don't have to completely remodel your classroom or buy special software/hardware to make your lessons more accessible.  I am going to focus on how you can do accomplish this using G Suite and other free resources.

Step 3: Adjust Your Old Content As You Go.  You don't have to start over from scratch.  Instead, take what you are already doing and make modifications to make it more accessible.  You don't have to do all of them at once either.  Pick a few ways to improve them, then if you use that resource again make more improvements.  This will become much more clear to you as we dive into some of the improvements you can make. 

Step 4: Create New Accessible Resources.  When you do create new resources, build in the accessibility features as your go.  This will eventually become a habit and you won't even realize you are doing it. 

Step 5: Don't Assume, Ensure.  Sometimes students will come to you and need a print copy of an assignment or a transcript of a video.  They may need closed captions on videos.  If you don't provide those ahead of time or make it available to all, then that student starts out behind everyone else and that desire to learn I mentioned at the beginning of the post quickly fades. 

Those are the five steps I want to keep in mind about accessibility in the classroom.  The next post in this series will cover some tips in Google Docs.