I'm curious about this. Has anyone during the transition to online teaching been given any requirements about maing their courses ADA compliant? My impression has been that just about every school has made little or no effort to enforce this, or even to inform faculty about the standards.
I'm not even sure that using Zoom fits with the standards. Has this come up at all?
Not a peep here (with respect to our equivalent of the ADA). Just a list of tips and things we might want to include on our syllabi, all pertaining to online instruction but none to disability accomodations.
https://insidehighered.com/news/2020/04/06/remote-learning-shift-leaves-students-disabilities-behind
Can you say "class action lawsuit waiting to happen"?
I have been told by two places that online teaching needs to be ADA compliant whether or not any students in my courses are registered with the college disability services. But presumably only students who have actually suffered as a result of the change can sue.
My uni won't sign the contract with a new Closed Captioning company.
Instead, I did 20 videos for my colleagues using Youtube.
I should get paid for that.....
Quote from: FishProf on April 23, 2020, 11:35:06 AM
My uni won't sign the contract with a new Closed Captioning company.
Instead, I did 20 videos for my colleagues using Youtube.
I should get paid for that.....
I'm not sure I understand. You used the YouTube auto closed captioning, or you wrote out the captioning yourself?
Let Youtube do the auto, then edit for clarity.
"Meiotic cell division" came out "my toxic sell television".
Quote from: downer on April 23, 2020, 08:09:04 AM
I'm curious about this. Has anyone during the transition to online teaching been given any requirements about maing their courses ADA compliant? My impression has been that just about every school has made little or no effort to enforce this, or even to inform faculty about the standards.
I'm not even sure that using Zoom fits with the standards. Has this come up at all?
Is there a different requirement for online versus in person in terms of accommodations? It would seem strange if there was a requirement to make courses accessible to all, rather than just provide accommodations for students who need it.
Quote from: Caracal on April 23, 2020, 02:45:15 PM
Quote from: downer on April 23, 2020, 08:09:04 AM
I'm curious about this. Has anyone during the transition to online teaching been given any requirements about maing their courses ADA compliant? My impression has been that just about every school has made little or no effort to enforce this, or even to inform faculty about the standards.
I'm not even sure that using Zoom fits with the standards. Has this come up at all?
Is there a different requirement for online versus in person in terms of accommodations? It would seem strange if there was a requirement to make courses accessible to all, rather than just provide accommodations for students who need it.
It is strange to me. But that's what I've been told. In a regular class, we make accommodations for the actual students. In an online class, have to make accommodations whoever is in the class.
It is strange to me. But that's what I've been told. In a regular class, we make accommodations for the actual students. In an online class, have to make accommodations whoever is in the class.
Quote from: downer on April 23, 2020, 03:33:06 PM
Quote from: Caracal on April 23, 2020, 02:45:15 PM
Quote from: downer on April 23, 2020, 08:09:04 AM
I'm curious about this. Has anyone during the transition to online teaching been given any requirements about maing their courses ADA compliant? My impression has been that just about every school has made little or no effort to enforce this, or even to inform faculty about the standards.
I'm not even sure that using Zoom fits with the standards. Has this come up at all?
Is there a different requirement for online versus in person in terms of accommodations? It would seem strange if there was a requirement to make courses accessible to all, rather than just provide accommodations for students who need it.
It is strange to me. But that's what I've been told. In a regular class, we make accommodations for the actual students. In an online class, have to make accommodations whoever is in the class.
+ 1
The place I teach is abysmal on this stuff at the best of times. I suggested to colleagues that images on the CMS should have captions, and that having a written exam based entirely on visual sources (I am not in art history) was not accessible. They looked at me like I was from another planet. That was pre corona. Now we have weekly livestreams where the high ups tell us what is going on. These are not captioned, and no transcript is provided later either.
Oh I do have a hard of hearing student in my course and the university provides someone who comes along on Zoom. I don't think the person is interacting with the student in real time but does provide transcripts at the end. They frankly aren't that accurate since the person doesn't seem to have even tried to learn the technical terms and I've never been told how to interact with the person. But there is something... The rest of the accommodations were all extended time on tests.
The thing is that Universal Design — designing the course so it's accessible to students with disabilities — is not something that it's easy to retrofit. For instance, machine readers or whatever they call those things that read the text out loud for you. They only operate intelligibly if the documents are formatted a certain way. You can't have all kinds of sudden multiple columns of text and different blocks of text and things and have the machine read it so that it can be understood. So it makes a lot more sense to learn the principles, and design your documents that way from the ground up (once you know the tricks it's easy; it just requires following the principles). If a student were to enroll in your course and show up and say "But my machine reader can't read your documents, can you alter them?" you'd have a lot of work on your hands at the last minute. So that's why it's much easier on everybody to use Universal Design from the get-go.
Now, what my place did was to have a day-long workshop on the importance of Universal Design, with all kinds of people from the disability office and students with disabilities speaking and everything. Great, we were convinced, we were ready to go. Then we had a 90-minute introduction to about 1000 options for Universal Design, narrated at a rapid-fire pace by a guy whose slides were impossible to follow as they flashed by. So I know only the most basic principles. But I agree that the concept is important.
Quote from: Hegemony on April 23, 2020, 07:19:46 PM
The thing is that Universal Design — designing the course so it's accessible to students with disabilities — is not something that it's easy to retrofit. For instance, machine readers or whatever they call those things that read the text out loud for you. They only operate intelligibly if the documents are formatted a certain way. You can't have all kinds of sudden multiple columns of text and different blocks of text and things and have the machine read it so that it can be understood. So it makes a lot more sense to learn the principles, and design your documents that way from the ground up (once you know the tricks it's easy; it just requires following the principles). If a student were to enroll in your course and show up and say "But my machine reader can't read your documents, can you alter them?" you'd have a lot of work on your hands at the last minute. So that's why it's much easier on everybody to use Universal Design from the get-go.
Now, what my place did was to have a day-long workshop on the importance of Universal Design, with all kinds of people from the disability office and students with disabilities speaking and everything. Great, we were convinced, we were ready to go. Then we had a 90-minute introduction to about 1000 options for Universal Design, narrated at a rapid-fire pace by a guy whose slides were impossible to follow as they flashed by. So I know only the most basic principles. But I agree that the concept is important.
I agree with all of this. It's like building ramps in every new structure: most people might not need them, but those who will, will, and it's a lot harder to retrofit later.
Quote from: Caracal on April 23, 2020, 02:45:15 PM
Quote from: downer on April 23, 2020, 08:09:04 AM
I'm curious about this. Has anyone during the transition to online teaching been given any requirements about maing their courses ADA compliant? My impression has been that just about every school has made little or no effort to enforce this, or even to inform faculty about the standards.
I'm not even sure that using Zoom fits with the standards. Has this come up at all?
Is there a different requirement for online versus in person in terms of accommodations? It would seem strange if there was a requirement to make courses accessible to all, rather than just provide accommodations for students who need it.
Possibly strange, but definitely the current US federal law that affects all institutions subject to the ADA and federal financial aid requirements.
https://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/1/ada-compliance-for-online-course-design
After being sued for public content not being ADA compliant, Berkeley took down tens of thousands of freely available lectures rather than make them compliant: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california-berkeley-delete-publicly-available-educational-content
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/10/fifty-colleges-sued-barrage-ada-lawsuits-over-web-accessibility
https://www.adatitleiii.com/2019/01/number-of-federal-website-accessibility-lawsuits-nearly-triple-exceeding-2250-in-2018/
The argument is exactly that certain activities, like the Universal Design and captioning, are just like ramps and elevators in that they should be present for all who want to use them as a standard expectation with special, individual accommodations as an occasional remedy for those who need something more than the baseline standard. That baseline standard has gone up substantially for online content as the technology advanced to the point that it is reasonable to expect Universal Design to be the standard.
Quote from: downer on April 23, 2020, 03:33:49 PM
It is strange to me. But that's what I've been told. In a regular class, we make accommodations for the actual students. In an online class, have to make accommodations whoever is in the class.
From what I could gather from reading legal guidance, this interpretation seems like an overreach. (I mean on the part of the administrators telling you this, not you!)
Obviously, I'm not an expert on this, I just read some legal guidance for 20 minutes and I'm happy to be corrected if I'm getting parts of this wrong.
Here's the article I found most helpful https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1171774.pdf
All the cases where colleges faced lawsuits or entered into consent agreements with the department of justice seem to involve University systems being designed in ways that ignore the ADA. Montana for example was supporting a Moodle system that was inaccessible to people with certain kinds of visual disabilities, the clickers they sold for classes also weren't designed so that people with visual impairments could use them, ditto for various parts of the university website, technology in classrooms etc.
Basically, I think the universal access requirement is for the basic infrastructure, but I don't really see anything suggesting that every individual only course has to be designed in accordance with universal access. For example, my university gives us access to a few different video recording/screen sharing apps, including Zoom. I know that Kaltura which I experimented with, does have pretty good closed captioning. I've ended up using Zoom because Kaltura was driving me crazy. As I read it, it seems like there's really no problem there. If I had a student in my class with a documented disability and Zoom lectures weren't accessible to them, I'd just have to use Kaltura or something else. The problem would come in if the school was either mandating zoom or basing online course delivery on particular functions of the software in a way that would make it very difficult or impossible to provide individual accommodations.
Quote from: Caracal on April 24, 2020, 06:38:16 AM
Basically, I think the universal access requirement is for the basic infrastructure, but I don't really see anything suggesting that every individual only course has to be designed in accordance with universal access.
You might want to check with the regional accreditor and their expectations for online materials when they do spot checks of individual courses.
The standards have been rising in recent years. Time was that no one really enforced the ADA online. That has changed and crackdowns are occurring.
I filled out the paperwork for the federal compliance aspect of the HLC review at Super Dinky. As director of the online programs at Super Dinky, I was up on all the requirements to become accredited and then to stay in compliance with the evolving situation. That was almost 5 years ago. Nothing I'm reading now indicates scaling back on the requirements. Instead, I'm seeing more urgency to be in compliance by all websites (including my current employer for taking a lot of federal money for non-academic reasons) because the interpretation of the law has changed as technology has changed and more people are using readers/captioning as a normal part of daily life.
The time of only meeting explicitly requested accommodations for specific individuals is fading into the past for the institutions that are likely to survive the next few years. This is another area in which the rapid changes due to COVID-19 have highlighted existing problems and increased the probability that those institutions that were already below standard expectations will be closed more quickly.
Quote from: polly_mer on April 24, 2020, 06:36:07 AM
Quote from: Caracal on April 23, 2020, 02:45:15 PM
Quote from: downer on April 23, 2020, 08:09:04 AM
I'm curious about this. Has anyone during the transition to online teaching been given any requirements about maing their courses ADA compliant? My impression has been that just about every school has made little or no effort to enforce this, or even to inform faculty about the standards.
I'm not even sure that using Zoom fits with the standards. Has this come up at all?
Is there a different requirement for online versus in person in terms of accommodations? It would seem strange if there was a requirement to make courses accessible to all, rather than just provide accommodations for students who need it.
Possibly strange, but definitely the current US federal law that affects all institutions subject to the ADA and federal financial aid requirements.
https://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/1/ada-compliance-for-online-course-design
After being sued for public content not being ADA compliant, Berkeley took down tens of thousands of freely available lectures rather than make them compliant: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california-berkeley-delete-publicly-available-educational-content
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/10/fifty-colleges-sued-barrage-ada-lawsuits-over-web-accessibility
https://www.adatitleiii.com/2019/01/number-of-federal-website-accessibility-lawsuits-nearly-triple-exceeding-2250-in-2018/
The argument is exactly that certain activities, like the Universal Design and captioning, are just like ramps and elevators in that they should be present for all who want to use them as a standard expectation with special, individual accommodations as an occasional remedy for those who need something more than the baseline standard. That baseline standard has gone up substantially for online content as the technology advanced to the point that it is reasonable to expect Universal Design to be the standard.
Right, but all those cases and links involve issues of either public accessibility, or accessibility of university systems to everyone in the University community. If Zoom lacks acceptable closed captioning functionality, there's an issue with using it for a University meeting open to all students. Individual faculty can use it in their classes as long as there are systems in place to provide accommodations as needed. MOOCs or online content put up by the university have to meet different standards of accessibility.
Quote from: dr_codex on April 23, 2020, 08:53:28 PM
Quote from: Hegemony on April 23, 2020, 07:19:46 PM
The thing is that Universal Design — designing the course so it's accessible to students with disabilities — is not something that it's easy to retrofit. For instance, machine readers or whatever they call those things that read the text out loud for you. They only operate intelligibly if the documents are formatted a certain way. You can't have all kinds of sudden multiple columns of text and different blocks of text and things and have the machine read it so that it can be understood. So it makes a lot more sense to learn the principles, and design your documents that way from the ground up (once you know the tricks it's easy; it just requires following the principles). If a student were to enroll in your course and show up and say "But my machine reader can't read your documents, can you alter them?" you'd have a lot of work on your hands at the last minute. So that's why it's much easier on everybody to use Universal Design from the get-go.
Now, what my place did was to have a day-long workshop on the importance of Universal Design, with all kinds of people from the disability office and students with disabilities speaking and everything. Great, we were convinced, we were ready to go. Then we had a 90-minute introduction to about 1000 options for Universal Design, narrated at a rapid-fire pace by a guy whose slides were impossible to follow as they flashed by. So I know only the most basic principles. But I agree that the concept is important.
I agree with all of this. It's like building ramps in every new structure: most people might not need them, but those who will, will, and it's a lot harder to retrofit later.
Universal Design sounds like a great idea in principle. However, that is not what the colleges I work for are actually insisting on. They are insisting that videos be subtitled and images have alt-texts. The effect is that I just don't use videos much, unless I can find ones that are already well-subtitled. Insisting that everyone receives equal resources but not funding extra resources means that everyone just gets less.
Quote from: downer on April 24, 2020, 07:13:06 AM
Quote from: dr_codex on April 23, 2020, 08:53:28 PM
Quote from: Hegemony on April 23, 2020, 07:19:46 PM
The thing is that Universal Design — designing the course so it's accessible to students with disabilities — is not something that it's easy to retrofit. For instance, machine readers or whatever they call those things that read the text out loud for you. They only operate intelligibly if the documents are formatted a certain way. You can't have all kinds of sudden multiple columns of text and different blocks of text and things and have the machine read it so that it can be understood. So it makes a lot more sense to learn the principles, and design your documents that way from the ground up (once you know the tricks it's easy; it just requires following the principles). If a student were to enroll in your course and show up and say "But my machine reader can't read your documents, can you alter them?" you'd have a lot of work on your hands at the last minute. So that's why it's much easier on everybody to use Universal Design from the get-go.
Now, what my place did was to have a day-long workshop on the importance of Universal Design, with all kinds of people from the disability office and students with disabilities speaking and everything. Great, we were convinced, we were ready to go. Then we had a 90-minute introduction to about 1000 options for Universal Design, narrated at a rapid-fire pace by a guy whose slides were impossible to follow as they flashed by. So I know only the most basic principles. But I agree that the concept is important.
I agree with all of this. It's like building ramps in every new structure: most people might not need them, but those who will, will, and it's a lot harder to retrofit later.
Universal Design sounds like a great idea in principle. However, that is not what the colleges I work for are actually insisting on. They are insisting that videos be subtitled and images have alt-texts. The effect is that I just don't use videos much, unless I can find ones that are already well-subtitled. Insisting that everyone receives equal resources but not funding extra resources means that everyone just gets less.
And I agree with that, too. My place is insisting on both, and there's going to come a day when we ask for the money to CC everything, and to provide transcripts in Universal Design format. We are not going to get that money.
An enterprising publisher of academic textbooks is going to seize on this, and advertise ADA Compliant Course Packs.
The new ADA requirements are indeed onerous, and compliance is indeed now taken very seriously by the regional accreditors.
Once the emergency waivers by the Department of Education have lapsed, all U.S. universities should be planning along the "Stanford Model". If you can't make all of your online content completely closed captioned, text-labeled, and properly colour-coded, then you had better pull it down.
Our college has been prepping for this since last Fall. The college and the professors have been pulling everything down that cannot conform to the new draconian guidelines. Education is now the lesser for it, with the much reduced flexibility and offerings of digital resources. Every single graphic has to have an internal text label to it describing it. Every single video has to be fully closed caption enabled. Every single use of color has to conform to ADA standards for common forms of color blindness. Unlike previous practice, where the very rare students requiring special accommodations were provided them individually without affecting the rest of the class much, now we're being told to universally convert *all* digital content.
In my 10 years of teaching at Big Urban College, I have had only a single instance ever where a student needed these sorts of accommodations. One single person. That's it. And the accommodations were provided to her individually (black and white-rendered class notes) without much lessening the rest of the student's experience.
In many ways, there are parallels here with No Child Left Behind.
Quote from: dr_codex on April 24, 2020, 07:17:17 AM
An enterprising publisher of academic textbooks is going to seize on this, and advertise ADA Compliant Course Packs.
They are already doing this.
Quote from: polly_mer on April 24, 2020, 06:53:52 AM
Quote from: Caracal on April 24, 2020, 06:38:16 AM
Basically, I think the universal access requirement is for the basic infrastructure, but I don't really see anything suggesting that every individual only course has to be designed in accordance with universal access.
You might want to check with the regional accreditor and their expectations for online materials when they do spot checks of individual courses.
The standards have been rising in recent years. Time was that no one really enforced the ADA online. That has changed and crackdowns are occurring.
I filled out the paperwork for the federal compliance aspect of the HLC review at Super Dinky. As director of the online programs at Super Dinky, I was up on all the requirements to become accredited and then to stay in compliance with the evolving situation. That was almost 5 years ago. Nothing I'm reading now indicates scaling back on the requirements. Instead, I'm seeing more urgency to be in compliance by all websites (including my current employer for taking a lot of federal money for non-academic reasons) because the interpretation of the law has changed as technology has changed and more people are using readers/captioning as a normal part of daily life.
The time of only meeting explicitly requested accommodations for specific individuals is fading into the past for the institutions that are likely to survive the next few years. This is another area in which the rapid changes due to COVID-19 have highlighted existing problems and increased the probability that those institutions that were already below standard expectations will be closed more quickly.
If you're talking about the ADA, I really don't see a requirement for Universal course design online in any of these cases. I'd be interested to know if accreditation standards are more strict, although I expect they vary. I can see why a school would want to go in the direction of universal design for online courses. In a lot of ways it would probably be less complicated to set up infrastructure so everyone is using accessible technology instead of having to make the individual accommodations. But that's different from a requirement that every course be universally accessible online.
Quote from: Aster on April 24, 2020, 07:25:25 AM
The new ADA requirements are indeed onerous, and compliance is indeed now taken very seriously by the regional accreditors.
Once the emergency waivers by the Department of Education have lapsed, all U.S. universities should be planning along the "Stanford Model". If you can't make all of your online content completely closed captioned, text-labeled, and properly colour-coded, then you had better pull it down.
But that's for publicly accessible online content right? I just haven't actually seen anything saying this applies to closed courses.
Quote from: Aster on April 24, 2020, 07:25:25 AM
In my 10 years of teaching at Big Urban College, I have had only a single instance ever where a student needed these sorts of accommodations. One single person. That's it. And the accommodations were provided to her individually (black and white-rendered class notes) without much lessening the rest of the student's experience.
You can't necessarily know about those of us who sit in the front row and keep adjusting our glasses in the hopes that we can see all the content, but love being on our computers so we can zoom into whatever resolution we need.
You can't necessarily know about those of us who have trouble hearing the audio on a video and watch all video with the closed captioning on (I hate traveling and discovering that I can't make the closed captioning big enough for me to read) because getting the audio loud enough means huge distortion and thus no improvement, especially for audio on something that wasn't professionally done like a movie.
You can't necessarily know about those of us who can technically make in-person work in ways that online does not now that we are limited to what we can do at home. I remember more than one handout in various places that I took to a photocopier to expand to something I could use or had to request a different copy because the scan of a scan of a scan of a scan doesn't have enough contrast for what I need.
An in-person class where I can ask the targeted question of someone when I miss something by virtue of not being able to see it or hear it is not at all the same experience of having put up lots of content that is unusable to me in that form.
I am not officially disabled in any capacity, but I definitely support attention to online details that help all of us, not just those who legally can force the accommodations.
Quote from: Caracal on April 24, 2020, 07:27:30 AM
If you're talking about the ADA, I really don't see a requirement for Universal course design online in any of these cases. I'd be interested to know if accreditation standards are more strict, although I expect they vary. I can see why a school would want to go in the direction of universal design for online courses. In a lot of ways it would probably be less complicated to set up infrastructure so everyone is using accessible technology instead of having to make the individual accommodations. But that's different from a requirement that every course be universally accessible online.
Are you looking for a sentence that explicitly states something like "The HLC requires that all online courses use Universal Design for every single course every single time and we really, really mean it because that's an ADA compliance issue"? No, you won't find something like that anywhere I know to look.
Instead, the minimum expectations are for institutions to be in compliance with all federal, state, and local laws. What compliance looks like for online materials for the ADA has been rapidly evolving in the past few years. Much like the ramps and elevators are now standard for new construction and even for renovations of grandfathered buildings, having an observable policy of "use UD to the extent possible and reserve special accommodations for individuals who need something unique" is a much, much better course of action at the moment than hoping no one investigates too hard on the extent to which the university is compliant with something that is straightforward to check once one tries.
Again, my time at Super Dinky as accreditation lead combined with online director gives me access to a different perspective. One of the most frustrating times I had was having faculty help write the accreditation report and they would put in items proudly stating "We now do X and have for six months!" where X was a minimum expectation that the HLC doesn't even bother to check unless there are other red flags that prompt additional investigation. Being proud of fixing something that wasn't even on a checklist because surely no one would be running a college in 201X without doing that thing was something on which I cracked down at every turn to try to prevent raising red flags.
Online ADA compliance at the moment is much like the federal financial aid rules on how much instructional time is required for each credit over a given academic term. Sure, no one is probably going to find out that certain courses routinely let out early and are canceled more than they should be... until you get unlucky during a review and someone notices that a student charged time to their work-study job when that student should have been in a specific class. Then, the resulting review of how many courses are regularly shortchanging the students proceeds and it's really, really, really "fun" trying to prove that was a one-time thing by one silly individual or a bad weather semester, not a pattern when students write such patterns on the course evaluations (sometimes as praise), in reasons for leaving the college from certain programs, and formal complaints against certain faculty members.
Sure, no one is probably going to find out that certain courses for specific requirements don't have nearly enough work to achieve the student learning outcomes listed on the syllabus... until that's one of the syllabi pulled for a quick check and then there are lots and lots of questions. Adams State University went on probation with the HLC for their accelerated online programs not having enough content, right after a successful HLC review, in part because of media reports about large numbers of students from other institutions enrolling in these shortened courses because they were easy.
With the rapid shift to "everything" online, the reports of online material not being up to standards are likely to accelerate, especially for those who purposely chose on-campus. Institutions might get away with "it was a one-time emergency, mid-term conversion" for this spring, but that won't save anyone in the summer or fall.
Quote from: Aster on April 24, 2020, 07:25:25 AM
In my 10 years of teaching at Big Urban College, I have had only a single instance ever where a student needed these sorts of accommodations. One single person. That's it. And the accommodations were provided to her individually (black and white-rendered class notes) without much lessening the rest of the student's experience.
There may be a very good reason you have only had one student who needed these accommodations, and that very reason may be the trouble all students have in even getting to this level, because of the lack of accommodations. It reminded me of when there was a big debate about whether the Washington DC metro system should put in elevators so that people in wheelchairs could use the system and get down to the trains. A friend of mine was very much against it. "Complete waste of money to give them access!" she said. "Why, in all my years, I have never even seen someone in a wheelchair on a metro train!"
Quote from: polly_mer on April 24, 2020, 07:55:15 AM
Quote from: Aster on April 24, 2020, 07:25:25 AM
In my 10 years of teaching at Big Urban College, I have had only a single instance ever where a student needed these sorts of accommodations. One single person. That's it. And the accommodations were provided to her individually (black and white-rendered class notes) without much lessening the rest of the student's experience.
You can't necessarily know about those of us who sit in the front row and keep adjusting our glasses in the hopes that we can see all the content, but love being on our computers so we can zoom into whatever resolution we need.
You can't necessarily know about those of us who have trouble hearing the audio on a video and watch all video with the closed captioning on (I hate traveling and discovering that I can't make the closed captioning big enough for me to read) because getting the audio loud enough means huge distortion and thus no improvement, especially for audio on something that wasn't professionally done like a movie.
You can't necessarily know about those of us who can technically make in-person work in ways that online does not now that we are limited to what we can do at home. I remember more than one handout in various places that I took to a photocopier to expand to something I could use or had to request a different copy because the scan of a scan of a scan of a scan doesn't have enough contrast for what I need.
An in-person class where I can ask the targeted question of someone when I miss something by virtue of not being able to see it or hear it is not at all the same experience of having put up lots of content that is unusable to me in that form.
I am not officially disabled in any capacity, but I definitely support attention to online details that help all of us, not just those who legally can force the accommodations.
These arguments might have validity if there was any meaningful need for them communicated by non-ADA, non-accommodation students in anything more than unicorn-interval instances.
Professional educators with any experience know what is universally visible to the entire class, what is universally accessible to the class, and what the common, uncommon, and even rare complaints are for students in a class. Mandatory closed captioning for every single video clip is not one of these. Mandatory internal graphics tags for every single graphic is not one of these. Mandatory color and contrast restrictions for each and every digital resource is not one of these. I work at the institutional type with the highest percentages of special needs and nontraditional students. And we do just fine. Our professors are permitted the basic professional courtesy as Higher Education professionals to identify, assess, and deliver their own solutions to each student that needs it.
College is most decidedly not broken on this issue. Micromanaging curriculum to this extent is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Existing policies for ADA compliance and other student's special accommodations are highly effective, and arguably superior to the new guidelines. People needing special treatment get special, individual treatment. Treating this as another No Child Left Behind solution scenario drops the bar on curricular flexibility, curricular innovation, and academic freedom.
Quote from: Hegemony on April 24, 2020, 04:34:40 PM
Quote from: Aster on April 24, 2020, 07:25:25 AM
In my 10 years of teaching at Big Urban College, I have had only a single instance ever where a student needed these sorts of accommodations. One single person. That's it. And the accommodations were provided to her individually (black and white-rendered class notes) without much lessening the rest of the student's experience.
There may be a very good reason you have only had one student who needed these accommodations, and that very reason may be the trouble all students have in even getting to this level, because of the lack of accommodations.
No, it's not. I work at an institution and teach the courses where students needing special requirements are specifically directed. By percentage, we have very high numbers of students needing special accommodations. Up to 20% of my classes can be made up of students with special requirements.
If 20% of your students need accommodations, how come "In my 10 years of teaching at Big Urban College, I have had only a single instance ever where a student needed these sorts of accommodations"? Or do you mean accommodations for hearing loss, or for sight impairments? If you never have students with those disabilities, I'd suggest it's because they go elsewhere, in part because you don't provide the necessary accommodations as a matter of course. I have certainly had both deaf students and blind students in my classes, and as well as students with partial impairments of both those types.
I remember coming upon a mostly blind student with her ear up against her laptop. I asked her what she was doing. She was listening to her machine reader reading a syllabus to her, trying to find one specific part that gave one piece of information. The syllabus had not been formatted according to Universal Design. So to find the part she was looking for, she had to listen to the machine reader read the whole thing, much of which was gibberish because of formatting the machine reader couldn't negotiate, and hope to catch exactly the right part as it went past. She was on her third or fourth try.
Quote from: Aster on April 24, 2020, 05:17:11 PM
College is most decidedly not broken on this issue. Micromanaging curriculum to this extent is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Existing policies for ADA compliance and other student's special accommodations are highly effective, and arguably superior to the new guidelines. People needing special treatment get special, individual treatment. Treating this as another No Child Left Behind solution scenario drops the bar on curricular flexibility, curricular innovation, and academic freedom.
To be clear, I think Universal Design for all kinds of back end systems makes a lot of sense. Of course the CMS should be functional for people with visual disabilities. If they wanted to strongly encourage the use of a few different screen share/recording programs which did a good job of captioning and were functional in other ways, that would be wonderful. You want to create a system that doesn't require people to be asking for something at every turn.
What doesn't make sense is expecting every individual faculty member putting content up online to essentially do this all themselves. This isn't just an argument about workload, although that part is certainly relevant. There's this idea that gets expressed on here that faculty who don't like the idea of taking on some task like this must be lazy, or aren't willing to do their job. It would be like expecting me to fix an electrical short in my classroom. The question of whether or not I ought to gladly help the institution by taking on this responsibility which seems outside of my job description, is sort of beside the point. You probably don't want me in the electrical room flipping some switches and seeing what happens.
I'd be perfectly happy to do my part to make things work, but it can't be that I'm expected to read giant document located somewhere in the bowels of The Center for Teaching and Learning's site and then figure out which program is accessible from all the options that aren't and convert everything thing myself. Whether I should be expected to, isn't even the point, if you'd like to have classes that meet some standard, this isn't going to accomplish that goal.
Quote from: Caracal on April 25, 2020, 06:30:17 AM
I'd be perfectly happy to do my part to make things work, but it can't be that I'm expected to read giant document located somewhere in the bowels of The Center for Teaching and Learning's site and then figure out which program is accessible from all the options that aren't and convert everything thing myself.
Somewhat true. The HLC assumed practices include "The institution provides its students, administrators, faculty, and staff with policies and procedures informing them of their rights and responsibilities within the institution." Thus, you should be able to know and not have to dig too hard.
However, some of the complaints voiced on this thread about the difficulty being put on individual faculty to be compliant sound a lot more like ignorance combined with a refusal to even consider changing more than valid complaints akin to asking English faculty to deal with electrical shorts.
Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2017/05/03/tips-designing-ada-compliant-online-courses
Quote
we recommend beginning with ensuring all hyperlinks are text within a sentence to foster readability.
...
a sans serif font is easiest to read
...
The best option for readability is a black font with a white background. If instructors want to use color, they need to avoid using extremely bright background colors, such as red.
...
the only text that should be underlined is text that is hyperlinked to meet ADA compliance.
...
Images and graphics should be relevant to the content, visibly easy to see and in high resolution. It is best to avoid animated or blinking images.
...
Alt text stands for Alternative Text and is a word or phrase that can be added to describe the image or graphic.
...
Clear audio requires minimal background noises, clear word pronunciation and consistent volume. Clear video has minimal movement to avoid blurred refocusing and high resolution in rendering.
...
Including transcriptions with lectures shows due diligence towards ADA compliance, and so does providing transcripts of audio feedback.
...
All text in a course should be searchable, which allows learners to search for words or phrases within a document. If a PDF document is not searchable, an accompanying plain text version should be available. When linking documents within a course, the label of the link should have the file extension type at the end
...
Any table or chart needs to have identifying headers and labels as well as summaries.
People who are using Word or some other common software package can easily do this.
People who put a little thought into where the hyperlinks go and into how a image is captioned can do this.
The only part of those steps that can be arduous for faculty is a lot of transcripts/closed-captioning for video/audio. Bigger institutions have services for faculty as part of their accessibility services. Even Super Dinky with a disability services office of one person could get me transcripts for video with sufficient notice.
As advocates have pushed for compliance, more and more video/audio from various sources already comes with captioning/transcripts. When I was doing science outreach with a lot of movie clips, turning on the captioning before taking the clip using my editing software was an extra 30 seconds of work.
Compliance with the ADA requirements isn't asking for the moon. However, it is asking for better than blurry scanned handouts, first-draft-equivalents of recordings, and ton of cutesy images* that do nothing to add to the content of the course.
*Yes, in my role as reviewer of online courses, I've seen some sad, sad things that people did to try to make the course "more visually appealing" through excessive use of clip art.
I use voice-over with my slides. I've found very little about how to make them ADA compliant.
There is stuff about speaking clearly, no background noise, and consistent volume levels. But seems that is not going to do it all.
Quote from: polly_mer on April 25, 2020, 06:56:20 AM
Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2017/05/03/tips-designing-ada-compliant-online-courses
Quote
we recommend beginning with ensuring all hyperlinks are text within a sentence to foster readability.
...
a sans serif font is easiest to read
...
The best option for readability is a black font with a white background. If instructors want to use color, they need to avoid using extremely bright background colors, such as red.
...
the only text that should be underlined is text that is hyperlinked to meet ADA compliance.
...
Images and graphics should be relevant to the content, visibly easy to see and in high resolution. It is best to avoid animated or blinking images.
...
Alt text stands for Alternative Text and is a word or phrase that can be added to describe the image or graphic.
...
Clear audio requires minimal background noises, clear word pronunciation and consistent volume. Clear video has minimal movement to avoid blurred refocusing and high resolution in rendering.
...
Including transcriptions with lectures shows due diligence towards ADA compliance, and so does providing transcripts of audio feedback.
...
All text in a course should be searchable, which allows learners to search for words or phrases within a document. If a PDF document is not searchable, an accompanying plain text version should be available. When linking documents within a course, the label of the link should have the file extension type at the end
...
Any table or chart needs to have identifying headers and labels as well as summaries.
Parts of this are perfectly simple and already what I generally do anyway. Other things are workable, although again, a bit more clear guidance, like on the CMS page would be helpful. I really liked the captioning in Kaltura, which was quite accurate. I would have kept using it, except it was dreadful software in every other respect and it was taking two days to upload to the CMS. For teaching in the summer I may see what else I can do.
There are other things that I couldn't do without changing almost everything about my teaching. My lectures are based on fairly sparse notes, there is no written version. Audio transcripts are more doable.
It is important to realize that for some classes, some things actually aren't possible. To take an example, I'm teaching a class this summer where a major part of the class is going to involve looking through a bunch of court transcripts uploaded onto a site. These are image files and they aren't indexed. And no, there really aren't any comparable indexed versions. The idea isn't just to give students an assignment to read but to have them explore these databases and select documents to look at more closely. We then all end up reading a few documents more closely, but these can run up to 300 type written image pages.
There's really no way I could meet these guidelines in terms of universal design for the assignment. I'm not being obstinate, I'm trying to teach students how to operate like historians and get them to do original work.
Now, if I had a student with accommodations that made it difficult or impossible for them to read these images, I could figure out ways to make it work. I'd probably just figure out an alternative assignment for them to do instead of searching through the database. Once we got down to reading discrete documents, I guess it would be possible for someone to type out a transcript of three hundred type written pages? Maybe there is software that could do this? Obviously it would be my job to work with people in disability services to figure out ways to make this work. That would be my responsibility, but Universal design isn't workable.
Quote from: downer on April 25, 2020, 07:31:21 AM
I use voice-over with my slides. I've found very little about how to make them ADA compliant.
There is stuff about speaking clearly, no background noise, and consistent volume levels. But seems that is not going to do it all.
I will say that Kaltura's closed captioning was quite good. If I could figure out a way to separate that functionality out from all the other things about the software, that would be great...
Quote from: downer on April 25, 2020, 07:31:21 AM
I use voice-over with my slides. I've found very little about how to make them ADA compliant.
There is stuff about speaking clearly, no background noise, and consistent volume levels. But seems that is not going to do it all.
This is why I'm sourcing material online rather than making my own. I've found podcasts (produced by academics) that already have transcripts available.
Quote from: polly_mer on April 25, 2020, 06:56:20 AM
Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2017/05/03/tips-designing-ada-compliant-online-courses
Quote
...
Alt text stands for Alternative Text and is a word or phrase that can be added to describe the image or graphic.
The problem here, which has been raised previously, is when images are used
to show how to visually identify something. At the very least, the alt text would have to be paragraphs long. Even if a visually impaired pesron were going to have a non-visually impaired person describe an object to them so that they could identify it, if the non-visually impaired person hadn't seen the original image they'd probably have a hard time describing the object meaningfully.
I remember either here or on the old fora someone talking about having to make those accomodations in a
visual marketing course.
What would a music course need to be adapted for a deaf person?
(FWIW, I had all of my own web pages compliant
years before the university did, so I'm a supporter of things like universal design and accessability, but there are situations that are beyond any rational description of what
should be done, and why a student with a particular disability would even
choose to take a specific course and what they'd hope to get out of it.)
Quote from: bacardiandlime on April 25, 2020, 07:52:25 AM
Quote from: downer on April 25, 2020, 07:31:21 AM
I use voice-over with my slides. I've found very little about how to make them ADA compliant.
There is stuff about speaking clearly, no background noise, and consistent volume levels. But seems that is not going to do it all.
This is why I'm sourcing material online rather than making my own. I've found podcasts (produced by academics) that already have transcripts available.
That only really works if the topic is discrete and the larger context of the course isn't a problem. Might make sense in particular for some STEM and related courses where there's no need to create your own description of how photosynthesis works. In my humanities discipline, I'm putting things within particular contexts and I'm emphasizing certain things. I couldn't have a very coherent course If I just turn all that over to someone else.
Quote from: Caracal on April 25, 2020, 07:50:14 AMOnce we got down to reading discrete documents, I guess it would be possible for someone to type out a transcript of three hundred type written pages? Maybe there is software that could do this?
If the original pages are typewritten, OCR software might do a decent job in creating a plain text version. That's essentially how books get added to Project Gutenberg. The original source is a set of images of scanned pages, OCR software turns those into text. (There's a lot of volunteer work to review the OCR output and additional work to create html/epub formats for PG, but if the source is good, the software generally does a good job with the initial conversion to text.)
Quote from: saffie on April 25, 2020, 08:55:01 AM
Quote from: Caracal on April 25, 2020, 07:50:14 AMOnce we got down to reading discrete documents, I guess it would be possible for someone to type out a transcript of three hundred type written pages? Maybe there is software that could do this?
If the original pages are typewritten, OCR software might do a decent job in creating a plain text version. That's essentially how books get added to Project Gutenberg. The original source is a set of images of scanned pages, OCR software turns those into text. (There's a lot of volunteer work to review the OCR output and additional work to create html/epub formats for PG, but if the source is good, the software generally does a good job with the initial conversion to text.)
Cool, that's good to know should I have a student who needs it. If only somebody was making software that would do the same for 19th century handwriting...
Quote from: Caracal on April 25, 2020, 07:51:41 AM
Quote from: downer on April 25, 2020, 07:31:21 AM
I use voice-over with my slides. I've found very little about how to make them ADA compliant.
There is stuff about speaking clearly, no background noise, and consistent volume levels. But seems that is not going to do it all.
I will say that Kaltura's closed captioning was quite good. If I could figure out a way to separate that functionality out from all the other things about the software, that would be great...
Your school needs to subscribe to Kaltura, right?
Quote from: downer on April 25, 2020, 11:16:36 AM
Quote from: Caracal on April 25, 2020, 07:51:41 AM
Quote from: downer on April 25, 2020, 07:31:21 AM
I use voice-over with my slides. I've found very little about how to make them ADA compliant.
There is stuff about speaking clearly, no background noise, and consistent volume levels. But seems that is not going to do it all.
I will say that Kaltura's closed captioning was quite good. If I could figure out a way to separate that functionality out from all the other things about the software, that would be great...
Your school needs to subscribe to Kaltura, right?
Yeah, its linked in through our CMS. Perhaps given more time, I could figure out how to use it better, but I found it difficult to use because it all goes onto a cloud server. That seems like a fine idea, but casques all sorts of trouble. The interface is weird and it will drop the connection and never bother to tell you. I gave a whole lecture talking to nobody in my office. It also meant it just took forever to get from their servers to the CMS. That might have just been about their overloaded servers and my slower than normal internet speeds.
Quote from: marshwiggle on April 25, 2020, 08:00:38 AM
The problem here, which has been raised previously, is when images are used to show how to visually identify something. At the very least, the alt text would have to be paragraphs long. Even if a visually impaired person were going to have a non-visually impaired person describe an object to them so that they could identify it, if the non-visually impaired person hadn't seen the original image they'd probably have a hard time describing the object meaningfully.
Or for example, "estimate the instantaneous rate of change of this graph at x = 4" or something like that. If it's an in-person class we can do something with a tactile graph, but this is not really conducive to description with alt-text.
Yes, there are clearly some fields where it's an incredible challenge, and some where it's downright impossible. But I think it behooves the rest of us to design things accessibly where it's easy and straightforward. No question that it can be extra hassle. For instance, I take the point that PDFs are non-searchable. So by that standard, a syllabus should not be in PDF form. But then there have been cases when people load syllabi in Word on the LMS, students download them and are able to change them and claim that the syllabus never said so-and-so, or that the syllabus they downloaded says so-and-so, or whatever. So we are told to use PDFs for syllabi so that students can't download and change them. Or we could post two syllabi, one in PDF form and one in Word form. And then students would read the two and try to figure out why there are two syllabi and if they are different and which one applies to them, and so on. Or we could use the Syllabus page of the LMS, which doesn't seem to be downloadable, and therefore is trouble for students who have poor internet access. So many concerns, so many variables...
Serious question here, to Hegemony's point:
Everything I upload in my F2F and online classes is posted after I've locked those files as "read-only." Doesn't that cover the issue of students changing the content of the Word and PPt files?
The accessibility tools built into Word are actually pretty darned good these days, at least for the content I generate (English/humanities docs, syllabi, assignments, etc.). I don't know how well they work for other disciplines' materials. Alt tagging and table formatting are also simple to do, as others here have said. And Blackboard also has some decent tools to check/remedy problems related to accessibility issues.
My sabbatical in 2015 involved generating a pretty comprehensive set of documents for faculty use in assuring accessible course materials. Our library's archivist said they sat more or less unused, until prep for our most recent HLC visit started. Since then, they've enjoyed a lot of use.
Quote from: polly_mer on April 24, 2020, 08:18:47 AM
Adams State University went on probation with the HLC for their accelerated online programs not having enough content, right after a successful HLC review, in part because of media reports about large numbers of students from other institutions enrolling in these shortened courses because they were easy.
Does anyone know what's going on with Adams State now? I recall there was some drama about a Masters with an external partner that had to be shut down, and the coach cheating fiasco from a few years back.
To answer AmLitHist's question, I myself am baffled about how students manage to change the files. But several of my colleagues report it has happened to them. I'm sorry I can't explain further.