Online courses and accessibility

[polly_mer]

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.

[Caracal]

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.

[polly_mer]

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.

[Caracal]

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.

[downer]

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.

[dr_codex]

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.

[Aster]

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.

[downer]

An enterprising publisher of academic textbooks is going to seize on this, and advertise ADA Compliant Course Packs.

They are already doing this.

[Caracal]

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. 

[Caracal]

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.

[polly_mer]

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.

[polly_mer]

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.

[Hegemony]

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!"

[Aster]

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.

[Aster]

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.