COC Faculty Resource: Accessibility

Making Accessibility Part of Your Course Design

Accessibility- College of the Canyons Faculty Resource Course

Why Focus on Accessibility?

You may be thinking: “But I don’t have any deaf/blind/mobility-challenged students in my class so I don’t need to worry about it, right?”

A perhaps startling statistic is that just under 20 percent of undergraduates report having a disability, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics. Another unhappy piece of data: According to the U.S. Census, just 13 percent of adults with a disability have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 32 percent of non-disabled adults. 

Beyond the fact that Section 508 compliance is a legal requirement...you don’t necessarily know if you have a student with a disability in your online class. And you almost certainly don’t know how many differently-abled students may have registered, taken a look at your course materials in the first day or two and then dropped because they knew your course was going to be too hard to get through since proper accommodations weren’t yet in place.

Accessibility Features Benefit Everyone

Those of us not living with a disability often don't realize the additional burden it can place on a student. Interpreting a graph, for example, might take the average sighted student just a minute or two, yet could take a student with a visual impairment significantly longer (particularly when content has not been properly formatted).

One of the wonderful side benefits of designing with usability/accessibility in mind is that it will not only help students with disabilities be successful in your course, adding usability features gives ALL students the opportunity to learn more effectively. For example, video captioning is clearly of great help to students with hearing impairments—and it's also is beneficial to:

    • students who are learning English,
    • students who are struggling readers,
    • students with attention deficits, and
    • even students working in a noisy location (on the bus or in Starbucks).

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