M1: Incorporating accessible and inclusive design principles
As you begin thinking about making revisions or adding content for your course we encourage you to be proactive and make changes that will make your materials inclusive and accessible. By being proactive and incorporating practices that support flexibility and diverse learning needs you will not need to retrofit your materials to address needs as they come to your attention.
Benefits of an accessible and inclusive design approach are as follows:
(adapted from Accessibility & Inclusivity Considerations)
- It saves time. Considering accessibility and inclusivity from the start is easy to do, and you won’t need to spend time redoing work later.
- It removes the burden for marginalized students of having to ask for help. Requesting accommodations can increase administrative and emotional burdens on affected students and make them feel vulnerable. Some may choose not to request help, even if it compromises their ability to learn.
- It assists students who may not know to ask for help. Not everyone realizes their accommodation needs or qualifies for formal assistance, and incorporating inclusive design principles benefits all students.
If one of your students registers with the Centre for Accessibility you may be asked to provide accommodations such as extending test times, offering alternative content formats or other forms of requests. Refer to Checklist 5: Accessibility accommodations & academic concessions for assessments in M2: Grading in Canvas for information about changing settings in Canvas to support exam/assessment accommodations.
Creating accessible content
While you may not be able to make your course content fully accessible, the best practices listed below can help ensure your course is accessible to as many students as possible. Fortunately, the accessibility checker Links to an external site. in Canvas makes it easy to review content for accessibility. For additional information about creating accessible content, we encourage you to consider these guidelines (refer to UBC Accessibility Handout for additional details):
- Describe your visuals by including a descriptive alternative text.
- Transcribe your media by including text versions of spoken words.
- Describe your hyperlinks by linking text that describes a topic or a purpose.
- Make your text readable by ensuring that font size is large enough and there is enough color contrast between the color of the text and the background.
- Structure your page by organizing content using a hierarchical structure that allows students to easily understand how concepts are related.