Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

11 – Accessibility and Universal Design
disabled users alike. It supports persons with low literacy
levels, improves search engine listings and resource discovery,
repurposes content for multiple formats or devices,
increases support for internationalization of courses and
assists access for low-bandwidth users.
An inaccessible site in a corporate world may mean a
loss of clientele. In an educational setting, the quality of
a learning experience is much more difficult to measure,
since it is not only a matter of numbers and physical
access. With this awareness, content should be presented
in a variety of ways in order to meet the online
learners’ needs. Material that is inaccessible to a student
with one type of disability can be offered in an alternative
format. It is important to realize, however, that not
everything can be made accessible without compromising
the value of the learning experience. Teaching visual
concepts and explaining different colour schemes, for
example, is not fully adaptable for students who are
blind. The materials should be made as accessible as
possible for most groups of disabled students, but some
people ultimately may still be excluded. In those cases,
you will need to offer alternative exercises for the affected
student, although the production of such materials
can be time consuming. The choice of different
delivery methods can exist, but only “in ideal world”
(Draffan & Rainger, 2006).
Every effort made to increase accessibility will help to
disseminate information on accessibility issues and provide
a basis for raising awareness not only in British
Columbia, where this project was conducted, but in
wider academic communities as well.
ACCESSIBILITY AT UNIVERSITIES IN BRITISH
COLUMBIA
It is the policy of UBC (and it is similarly stated in virtually
every other university policy in North America and
Western Europe) that “the University is committed to
providing access for students with disabilities while
maintaining academic standards” (UBC Student Services,
2006, para. 1). This is in keeping with UBC policy
that recognizes its moral and legal duties to provide
academic accommodation. The University must remove
barriers and provide opportunities to students with a
disability, enabling them to access University services,
programs and facilities and to be welcome as participating
members of the University community. The Policy
goes on to note that such accommodation is in
accordance with the B.C. Human Rights Code, the Canadian
Charter of Rights and Freedoms and US federal
law. Universities have worked hard to write and implement
policy that improves access to campus buildings,
ensures the health and safety of those with disabilities,
and which provides appropriate supplementary support
in the facilitation of learning.
The External Programs and Learning Technologies
office (EPLT) (http://www.eplt.educ.ubc.ca/) acts as the
facilitator for all off-campus Faculty of Education programs,
both domestic and international at the University
of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. EPLT
seeks to use innovative, efficient and effective delivery
vehicles that are first and foremost designed to meet the
diverse needs of learners. Furthermore, it provides them
with access to the highest quality programs possible by
making Web content accessible to a variety of Webenabled
devices, such as phones, handheld devices, kiosks
and network appliances.
The second largest university in British Columbia,
Simon Fraser University has a Centre for Students with
Disabilities (CSD), which primarily offers services to
students on campus, similar to UBC’s Access and Diversity—Disability
Resource Centre (http://www.students
.ubc.ca/access.drc.cmf).
Universal design
The first six sections of this chapter discuss how to address
accessibility issues for an online environment,
along with resources, activities, and assessments, used
with face-to-face coursework or a fully online course. If
you are just starting out, then you can address these
issues and numerous others from the beginning by using
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles. UDL
builds upon universal design concepts from other fields,
such as architecture and urban planning, and applies
them to learning situations.
The “curb cut” is a common urban planning example
used to demonstrate the fundamental idea of UDL.
Since the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, curb
cuts—ramps extending from the street up to the sidewalk—must
be present on sidewalks. Curb cuts allow
people who use wheelchairs or who have low mobility to
go from sidewalk to street and back again more easily.
However, to add a curb cut to an existing sidewalk requires
a jackhammer and a lot of extra work. Making a
sidewalk that was designed with a curb cut from the
beginning is much easier. Coming back to UDL, it is
often easier to accommodate different learning needs by
designing the course with those needs in mind.
As we will see with accessibility solutions for online
learning, the curb cut accommodates everyone, not just
the original intended audience. Parents with strollers,
children walking their bicycles, skateboarders, and more
146 Education for a Digital World