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Course Accessibility Workshop
Andrea Blair –Disability Support Services Phyllis Epps –Media Development Center/ Information Technology Assistance Center Jason Maseberg-Tomlinson –Disability Support Services I would like to thank you for joining us today for the Course Accessibility Workshop. The goal of the workshop is to help you better understand what is meant by course accessibility and offer some tips on how you can begin to make your courses more accessible. There will be a question and answer period at the end of the presentation so please save any of your questions and comments until the end. Let me introduce you to our presenters today. Jason Maseberg-Tomlinson works in Disability Support Services as our adaptive technology specialist. He works directly with students with disabilities who are enrolled in online courses offered through Division of Continuing Education. Phyllis Epps is the Manager of the Media Development Center. She helps students, faculty and staff with all their media related needs. The MDC also houses much of the hardware and software needed to create accessible courses. And I am Andrea Blair, Director of Disability Support Services. The mission of DSS is to ensure that students with disabilities have equal access to educational opportunities offered here at K-State. DSS serves over 450 on-campus and/or online students with disabilities. Examples of disaiblities that are greatly impacted by what we will learn today are students who are deaf or hard of hearing, blind or visually impaired, moblity impaired, and who have cognitive disabilities such as learning disabilities. It is necessary for many of these students to use adpative hardware and software to access the computer and its content. For example, a student who is blind would use specialized text to speech software to navigate the mouse instead of his eyes. Welcome to education in the 21st Century. It is characterized by the explosion of technology which we have all embraced. Technology in education provides more flexibility, greater collaboration, and global opportunities. For students with disabilities, this digital explosion has revolutionized their lives. Technology has removed barriers and created greater opportunities than we ever thought possible. Completing academic courses and degrees online are examples of the power and flexibility that technology brings to making education inclusive for all.
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Examples of Universal Design
The most efficient way to think about course accessibility is in terms of universal design. Universal Design refers to the idea of designing products, environments and services to be used by all people, to the greatest extent possible without the need for any special changes or retrofitting. The term was originally coined by architects in the 70’s and 80’s that were looking at accessible building designs. At that time, K-state focused on constructing elevators and adding curb cuts to the sidewalks. Initially, closed captioning on your TV was developed for the deaf and hard of hearing. How many of you use it at home when your partner is sleeping and you want to watch TV because you can’t sleep worrying about all this course accessibility stuff. Just as parents with baby strollers benefit from curb cuts, the benefits of creating a universally designed course is not limited to students with disabiliities. For instance, a lecture that is viewed via K-State Online with the accompanied written transcripts is necessary for a student who is deaf but can also benefit an international student whose primary language is not English or benefit a student who is a visual learner. There is a growing interest in universal design and for good reason. As life expectancy increases, our sight and hearing will be compromised. Having a disability is the only protected class that we can all become members of at any time. Before Jason gives you some tips on making your courses accessible, I want to highlight a few points in the Course Accessibility Standards Policy. Other Disability offices across the nation are quite envious of us. They are just now beginning to develop policies like the one we have here at K-State.
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1. Course Accessibility Standards Policy
Approved by Faculty Affairs - May 15, 2007 Approved by Faculty Senate - June 12, 2007 Background Many of the courses offered at Kansas State University use technology to enhance course delivery, both on-campus and through distance learning (referred to as eLearning). The United States Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has stated that eLearning must be designed and delivered in such a way that all students, including students with disabilities, have equal access to course content. In 2001, Kansas State University developed a memorandum detailing the University’s responsibility for creating accessible administrative, college, and department web pages. Accessible templates were developed for this purpose. Since 2001 the use of websites, web-based course management systems, and various technologies to routinely provide instruction to students has grown exponentially. Therefore, the Course Accessibility Standards Policy extends beyond the 2001 Web Accessibility Memorandum to include distance education and instructional websites as well as all eLearning course content. My first point is: making sure that technology is accessible is not new. In 2001, Kansas State University developed a memorandum detailing the University’s responsibility for creating accessible administrative, college, and department web pages. Accessible templates were developed for this purpose. This policy expands on the 2001 memo and makes us begin thinking about technology in a larger context.
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1. Course Accessibility Standards Policy(2)
This policy applies to all faculty and staff developing courses or course management systems for K-State or affiliates. All course delivery mechanisms and course content must be made accessible. This policy refers to new courses, new materials added to existing courses, and “retrofitting” of existing courses. In addition, software that is purchased and utilized in a course must also be accessible. Making courses accessible may include, such actions as saving documents in a universal format such as Microsoft Word, providing a written transcript of audio content, or embedding a text description of graphics inserted into a PowerPoint slide or website. By making courses accessible to students who are sight or hearing impaired, you are also making the same course accessible to students with a wide range of other disabilities. Secondly, Policy This policy applies to all faculty and staff developing courses or course management systems for K-State or affiliates. All course delivery mechanisms and course content must be made accessible. This policy refers to new courses, new materials added to existing courses, and “retrofitting” of existing courses. In addition, software that is purchased and utilized in a course must also be accessible. Sometimes the question arises as to who the policy applies to. The policy applies to all of us that use technology to deliver course content. Some examples of technology that may be used in the classroom or online environment include K-State Online, videos, power point presentations, external webpages, or 3rd party software. Let me share with you an example that occurred a few semesters ago. An academic department purchased some 3rd party software to use in a course. Since it was not on their radar yet, they failed to ask the company about the accessibility of their product before purchasing it. We figured it out as soon as a student enrolled in it who was blind.
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1. Course Accessibility Standards Policy (3)
Responsibilities All University administrators, faculty, and staff who are involved in course development and delivery share the obligation to ensure that eLearning is accessible to students with disabilities. The Dean of each College will be asked to review for compliance with this policy any new course approval or course alteration. The Office of the Provost will make reasonable efforts to provide professional development, training, and technical support for faculty and staff involved in the creation of accessible eLearning. My last point is who is responsible. Responsibilities All University administrators, faculty, and staff who are involved in course development and delivery share the obligation to ensure that eLearning is accessible to students with disabilities. The Dean of each College will be asked to review for compliance with this policy any new course approval or course alteration. The number one question that comes up is who is going to pay. Fortunately, most of the tips that we are about to show you do not cost any money nor are they labor intensive. It is more cost effective for the university to consider accessibility at the design stage. Let me give you another example of what can happen when accessibility is implemented ad-hoc. A distance student who is deaf enrolled in a summer course that was offered solely online. Much of the course content was delivered via lectures that were pre-recorded using Tegrity. The student requested transcripts but none were available. It was decided to send the audio portions of the course to a transcription agency to make the transcripts. When the transcripts were returned, just a week before the start of the course, the faculty member deemed them unusable due to numerous errors with the content-specific vocabulary. Not planning for accessibility at the beginning can easily result in undue burdens both for the faculty member and the student.
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Welcome "We know that equality of individual ability has never existed and never will, but we do insist that equality of opportunity still must be sought." Franklin Delano Roosevelt The goal of this workshop is to help you design your courses for the 21st Century. The increase in online learners and use of technology to deliver content is what has led us to this point. Legally and ethically we can not deny individuals with disabilities opportunity to an education. We must focus our attention on technological barriers and begin designing courses with universal design in mind. This will in turn benefit most students to the largest extent possible. 6
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2. Demonstration of software commonly used by students
Lets look at some software that highlights some of the necessity for content accessibility. ZoomText is a program which changes the color and size of text on a screen and also reads text to a user. ZoomText is commonly used by our students and can be found in all of the computer labs on campus. Lets take a look at a document which is accessible and one that is inaccessible using ZoomText. [Open ZoomText at a power of 2 and then change to 1] It is important to know that adaptive technology uses real text in order to read documents to users. I call it Real Text because each character is alphanumeric data. Real text is that which you can copy, highlight, edit, or paste. Commonly used files are .html, Word, Excel, and PDF files. [read page 1] Graphics of text are not accessible. Pseudo text, as I call it, cannot be copied or read by any adaptive technology yet it appears just like real text. Again, these files are just an image of text. They can only be read by use of vision or costly Optical Character Recognition (OCR) programs that convert images of text to real text. Commonly used pseudo text files include PDFs, JPEG, GIFFs, and tiffs. As we look at page two of our PDF you can see that the text does not read. [try reading page 2] This is an example of an inaccessible PDF.
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3. Seven ways to increase course accessibility
To help faculty and staff create accessible documents we have created seven Quick Tips that focus on text and audio/ visual elements. Some of you may have picked up some examples on the table up front. These can be found on the website In years past, web accessibility was tricky. Thanks to recent advances in web programming and adaptive technology accessibility is easy to achieve. Web accessibility standards have gotten much better; therefore, tools used to make web pages, such as DreamWeaver, have improved. If you write your own web pages, check the accessibility features of the software you write with. Secondly, thanks to K-State Online, we already have an accessible environment in which to work. Our students report that the environment is working very well for them. The exception to this is content, as Andrea pointed out. Although K-State Online is accessible it does not automatically equate to the content being accessible. The problem comes when the student clicks on a link in K-State Online such as “Content” to open the syllabus and then the syllabus is not accessible. This is probably because the document was not saved or uploaded in an accessible file format. Content such as text files, graphics, and PowerPoint needs to be created with care if it is placed in an online environment or if it is used in class. Keep in mind, the policy speaks of eLearning, any electronic learning. This includes courses that are on campus and any technology used inside a physical classroom. K-Access Quick Tips walk you through some easy steps to make sure your content is accessible. I am going to talk briefly about each tip we have posted.
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3.1 Adding Real Text to PDFs
First, back to PDF files. We all use PDFs. However, they can be deceiving and there is more to a PDF than meets the eye. Text may or may not be present, as we saw in our example reading, and we suggest checking for real text. Try copying text, for instance. Use this quick tip so that you know how check for accessibility and to add text to your documents and make them more accessible. Adobe Acrobat Professional (available in the Media Development Center) gives you the power to check accessibility and create text if it is not present. It uses Optical Character Recognition to quickly add text to the document with a simple click in the Document menu. You, however, will see no changes at all! I am going to go ahead and answer a popular question that we get: Can you secure a document that is accessible, the PDF format for example? Yes and no. There are file formats that are starting to emerge which allow this, Daisy for instance, but these formats require special software to convert and special players for playback. Yes, you can lock a PDF with real text, but it also blocks all accessibility features. If you are concerned about content security we recommend giving access to students who need them but maybe not to the entire course. Publishers do this as a common practice by sending us entire books in a PDF format to give to students in a secure manner.
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3.2 Converting Text Images into Text Files
Our second most commonly used Quick Tip is converting text images into text files with the software OmniPage. A text image is a scanned document that is a picture of each page, much like the PDF page that did not read. OmniPage takes these files and turns them into a text document such as .rtf or Word. This is Optical Character Recognition (OCR). While many people do use Adobe and can add text with Adobe Acrobat Professional, it is limited to certain file types and sizes. Adobe Acrobat also outputs a PDF whereas OmniPage outputs to many file types, including a well formatted Word document. With three simple buttons, OmniPage will guide you through the process of creating a nicely formated text document. There may be some editing involved, one of the many reasons it is important for faculty to convert these, but it is usually brief. OmniPage does an incredible job with most documents. I have used it to scan entire books with very few errors in spelling and formatting. We are seeing changes in technology that will make scanning into text files easier and easier. For instance, many scanners now have the option to scan straight into a text format, some include a button labled “OCR.” Even so, keep this Quick Tip in mind if you ever sort through old files and disks. It is surprisingly helpful.
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3.3 Adding Styles to Word documents
So now we have text. What about the framework: headings and such. If you use long Microsoft Word files you should really think about applying styles as well. (Anyone who has worked with HTML knows all about this.) Styles are similar to tags. Using Styles, which differ from the formatting buttons in the top of the window, will not only save you time editing and formatting, it will also increase accessibility. Styles and formatting can easily be found in the toolbar. It is our hope that students read a document once and study it later. When students study they look for bold headings and important points. They skim. Students using certain types of adaptive technology skim by having the software read all headings and subheadings. The software is checking the styles to know what to read. Once the right heading if found, the user points it to the text that follows it and reads that next. If a document does not have styles, it is impossible for the technology to skim a document. Students either read it all again, or search for words and miss out on much of the information. Let’s think about a different student. If a student has a visual impairment they may need to change the format of a document. With styles they can use your framework of headings and with one click change all headings to stand out. They can do the same for all text in order to make it large enough to read. Styles are so versatile that ANY student who may want to re-organize the information for study strategies can color code top headings one color, secondary another, lists another and so on. Just as students can easily change styles, so can you. This is the big pay off. This Quick Tip will show you how to apply and use styles so that you can easily change the format of an entire document with a couple keystrokes and clicks rather than selecting each type of text individually. You will be surprised at how much time you save in the long run.
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3.4 Tagging PDFs If you are a PDF power user and you create documents that are long and divided, read this Quick Tip on Tagging. They are just like HTML tags or Word Styles. I will admit that this is complicated and it is more helpful for long documents with chapters and headings. Tagging PDFs is not necessary for a three page reading without headings; however, if you have a course pack or a complex layout you are going to use for years to come, think about tagging it.
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3.5 Creating Accessible PowerPoint Presentations
Moving away from text documents, lets talk about another popular file format: PowerPoint. PowerPoint is used for more than the presentations for which it was intended. We use it to convey information in many online environments. This Quick Tip is available to make your PowerPoint more accessible. The best approach to creating a more accessible presentation is also the most basic. Simply use the tools that PowerPoint gives you in the normal layout: the outline / slides pane, the notes pane, and auto-layout. If you use graphics you will also want to add alternative text. Right click the graphic, select “Format Picture” and then type a description in the “Web” tab. Include a description of what the object is and how it is important. Make sure to include important details that students need to know. It really is as easy as 1,2, 3.
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3.6 Purchasing Accessible 3rd Party Software
What if a course uses software or environments outside of K-State Online? Do you purchase software? Do you use any third party software? You can save yourself and your department some time in the future by having a software representative answer some questions about accessibility which we list out in this Quick Tip. Although software issues are not as common as text issues, when software is inaccessible the burden on resources can be great. Let me give you an example. A couple years ago, at another university, I was working with a student who was blind taking statistics. The course used a stats program. It had been said that the program was accessible. Parts of it were purposefully made accessible. Inputting data, for example, was easy for this student. But, even though the student is a computer wiz, she was unable to access the reports and automated graph creation tools, tools that were vitally important to the course. Either a completely different curriculum would have to be made, or someone was going to have to be the student’s scribe, moving the mouse and clicking buttons guiding her through the screens. Since the course was starting in a matter of weeks, a scribe was used. A one hour lab one day a week quickly turned into two three hour meetings each week; guiding someone to use the computer and then have them interpret the screens is a tedious process. Unfortunately, there are no clear measurements for software accessibility; a representative may say it is accessible and yet it is not. The questions posted in this Quick Tip iron out those details. We cannot retrofit another vendors software like we can a text document, nor will the programmers be able to do it in time. If a student is in a course but cannot access the software it will take much time and many changes for things to work well. This also applies to video: DVDs or content from a publisher’s website. Please make sure that any video you purchase has captions or subtitles that can be turned on in your on-line course as well as in the classroom.
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3.7 Creating Transcripts Finally, Transcripts.
Do you record your lectures? Do you have videos that students are required to watch? If you do, you will want to learn about creating transcripts. Transcripts help students with hearing impairments and, when done in detail, they can also help students with visual impairments. You can either do them in house, or, through outside agencies. Check out the F.A.Q. on the K-Access page for a brief list of transcription and captioning agencies. Our website also posts steps for doing transcripts in house including helpful tips on headings and the use of all caps if you are in a time crunch. Captions are another possibility. If you have the technology or ability to create captions for video content, this would be ideal. Check with your technology staff or Instructional Designers for their advice. Depending on the video used, it may not be possible to apply captions. When should you create transcripts? First, if a student with a pertinent disability is in your course we will connect with you ahead of time and you will need to make transcripts. Second, if a student with a pertinent disability is enrolled in your program, you will want to make sure that courses they will be taking are accessible in advance. Thirdly, we also recommend planning in advance and creating transcripts if you have a course that is popular and has high enrollment from semester to semester. There is a good chance you will have a student with a hearing impairment sooner or later. If you are revising a course that has included video you may want to consider what type of mediation is best. If video is necessary, go for it. If not, it may be a better use of your time and resources to trim it down. Developing transcripts/closed captioning for audio/video content and creating text descriptions for images used in, for example, a power point presentation, are the two accessible features that have the greatest impact on cost and time. However, effective online teaching should include multiple means of content delivery which should greatly reduce the amount of transcripts or text descriptions needed. Dr. Darcy Hardy, President of the United States Distance Learning Association, states that information should be chunked into smaller pieces and in multiple modes of instruction. On average students pay attention to 10 to 20 minutes of video, tops.
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4. K-Access – k-state.edu/dss/k-access
All of these tips can be found at Click “Quick Tips” for a listing. As our online environment grows, so will we. We will post any questions and concerns in our F.A.Q. section. As issues grow more complex we will make sure to give these topics more coverage on our site.
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