Taking steps towards inclusive education
Making content accessible has benefits for everyone.
A student approached one of my colleagues at the end of a class in the Bachelor of Music program with a problem. The student, Abigail, explained she was legally blind and so could not see anything on the board. Despite having two PhDs in education, my colleague did not know how to respond with a solution. As testament to her dedication as an educator, she conducted a literature review on delivering music education to blind students, but couldn’t find anything relevant to higher education. She contacted Vision Australia and was sent “A survivor’s guide to braille in music notation”. But Abigail does not read braille.
The solution: Abigail is an expert in how she learns as a vision-impaired student and was able to teach my colleague how to teach her. Abigail completed the course, her Bachelor of Music program, and enrolled in a PhD. She now works as a student partner in accessible learning design and helped to create a model course for accessibility in online education.
I attended a talk by Abigail and was fortunate to spend some time with her. I was stunned to see how frustrating lectures must be for vision-impaired students when she demonstrated the output of a screen reader from a Powerpoint presentation. The reader voiced “Animating picture 23 with strip” and “Animating textbox 7 with fade in” as it described the animations and graphics embedded in a slide while never reading any of the text itself. The content was not accessible at all.
After this experience I made a number of changes to my course delivery — which have benefited all students. I am no longer hesitant to introduce myself to students registered with disabilities in my courses. I ask how I can best help these students and I have found small actions can have great benefits to them.
Accessibility actions
I now ensure all online content is more accessible by taking the following actions:
- Using Powerpoint to create accessible notes that include alt text, heading hierarchy and providing these are tagged pdfs.
- Providing captions or transcripts for all videos. Transcription services are extremely cheap and presentation software, such as Powerpoint, often has automated captioning options.
- All content is made available at the start of the course (no more late night uploads of lecture notes).
- I take time to ensure my microphone is working well so the recordings are audible and clear.
There are not many vision impaired students in my courses, so why do this?
Although there may not be many vision impaired students in my course, there may be some I am unaware of, and there may be more if I provide accessible materials. There have also been unintended benefits for all students.
Unintended benefits
Every term I now receive numerous positive comments from students personally and through evaluations that relate to the changes I made. Students overwhelmingly find the accessible notes are clear and easy to understand. Many find the transcripts and captions helpful, especially if english is their second language or if the videos include a new term. Providing content early has resulted in many students reading ahead and arriving better prepared for classes, and creating quality recordings has also benefitted those keen on efficiency (listening at a faster speed) and those less familiar with english.
Acting on the voice of one student provided benefits for many of my students. This reminded me to listen to student voices, as only students can provide feedback on how the content I create is experienced.
