Accessibility for Online Education Service Providers
Online classes, exercises, and tests are common components of modern education, making it vital to ensure that all students have equal access to these materials. Students with disabilities face numerous challenges using online content, and require accommodations that account for visual, hearing, movement, learning, and other disabilities. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act promote standards and principles for institutions to achieve full accessibility in their eLearning course components.
Accessibility can be built into online materials from the start, or existing materials can be remediated to add accessible features. While the former is certainly preferable (because proactively planning for built-in accessibility both reduces long-term costs and increases overall usability), it is often necessary to repair existing inaccessible content as well. Four main categories of online materials must be considered when building or remediating eLearning content:
Audio/Video Accessibility: Audio and video content includes not only produced content, like films and television programs, but also live performances and lectures. Captions (either encoded with a recording or generated on the fly during live events) enable deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences to participate, while audio descriptions provide synchronized explanations of on-screen action for blind audience members. Audio descriptions for complex materials, like advanced math and science topics, may need to be enhanced with inserted pauses (to allow longer descriptions) or accompanying files and hard copy content to fully convey the depicted images and learning objectives.
Document Accessibility: Textbooks, homework, exams, and supplementary reading must be made available in a usable format. For example, if a blind student is a braille reader, then electronic braille content may be fine for them, but would not be usable by a blind student who only uses screen readers. In each case, translating the content may require special effort beyond simply converting the text. STEM content requires special braille codes and specially designed audio that maximizes clarity and eliminates ambiguity. Books with complicated layouts (like sidebars, text boxes, and word art) need to be reflowed to ensure proper reading order and to prevent text from being jumbled together. Tactile graphics (images made using raised lines, which are sometimes the best alternative for online graphics) must be carefully designed to retain important details.
Image Accessibility: In many cases, images can be provided as tactile graphics to enable blind students to access maps, graphs, and other class materials. However, this requires extensive design and print production, and is certainly not an online solution for eLearning content. Alternative text (or Alt text) is a description of an image, accessed via keyboard commands. While alt text doesn’t provide the spatial sense of a tactile graphic, it can be produced more quickly, and is easily accessible using the same eLearning interfaces used by other students. Alt text still requires careful design, describing all important details while being concise and coherent.
Website Accessibility: This includes the previous three categories, since videos, text, and images are all often delivered via web interfaces in online learning environments. Websites must be designed with sensible navigation in mind, since blind and mobility-impaired users may not be able to effectively use complex menu systems or labyrinthine site structures. In addition, colors and text must consider the many individuals with visual impairments who find that low-contrast or oddly shaped text difficult to read. Since many screen readers automatically parse a website’s text and graphical elements, it’s important to code the site and pages to allow easy and sensible reading order from beginning to end.
Added Wrinkles for STEM
High-demand careers often require expertise in math, science, and other STEM subjects. These subjects are traditionally difficult for students with disabilities. When accessible accommodations are made for STEM course content, special care must be taken to ensure that already-challenging subjects aren’t made more difficult by improperly implemented accessibility features.
For example, many online STEM assessments use diagrams and images to present questions and problems to solve. Such questions present a number of challenges for students with vision disabilities. Even if alt text is provided for images, special care must be taken while programming the interface to ensure that the alt text is read in the proper order, and that the student can navigate between text blocks, captions, and answer choices without using a mouse. Furthermore, this fulfillment of basic distance-learning accessibility requirements doesn’t address the content of the alt text itself. In the case of STEM diagrams and equations, descriptive writers must be knowledgeable about the subject in order to avoid confusing or ambiguous terminology (for example, confusion between hyphens, minus signs, negative signs, dashes, and chemical bond symbols). The writers must also study the questions and test content, so that the alt text does not give away any answers (for example, if an exercise is testing a student’s ability to sort out nested negative terms and minus operations, the alt text must be carefully written to avoid naming the symbols and giving the student more information than their sighted classmates). Thus, it is even more vital to consider both usability and compliance when developing accessible STEM content.
Common Questions About Online Education Accessibility
Does my online curriculum need to be accessible?
In a word: yes. There are federal laws in place (such as the Americans with Disabilities Act) mandating equal access for all students, and these laws apply to accessibility in online courses, as well as traditional hard copy materials. Not only does accessible course design and accessible online content ensure compliance with these requirements, but it also expands your market size to include students of all ability types and situations.
What other areas of accessibility do I need to think about when providing online curriculum?
For elearning accessibility, it’s important to consider all student-facing interfaces and materials, not just classwork content. Students need to be able to access all elements of what may be an interlinked group of applications, including course selection and registration, learning management systems (LMS), student information systems (SIS), and external content repositories and services.
Does simply being WCAG compliant mean you are fully accessible?
Not necessarily. WCAG requirements test for functionality (like keyboard-controllable interfaces and screen reader features), but not for content appropriateness. For example, a photo of a painting is “compliant” if it includes alt text, but may still be inaccessible if it is too brief, fails to provide sufficient information, or actually gives away the answer to an accompanying test question. Regardless, WCAG guidelines are a key tool in building a complete online course accessibility checklist, but additional criteria must be considered to ensure practical and useful accessibility efforts.
Does my online curriculum teacher interface also need to be accessible?
Generally, interfaces and systems that are not student-facing do not need to be accessible. However, accessibility is still a good idea, since it encourages a uniform standard of development across the entire organization, and ensures immediate usability when administrators and teachers with disabilities need to use those interfaces.
I only supplement my class with online content. Does supplemental curriculum need to be accessible?
It’s strongly recommended. At the very least, an appropriate and equal alternative must be provided, so that students with disabilities have equal access to the learning opportunities afforded their classmates.
What is a VPAT and do I need one?
A Voluntary Product Accessibility Template is a comprehensive checklist of accessibility features according to Section 508 Standards. VPATs are voluntary, and are provided by software developers to customers as a description of accessibility (or not) of a piece of software. While not mandatory, a properly completed VPAT shows your customers that you are aware of accessibility requirements and are working to meet them (or better yet, have fully complied with them).
Is Universal design for online curriculum the same as accessibility?
No. Universal Design for Learning (or UDL) is a framework of techniques and principles that encourage flexible and customized approaches to learning, with the goal of providing students with materials suited to their individual needs. Accessibility focuses on ensuring that people with specific sensory, physical, and/or cognitive needs have the necessary accommodations to access materials. While the two concepts do overlap somewhat, they’re not the same. UDL is more broad-based, with the goal of efficiently and effectively delivering information to students, whereas accessibility is more concerned with the accommodations necessary for students to effectively receive that information. For example, a UDL curriculum might provide students with different options for getting lecture notes (recordings, hardcopy, video, etc.), and the same curriculum with accessibility would ensure that students needing screen readers, closed captions, or audio description services have access to those accommodations.
Are all virtual schools providing full curriculum or supplemental education to the public subject to Section 508?
Technically, Section 508 only applies to institutions that make use of federal funds. However, all schools are encouraged to develop and execute a virtual-school accessibility roadmap, to make content easier to use for everyone, not just people with visual or auditory disabilities.