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>>SPEAKER ONE: Welcome to online course accommodations for students with disabilities. I'm the executive director
of continuing education at Fresno Pacific university.
I'm a fellow traveler with you, on this journey of trying to figure out how to make our courses more
accommodating for students with disabilities. In this session I am hoping to share with you some basic things that you need to
know, along with some tools that are out there to help you in this process.
I have a website that I have created to go along with this presentation, and I will continue to add to this
as we go along, because I am continuing to learn myself. And so, let me share that
with you. I am going to push it to you right now. (pause).
Here is the website, and you should be able to see that. Of course, you can bookmark
this to see it at any time later. I will also share my screen with you during the presentation so that
you know where I am at and what I am talking about any particular time. So you can always come
back later but also fall along with me now.
But as we go through the presentation, there will be some video clips that I would like you to watch. It is
better if you watch the video on your own computer. But we are going to put up a
timer during the link to the videos of that you can watch it, and then come back and we will continue
the discussion. Just be aware that when we put up the timer, I will hopefully have pointed out what video you should be
looking at. So I will share my screen and we will begin. (pause).
OK. At this point you should see my screen, the website that
I have created, online course accommodations for students with disabilities. So we are going to
go through this, and as I said, once in awhile we will stop to watch a video.
I worked in continuing education at Fresno Pacific university. We are a private Christian liberal arts university.
What I work mostly, mostly with is distance
learning teacher professional development, so obviously this is a big big to us.
thing to us.
There are a number of Assistive technologies for students, and many of you know this already but I wanted to
give you some links to the major ones that students use in order to interact with online courses.
There are various screen readers, and of course if you click on any of the links, it will open a new window and tell
you more information.
Because this presentation is only an hour, you will want to go back and look at things that you buy more
interesting and spend more time on it.
Jaws is a screenwriting
Another thing is for screen magnification. For some students, it is not that they cannot see but they need to
make things larger. So we want to make sure that our courses work with that. Here is an example
of magic screen magnification software, where you can find out more about that.
And notice that it also works with the screen reader-these are from the same company, so many
students may have access to this type of software as well.
Obviously there are a variety of onscreen keyboards. There is also voice recognition tools.
Some of the work that you will be doing or the students will want to be able to speak and
not tied, the when they have typing issues. So Dragon naturally speaking is one of
those pieces of software that students can use to create their products for you. I have used
this of the Macintosh and it works really well. I also have people who have used it on the Windows
PC, so there is a version for both platforms.
And the thing that we will talk about all lot is how to do captioning and audio transcription for people in
So these are a few things. There are others. I have a link
here, [on the board], and it talks more about different types of Assistive technologies.
What I would like to do
here-Well, I would encourage you to go back later and take a look at this video. Because it
talks about all different types of Assistive Technology that students are using. As you can see over on
the right side, there is even more information about different types of Assistive Technology.
So this is a great website. If you do not know about this website, it is sponsored by George
Lucas-yes, the man from Star wars. All the money that
you spent on those movies is being put to good use, and there are lots of great resources on this website.
Anyway, take a look at that later.
I do want to take a five minute break for you to watch this next video on how the I pad
works with autistic children. I believe that mobile technology is another key factor
in trying to make things accessible for students. This video shows
how that works. So, let's stop for five minutes and watch the video.
(pause).
(chat window link).
>> I hope you enjoyed that. To me is inspirational to see what the I pad can do
for students with severe disorders such as autism. For me, but long time
ago, you know, we had had really expensive devices. And now, with the I
pad and some sample applications we can make a difference for children. Not only do we need to think about online
courses and excess ability; but then, how can we take those online courses and harness the
power of the I pad and help someone with disabilities to interact with the course. I think this is a whole new area.
Anyway, just something to think about.
When we talk about old online disability issue, obviously there are laws.
We are going to take some time to talk about laws right now, but there is a link right here to the
laws in California. If you are watching this outside the state of California, obviously there are
other regulations. Including the Americans with disabilities act. But you can take a look at this. The point is that we need
to be doing this whether it is a law or not, to be meeting the needs of our students. So the information is there
if you would like to take a look at it.
This all revolves around the principle of universal design. [on the board]. I am just learning about
this along with you, so I am not an expert in Universal design. But there are some design
principles that we have to think about each time that we create an online course. There
is the Center for universal design. [on the board]. Here are the
principles. We need to have equitable use. We need
everybody to have access. No. 2, we need to have flexibility. So we need more
than one way for students to interact with our online courses. That means that if they're going to watch a video,
we have to have a transcript, we have to have captions. If we have an assignment or an activity,
something that they have to do during that activity where the disability is an issue, we need to
have an alternate assignments or a different way to do it. Anyway, when they do have equitable
use,
flexibility, and simple and intuitive to use. Sometimes when I create assignments, I don't
realize how complex I am making them. That is not just for people with disabilities but all students that we work
with, making sure that we are very clear in what we ask them to you do, and that
is easy to do and the steps are simple to understand.
It needs to be perceptible information. So there needs to be different ways to interact. If we have a
picture in our online course, when they do have an ALT tag for that
picture-we need to have an ALT tag for that picture, so that when someone is using a screen
reader, the software will state what the picture is. One of the things that I am concerned
about in online class's that I oversee, Prof. sometimes use lots of different
typefaces and colors, and that is fine; but it can be confusing if you have issues with color
blindness or other types of eyesight issues. So we want to be sure that everything is
legible and organized well.
Later on I will show you some checking tools that will allow you to go on line in a class and check to
see if it is too much one way or the other, as far as the colors
or organization or structure.
No. 5, tolerance for error. We definitely need to make sure that there is nothing that will cause
problems as far as hazards. Probably not a big thing when it comes to on-line class's, but it is
a principle of universal design. Low physical effort, that is more when we're talking about
working outside the on-line environment. (No. 6). But again, another design principle.
No. 7, size and space, not necessarily when we talk about online class's, but universal
design and exists ability talks about all things that students have to deal with. So these are the principles we need to think about as we
are greeting the course.
I just found this, an article on
creating and using the instructional design principles of for mobile learning. Remember we
just looked at the I pad. So this talks about what has to be different or would be emphasized when you are talking
about mobile technology, and some of the challenges and opportunities for mobile learning. So I would encourage you to take a look at
this later. This is right off the press, so I think it has some good things to think about. As I
said earlier, I think this is a new area, and certainly something that now, everybody
is walking around with a cellular telephone or and I pad or some other mobile device. It
Mean So those are the great principles that we need to think about.
Here are some tools, [on the board], that can help you to create your courses. A check list.
The state of California has a variety of check list that you can use to see
if your material works with certain browsers, is the Code correct, the colors correct.
And Stanford has tackled this-Well, I guess I have to fix this.
Sorry about that. But anyway, Stanford has a checklist that they work with, and I am sure
that many colleges have their own check list as well. So, I just want to
show you a couple of examples if you do not know where to buy some basic information.
What I am really excited about is
this web accessibility evaluation tool. [on the board]. This allows you to put in a website
address (typing), and it will check the page.
I don't know if you will be able to see this or not. I hope that
you can see this. It will show you where the accessibility problems are. When you see
the red, that means there is an issue. Obviously our own website here has board problems.
When I see green and that is good. When I see yellow, that is a warning. You can see
You can also take all look at what the structure and order of the web page by clicking on that link.
[on the board]. If I am using a screen reader, these are the things that it would read as it goes.
Sometimes, you may notice where it goes from 15 down to 30 and back up again. That means that you
have an issue with the structure of your web page. So you can quickly check the structure of
your web page and see how it is for a screen reader.
You can also look at what you're website would look like as text only.
(pause).
(working). Well, that is not working.
Anyway, you can click on text only, and also the outline view, and it will show you
what you're website looks like in those ways. So this is a really cool tool.
There is a
plugin for Firefox. you
can put the tool on your browser bar, and then you can click on it and it will go
ahead and analyze a website the same way. If you are going behind a password protected site, you
need to use that, and then you can have this software analyze the page after that.
Another place that is
useful
>> OK. Another tool that is useful to help with checking for online accessibility issues
is, juicy studio. If we look here, [on the board] ,
, this is the link. This has some of nice things in here. It has
a readability test, a cascading style sheet analyzer .
. Other analyzers. But the thing that I'd think is really cool ,
, and this would be good to use no matter what the class, is the
readability tool. This test here, [on the board], allows you to go in
and see what the readability of level is above what you are putting on a website .
for what you are
putting on a website.
the So if I ask it to calculate the readability, this will tell me the number of sentences and so forth.
And then of course the grade level down here. If you look at
our website, it has about an eighth grade reading level. That is what that means, and then it has been
additional information in how it calculates
that. So you can look it your website, a description of a particular
activity in your class, any content reading that you want students to go through that you graded yourself.
And just check to see if the readability is at the level you wish. So, choose the studio is another good
tool to use when you are trying to take a look at
your Web site or online class's to see if they are accessible.
Also, W3C
has a lot of great information on its Web site, the web accessibility initiative. Once again, all lot more
information than you will ever be able to look at. But I wanted to leave it here so that you can do your own research.
For my class's, we are trying to get everything caption, and try to make sure that we take care of
the major accessibility issues, as far as Alternate tags, readability
of our web sites, those kinds of things. We are trying to tackle that first and handle
that, and then we are going to go back and look at more of the detail issues like colors and things like that.
Anyway, to me, the whole process is done one step at a time. You have to go in and continued to
Now, another big component is captioning. Here I have some information on different captions.
Google talks about how it does captions. There is a tool called caption
tube, that helps you to captioned YouTube video.
I am showing you free websites and free resources. Obviously, you can create
captions yourself and put them into any video that you create. But these are things that will help you after the
fact, or give you some ideas of places to up load, where video can be worked
Here is a video-and again we will not take the time right now to watch it, but I would incur urge you
another website, it you post a video to this website, uses
the power of people on the Internet to get video captioned. Not only captioned in
English, but in multiple languages. So when you load a
video here, you need to do the captions initially in English, but then
the videos are out there for everyone to see. People working in other
languages can go in and bad the captions in that language. Pretty cool. When
you put on a particular video, it allows you to see what ever captions you are looking for.
DotSUB,
a free Web site, and they're asking you to create captions in any language. And there is actually cool here
that helps you to do the translation.
Another video here to show you how that works. [on the board]. We will not take the time right now but you can go
back and take a look at that later. Overstream
is another website that you can post video to. It allows you to include subtitles in any language, kind
of like the website will adapt before. Just another one
we looked at before.
Obviously, there are copyright issues here. You need to make
sure that the video here, that you have copyright to, and they are your own video when you
post them here.
It may be that other people have put video on here, so this may be a place to look
So, where do you want to go from here? Again, there is lots of training out there.
Washington state, the University of Washington is really another location where they have done all lot more work on
this, and they talked at the end do it center about what videos should look
like, and how it should be transcribed. And they also have audio help. In other
words, if you look on this video on the left side of the screen, [on the board], if I am
blind that will not be able to see this text. So when you play this video, which we will not do right
now, but it will actually describe what is on the screen.
The graphics. When a person comes up on a
newscast, you can hear them but you cannot see who it is. Not only do you have to have captions for people who cannot
hear and what to read the video, but for people who are blind, you need to have the audio assistance.
So when they are listening to the video, they know who is talking and what is going on. We are not quite there yet.
It will take a lot of time to get to that point. But this is definitely an example
of true excess ability in all areas.
I would encourage you to go back and look at this video, as well as a variety
of different formats for you to use that they have here, if this particular format does
not work for you.
And of course, on this website, they have lots more information. So I would
encourage you to spend some time here. Looking at what
they say about accessibility. For me, it is just one step at a time. We
are not where they are And yet, but we are working in that direction. But it really does open
up your thinking when you watch the video about all the different ways, and all the work that will
Another book that I have read it is this course, this book by Norman
Coombs.
I would encourage you to look at this. It is very simple but it would give you some basic
knowledge beyond my presentation of things you want to take a look at. You can see that there are some excerpts here.
Not a very expensive book. In fact, this publisher
has an entire group of books that revolve around online teaching and learning that I would recommend.
Let me see if this brings it up. [on the board]. There is a whole series of books that
you may find interesting, not only on accessibility, but how to teach laboratory courses
on online, all kinds of online issues are in these books. Very useful.
In fact, they are textbooks in current doctoral course is that I
am in right now. And I think you will find them to be useful.
There is also a web accessibility class [on the board].
This talks again about style sheets, the Scripps, etc..
The last thing that I want to mention quickly is, we do have an through Fresno
Pacific a certificate in on-line teaching. Let me pull that up real quick.
[on the board]. This not only focuses on accessibility in the
courses, but it also impacts all the other things that all my teachers need to know. But me bring this
up here real quick. (pause).
If you are interested, we do have the certificate for online teaching. It consists
of four courses, a total of 12 units. And these are the courses involved. [on the board].
This is another place where you might want to go to get more information about how to teach online.
Anyway, I want to conclude. I hope this has been helpful to you. My purpose has been to
do a quick overview, and point you in the direction of lots of resources beyond myself.
So that you can continue to struggle with this issue back at your campus
or school, and continued to try to create courses that continued to meet the needs of
students with disabilities. If you have other resources that you would like to
recommend, please feel free to send me an e-mail, and I will be glad to add those to this.
This is a growing resources for all of us. This website that I used is called
storify.
it is a website that allows you to create simple website by pulling in resources from the
Internet, from Twitter, from YouTube and other things. And it is a
way of greeting some research and book marking places that you want to go back later and look at. So I would encourage you
to take a look at this website as well. A great resource. At least, it has
been for me.
With that, I want to conclude.
We have a survey that we would like you to the loud. Much.Once again, the free to send me an e-mail and if you have any questions, please let me know.