These sessions have made me think about what my syllabi look like and how to create resources for everyone to use without excluding anyone in the course. I will start with my syllabi and one course for fall to ensure I am providing the best possible resources!

I think this is a good strategy Carolyn, it is easy to get overwhelmed so taking it slow is I supsect more productive in the end.

Adeline,

I think it also helps to learn the correct methods for formatting syllbi and setting up resources.

Carolyn

Carolyn, it is so helpful when institutuions template out syllabus' for their faculty. This way you can handle lots of accessibility issues prior to faculty even working with their syllabus content!

Agree 100%. Having a template also eases some of the angst that some faculty have around these issues. A syllabus template is a very concrete, easy to explain document.

This series has packed a ton of information into a short amount of time. Baby steps seem the best approach to sharing this out with our faculty. 

I couldn't agree more. We have come up with a plan for active work for 10 minutes in our department meeting focusing on one thing at a time within one course. If we don't provide some active work time during the meeting on one thing at a time, they will likely not do anything. Small active steps. 

Oh that is Brilliant! I love the idea of everyone taking ten minutes and working together. This makes it all far less daunting. 

This video explains alot for understanding the WCAG guidelines.

Thank you for sharing this Teresa! Informative!

Laurie

I would like to share our last dicussion we reviewed  a Stratefic Draft Plan that is   designed to help instructors create a polished OER course and textbook for students.  This draft plan we discussed today is the first step in communcating to the campus community; inlcuding instructors, library staff, and  administrators  a possible path forward to providing students with OER Access., I am glad to being a part of this working group. 

One resource that we discussed in our breakout room today is Simple Syllabus. It's a syllabus management system that takes a lot of the guesswork out of creating an accessible syllabus, and it integrates nicely with our LMS. We use a Universal Syllabus at the course level with certain sections that can be modified by instructors. It allows us to ensure consistency between classes and accessibility of the resource, regardless of who teaches the class.

We also discussed among our group about the ways in which our institution's template syllabus needs an accessibility update.

UDL LibGuide with tab on accessibility.

Thanks for sharing! This looks like a great resource! I've bookmarked it for later :)

Thank you for sharing this resource! Great ideas for out library!

Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for sharing this LibGuide. It includes a vast array of information. 

I've enjoyed this series and am thankful to have had the chance to attend. One question I'm left with is what types of activities / habits / strategies do people find helpful if they / their faculty and staff feel anxiety after running checkers / identifying areas for improvement (even if changes are small and staggered)?

Thank you all! :) - Julie

I feel like this is such a tough question, Julie! There are always folks who are going to feel overwhelmed by what they are seeing.

One thing that we do at our institution is try to focus on one or two things at once, like just alt text or just headings. Then, faculty can go through again later and look for the next layer. Chunking it down, just like we do for our students when they are learning something new, helps.

I also remind my faculty that it is overwhelming for me, too. I am still always learning. It is a slow process for me to get comfortable building accessible materials from the ground up, but the more I practice, the easier it gets. Like any other skill, consistent application helps.

It's normal for them to feel anxious when they are learning something new. If they can shift that anxiety into excitement about a new opportunity, there is also research that suggests that anxiety can be a positive in learning new tasks. It is tough, though!

It's been great - thanks for bringing us together, Julie!  I look forward to working on the answer to your question with you over the next many months....

I love using colored fonts on my weekly newsletters, but I have to remember that folks with cognitive or visual disabilities as well as others without disabilities may struggle to read text that not have enough contrast with the background or worse, the patterned or loud background fights with the text.  Just becuase it "can" be done doesn't mean it "should" be done!   Ensure color contrast; black text on a white or light background is the most readable (love that 14 pt font!). Color alone cannot be used to indicate importance!  

Honestly, I learned a lot (too much to digest). My group is considering how we can disseminate all of the information during the new faculty orientation and then plan workshops for the entire campus. It takes a village, but it is worth it!

Running a faculty orientation is a great way to get everyone on the same page and so are workshops. Good Luck

This series has included an amazing compilation of resources.  As our university completes a full transition to the Canvas LMS, I have worked with students in my own classes to customize their accessibility settings.  While not an OER platform, this information was critical as I better understood changes students can initiate to make a more accessible LMS learning experience.  Visit 'What Feature Settings Can I Enable in My User Account as a Student' (Instructure/Canvas).

Here is a Padlet that I created where I curate resources for our campus related to accessibility, universal design for learning, humanized online learning, liquid syllabus etc.

https://padlet.com/mb727/udl-humanizing-learning-48bauhez7r46md7u

Also, I shared this in one of the earlier weeks, but I really appreciate the following resources: Accessibility THRIVES, Trevor Bolands AT8 , Anne Gagne's Accessibility Podcast! and Accessible Social!

Thank you!

Thank you so much for this. I love Padlet and this is such a helpful way to present and list the different resources. 

From The Accessibility Office at Bucks County Community College, we have a few links to provide resources.

The Accessibility Office - Scroll down to Past Faculty Events

Assistive Software Technology Resources

Microsoft offers a range of accessible templates for Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on its webpage to assist users in creating more accessible documents.

I've been a part of a DEI collaborative whose goal is to infuse DEI into course quality. Our goals providing specific, actionable practices to help all learners succeed. We've found that UDL is the base of online course quality. I hope you check out our site!

This is great!

I'd like to share BCcampus Open Education's Accessibility Toolkit - 2nd edition (opens in new tab). It was created for authors of OER and includes some screen shots and how-to for Pressbook's editor. It has a CC BY Creative Commons License which means we can copy part of it and remix, revise to build tutorials for our own faculty building OER in Pressbooks at CSU, giving credit for the original authors and editors of it.

They have a handy Checklist for Accessibility (opens in new tab) in the first appendix.

Thank you for such a great webinar series!  I appreicated it very much.  I would like to share an additional tool that we are starting to use at CCC.  It is the UDOIT Canvas add-on.  It scans courses for accessibility issues and then provides one dashboard and modal window to repair the issues.  Tips and principles are shared in this repair screen to help build knowledge about accessibility principles.  

We are also drafting accessibility guidelines for our institution so we are making progress towards implementation and training of accessiblity principles and practices.

This accessibility guide from BC Campus might be useful to folks -- we're using it as a starting place for the project we're developing.

I really enjoyed learning with all of you during this training!

Our group was happy to come up with a goal for the 2023-24 academic year that we feel is managable if we build in small chunks of time during already scheduled monthly department meetings to chunk and share SLIDE information: By April, 2024, the Special Education and Office of School and Community Partnerships department faculty will use components of SLIDE when developing content for at least one of their course presentations with 90% participation by all faculty.

Introduction to Accessible Images

We have an unprecedented opportunity to ensure all content that is "born digital" is also "born accessible" so that all readers have access to the information they need. Use the interactive features on this website to determine when additional details are necessary and what makes for a good description. https://poet.diagramcenter.org/ 

Our institution has taken great strides toward increased accessibility over the past few years. Some of the tools we have used along the way have been the Blackboard Ally accessibilty reporting and conversion tool (integrated into D2L Brightspace), Kaltura video and virtual class platform, ReadSpeaker text-to-speech aid, and HTML to replace traditional documents such as PDFs.

We use Canvas as our LMS.  I know there is an accessibility checker.  I plan to work with our Instructional Technology folks to learn more about it and share with the rest of my discipline.

I've got a list of things in mind to make my syllabi better, so I'm going to write those for fall now while it's all fresh.  I also have a list of things I want to check my PowerPoints for that I can also do now to be ready for fall.

Coming from the arts, I am very good at long-form, vivid descriptions of artworks and imagery. Creating consise and appropriate alt text for images has always been a challenge. I have been working on reframing the way I approach alt text, and came across a project known as Alt Text as Poetry. The project is a collaboration between disabled artists Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan, supported by Eyebeam and the Disability Visibility Project, and provides a free workbook and additional resources that have helped adjust my perspective.

This is so cool, Aaron. I used a spoken word performance by JJJJJerome Ellis at our 2022 University Common Dialogue Day. The theme was "Breaking the Silence", and I love that this resource offers pieces that are read aloud for users as well.

I'm with you; I tend to write long-form descriptions of images and struggle to write concise descriptions that capture what is important about the image while still using plain language and communicating clearly to the user. I can't wait to dig into this further to fuel my process!

I already chnaged my CV and my syllabus to reflect some of the accessibility issues we discussed, so I am very excited! My advice to faculty would be to start small and do one chnage at a time. For example, faculty could work on tables one semester, on images the enxt and so forth. 

I would like to share a story/piece of advice. My institution has embraced OER and we look forward to continuously learning about it. We have formed an OER committee and members of our committee took this workshop. We will take what we have learned here and bring it to our institution. Even with all this progress, there are still members of our community who do not embrace OER like our committee does. Therefore, my piece of advice is to have patience. Eventually, with constant professional development opportunities, we can do our best to make sure that OER becomes more of a normalized practice among higher education institutions. 

I'm a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of resources out there to explore, so I won't add one to the mix. I'm excited to think about streamlining and way-finding a path toward accessible OER for our institution, that prioritizes a very small number of key resources (like the incredible ones we've been introduced to in these sessions) and very practical applications of their lessons. 

Hope,

You're not alone in that regard. For those academic institutions that are relatively new to this technology. A streamlined approach focusing on small number of key resources might be best.

As a Faculty Developer, this workshop has helped me come up with workshop ideas on how to support faculty with this overwhelming, but incredible important, work.

I think the piece of advice that I've given myself throughout these rapid six weeks is the same advice I give myself whenever I get the tremendous opportunity to collaborate with powerful learning leaders and take in more about something I am passionate about at a great conference owr workshop: listen and breathe.

I know that there are so many wonderful people and resources available. I've tried connecting with a few folks on LinkedIn in the hopes of keeping those connections alive and getting the benefit of reinforcement from these wonderful colleagues in future.

I know that I will see one of the resources that was shared here in a few months (or a year, etc.) and say, "Wow! That's great! Why haven't we been using this the whole time?!" and that is okay. If I can take away one good thing from this academy, that is enough. I am taking much more than that, but one is enough.

As for something to share, our institution has dipped a toe into the OER waters with a remix of an Accessibility and UDL course initially developed by Jess Thompson of the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges under a CC attribution. We've made some adjustments to the resource to personalize it to our institution, but it is publically accessible if any of you wish to review it.

The course is loaded with great Accessibilty resources and models UDL practices in the design as well. It's something that we leave open to all, but we have also adapted a version as a mandatory assessed resource for faculty to complete. This step is great, but I can't wait to get more OER into the classroom for our students, too!

Greetings All,

I want to take this opportunity to share what I've learned from my teaching (since Summer 2004) experience here at Trident Technical College.

Over the years, been blessed to be able to share important historical information with students in a variety of formats. Online. Hybrid. Face to Face.

However, I picked up two key "educational nuggets" that served me well across variety of instructional formats.

Always place the interests of students first.  Guage early on what topics excite them the most. Taylor the historical information you share with them to tap into those interests. Keep them engaged. Create an educational setting that makes them comfortable sharing their impressions or posing questions without fear of being demeaned or embarrassed.

Next, provide multiple opportunities to allow each student regardless of past educational experience or accomodation needs to be successful. Ensuring each student that enters a course be equipped with easy access to syllabus, course learning objectives, e-book materials, powerpoint slides, and study guides. Making sure each student knows where to access and criteria guidelines to submit required coursework. Quizzes, Discussion Forums, Research Papers, Critical Thinking Exercises.

Finally, I want to reflect on the value of these OER Cohort Training Sessions.  Thing I appreciated most were the collaborative sessions that took place within our OER Cohort Meeting Rooms. Our OER Cohort Team at Trident Technical College included skilled and talented professionals from History Department as well as Media Specialists on our Library Staff.

By end of our OER Training under leadership of Charnette Singleton.  We were able to craft a framework that enables us to continuously search for and identify educational resources that are open and accessible to everyone regardless of their educational background or accomodation needs, and free. With the goal of actively implementing these resources in our course shells throughout Department of Humanities and Social Sciences over next several years.

To briefly summarize. This opportunity was simply "Awesome"

This course made me realize that the library needs to conduct an accessibility review of its LibGuides and in particular a review of the curated OER resources LibGuide. Lots of work to do!

This series has been a LOT of information in a short period of time.  I'm looking forward to in person time with my team starting next week to begin putting tools into practice.

Whenever I've had to advocate for using plain language, I've tried to share resources like this article: Plain Language is for Everyone, Even Experts
 

If you use Adobe products to create any visuals, they have a color contrast checker that I think is fairly easy to use.

You've shared both of those with me, Kristin. Thanks!

I still consider myself a "newbie" when it comes to the OER world, but with every training, collaboration, and exploration with OER, I am becoming more confident with my strategies for implementation. When I first dove in, it was extremely overwhelming, and I didn’t even know where to start with the available information. My recommendation to those who feel it is overwhelming, I hope that you can take comfort in knowing the OER community is very supportive and helpful! I reached out to different institutions who are successfully finding new ways to support programs with fully OER programs, OER digital libraries, and training sessions for campus. Each one has welcomed a conversation. So, don’t be afraid to ask.  I found UCF has a great toolkit! Open Education Resources - Open Access - UCF Research Guides at University of Central Florida Libraries

I want to become an expert in creating accessible resources for the classroom to advocate for standardization at our institution and teach and be a resource for other faculty.  I have attended other training and workshops on accessibility, but to date, this one has provided the most resources and tools.  A lot of information was covered over the last several weeks, but it is organized so that I can return to obtain the information as I revise my syllabi and courses.  I will continue to hold Thursdays from 1 - 2:30 ET on my calendar to change my course documents and redesign my courses.

I have learned so much from the sessions and I am looking forward to taking more time to digest everything and apply it to my work! 

I keep coming back to this accessibility guide by CUNY. It's comprhensive and easy to navigate with specific tabs for principles, best practices, and platforms.

https://guides.cuny.edu/accessibility/home 

This was such an inspraitonal programme that packed a lot of material into six weeks. I was inpired by the Team who presnetd each week and they prompted lots of rich discussions in our institutional group. We have so many plans but we are going to start small but continue to think big. Its been such an enjoyable and insightful programme. I've learned so much. Thank you. 

Being able to be a part of this series and have the conversations with my collegues has been great! As a few others have mentioned starting with an assessible syllaus to provide for an example for faculty to  use so that we can have the necessary follow-up conversations is a great first step! I would also like to put together a list of resources for best pratices and resources for faculty, including some of the videos that were shared. :) 

This webinar series has been, in itself, an excellent tool for best practice in inclusion and accessibility. Thanks to all who created, participated, and generally made this an awesome experience! I’m excited to share what I’ve learned with faculty at my institution, and also just really excited to process all of the information that I’ve gotten and start to use it in my library in general to up my ‘best practice game’. Choice 360’s Digital Access in Libraries: A Primer is helpful in that it gives you resources (a lot of which we’ve covered these last six weeks), but also it helps put you in the mindset of what you can do to meet the specific needs of patrons who require different ways of access to information.

Personally, I feel equipped and empowered to make significant changes to my course content. Thank you everyone for providing the resources and sharing stories and examples to support my learning experience. I did want to share the work of our Accessibility Office team at Bucks County Community College: Assistive Software Technology Resources. Our team does an incredible job by providing comprehensive resources to students and faculty while staying within budget parameters. Many of the resources on the website are free. Kudos to the team! 

I would like to share a recent letter from the Dept.   of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which provides a renewed urgency to address accessible digital content. In addition, the OCR provides a wealth of resources on their Digital Accessibility sub-site.

The overall course coincided with me learning about a curretn student who has dysgraphia. This course truly helped me gain a better understanding of how I can improve the way we teach and provide materials to all students. Often we do not know they have learning challenges since many do not want to be treated differently. Thus we are again back to integrating accessibility so all can acquire the same information :)

I'm not sure I have any advice to share for others but rather maybe just myself : )  And that is to take this one step at a time seeing how I can build more and more of this into what I do.  

This is more of a directive...on our instructor evaluations each semester we have an indicator that is scored that focuses on "accessibility for diverse learners". This has been continuously low for me. My hope is that I can start slow with making my syllabus more accessible and focus on all of my learners in my classes.

We have decided to start with a targeted group of faculty in order to create a cadre of accessibility champions on our campus. We are also integrating some of the information about the tools into our workshop on online course design.

I don't currently have additional resources, however, I will say that the best advice I can give is to be willing to start small and make improvements over time. This is especially true if you are remixing already-created content.  If you are creating content from scratch it is slightly easier to ensure accessibility as you go. 

Keep up the amazing work, our students and everyone will be greatful of the hard work that we are putting into making things accessible for ALL!

I was so excited to learn during the participation in this course that our LMS, Brightspace D2L, has an accessibility feature! I was subsequently disappointed to learn that it is an additional feature and our institution does not pay for it. I plan to investigate why this is so and make a case for acquiring it.

I really want to find a simple approach to get faculty on board for making these changes. Helping them to recognize the importance of accessible content. I have been thinking through how to approach this. Simple emails with suggestions/reminders, handouts, beefing up our Libguide on accessibility, offering drop-in accessibility sessions, and updating our accessibility policy. I have found some 10-day challenges were people put together small course activities for faculty to complete to improve their content and I think I might work with that as well.

I would say start small and work towards larger items. We began with our Syllabi's.  Now to look at the entire course...

Laurie

I feel overwhelmed by the amount of information learned in this series. It will take a while for me to process it all and figure out how to implement it all into my courses.

It would not be hyperbole to say that this is how I have felt throughout this series, but I am grateful for the new information and resources.  I am also excited to have seaveral school-level and team based project to which I can immediately apply this new information as well.

Below are two of my favorite resources to keep handy as I am working on new content.

• WebAim Accessibility Cheatsheets  (link opens in new window)
• Accessibility Checklist for Online Course Development (link opens in new window)

Tanya, not only is this a wonderful encapuslation of a very relatable feeling, but your alt text made me laugh out loud.

Our group discussed how quickly tackling accessibility can feel overwhelming. So for our guidelines for our faculty when they design or select an OER, we decided to focus their attention on what we consider the priorities (or must-have). If they can do more, then, we added optional items to review, but those would be considered nice-to-have. This way, we meet our faculty where they are at while encouraging them to do more than the minimum if they can.

I would like to share with everyone that if you create content inside of software such as CourseArc or Rise many, if not all, accessiblity issues are handled FOR YOU! Take a look here:

https://www.coursearc.com/

Hi Katie,

I just discovered this today!!  We created two courses in Rise 360 and I tested them both today using the WAVE web accessibility evaluation tool and they came back with zero errors.

I don't have an additional resource to share, but as I've begun working on creating course documents for the fall semester and working in Canvas (new as an LMS at our institution), I'm excited to be applying some of the tips I have learned from this series. I am looking forward to sharing them with my teammates on our OER project in progress.

Not specific to OER, but this LibGuide is one of my favorites regarding the CRAAP test. It lays out how the test works, alternative options, and gives suggestions on how to evaluate books, websites, and images. I think these general evaluation strategies are useful when thinking about OER as a whole. 

https://researchguides.ben.edu/c.php?g=261612&p=2441794

The sessions really made me think more globally about OER and envouraged me to try new things like accessible QR codes and color contrtasting. I implemented both of these at my recent UDL conference and they worked brilliantly.

Our library collaborated with our office to create an Accessibility LibGuide. Here there are also weekly accessibility tips that we have posted as well as great resources.

The webinar created a wonderful opportunity for members of the UMGC team to come together and focus on OER and accessibility best practices. This has strengthened working relationships and the shared committment to supporting and serving our students, staff and faculty to the best of our abilities. 

Thank you!

Phyllis

I’d like to share this link that is specific to history, World History Commons. It has a variety of primary sources and supplemental modules that are CC By-NC 4.0.

Our school uses D2L/Brightspace, and Ally is built into our LMS. Ally is fairly robust tool for reviewing the accessibility of resources. It also provides tips for how to improve accessibility if there is an issue. Use the checker! 

I think this idea of accesiblity is something that needs to be considered before making any resource.  I tend to make something, then try to make it accessible.  I think accesiblity should be something more at the forefront of our plans.  

I am excited to start ensuring that my resources are compliant and accessible for my students. I hate to think I have hindered their learning experience because I did not ensure accessibility. 

We use the Open SUNY/OLC rurbric for evaluating online course quality. I've decided to make sure that in addition to the accessibility items on that rubric, we also do the mouse challenge.  It's a great practical way to test the accessibility of the content.  

One of my favorite resources to share from our campus: OER & Online Resources Evaluation Checklist. It is just a helpful way to look at resources and make decisions for use.

UDL on Campus has a great webpage on creating accessible OER that reinforces and extends on what we learned here. Hopefully it isn't cheating to share a CAST webpage!

Great. Thanks for this!

Work on the syllabus first and make sure to use the accessibility criteria.

I started making videos with interviews everytime that I go back to Italy. This allows me to have videos ready for different activities with the vocabulary, the grammar and the concepts that are suitable for the levels of the students. I think it is a good thing to do, because sometimes videos that are available on Youtube are too difficult. 

In building my courses, I have learned that AI makes things so much easier. Also, I highly recommend that we start to share resources and align them more with business and industry needs rather than replicating models of texts that we have already seen. 

This has been really useful information. I feel like we have just touched the tip of the iceburg on all the information can help make resoures more accessibility. As learning more about alt-text and how to deal with complex images is something I have wanted to learn more about, I wanted to share a couple of resources I found on this topic.

https://www.perkins.org/resource/describing-science-best-practices/

https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/complex/

Thank you to everyone for making this training so great and so informative!

I feel like I have learned so much during this course, and I'm hopeful that I'll be able to use it when designing my own work going forward so that everything I create will be accessibility-focused from the start, rather than something that needs to be redone or heavily reworked later to make it meet the baseline.

I use a lot of HTML in my work designing LibGuides for my library, and something that may be helpful to others in a similar situation is the W3 Schools Accessibility Guidelines site. It goes step by step through various aspects of HTML, CSS, and general web design to explain and provide examples for different kinds of accessibility measures.

These sessions made me much more excited about accessibility and gave me the tools I feel I need to improve my own courses. I think this will have to be a grassroots effort, so if I can get one more person excited about it I hope I can watch it grow from there!

UMGC recognized that we have a lot of students who will not reach out for accommodations for various reasons. We developed an assistive technology libguide. We are still hoping to improve it! https://libguides.umgc.edu/assistive-technology

Designing for Neurodiversity

Hi all,  I enjoyed participating in this cohort.  For those interested in digging deeper into core accessibility competencies, you might want to check out the International Association of Accessibility Professionals and their Certification in Core Accessibility Competencies. Membership also provides access to the Princeton University's CPACC Preparation Course and Sample Exam. I found the CPACC course an engaging way to explore accessibility and its relationship with universal design.  

This was a very informative and productive webinar series. Thank you for planning and executing this workshop.

I for one have enjoyed the comaraderie of my MCC colleagues as we have participated in this series and created a rubric for evaluating accessibility in OER materials.  I feel as though we are making important contributions to our campus!

Yolanda

Our Accessbility Lib Guide with a tab on UDL.  HCC Accessibility Lib Guide  

I teach Technical Writing, and accessibility is a topic I teach my students... interestingly, the book we used several years ago used the term "accessibility" a bit differently in describing it as creating a document made up of small sections of information, making the information accessible for a busy reader. (Examples included things like tabs on websites, section headings in a document, etc.).

The next edition of the same textbook added the term "usability" to refer to this idea of a concise design and specified "accessibility" as what we define it as (a document's ability to be used/read by people with varying physical abilities).

I'm proud to say we now use an OER for the course (yay!), which discusses accessibility separately from document design (headings, styles, bullet points, etc.). What I have realized, especially with UDL in mind, is that all of these pieces/terms/concepts go together in terms of this overall idea of accessibility.

Though we talk a lot about accessibility in terms of screen readers, etc., there really is more to it than just readers with visual (or other) impairments. Accessibility should be considered more like usability, with the idea that we should make documents more readable for everyone. I've often heard that closed captioning on videos isn't just for the hearing impaired; many people (myself included at times) like to have the CC on to confirm what they are hearing. This should extend to documents as well -- bullet points make a list easier to read, therefore making the document more accessible. Headings are good for accessibility for screen readers, but they also make the document more accessible to a busy reader because they can skip to different sections as needed (or revisit them for reference more quickly/easily, etc.).

All of this is my wordy way of saying the concept of accessibility needs to be considered more encompassing than just thinking of those with disabilities -- it's how can we make the information more accessible to everyone, disability or not, to make sure they are getting the message as clearly and efficiently as possible!

I think my personal story is just a quick note to let you know folks know this course has helped impact our OER for Textbook Publication cohort at Palo Alto College this summer -- the course contains a primer on Universal Design, with more to come!

Excited to use the accessibility tools shared in the workshops! Starting small by focussing on modifying the syllabus for a course for Fall 2023.

I'm re-doing my class over the summer with accessibility in mind now and I have a better idea of what tools to use besides the Canvas accessibility checker. 

I have learned so much during this institute, but mostly I have learned that I could do more. I thought I was following good accessibility practices, but the last several weeks made me realize that there is much more to be done and there are some amazing tools available to help with that. I am going to spend some time this summer making sure that the items I have published (libguides, etc) are as accessible as they can be. 

Hi from Ireland,

I always love checking out AHEAD's website for tips on accessibility.

They always have really great articles, courses, videos and tips to follow. Here's a few to explore:

• 5 Free Online Courses on ARK - Accessibility Resources and Know-How! - AHEAD
• 10 Ways to Ensure Online Assessment is Accessible and Inclusive - AHEAD
• PowerPoint Presentation Accessibility Guidelines - AHEAD

Thank you all for a brilliant course, I will miss taking part, I have learnt so much.

Leah :)

These sessions have really made me aware of accessibility and how it's not something to applied as an add on but that it should inform all planning, devoloping of resources and class work.

I learned a lot of information during this course. It is very valuable information that I can share with others. I have enjoyed working with my group and look forward to how we can keep the dialog about OERs and accessibility going. 

I love accessibility literature! My advice would be to consider books you can share with stakeholders, etc.

I'm not sure what to share to the group, but I sure love the examples that I've seen from others. Like others have said here, I still feel like a newbie with so much of this. And one hope for me is to be more consistent in what I do. I'm looking forward to continuing work with our cohort and glad that my colleague Julie brought us together - to you.

I'd like to share this OER checklist from BCCampus. It has helped us to develop our own faculty checklist for training purposes. After this workshop, I would significantly improve the section on Accessibility!

https://open.bccampus.ca/files/2014/07/Faculty-Guide-22-Apr-15.pdf

This series has reminded me of a presentation I recently attended online where a professor explained how she remixed OER to add more diverse images to the texts. It was heartwarming to hear a professor not only willing to use OER, but care about representation enough to do the extra work.

I have learned so much and, as many have stated, do find it overwhelming yet also very exciting. The large number of tools and techniques that we were exposed to felt a bit like a whirlwind. However, I am left feeling invigorated and excited to create and share materials reach all learners and have a positive impact on their educational experiences. I am looking forward to getting to work and helping others do the same. 

A couple of websites that I have found to be very helpful are the following: 

• OER Accessibility Toolkit, The University of British Columbia
• OER Accessibility Series and Rubric, Affordable Learnging Georgia (ALG)

The discussions, team meetings, and presentations have shown me that accessibility is a major blind spot in my teaching. After more than 15 years in the classroom, many of my materials have gotten more complicated/complex, more busy, less accessible. I now have some concrete ways to amend and re-design my materials. I am spending this summer creating H5P content for my OER, and I feel empowered to complete that work from a place of knowledge, intention, and accessibility. I know how to "check my work". I know why it matters. All of this provides an exciting new energy for my own teaching but also for my pedagogical advocacy more generally!

Overall, this seminar helped me appreciate the barriers we sometimes put up for students. Something as simple as how we use Word documents or through images without alternative tex, etc. Gave me a whole new understanding of accessibility.  

Our group came across the accessiblity website for Clemson University which had a lot of great resources and information: https://www.clemson.edu/accessibility/index.html 

This group has been so helpful to kick start our UDL/accessible materials faculty work group at our university. Thank you for opening the conversation. The faculty have been responsive to our requests to join our work group giving us hope that we truly can see change at our university!