Accessible Environments, Products, & Communications
For many people in higher education, the topic of accessibility has strong associations with risk and compliance. And rightly so. Over the past thirty years, remarkable progress has been made in making accessible the workplaces, transportation systems, paths of travel, buildings, classrooms, and furniture we deploy. Thanks to the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, students, instructors, and staff have legal protections that allow them more fully to engage in higher education. It takes tremendous advocacy and more than a few legal actions to nudge institutions in the right direction. Today accessibility programs and a culture of barrier-free environments are the norm, but there is always more progress to be made.
The accessibility of websites or videos in educational settings is another major focus of institutional policy. Near the start of every term, great efforts are undertaken to remediate course materials (e.g., online readings, problem sets, slide decks) in time for use in instruction. As they should, institutions put a premium on providing versions of the material for students with disabilities. Performing remediation in this fashion at the last minute, most alternative media specialists would say, requires a tremendous effort.
From a UDL perspective, a better approach would be for the authors and creators of the instructional materials to build in accessibility from the very start. Also, the accessibility-from-the-start approach would not see users with disabilities as special edge cases. In UDL, accessibility considerations apply to the broader range of different capabilities across all users.
