Faculty Training on Accessibility
Welcome to our online training. These series of videos have been designed specifically for those teaching students with disabilities. It is broken down into three sections which will cover:
Accessibility Basics
1 in 5 individuals reports having a disability. The majority of these students have invisible disabilities, such as ADHD, a Specific Learning Disability or heart disease.
In this section, you will learn:
- What are the common types of disabilities?
- What are appropriate ways of communicating with people with disabilities?
Course Accommodations
The Office of Disability Services partners with faculty and/or the schools to ensure that student's approved academic accommodations are met. Accommodations are approved for a student after the student has met with a coordinator within the Office of Disability Services and provided documentation of their disability. Accommodations are intended as a means of leveling the playing field, not providing an advantage over other students or ensuring success. The goal is to ensure equal access.
In this section, you will learn:
- What are reasonable accommodations?
- What is a Letter of Accommodation?
- What student information needs to be kept confidential?
- How to create accessible online courses?
- What are exam accommodations and how do I deploy them in-person or online?
- Faculty web based course content accessibility guide
- How to create appropriate navigation in a course for disabilities?
- What are the Top 3 Ways to create an accessible Word document?
Creating Accessible Documents from the Start
Now that you understand the challenges students with disabilities face when things aren't made accessible, we want to give you the tools to make your content accessible from the start. This section will cover:
- Easy steps that will allow students to navigate the content
- Measures to ensure images and charts can be accessed
- How to instantly tell if a Text-to-Speech reader can read a PDF?
- How to make your PDFs , PowerPoints, Word Documents, Math, Graphs accessible?
- How to remediate borrowed content (such as PDFs) which are not accessible?
How Students Use Assistive Technology
How students use assistive technologies is important to understand when creating course content, documents, web sites and other information technologies. In this section, you will learn about the most widely used assistive technologies that our students utilize.
- Using Screen Readers such as JAWS, NVDA or VoiceOver. Screen readers are typically used by blind or visually impaired individuals to view content using their computer or mobile device.
- Using Zoomtext, which is a screen enlarging software program and reader.
- Using tactile graphics, which are used largely by blind individuals to view with their fingers graphs, charts, maps etc.
- Using Closed Captioned Televisions or CCTV's and magnifiers. These are mainly used by blind or low vision users.
Advanced Accessibility
This section primarily focuses on creating accessible STEM content. It will teach you:
- How to create accessible Math documents (with and without using LaTex)
- How to create accessible graphs
Accessibility Checklist
A final checklist for faculty to ensure that their courses are accessible.
How to View this Training
At the end of each page you'll see a link for "Next Faculty Training Topic" which will take you to the next lesson. You can take this course linearly, or use the left side menu to choose topics of interest. Our office does provide both virtual and in person training. If you have questions, or would like to schedule a training session, email us at: RADR@echo.rutgers.edu.