Faculty Training on Accessibility

The rules of etiquette and good manners when communicating or interacting with people with disabilities are generally the same as the rules for good etiquette in society. These guidelines address specific issues which frequently arise for people with disabilities in terms of those issues related to disability and outline basic etiquette for working with people with different kinds of disabilities.

These should be regarded as general caveats of appropriate behavior. Since everyone is different, these guidelines only hold true for …

Building a new course?

If you are starting your course from scratch, this is a great model to utilize in building your course. 

Research Phase Do I have the right people on the bus, and in the right seats?

Developing a course takes many groups of people and skill sets. It is highly recommended that you set up a meeting to talk with at least the following people:

• Office of Disability Services- They can provide you with great insights into how to make items more accessible. However, more…

Desmos

One of the tools available to students, is a free online program called Desmos (Links to an external site.). It allows the user to create graphs, and then listen to them by either reading out the plots or interpreting changes in tone and pitch.

 

Next Faculty Training Topic: Accessibility Checklist

 

Students with Low Vision may also utilize a CCTV, which is a camera mounted device that enlarges a book or other item under the camera onto a screen. This device can then adjust the zoom, color contrast, and colors of the page for the student. There are portable options, which uses a video camera embedded in the device to enlarge the items. 

You may see some students attempt to use their phones in a similar fashion. After a certain digital zoom level, the items on the phones become pixelated. The portable digital magnifier has…

A guide for faculty, staff and administrators regarding confidentiality for students with disabilities enrolled at Rutgers.

Creating accessible math is hard. As you heard in a previous video, depending on the type of browser, its version, the type of screen reader and its version, the same equation may be read in multiple ways to the student. 

Below is a video tutorial on how we would recommend you create your math, that would allow our office to provide the student with accessible math.

(P.S I intended on combining the two videos, but ran into issues doing so)

From LaTeX to Accessible Math

 

From MathType to Accessible…

In our introduction to screen readers part 1, we looked at how  a student would navigate your course content. Below is a tutorial on how to set up structure with in your documents to allow a student to easily navigate through them.

 

 

To add a heading style

1. Select a text that you want to add a header to.

2. Select Home > Styles (or press Alt + H, then L), and then select the heading…

Introduction 

This document is for all Professors and Teaching Assistants who wish to enlarge font of a document/Exam in word format. Typically, students’ Letter of Accommodation has the approved font size, if it is absent then consider 22, as a least font size for enlargement. Also, such students use a computer or separate set of sheets to record their answers for exams. Hence, the formatting will be done considering such factors. 

 

Best Practices…

Only students approved for accommodations may submit a request. For questions regarding the registration process visit our Registration Page.  For RBHS students, this exam process may not be applicable. Please check with your ODS Coordinator for instructions on how to request testing accommodations related to the RBHS school or course you are enrolled.    Submit your Exam Accommodation…

Rutgers Access and Disability Resources Support for Faculty:

RADR has created many resources for faculty below and throughout this web site related to accommodations and making online courses more accessible.  

Faculty/instructors who still have questions related to technologies and providing accommodations for students with disabilities, please connect with us by emailing us at: radr@echo.rutgers.edu. 

Exams Extended time:

• …

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?
• …

How to Create an Accessible PowerPoint Presentation

WebAim: PowerPoint Accessibility (Links to an external site)

Video tutorial

Our office has found that many faculty create their own PowerPoint slides which make up a large percentage of what faculty upload to their LMS. Below is a step by step video guide on how to create accessible PowerPoints.

 

For written documentation, please visit…

Respondus Information for Faculty:

What is Respondus?

How do I set up Respondus in my course?

How do I set up Extra Time Quiz/Exam Accommodations when using Respondus?

What if the accommodation the student is requesting is not listed on the Letter of Accommodation submitted by the student? 

…

 

The world is filled with a lot of PDFs. In your course, this may be one of the most used content types.  The above video outlines the difference between a searchable PDF, meaning that you can highlight the text, and an image only pdf.

Things to remember:

Below are a few things to consider about PDFs. We'll go through each in detail in the following sections.

Creating your own PDFs

Many times you may be converting your own content from an accessible powerpoint/word document into…

SensusAccess (Links to an external site.) is a free online software that allows you to convert files into a PDF format. Users upload files to the system and it is then converted by the software and emailed back to the user. 

SensusAccess works best to create accessible PDFs when:

• You have created an accessible document (i.e Word, powerpoint files)
• You have an imaged PDF that you want to create a searchable PDF
…