Instructional and Digital Technology Accessibility Toolkit
Instructional and Digital Technology Accessibility Toolkit
Welcome to the Council on Online Learning Excellence (COLE) Accessibility Toolkit!
The purpose of the Toolkit is to equip instructional technologists, curriculum adopters, faculty, instructors, and administrative staff in Oklahoma with a set of resources and information to help them make their content more accessible to students with disabilities. Below you will find links to resources that will help to build your skill-set. The Toolkit is a living document and we will gladly take suggestions for additional content via email to<EMAIL_ADDRESS>The Toolkit is a product of the COLE Accessibility Subcommittee.
Introduction to Accessibility
These two resources help to put accessibility in context of technology. The World Wide Web Consortium Perspectives Video Series is a compilation of rich media resources. Viewers will be able to see how individuals interact with devices and the impact and benefits to each person.
The WebAIM Introduction to Accessibility builds on the Perspectives videos. This article gives you a good introduction to the core ideas behind accessible technology.
Creating accessible digital materials removes barriers to access for people with disabilities. Higher education institutions are legally obligated to create and acquire digital material that is accessible. This is true for educational and academic material.
There is a very human reason to make sure that accessibility is part of our technology design and creation, though, that outweighs the legal implications. Students with disabilities should not face barriers that prevent them from participating in the academic pursuits. We cannot begin to truly include students or other individuals with disabilities in our academic, social or civic activities if we prevent them from doing so in our digital environments. Accessibility is a vital first step to inclusion.
Accessibility is critical for learners with disabilities. Statistics show that individuals with disabilities face large gaps in critical markers such as workforce participation, wage earnings, and educational attainment. If our educational environments stop people with disabilities from engaging with them, then they cannot make their way through our institutions and into the workforce at the same level that their non-disabled peers can. As educators, it is ours and our institutions’ responsibility to make sure that we actively work to remove barriers to access in the digital, as well as physical, space.
In short, first, we must stop doing harm. One way to do that is to identify and bridge gaps that we have in our knowledge. By increasing our own skills as individuals and across institutions, we position ourselves to remove barriers to access and keep them from going up to begin with.
Getting Started
The most difficult thing to do with accessibility is often figuring out where to start. Especially over the past year we’ve seen the volume of digital learning material is o