6 Cooking with Accessibility
Elliott Stevens
The Storytelling Part of the Recipe: Some Background and Setting
Digital accessibility works best when it is incorporated at the design and development stage. This means that, if we want to build accessibility into multimodal projects, then it’s important for instructors to plan for digital accessibility early on – like when they are drafting lesson plans and assignments – and it’s crucial for students to be aware of and get some training in digital accessibility before they embark on their work.
As an English Studies & Research Commons Librarian at the University of Washington, Seattle, I am not an accessibility expert, but I do help instructors and students out with multimodal assignment design and projects, and I firmly believe that featuring accessibility in these contexts isn’t just preferable or a good idea but essential.
Over the years, as I’ve learned about accessibility and how to bring it into assignments and the classroom, I’ve found that there are at least a couple times when instructors and students seem to need accessibility training the most: when instructors are planning assignments and before students start their projects.
In this recipe, I’ve included an agenda for training instructors about accessibility and a lesson plan for training students about accessibility.
The Ingredients and Method of the Recipe: A Workshop Agenda, a Lesson Plan, and Some Framing
Agenda for Training Instructors:
In the Program in Writing & Rhetoric at the University of Washington, quite a few instructors teach multimodal assignments that often come in the form of multimedia like video making, podcast making, and digital publication. In fact, there is even a course designation – English 182 – that specifically focuses on multimodal composition.
Some instructors seem to be comfortable with teaching multimodal assignments right away, often because they already have experience with such things, but others are more curious and would like to learn how to get started, while others still are curious and maybe even a little afraid of designing, teaching, and grading a multimodal assignment.
In order to provide some guidance on multimodal media making – and to also allay some fear – I’ve worked with Stephanie Kerschbaum, the Director of PWR, and Kimberlee Gillis-Bridges, the Director of Computer Integrated Courses in the Department of English, to put together a workshop series for graduate students. In this series, we’ve used the first event to focus on getting started with assembling podcasting or video making assignments, the second event focuses on the accessibility of those assignments, and the third is all about Copyright/Creative Commons/Fair Use as well as the online safety and privacy of student authors.
For video-making assignment and accessibility workshop that we ran in Winter 2024, we used this agenda and these slides.
For both the agenda and the slides, our focus was not so much to lecture instructors, to