8 Universal Design
Introduction
A big part of the open education movement is the belief that education must be available to everyone, which means supporting the creation of free, open, and accessible educational resources. We are actively committed to making OER created at Iowa as usable and inviting as possible, and this chapter is intended to help you design your OER with accessibility in mind. It and others in this section, are adapted from BC Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit by Amanda Coolidge, Sue Doner, and Tara Robertson[1]. I would invite you to review the full toolkit for more information about making your work accessible and inclusive.
Universal Design
Universal Design is the process of creating products (devices, environments, systems, and processes) that are usable by people with the widest possible range of abilities, operating within the widest possible range of situations (environments, conditions, and circumstances). Universal Design emerged from the slightly earlier concept of being barrier-free, the broader accessibility movement, and adaptive technology and assistive technology. It also seeks to blend aesthetics into these core considerations.
Let’s review two common definitions of Universal Design:
Definition 1: Universal Design or Universal Instructional Design (UID)
…an approach to teaching that consists of the proactive design and use of inclusive instructional and evaluation strategies. This approach provides academic access to a broad range of learners, including students with disabilities, while maintaining academic standards […] reducing the need to having to retrofit after a course is already underway[2]
Definition 2: Universal Instructional Design (UID)
…an approach to designing course instruction, materials and content to benefit people of all learning styles without adaptation or retrofitting. UID provides equal access to learning, not simply equal access to information. UID allows the student to control the method of accessing information while the instructor monitors the learning process and initiates any beneficial methods… It should be noted that UID does not remove academic challenges; it removes barriers to access.[3]
Why Universal Design?
You may be surprised to learn that during the 2020-21 school year, 15% of all public school students received special education services, and a full ⅓ of those students had learning disabilities. These students benefit directly from accessible course materials since these materials work well with assistive technologies, like screen readers.
Yet as the University of Minnesota points out, accessible design can help many people who do not have disabilities. Captions on videos, for instance, can help English language learners better understand a video presentation, and a transcript of a podcast can help students who need to do their coursework in very noisy or very quiet places.
For our purposes, we frame the practice of using Universal Design in a holistic and manageable way