University Times

Although Pitt Online was created only four years ago as a portal for web-based graduate classes, the University is making a major contribution to the field of online education, creating guidelines that soon will help universities nationwide make online courses more accessible to those with disabilities.

The aim of the guidelines is to allow educational institutions to design courses that are accessible to all students. The guidelines:

• Review U.S. laws that govern accessibility;
• Define applicable terms, such as universal design (“the proactive design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design”);
• Outline best online course-design practices for accessibility, such as the need to examine externally linked web sites for their accessibility, and the necessity of assuring that documents provided as part of each course are accessible as well;
• Describe the specific job responsibilities of academic teams designing accessible online offerings;
• Delineate a recommended quality assurance process, and
• Provide other resources and references for the online course-design team.

In addition, the guidelines offer specific accommodation recommendations for text accessibility for students with visual impairment, audio and video adaptations for those with hearing impairments, and other ways to adapt and distinguish course content, make keyboards more accessible, create pages that are most easily navigable and other modifications.

These accessibility-policy guidelines will be distributed this spring by Quality Matters, the Maryland agency that provides services and tools for online course improvement to its 650 member academic institutions across the United States. Staff from Pitt Online, which is part of the Center for Instructional Development and Distance Education, proposed creating the guidelines, and Quality Matters funded the work beginning in 2011.

Students with disabilities shouldn’t have to ask for accommodations, says Barbara Frey, a Pitt Online senior instructional designer who led the guideline creation. Over the past five years, she has taught Quality Matters workshops for faculty throughout the United States who wish to improve their online teaching and understand which adaptive technology solutions are best. “You should be able to get everything upfront that you need,” she says. “Students with disabilities like the independence.”

Frey doesn’t know how many students here will benefit from the accessibility guidelines, because Pitt Online has no statistics about how many students with disabilities take its courses. Frey says, “If you’re not asking for an accommodation, there’s no reason you should have to self-identify to the instructor or to the other students in the class.”

Prior to writing the accessibility guidelines, Frey surveyed Quality Matters membership, asking what kind of accessibility resources faculty had and whether their institutions had a specific accessibility policy for online courses.

Says Deb Adair, Quality Matters managing director and chief planning officer: “The results surprised all of us — how relatively few institutions had a policy for accessibility of online courses.” Faculty also reported low institutional support for creating or increasing online accessibility.

So Frey, Pitt Online colleague Lorna Kearns, who is a senior instructional designer, and Denise King of Carlow University set to work building what they labeled a “template” addressing issues of online accessibility. “There is a lot of interest in it,” says Adair of Quality Matters. “We were very pleased with the final product because it’s a really good foundation for institutions, especially ones that don’t have anything in place. It’s straightforward and has a lot of good resources. Barbara and her colleagues really did their homework.”

*

As Frey and Kearns were finishing their work on the online accessibility guidelines last summer, they teamed with Pitt Online’s associate director K. Holly Shiflett and program coordinator Erik Arroyo to take a closer review of Pitt Online’s own accessibility. Gabe McMorland, a 2011 graduate of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in urban studies, was hired to help assess the current state of Pitt Online for those with visual impairments, and to make recommendations for improvement. He reviewed more than 30 courses, including all that were available in fall 2012.

McMorland’s visual impairment — neuropathy — prevents his optic nerves from functioning fully. “I can see big things like furniture, people, trees, but I can’t read, because the center of my visual field is gone,” he says.

As an undergraduate, McMorland worked with Pitt’s Office of Disability Services and has high praise for the staff: “They do a lot of good work.” But he says the office’s small staff shouldn’t have to sort out accessibility problems in online courses after the fact. “It’s better to plan ahead.”

McMorland is an expert at using the JAWS screen reader on a computer, which also is employed by some of those with other disabilities, such as autism. JAWS — Job Access With Speech, the most common screen reader — reads the HTML code of web pages, so it can read text and label items as buttons or headings, but it has its share of shortcomings. It can’t tell what is highlighted by italic or bold text, nor what has been set apart from the main text in a box. It can’t read pictures or illustrations, such as charts and graphs, or narrate videos.

But the Pitt team was able to work around those problems. “What was surprising is that most of the solutions were low-tech,” McMorland says. “A lot of it just has to do with how the content is laid out, how the content is arranged and labeled.” Highlighted words can be turned into a labeled list of keywords, for instance. Headings can point out that boxes are sidebars. Videos can be closed captioned, which should include “stage directions” about the action, he says, or narrated for those with hearing disabilities. Everything can be more specifically and explicitly labeled. (A video demonstration of McMorland using the screen reader is available online: http://mediasite.cidde.pitt.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=1a2d9b0cec6e48d1af00881485592667).

It was a good idea to have somebody who is visually impaired test the courses, McMorland says. Fully sighted computer users may not realize how much they skim and scan when encountering web-based media, such as online courses. “I’ve seen a lot of examples where people think they’ve tested content, where they don’t really understand what a user experience was like” for those with disabilities — or what such a user experience ought to be like.

Pitt Online courses already were well organized, and all organized in a similar way, which helps screen-reader users learn their navigation, says Shiflett.

However, says Arroyo: “Working with Gabe, it was particularly humbling for myself and some of the group … how much we take for granted.”

“‘Click here’ — we don’t use that term anymore,” says Frey.

*

Lorna Kearns notes that having all course material accessible at the beginning of the semester also is very important. Students then can review all the material for any special needs that remain.

“Part of making courses successful is to make them accessible on all sorts of devices, platforms and browsers,” Kearns adds. “When you design for accessibility, you improve the learning environment for all students,” such as those who may need accommodations not based on a disability, including international students. Although McMorland conducted interviews with several other students with various disabilities to detail their experiences with Pitt Online, Frey says the courses have not been adapted yet in ways to accommodate persons with disabilities other than visual and auditory ones.

New courses are being created with these accessibilities as part of their essential design, Shiflett says.

“It’s a best practice in online learning to present materials so that they’re accessible to as many people as possible,” says Frey, “but there are sometimes barriers.” She suspects that the necessity to accommodate motor impairment will create the need for future modifications, since this disability is affecting greater numbers of recent military veterans.

Concludes McMorland: “Creating accessible courses is really a conversation that doesn’t stop. Technology is always changing, there’s always more to learn from the students and from the faculty about what their needs are, and there’s always more to teach both groups about what’s possible.”

—Marty Levine