Accessible Pedagogy  

All students benefit when classroom and curricular spaces are made more inclusive by increasing accessibility. Legal accommodations are targeted to students with disabilities and determined by the DRS.  Inclusive pedagogy (UDL) provides greater accessibility to all students and facilitates communication throughout the university community.

• Legal accommodations are required accommodations teachers must make for students that have been identified by the campus disability office (DRS) based on testing and assessment that may not be available to all students.  DRS letters address the required legal accommodations to which students are entitled. Information on managing DRS accommodations.
• Inclusive pedagogy, also called Universal Design for Learning (UDL), allows teachers to make their classrooms more inclusive for all students.  In addition to benefiting students receiving accommodations, inclusive design benefits students who have not disclosed their disabilities to the university for a variety of reasons (such as cost of testing or stigma) and students who have various learning styles but have no diagnosed disabilities. Multiple modes of delivery have also been found to benefit many students who have different learning styles and needs by delivering material in more diverse modes. Teachers often rely on one strategy in their teaching and are textual learners, but many of our students learn best by different modes including visualizing, listening, and/or hands-on activities. Consider providing information in more than one form to your students. For example: lecturing with a handout (or PowerPoint) with similar information, being sure videos are close-captioned.  Inclusive pedagogy promotes greater student success.
• Consider including a syllabus statement on disability and access.  The Syllabus Statement: Disability and Access has a model statement, information on crafting your own statement, and your responsibilities.  Letting students with disabilities know you comply with ADA, and more importantly, are committed to making your class accessible and inclusive is important. The university requires that you include a statement on accommodating disability in your syllabus.   

How to Improve Accessibility of Course Materials and Community Communications

There are a few changes that can be made to any form of textual communication that can improve accessibility for everyone.  This document guides you through some simple changes you can make.  

On Percipio (access via Skillsoft):

CU: Accessibility Fundamentals for Digital Communicators 
provides information and techniques to address Information and Communication in easily manageable modules.

Workshops are offered each semester in conjunction with the Accessibility Ops Team and CFDA. (Check Events Page)

Sensus Access- available through OIT

SensusAccess is a self-service tool that converts documents into digitally accessible alternative formats.  It can transform inaccessible documents including PDFs, scanned documents, pictures of text, and PowerPoint presentations, and convert them in to more accessible formats. As an automatic tool, it does not fix all accessibility issues.  We encourage faculty to simply change documents to word.doc format for accessible; faculty are not responsible for creating other alternative formats. Changing your documents to word also then allows you to go into the document and add additional features such as heading, clean up and remove typos and other editing issues.  SensusAccess is a simple 4 step process:

Step 1: Upload your document

Step 2: Choose accessibility conversion for output format

Step: Choose doc.x Microsoft Word for conversations option

Step 4: Enter email address. (The converted word.doc is sent to your email within 15 min.)

Anthology Ally is also available to faculty through TIPS.  We do not endorse Ally and the Accessibility Scorecard as this is a highly flawed measurement tool that is discouraged by the universities leading in digital accessibility and our own internal studies.  We encourage all faculty to take steps to improve their course accessibility by the many tools and opportunities listed.

Improving auditory and visual materials for students and colleagues:

Closed Captioning in Zoom- For information on setting up closed captioning in Zoom.

Audio Transcription of a Zoom Meeting- For after a Zoom meeting is recorded.

The Immersive Reader is now in all canvas courses. This tool both enlarges texts in Pages and also reads them. Please let your students know about the availability of this tool.

For further help on making your class materials or meeting materials accessible please contact the contact the FA DisCom or Accessibility Operations Team. You may also contact colleen.donnelly@ucdenver.edu, Chair of the Disability Committee, with suggestions, requests, and comments. For additional training and information on available technology, contact the OIT Service Desk: oit-servicedesk@ucdenver.edu or Academic Technology Support.