Ed Blog: Working to Remove Barriers to Accessibility in Online Learning

The U.S. Department of Education's ED Blog recently published an account of a resolution agreement reached between ED's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and the University of Phoenix, ensuring equal access to online education for learners with disabilities.  The post chronicles the story of an adult learner with presbyopia and dyslexia, and her experience when Phoenix switched learning management platforms, to one which she could not access. “When they switched ... format,” the student explained, “my instructors literally put up an image with text in it; no screen reader can read text embedded into a picture, so I couldn’t work with it.”

She tried multiple times to resolve the accessibility issue with Phoenix, but was unsuccessful, so she filed a civil rights complaint asserting that the university’s polices violated Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. OCR’s policy states that students who are blind or have low vision “must be afforded the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted students.”

In June 2015, the University of Phoenix entered into a voluntary resolution agreement with ED, under which Phoenix committed to ensuring that its new online technology is accessible, removing barriers to access for existing content, and converting inaccessible documents to accessible documents within 24 hours of receiving a request.

Questions: What lessons can be gained from cases like this one?  How do we educate learners with disabilities to be advocates for their right to accessible online learning content?  How can we, as professionals in the adult education field, help educational technology companies better understand the needs of our learners with disabilities, in order to plan accessible learning products and platforms out of the gate?  

Mike Cruse

Disabilities in Adult Education Moderator

michaelcruse74@gmail.com

Comments

I think it's an opportunity for the non-profit schools to market their accessibility-- they lose a lot of students to the well-marketed "you don't have to do anything; we'll figure out how to get your financial aid to work" institutions.   THis is one important advantage attending an established school has.   Of course, the "established" schools have to make sure their materials are accessible, too... 

Hi, Susan - 

Thanks for your comment.  I'm glad that you see the opportunity for non-profit schools to 'market their accessibility'.  How do you think our schools and programs can learn from this case, and develop marketing to attract and retain more learners with disabilities?  A first step, as you mention, is making sure that materials are accessible.  Assuming that's in place, what strategies have you seen, or imagined, to communicate that post-secondary education is possible for learners with disabilities?

Best,

Mike Cruse

Disabilities in Adult Education Moderator

michaelcruse74@gmail.com

What Parkland College did -- based on findings of a task force for figuring out how to help our "developmental" students with pre-college skills -- was hire a person with a background in disabilities to offer academic support.   So while my advertised duties are that I give academic support to developmental students, they didn't just find somebody who wanted to help developmental students; they specifically looked for somebody with a sped background. 

      We are now working on improving communication and collaboration between our "academic support" and our official "disabilities services," because the academic support center isn't officially connected (so no paperwork or disclosure or stigma).   I would love to take it four steps further.   We already have faculty working on accessible instructional design -- not just physically accessible (print, etc) but what I call "cognitively accessible."   I loved taking our computer programming classes because the professor modeled it so well. Students talked about him as if he were Elvis ;)   The concepts of storing & accessing information in memory with object-oriented programming was delivered... and re-delivered... with pictures and metaphors.   

I dream of a college where challenging majors like computer programming were designed to be accessible to those bright folks on assorted spectra.  A little consulting about little enhancements to delivery, support and accommodations to meet the individual's needs, and we could be famous :) 

Susan,

I love the term, "cognitively accessible" as you've described it.  Are you familiar with Universal Design for Learning (UDL)?  The Teaching Excellent in Adult Literacy website has a good introduction to UDL principles.  I have posted a poll asking members of our community to weigh in on whether they have heard of UDL, or not, because I would like to plan an event for the group around learning more about how UDL applies to working with adults, both with and without disabilities.  To my way of thinking, UDL is what making courses and content "cognitively accessible" is all about.   

If you haven't already, please take a minute to respond to the UDL poll here.  Keep on building those bridges between the academic support and disabilities services sides of the house at Parkland College.  We need more examples demonstrating that "cognitively accessible", or UDL-driven curriculum and instruction, transcends the labels we sometimes apply to programs and learners.

Best,

Mike Cruse 

Yes, I'm familiar with UDL -- that's kind of where the phrase erupted from in my mind.   Offering students different options for the input and output of learning materials is something that I do my best to encourage.   

One of my minor frustrations is that until I actually sat in and took the programming course, I would not have known how good it was.  Yes, the man gets good evaluations, but that generally doesn't mean somebody's got a fundamentally different attitude/approach about teaching programming... and I'm pretty sure it wasn't done with the idea of making the instruction accessible to folks with disabilities.

I'm hoping to talk one of our math instructors into sharing what she does at our tech conference -- I've told her I can help with putting the right buzzwords in the presentation application ("Using Blended Learning to Foster Growth Mindset in Pre-Algebra STudents")...