Digital accessibility is important for everyone and is imperative to an inclusive campus. In this workshop, you will learn how to apply the basics to digital documents and webpages with fun and easy tools.
This workshop will provide practical advice and approaches for instructors to implement in their daily work. This workshop will include links to some web accessibility tools but will not go in depth on that topic.
In online education, accessibility means that learners are given the technological, physical, and financial resources they need to access the offerings of an educational institution, regardless of disability. According to the World Wide Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative, accessibility allows people with disabilities to perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and in this way, they can contribute to Web as well. In the field of online education, accessibility refers to a legal, technical, and pedagogic framework that allows information inside an online educational platform to be available to all people, regardless of any physical or neurological disabilities they may have. This is important not only for legal and ethical reasons but also to ensure that the experience in online courses can be successful for all students and teachers.
- From the SAGE Encyclopedia of Online Education.
The A in the acronym DEIA stands for accessibility. At UC Merced we steadfastly uphold the concepts expressed in the University of California Diversity Statement including, “the variety of personal experiences, values, and worldviews that arise from differences of culture and circumstance. Such differences include race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, language, abilities/disabilities, neurodiversity, sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic status, geographic region, and more.”
Beyond differences in abilities and neurological processing, accessibility can make documents and websites more usable and user-friendly for all. See the information below about Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to learn more.
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