On July 8, the University of Illinois launched an accessibility MOOC, An Introduction to Accessibility & Inclusive Design. The course introduces some of the fundamental principles of accessibility and prepares learners for further study in accessibility and inclusive design.
The Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning plays a critical role in helping faculty design, implement, and evaluate content that is accessible to all learners.
Recently, four blind students at the University of Illinois earned a professional certificate through the Information Accessibility Design and Policy (IADP) program, offered through the College of Applied Health Sciences.
That makes Marc Thompson both happy and proud.
- “The IADP program is one of the success stories on our campus,” says Dr. Thompson, Assistant Director for Teaching & Learning Experiences at the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning (CITL) and IADP Program Director. “A large number of students in this program are coming to us from all over the country, even outside the country.” IADP is one of a kind in the broad, comprehensive program it provides for a diverse target audience of undergraduate, graduate, degree or non-degree seeking students ranging from computer science majors to website developers, programmers, instructional designers, information technology specialists, compliance officers, and disability service providers. Students learn principles of accessible information architecture and universal design, as well as information technologies used in educational, healthcare, corporate, and employment settings. IADP also covers federal and state legal mandates governing information technology accessibility and their relationship to the civil rights of people with disabilities, as well as information technology accessibility standards, and design practices that enable adherence to those standards.
And, he adds, according to the impact studies we’ve done, students are completing the IADP program with greater knowledge, advancing in their professions, and applying what they learn to create more accessible content for others with disabilities. University of Illinois’ Accessible IT Group also offers a series of shorter, online digital badging courses in the area of IT Accessibility, and covering a range of topics from Web Accessibility for Non-technical Users to highly focused courses on topics like Accessible JavaScript and Web Widgets with ARIA and ARIA Landmarks, Headings, and Page Titles.
Designing pathways that make education accessible for all students—including those with disabilities—is an issue that CITL is heavily invested in. The accessibility focus is part of the Center’s larger mission to use pedagogical approaches, instructional technologies, and assessment practices to strengthen teaching efforts and improve student learning outcomes.
In the case of accessibility, CITL is working to create a level playing field for all learners.
CITL Resources for Campus
CITL offers the following resources to the University of Illinois campus:
- Support of online course and program development, delivery, and evaluation
- Services for teaching evaluations, learning outcome assessments, new student testing and placement, and exam processing
- Training and assistance with instructional pedagogies and technologies
- Support to professors who are creating, revising, or blending a course
- Help in developing, using, and evaluating rich and creative learning environments
- Event planning for conferences, symposia, workshops, and the like
A Rich History as a Leader in Accessibility
That work has a rich narrative at Illinois.
“We have a long history here that stretches back to the returning WWII veterans, and on up through the Civil Rights era with Timothy Nugent and the work that he did,” Thompson says. In 1948, Nugent, known as the “Father of Accessibility,” founded the first comprehensive program in higher education for people with disabilities. Nugent is recognized as a pioneer in campus accessible architecture, accessibility standards, public transportation, adaptive equipment, and recreational activities for people with disabilities. He served as director of the University of Illinois Division of Rehabilitation Education Services (DRES), where Jon Gunderson now serves as coordinator.
“Jon Gunderson has continued the work that Nugent started, developing awareness internationally about accessibility in the digital realm, and helping to develop the Accessible Rich Internet Applications international standards, as well as several widely-used accessibility testing and authoring tools,” Thompson says.
How CITL Works with Faculty
Illinois’ reputation for excellence and leadership in accessibility is furthered by CITL’s efforts in educating and training faculty in both informal and formal ways.
“We provide training for instructors as part of the normal course development process,” says Thompson. “This is an opportunity, for instance, for the designer to talk to faculty about the importance of alternative text description and about using images in a purposeful way.
“Then there’s more formal training that we do with faculty, including our DIY intensives and full intensive workshops that help faculty design their own online course or prepare them to design a course with CITL, which can shave one to two months off the total development process.”
In addition, CITL provides accessibility training as part of compliance checking for instructors developing their own courses, and the Center offers more targeted training and workshops for colleges with specific needs. Thompson mentions the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, College of Education, and the Gies College of Business as units that CITL collaborates with on accessibility issues.
“There is a learning curve with accessibility,” he says, “but sometimes faculty are surprised at how easy it is to change some of the ways they typically deliver or author content—even something as simple as using styles in Word, or making a few changes in how they offer their PowerPoints.
“There’s a lot that instructors can do just by learning some of the fundamental best practices or even using a free tool like the Color Contrast Analyzer to check to see if the contrast between text and background is sufficient to meet accessibility standards.”
One of the challenges in making content accessible to all students is that many of the authoring tools are not designed by default to deliver accessible content. “Most of them are designed to retroactively fix something after we’ve authored it,” Thompson notes. “Many of the educational applications and tools that we have don’t really address accessibility directly until it becomes a point of sale issue for institutions. The A11yFirst Editor project, led by Jon Gunderson, is breaking this pattern by providing an authoring environment that supports accessible content creation by default, rather than checking for accessibility after the fact.
“There’s been a lot of progress, but we have a long way to go.”
Leveraging Technology to Create Accessible Content
That progress is critical first and foremost because all students deserve to be able to fully access content, and also because technology offers unprecedented educational opportunities. “The electronic frontier makes accessibility even more important as we develop courses that have a global reach now through our MOOCs [Massive Open Online Courses],” Thompson says. “Or even our regular online courses, where we bring in students from all over the world. Providing access to everyone in that broader global context is so important. And the digital medium can be leveraged very effectively if we keep accessibility in mind from the start, developing courses and assessments that are more inclusive.”
Accessibility helps learners who have no disabilities as well, he notes. “For example, multiple modes of expression where students have options to submit one of several deliverables for an assignment are more effective for all learners,” he says. “And captioning benefits many people besides deaf and hard of hearing learners. Captions act as a cognitive reinforcement and benefit viewers whose native language is not English. They also ease the conversions of other languages, helping to extend the global reach of the educational materials the faculty provide.”
While Thompson acknowledges the opportunities that technology opens up for accessibility, he also notes that technology alone is not the answer.
“It certainly can play a role,” he says, “but it’s not a substitute for a fundamental understanding of the basic best practices. A good case in point would be some of the recent progress Microsoft has made with checkers in products like PowerPoint and Word. They’re making some progress there, but they’re still not a substitute for the content creators’ basic understanding of accessibility.
“An accessibility checker can’t check for something that’s not there in the document. It can’t check for proper use of headings if you haven’t applied heading styles. It can be tempting to say that if you ran an accessibility check in the Microsoft Word accessibility checker, then your document is accessible. Or if you ran the accessibility checker in the Adobe Acrobat program, then your PDF is going to meet international standards for accessibility.
“But that’s not necessarily the case.”
Slow but Steady Progress
Thompson has observed a slow but steady progress in the accessibility knowledge of application developers over the last decade, as well as an increasing professionalization in accessibility, as evidenced by the rise of organizations such as the International Association of Accessibility Professionals and the growth of accessibility certification exams, like the Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC) or the Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS), offered through the International Association of Accessibility Professionals.
He also mentions the Section 508 Refresh, which took effect in January of 2018 and which brings the revised accessibility standards in line with international standards. “This Refresh legally gives us a more solid footing for decisions we make about accessibility,” Thompson says.
And vendors and other companies are getting more involved as well. “Vendors who develop educational technology are slowly becoming more aware of the need for accessibility,” he says. He notes that Microsoft has recently sponsored two AHS graduate students through its Lighthouse Fellowship program, and that companies such as Blackboard, Coursera, and Moodle have been working slowly but steadily to make their platforms more accessible.
Bright Future for Accessibility
Meanwhile, CITL continues to press forward in the area of accessibility, advocating for it, enlightening colleges and professors on its importance and advantages, helping faculty design accessible content for courses and programs, and partnering with groups both on the Urbana-Champaign campus (DRES, AHS, Technology Services, and various colleges) and off (UI Springfield, the Big Ten Academic Alliance, EDUCAUSE).
In his role as Assistant Director for Teaching & Learning experiences for CITL, and as Program Director for the Information Accessibility Design & Policy program, Thompson will continue to empower faculty, students, and diverse working professionals to become accessible content creators and to make sure his design team champions accessibility and follows accessibility standards as they apply universal design principles. Overall, he sees a bigger and brighter future for accessibility.
“There has been an increasing professionalization of accessibility, both as a field of study and, particularly given the need in industries, I see companies like Microsoft and organizations like Teach Access becoming more invested in accessibility,” he says.
“In higher education, increasingly more campuses are developing campus-wide policies. That’s important, because in doing so, they are ultimately disseminating the knowledge at campus level and developing policies that help campuses vet new products and technologies that can be leveraged in an educational setting.” Just this year, University of Illinois released its Electronic Information Technology (EIT) Campus Accessibility Policy.
Accessibility Tools Authored at the University of Illinois
The University of Illinois has long been a leader in disability services, beginning with Timothy Nugent’s founding of the first comprehensive program of disability services in higher education. Under Nugent’s leadership, the University of Illinois was first in having curb cuts, buses equipped with wheelchair lifts, and research that developed architectural accessibility standards that were later adopted nationally.
That innovation continues on the U of I campus in the digital realm with the development of a number of authoring tools, many developed under the leadership of Jon Gunderson, geared to making digital content accessible, including:
- A11yFirst, an editor developed under Jon Gunderson’s leadership that supports accessible content authoring by default, rather than as something to be checked after the fact
- The AInspector Sidebar, an evaluation tool for the Firefox browser, developed by the Accessible IT Group (AITG) at University of Illinois
- The Functional Accessibility Evaluator and the Accessibility Bookmarklets, both developed by the AITG
- Illinois Media Space, a Kaltura-based media-hosting/media-sharing platform for students, faculty, and staff, with automatic speech recognition and editing tools that make captioning videos easy.
For more information on accessibility tools, visit
Evaluation and Design Tools on the DRES web site.