tips in making online courses accessible

a lot of universities in the world have started a while ago with providing online courses, but how many of those courses or universities have thought about blind people when they designed their course? below are some tips to help make the online courses more accessible:

1. Work closely with the student to determine what accommodations will be helpful. Students who are blind have likely encountered many barriers and will be resourceful in determining what works and what does not work for them.

2. Give students plenty of notice in the event that research papers are to be assigned — someone may have to aid in that literature search, both in finding materials and in translating them.    You may want to extend deadlines for this  student.

3. if there is any Important information  on the webpage, please make sure that you put them in a bolted list, numbered list etc . underlining the text is not readable by the screen readeron a webpage.

4. If you are assigning reading from a textbook, remember that the page numbers in your copy may not correspond to scanned or large print. In addition to providing the page number, also give descriptive information regarding the section you want the student to read, such as ”the first word or the sentence in the paragraph or by  providing the paragraph number such as fifth paragraph in Chapter 5. ”

 

The degree of impairment and the student's background and training (like the degree of proficiency in using a screen reader) will affect the usefulness of the various strategies and suggestions. The student with a vision impairment will most likely need assistance in all aspects of science programs. The various strategies given below will work for most vision impaired students--some may not. Accessible description will be necessary for pictures, graphics, diagrams, videos, etc.;

If  you are posting videos of yourself, you will probably want to provide all descriptions yourself (i'm sure that RDS will be able to help with the description if needed). If you are showing a video from an external website , describe the action by writing it below the video link. If you distribute videotapes as handouts, any action or an explanatory text that is crucial to understanding the text of the presentation should be described.

If you are going to use Skype for conference calls, have each speaker introduce himself or herself to the audience so that the speakers' voices are keyed for the audience as to their identity.

The best way to send Handouts for visually impaired people is via email.  If this is not possible prior to your presentation, make your materials available to them within a short time after your presentation.

(please note, this is the first post about online courses, so for sure will be more in the future.)