What Do We Mean by Accessibility?

Accessibility is often associated with accommodations for students with disabilities, and ensuring students with disabilities can engage with your course is one of the most important reasons to create accessible courses and materials and recommendations  In a recent conference presentation, Dr. Eric Moore an accessibility expert from the University of Kentucky, observed:

Accessibility is not accommodations.

Moore and others recommend following the Web Content Accessibility Guide (WCAG) Accessibility Guidelines. Those guidelines suggest that courses designed to be

• Perceivable
• Operable
• Understandable

are more efficient and effective for all learners. In this workshop, you will work through several checkpoints to learn how to ensure your courses and materials are accessible for all students. Universal design for learning is the term applied a set of guidelines for organizing and structuring both online and in-person courses, and many instructional designers and instructional technologists identify similarities between courses and materials designed to be accessible and those designed following UDL principles. 

It should be noted that WCAG also includes "Robust" as a principle of accessibility. Robustness refers to the long-term accessibility of systems as they are updated and upgraded. The professionals who manage IT systems are responsible for ensuring this aspect of accessibility and faculty can safely ignore those guidelines when designing materials and courses.