Category: Accessibility

Camosun Faculty: Please share this message with your students! (time-sensitive)

Dear Camosun College Students,

** Do accessibility-related challenges impact your student life at college? **

Accessibility challenges for students at college can be the result of a mismatch between what you need to succeed as a student and how components of college experiences & environments have been designed.

For example, you may have experienced accessibility-related challenges associated with a physical or learning disability, or associated with speaking English as a second language, or associated with financial limitations, or associated with the use of technology at the college.

The 2019/2020 “Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Project: Phase 2” is a faculty/student-partners project at Camosun College. Our project team is interested in hearing your stories about accessibility-related challenges in college life, learning what would help to minimize those challenges, and creating learning tools out of your stories that will help our college community better understand how we can all help design experiences and environments that are more accessible for everyone.

** What does our college community need to know about accessibility-related challenges? What do you want us to know? **

We invite you to share your stories with us between February 24 to March 16, 2020 in small groups (Sharing Circles) or anonymously (Online Form).

Questions about this project may be directed to: Sue Doner, UDL Project team leader, in the Centre for Excellence in Teaching & Learning (doners@camosun.ca).

Information about this project and a schedule of opportunities for you to participate may also be found on the project website “Practical Applications of Universal Design for Learning”

UDL Guidelines from CAST

Want to dive a bit deeper into Universal Design for Learning?  Well, aside from coming and visiting our own Sue Doner or her website, there are some amazing resources you can check out online.  One I am going to highlight today is CAST – the Centre for Applied Special Technology, which just released an updated version of their UDL Guidelines.

“The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST. The UDL Guidelines can be used by educators, curriculum developers, researchers, parents, and anyone else who wants to implement the UDL framework in a learning environment. These guidelines offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.”

Find out more by visiting The UDL Guidelines.

BCcampus Accessibility Workshop Resources

Awhile back, I posted about the BCcampus BCcampus Inclusive Design Webinar Series.  But I since realized that I hadn’t followed up with a link to the resources which were posted later at BCcampus.

So, without further ado, here are the Accessibility Workshop Resources which include the presentation slips, and information on how to create accessible webpages, Word documents, PDFs, PowerPoints, etc.

If ever you have questions about how to create accessible documents for your WordPress sites, D2L course sites, or Open resources, or about how to create and edit closed captioning for videos you create in Kaltura, contact desupport@camosun.ca to arrange to meet with an instructional designer.