Accessible Teaching

The Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning is an advocate of inclusive teaching practices and strongly supports the University’s accessibility policy. 

Accessibility 

According to the Department of U.S Education, accessibility is reached when a person with a disability is afforded equal opportunity “to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as a person without a disability.” Therefore, the goal of creating accessible courses is to provide a flexible and robust learning environment where all students can thrive, regardless of disability. Some key questions to ask yourself are: 

  1. Can all of my students access and benefit from my course’s physical and digital materials, including those with disabilities? 
  2. Will all of my potential students be able to participate in core class activities, regardless of their disability?
  3. Can students demonstrate their achievement of learning goals without confronting unnecessary obstacles that may discriminate against some of them unfairly?


To help improve the accessibility of course materials, contact the Digital Accessibility Specialist, your local faculty support staff, or the Library’s Course Reserves staff. The staff of the Poorvu Center, in partnership with Information Technology Services, the University Library, and local support providers in Yale’s professional schools, offer a range of services to help Yale instructors. 

For additional support, see our list of Course Accessibility Support Contacts.  We provide some additional strategies when thinking about how to make your course accessible. 

Nichole Gleisner is a woman with glasses, shoulder-length brown hair and wearing a blue top.

“The Poorvu Center has been instrumental in supporting my classroom practices and connecting me with other faculty members dedicated to teaching. I’ve appreciated the opportunity to gather regularly with diverse peers across Yale to focus on student accessibility: learning from experts on campus, students’ experiences, and each other to envision and implement more responsive and inclusive pedagogy.” 

—

Nichole Gleisner, Ph.D, Lecturer in the French department

Accessibility Considerations

Learn about your students

We encourage instructors to begin with an appreciation of the diversity of our students, which includes a broad variety of cultural and educational backgrounds and abilities. According to the CDC, a disability is any condition of the body or mind that makes it more difficult for a person to do certain activities and interact with the world around them. Disabilities can include visual, hearing, mobility, cognitive, and mental health. They can range from short-term (e.g., a student with a broken arm) to long-term (a student diagnosed with ADHD). Approximately 11% of undergraduates in private four-year colleges register a disability with their school. Here are some ideas on how to get to better know your students: 

Use Confidential Surveys

One of the most essential things an instructor can do to promote student engagement and learning is to communicate a desire to create an inclusive learning environment in which every student feels understood, respected, and acknowledged. 

A confidential survey allows students to share privately with their instructor their motivation, preparation, and anticipated challenges regarding the course. Concluding the questionnaire with an open-ended question like “Is there anything else you’d like me to know about you and your ideal learning environment?” invites students to share ways of learning that have been beneficial in the past without needing to disclose a disability. 

Instructors might also consider explicitly asking students to use the Canvas Anonymous Feedback tool to share suggestions for improving the accessibility of a course. It is generally better to ask students to describe accommodations they may anticipate needing, including use of assistive technologies, than to ask them to identify specific disabilities or impairments.

Use Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Principles

Universal Design for Learning (UDL)  promotes a single, shared learning environment with sufficient flexibility to accommodate a full range of students’ capability, pre-existing knowledge, and personal investment or interest (Yuvall, Procter, Korabik & Palmer 2004; Zaloudek 2014). The goal of UDL is to support all student learning, and reduce any barriers to learning. 

The CAST organization has created a UDL guidelines framework that can be broken down into three categories: 

  • Means of Engagement: What are the ways you are motivating students to engage in their learning? 
  • Means of Representation: How are you presenting course content in multiple formats?
  • Means of Action and Expression: How are you providing different opportunities for students to express what they’ve learned? 

Ways these categories can be considered in a course could look like: 

  • Engaging students in groupwork in addition to individual work
  • Providing visual supplements to your lecture such as slides, audio or video (ensuring these options are all accessible)
  • Providing multiple options for students completing an assignment (e.g., presentation, written paper, oral exam, etc.)

Please note that UDL does not replace the need of formal accommodations for students with disabilities who require additional support and service. Student Accessibility Services offers additional resources for such students and should be consulted with if instructors have any questions. 

Write An Accessibility Statement

Learn more on our separate Accessibility Statement webpage to see the provided examples. 

Students report that simply including a personalized accessibility statement in a syllabus sends a powerful message about an instructor’s commitment to inclusion. An effective accessibility statement encourages conversation and cooperation between instructors and students rather than handing students off to the Student Accessibility Services office to request formal accommodations.

It is important to provide structure and communicate clear expectations. However, inflexible course policies and messaging such as “No exceptions!” can feel intimidating or exclusionary to some students and even potentially suggest to students with disabilities that the instructor would be reluctant to accommodate them. Here are some points to consider when writing an accessibility statement or making your course policies accessible: 

  • In addition to providing resources for students, consider mentioning what you will be doing to make your courses accessible and/or how you will support students with disabilities (whether they have a formal accommodation or not).
  • Consider whether rigid or zero tolerance policies (e.g., attendance, participation, deadlines, etc.) are necessary in your class. 
  • Explore various ways for students to participate rather than assess them solely on one mode of engagement.  
  • Re-consider any technology or laptop bans in your course, especially since students with disabilities may require these technologies to fully engage in the classroom. 

Consider Digital Accessibility

Making Your Canvas Site Accessible

  • Organize your syllabus as a web page and set it as the homepage using the Canvas editing tools, rather than attaching it solely as a Word document or PDF. Check out our support article on posting your syllabus in Canvas for more instructions.
  • Many students rely on screen readers or other text-to-speech technologies to listen to their readings. PDF scans may be only images of the text (which can’t be used with a screen reader) instead of text that can be read out loud by these technologies. Yale’s Adobe package has the ability to convert an image to machine readable text quickly and easily with OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
  • Word Documents and PowerPoint Slides may be more accessible, but still present barriers. You can “Check Accessibility” within the most recent versions of Word and PPT to check and fix accessibility problems as you’re creating files. 
  • Deaf or Hard of Hearing students need transcripts for any audio files and captions for any videos.
  • Use Modules and consistent course navigation, allowing students to focus more on the learning process.
  • Understand how to set up extra time and other accommodations for students in Canvas. 
  • Familiarize yourself with the basics of accessible online courses.
  • Use Panorama to improve accessibility of course materials. Sensus Access also provides more accessible versions of uploaded files. 

Making Your Course Documents Accessible 

  • Understand the creation of accessible course documents, outlined in the 30-minute tutorial Creating Accessible Course Documents. This tutorial covers how to choose and distribute more accessible versions of course documents, check if your PDFs are screen-readable text, and link directly to a library database or website that offers a reading as an online book, ePub, or HTML version. 
  • Share PowerPoint of other slide decks as the original slide decks and not PDFs. For additional PPT guidance, consider following the steps outlined in the online tutorial Making Your Slide Decks Accessible.
  • STEM faculty should use MathType when creating PDFs and PPTs using MathML and LaTeX.
  • Music faculty might consider MuseScore for accessible sheet music for Blind/Low Vision
  • Contact askpoorvucenter@yale.edu to discuss whether our student accessibility aides may be able to help remediate your PDFs and other course files.

Use Yale-supported technologies

When you use technologies licensed and officially supported by Yale, you have the assurance that the tool has been reviewed for accessibility and that there is local assistance available should students discover accessibility challenges. Yale tools are also screened for their ability to store educational data in a secure manner.

When considering alternatives not officially supported at Yale, research a tool’s accessibility, which may be in the form of a VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template). The Digital Accessibility Team in Yale ITS can help audit tools used for teaching and learning. Contact them for assistance at accessibility@yale.edu 

Instructors should also consider other potential obstacles such as unequal access to highspeed internet, or limited access to personal devices such as laptops or tablets (some students rely primarily on smartphones). It is important to communicate any technical requirements clearly to students at the start of a course. 

 

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