Who gets left at the curb?

Before curb cuts, city streets and high curbs tacitly privileged people with full mobility. The designers of sidewalks and curbs were not malicious or stupid, they had just failed to imagine the full spectrum of people who may need to traverse city streets. Thinking about the needs of different users--especially those with specific needs--enhances our ability to design wisely.

Who should we think about?

To make sure none of our students are left stranded on the curb, we need to be thinking about who could be tacitly left out of full participation or locked out of full access to our course materials. When we think of accessibility and the needs of our students, we often focus on three groups:

students with vision impairment
students with hearing impairment
students with mobility impairment

Thinking about the needs of these students provides us with a great starting point. Let's start with the last, first. Online courses may be inherently more accessible to students with mobility impairment, especially if they use specialized assistive technology like wheelchairs. However, we need to be sure we are thinking of the range of mobility issues that our students may be facing. Students with limited fine-motor control, arthritis, or carpal tunnel benefit when courses are designed with the demands of the keyboard and mouse in mind. We'll discuss this more in Week 2, when our focus is on design and assessment of web-based resources.

Let's turn our focus, then, to vision and hearing impairment. We'll also delve deeply into these issues:

If it is visual, make it audible; text & images need to be in a format that works seamlessly with assistive technology.
If it is audible, make it visual; videos, lectures, and meetings need to be in a format that works seamlessly with assistive technology.

We can keep these rules of thumb in mind, but to maximize our design thinking, we also need to re-vision what it is we're doing. Thinking of the unique needs of certain students helps us re-imagine the needs of all our students. Instead of thinking of students with differing abilities as students who need special accommodation, we can imagine them as the catalyst for helping us see where our design is flawed.

Please watch this TED Talk by Elise Roy to help you make this shift:

This video is closed captioned. If you would prefer to view it while reading, please see the Interactive Transcript of Roy's presentation, When we design for disability, we all benefit.