[ARCHIVED] Student Media Accessibility

[f65a0be54c9b7b2]

Hello Canvas Community,

Our organization has just moved to Canvas, yeah! I work with a team of instructional designers developing online courses in higher ed. I'm inquiring into accessibility requirements, ideas, and approaches for managing faculty and student media.

With the native media tools in Canvas, there will no doubt be many more assignments involving student videos, video-based discussions where students must review other students’ videos, and faculty lectures, instructions, and responses to students sent via video.

While Canvas is well designed for accessibility, using media tools and recording videos can still be difficult for some users, particularly for those using screen readers. I'm developing resources and training to encourage our team and faculty to embrace accessibility. I just need to clarify the legal requirements and would like to learn more about how other institutions are addressing accessibility issues related to student media assignments.

Since we’re designing courses now, I need answers fast! I would appreciate any guidance that you can offer. I would appreciate any guidance that the group can offer!

Lynn Kelly

Bridgepoint Education 

INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS THAT ADVANCE LEARNING^SM

[kmeeusen]

Hi f65a0be54c9b7b29e3eaa54dc94a3a209b85417d443ab0e45d1b451ab9e6e42fand Welcome to Canvas and the Canvas Community, and thank you for considering accessibility early in your transition!

Wow, tall order, actually, but I'll start with your best resource in the Community - the Accessibility group. I just looked, and that's where your message originated from, but it is a great resource to bookmark.

Washington State and our State Board of Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC)  recently mandated accessibility in all info tech used in our state, including our online classrooms, so we are working hard to train our faculty and staff, and make our classrooms accessible. I would like to point you to a great training resources available in Canvas Commons - Accessibility 101 - Principles of Inclusive Design.  You can find it by title or by its author, Jess Thompson of our State Board. This is a truly awesome course, designed using UDL principles, and easily modified to meet the needs of your faculty and staff.

Since you are in a hurry, I would also like to point you to the UDOIT Tool developed the University of Central Florida:  UDOIT Version 2.1.1 and UDOIT User's Guide This awesome, and free, tool integrates into Canvas as a course menu navigation item. It scans an entire course (or just specified components) for accessibility issues, then helps the user fix those issues. We currently have an IT Work Study student using this tool to go through our Canvas courses, and fix the accessibility issues.

Now for your biggee - Accessible media! There are many challenges around this topic, and around answering your question. Student created videos must also be created in an accessible format which includes  transcripts and/or closed-captioning, and this is especially important if those videos are intended to be shared with other classmates. Teachers created videos must also be accessible. The real challenge is with the student videos, because they must be taught how to do so. Yes, your teachers also need to be taught, but that skill will be used repeatedly by them; whereas your students may only need those skills infrequently, and learning them sucks time away from their regular curriculum, so the learning must be quick and easy, and the tools they use must also be easy. Unfortunately, help on developing accessible media is particularly technology dependent - what tools are your faculty/students using to create their media. Here is some quick help:

• How do I add captions to an external video as an instructor? 
• How do I add captions to an external video as a student? 
• How do I add captions to new or uploaded videos in Canvas as a student? (Canvas media tool)
• How do I add captions to new or uploaded videos in Canvas as an instructor?  (Canvas Media Tool)
• How do I create a caption file using the subtitle creation tool as a student? 
• How do I create a caption file using the subtitle creation tool as an instructor? 

Finally, some general resource on laws, rule, regulations, standards, tips and techniques:

• Overview | DO-IT  The University of Washington's Disabilities, Oportunities, Internetworking and Technology Cent is one of my favorite go-tos.
• WebAIM: Web Accessibility In Mind Another one to definitely bookmark!
• Accessibility at Penn State | Accessibility and Usability at Penn State This is another great resource, and rounds out my top three.

I hope this helps, and you are in the right place to hear more from others who work in accessibility and advocate for doing the right thing for the right reasons.

Kelley

[cadatko]

Hi Lynn,

For us accessibility is really in the hands of faculty, since we do not have a dedicated Accessibility Specialist on campus. We require all of our faculty who are teaching online to take an accessibility course through the @One Project. We also offer in-house accessibility training and materials.

I have an accessibility workshop for faculty (it's a 2-hour awareness-raising workshop) in a Canvas course as well as other training materials. You are welcome to download and/or use them however you wish -- they are licensed under Creative Commons non-commercial share alike with attribution (Attribution: Katie Datko for Pasadena City College).

Here are a few things that might help you and which might also help your faculty:

• Accessibility Overview from our DE Faculty handbook
• Accessibility Workshop Canvas course join link
• Accessibility Workshop Canvas course IMSCC file
• Tech Tip Tuesdays Videos, Infographics & Text Equivalents (several about Accessibility)

Good luck & feel free to reach out if you need anything!

Katie

[f65a0be54c9b7b2]

Hi Katie,

Thanks so much for your response!

This information is very helpful and well organized. It was very generous of you to offer these resources. I will be sure to appropriately reference any information pulled from these sources.

You’ve also reinforced my plans to provide onsite training workshops for our instructional design teams, and for our remote faculty, online training modules supported by tools, such as checklists and quick reference guides, etc. Although, in my case, this will all be done by me. <sigh!>

The question I still have not been able to answer definitively is regarding accessibility requirements for student-created media. My understanding is that student media is exempt from accessibility protocols, unless peer review is required. In which case, additional accessibility guidelines would apply. However, I’ve not been able to confirm this.

Any additional guidance, thoughts or suggestions?

Lynn

Lynn Marie Kelly, MS

Manager, Accessible Design & Technology

[cadatko]

Hi Lynn,

I'm glad they helped - seriously feel free to use or change anything you need!

The general rule of thumb we've been going by in the CA Community College system regarding student work (and I would say also multimedia instructor feedback) is that if student-created media is to be archived and/or used in multiple semesters (on a website or LMS for example), it should be captioned. Student-created media for one-time use should also be captioned if another student in the class needs an accommodation. Aside from that it wouldn't need to be captioned if used in a password-protected LMS environment.