Embracing and Teaching Accessibility
Concurrent Session 5
Brief Abstract
Bring your device to explore and evaluate accessibility tools. Learn how course designers assist faculty in making their course materials accessible. Hear how faculty embrace accessibility tools, become more independent and make courses more accessible for students. Celebrate online learners needing to request fewer or no accommodations with accessibility minded course design.
Presenters

Extended Abstract
As more learners are accessing their education online it is vital all course materials, activities and tools are accessible to the learner. Just because a course or document is presented online doesn’t mean it is accessible. This Exploration session will improve your ability to make your course materials ADA compliant as a course designer or online faculty member. Through experimenting with different accessibility tools you will experience what is and isn’t effective for you when teaching these techniques to others.
Participation: All participants have opportunities to explore with their device the Grackle Suite app for Docs, Sheets, and Slides; learn the importance of formatting a document for a screen reader while supported by the workshop leaders (Word or Google Docs). Questions will be answered in real time. Why and how to check on the accessibility of tables, texts, hyperlinks, images, and graphs will be covered and presented depending upon time and interest. Participants, by role, break into groups to share: instructional support, training professionals, and technologists--how they teach faculty to use accessibility tools; from administrators, faculty, researchers, and students how they implement the tools in their course to improve accessibility. Sharing a variety of perspectives provides participants with a range of ideas to improve accessibility. Online education is changing daily to improve the learner experience. Exploring different options spark a conversation at the conference and another when attendees return to their campus.
Session Goals: Participants evaluate through hands-on practice with the Grackle Suite for Google Sheets, Docs and Slides as well as using the Alt function in Word, Powerpoint, and Blackboard to enhance accessibility. Attendees learn strategies for teaching the use of select accessibility tools to faculty and students from presenters and via conversations with others during the session.