I think that too often when we talk about accessibility we don’t talk about teaching for equity and vice versa. I really appreciated the opportunity to talk about where these things intersect at a recent Canvas Accessibility workshop back in August with our Office of Digital Education and thought that I would share the video and some resources from that talk with our blog audience. Some of this is specific to University of Michigan Dearborn, and some is specific to Canvas but there is plenty in there about concerns of accessibility and equity more broadly so I think there is something for everyone.
Accessibility is often framed as a technical and legal conversation. We are shown where to click and what to do to technically meet the letter of the law but often that is where it stops. Not unsimilar, help around teaching for equity is filled with teaching tips that may mention accessibility but say little about specific technical steps.
This is an understandable situation. Both of these are big topics and trying to cover both simultaneously is difficult. Because this was a Canvas workshop I think it maybe leans a little more technical but I was grateful for the opportunity to try to combine these topics and could not have done it without help from our University Coordinator of Digital Education – who bailed me out at the end in clarifying a technical question. I see these two areas as closely interrelated and really wish we had more opportunities to present them together.
I used frameworks and definitions on Teaching for Equity from the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) here at University of Michigan and remixed a resource sheet curating a bunch of resources from all over – it is CC-BY-SA so if you are a reader from outside of Dearborn would like to remix it for your own school feel free. Check out the video, think about how you might combine accessibility and teaching for equity, and let me know if you have more ideas about how to present these two important areas together.