Accessible Video Discussions
Concurrent Session 1
Brief Abstract
In video discussions, how can you ensure that the videos instructors and students post are accessible for people with disabilities? This session covers how to easily and inexpensively make video discussions and the videos posted for the discussions accessible and UDL by design. You will also create and workshop an accessible video discussion prompt.
Presenters
Extended Abstract
With the increased popularity of discussion assignments where students post videos for one another, how can you ensure that the video discussion and the videos instructors and students create are accessible for people with disabilities? Often, video-based discussion accessibility efforts tend to focus only on captioning, ignoring the rest of the accessibility needs of the video discussion participants. How do you make sure that all visual components, actions, and visuals are accessible to people with visual disabilities? How do you ensure that all sounds that are not automatically captioned are accessible to people with auditory disabilities? How do you make sure that all videos don't contain components that cause seizures?
This session covers 3 easy requirements to add to every video discussion prompt to easily and inexpensively make video discussions and the videos posted for the discussions accessible by design. Creating prompts that require students to avoid flashing and flickering (meeting the needs of students with photosensitive disabilities) and requiring all students to say out loud all visual and auditory components (meeting the needs of students with visual disabilities who miss out on visual only content and meeting the needs of students with auditory disabilities that need all auditory content to be said aloud so that it is captioned). Requiring students to follow these rules of the road in student discussion videos also means that students with learning disabilities and students with different learning styles have their needs met because everything is presented both visually and auditorily (fulfilling UDL best practices). This also aids instructors in grading because they don't have to assume what a student is trying to show in an image, etc. In combination with captioning, these requirements for video discussions ensure that the video discussions students create fulfills higher education and federal requirements (QM/Section 508 Refresh/WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility requirements), are as accessible and inclusive as possible, reach as many people as possible due to required employment of UDL best practices, and aid grading. Designing for accessibility not only provides equal access to the discussion and the content in the videos for people with disabilities, it also creates multiple modalities for the viewers of the posted videos, making them easier for anyone to learn from no matter what their learning preferences are. It also makes them easier to grade because instructors do not have to guess what students are presenting visually, if it is not clear in the video, since they will have to present all auditory and visual content in more than one modality, eliminating some of the guess work in grading.
In this session you will have an opportunity to analyze why specific examples of video discussion prompts that are not accessible the lens of a student with disabilities. You will explain the barriers to learning presented in each example. And you will have the opportunity to fix each video discussion prompt to create an accessible video discussion prompt. Then, you will have an opportunity to create an accessible video discussion prompt, have it workshopped by your colleagues attending the session, and share it with the group.