Digital accessibility videos for faculty
Digital accessibility videos for faculty
The instructional goal here was to teach faculty from The Ohio State University's College of Medicine about digital accessibility and to increase the compliance with university's minimal digital accessibility standards. Many of the existing materials for digital accessibility were long, tedious online training sessions, or worse, they were reactive remediation documents that felt punitive. My aim was to create a series of short videos that tackled one aspect of digital accessibility at a time. I wanted the tone to be light and playful to help reduce previous mental or emotional barriers learners may have attached to the subject. I chose animations because research has found that they, "serve the dual pedagogical objectives of explaining complex concepts and principles to improve students’ understanding, while engaging students’ interest and attention with dialogues, humour, and real-world examples” (Liu & Elms, 2019, p. 23). To make the topic more approachable, I used kinetic typography, relaxed music, humour through fx sounds, and couched the concepts in health-related examples.
Alternative text can be difficult to get right. I wanted to show both good and bad examples. Additionally, I wanted to emphasize the need for long image descriptions as many of our faculty want to include complex diagrams and need to be able to provide an accurate alternative text description.
This video provides a good example of couching the content -- video captioning -- in the context of medical education. More specifically, I drew inspiration from a presentation I saw on using melenated suture pads. This allowed me to add an additional element of humor by creating the inaccurate transcript: melon aided.
This video was a particular challenge because I needed to show word processing features without doing a screencast of an actual word processing software (e.g., Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, etc.). To achieve realism, I used a few screen shots from Microsoft Word, but I mostly relied on mimicking the layout and user interaction with mouse movement.
I love the use of the "sigh" sound effect in this video. I think that is really drives home how frustrating it can be for learners with disabilities to try to navigate through our instructional materials. Here, again, I also used good and bad examples to highlight what faculty should and shouldn't do regarding links to external content.
"Digital accessibility can often times seem daunting and overly complex. This series of videos breaks down some of the complexities to help increase digital access by empowering content creators. Whether you are just curious, or creating more inclusive content, this series of videos will help you on your journey."
- Angela Bower
Systems Accessibility Senior Specialist