Requirements
"Assure that classrooms, labs, and field work are accessible to individuals with a wide range of physical abilities and disabilities. Make sure equipment and activities minimize sustained physical effort, provide options for operation, and accommodate right- and left-handed students as well as those with limited physical abilities. Assure the safety of all students."
At the systems and environmental levels:
Physical access is perhaps the most intensive and costly feature to retrofit to buildings and rooms. Widening doors, adding ramps, and adding elevators are not minor reconstruction efforts. When building a learning system, an administrator should take care to ensure that buildings, technological infrastructures, etc., are built with access in mind. For physical buildings, this means appropriate features built into the structures from the beginning. This is in compliance with ADA guidelines; however, a mere compliance mindset can actually create more problems than it solves. Instead of ensuring that environments are technically compliant with ADA (and Section 508), the focus should be on ease of access for all users – will the design make access or use more or less frustrating. Let's look at a case in point!
The Online World
In today’s society where access to learning is often mediated by technology, such as online classes, physical access becomes more than doors and ramps. By now, we are all familiar with alt tags, d links, etc. for web accessibility. (If you are not or want more detail, please see the Tutorial for Creating Accessible Websites.)
However, systemic level barriers still exist. Technology is a part of the university or school infrastructure and thus part of the system. Decisions about technology in learning environments have to be handled very carefully, or they become a part of the problem instead of part of the solution.
Physical Access Impeded by Technology – A Case in Point
Let’s explore a non-example of technology to make the point. There are many products out there on the market and vendors asking you to spend your education dollars on them. One such type of product is online collaboration tools that integrate video, audio, presentation, chat and other features. One of the first questions we always ask these vendors when they visit our university is “Are you Section 508 compliant?” The answer is invariably, “Yes, read our documentation on that.” We typically get a piece of paper with vague explanations and nobody is keen on following up in detail on just how accessible their product is.
In particular, many of them claim to be Section 508 compliant because – after the event – the captured presentation is captioned and a transcript is provided of the chat, making both the presentation portion and chat portion accessible. Sounds reasonable on the surface.
However – DURING the actual presentation, the chat windows are NOT accessible. A person using a screen reader would not be able to actually engage in the discussion taking place or see what portion of class discussion is taking place in other areas. He or she is missing out on the presentation. For those who are deaf or hard of hearing, there is no caption during the presentation. For these learners, their direct engagement in the learning process (not the learning product) is completely precluded. From an educational standpoint, this is absolutely unacceptable. Access to content does not equate to access to learning – learning strategies and level of interaction (with the content, with other learners, with the instructor, with the environment and with the interface) make a huge difference in learning outcomes – especially in technologically mediated environments (Bremmer, et. al., 2002; Rose & Meyer, 2002; Smith & Ragan, 2005; Moore & Kearsley, 1996).
Rose & Meyer (2002) assert that today’s technology makes access and universal design more possible than ever before. This is true – however, those features are not inherent in the technology. Those features are inherent in a design, and are therefore present or not present in a technology. When selecting technologies for learning systems, we cannot assume that accessibility and universal design are automatic features just because it’s technological. Instead, we have to know what to look for and make conscious decisions about what technologies to integrate and what technologies to avoid in order to build accessible learning environments.
When we adopt technology that is not accessible, we are limiting physical access to learning much in the same what that a building with no ramps or elevators or wider doors limits access to the learning space.