Requirements
"Use captioned videotapes. Make printed materials available in electronic format. Provide text descriptions of graphics presented on Web pages. Provide printed materials early to allow students to prepare for the topic to be presented. Create printed and Web-based materials in simple, intuitive, and consistent formats. Arrange content in order of importance."
Learners can’t engage with the content if they can’t access it. This principle is almost that simple (see below for the caveat). A deaf or hard of hearing student that sees a person talking but has no idea what is being said has just missed that information. A blind or visually impaired learner who participates in a chat for an online class but can’t access any of the text in the chatroom because it’s not compatible with a screen reader has just missed that information.
However – there are times to provide support for information access, and there are times to provide appropriate challenge and resistance (or create that zone of proximal development).
Access to Information vs. Access to Learning
There is a world of difference between accessing information and accessing learning. Access to information is critical to accessing learning, and yet not understanding the difference can sometimes mean we undermine learning goals by the form of access to information we provide.The aim of Universal Design is not just to make information accessible – that is actually what the concept of accessibility addresses. It is to make learning accessible – to provide a way for diverse learners to engage in the learning process and demonstrate what they have learned.
Rose & Meyer note, “increasing access to information can actually undermine learning because it sometimes requires reducing or eliminating the challenge or resistance that is essential to learning” (2002, p. 73).
Rose & Meyer provide an excellent example:
Ms. Abrams goal for Kamla, a 6th-grade struggling reader, is for Kamla to learn to decode text more fluently. Kamla is struggling with a reading assignment, so Ms. Abrams allows Kamla to use a text-to-speech function on the reading assignment. Does access to information support or hinder Kamla’s learning in this instance? (Answer)Answer: It hinders Kamla because the computer is decoding for her. Even though she has access to the information – the reading assignment, she is not actually learning what she needs – decoding words on her own to read on her own.
Used differently, however, it could support a different learner or different learning goal. Allowing Kamla to use the text-to-speech function could build motivation or enthusiasm for Kamla or help her master the content to apply it if the learning goal is applying the information to a project, rather than working on decoding skills.
Another example: Assessment for Blind and Visually Impaired Students
In a graduate level class for Assessment of Blind and Visually Impaired Students, one of the class activities was to obtain information on actual children as case studies and use that information to create an IEP. All materials had been made accessible to screen readers until the final case study, when a set of PDFs were purposefully not made accessible. Part of the learning goal wasn’t just for the students of this class to read the content and dump it into a report. Part of the learning objective was for all students to figure out what to do with difficult-to-read materials. The PDFs were all handwritten and nearly impossible to read – for sighted or non-sighted people! Providing access to the information would have actually impeded the learning goal. Students were frustrated, but that frustration was part of the learning process – the goal was to learn how to handle case files that contained that sort of “documentation” because that’s a very real occurrence in the real world.