AccessSTEM

The Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL) is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to work with cyberlearning-themed projects to support, synergize, and amplify their efforts. One of the ways CIRCL engages with the many targeted projects is through their dynamic website. The CIRCL site provides a place where new and existing projects can browse project descriptions, read perspectives from community members, and find resources.

At North Dakota State University, engineering students design assistive technologies for veterans with disabilities. Students’ projects must be cost-effective, have a long lifespan, be robust, and be technologically superior to existing options.

AccessCyberlearning, a project supported by the National Science Foundation (grant #1550477), published a set of questions that can be used as a starting point to help online learning (e.g., cyberlearning) projects evaluate the accessibility of their projects.

The checklist, titled Equal Access: Universal Design of Cyberlearning, includes sections on:

Alyssa Taylor, senior lecturer in the Bioengineering Department at the University of Washington (UW), teaches the second part of a two-quarter long Capstone Design sequence.

AccessComputing is a program at the University of Washington that helps students with disabilities successfully pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in computing fields. The program also works to increase the capacity of postsecondary institutions and other organizations to fully include students with disabilities in computing courses and programs. As a primarily-online mentoring program, building a community is essential to creating a supportive environment for students with disabilities.

Conference organizers can take a number of steps to ensure that their meetings are more accessible to participants with disabilities. Considerations may include:

College students often attend career fairs to prepare for graduation and plan their future in the workforce. Some recruiters set up “virtual job fairs” that take place online rather than in person on a college campus. For students with disabilities, these may provide a way to engage with potential employers without needing to be at a crowded event. But how do they work? Are they beneficial?

All major document publishing formats support alternate text for images, often abbreviated "alt text". The purpose of alt text is to provide a text equivalent of the image, so people who are unable to see the image have access to the message it’s intended to convey.

Many videos on campuses are captioned only as an accommodation for a person who is deaf or hard of hearing, even though they benefit many others, including English language learners, those with reading-related disabilities, and individuals who simply want to see the spelling of words spoken in the presentation. The University of Washington’s UW-IT Free Captioning Project was developed as an effort to promote proactive captioning of videos on campus.

When writing a course syllabus, faculty members can take explicit steps that take into account the abilities of the students that will be in their class, encourage students to discuss their disability with their instructor, and make the syllabus more accessible to students with disabilities. Faculty should: