An advanced-level UDL practice is to give everyone the same cards, so to speak. Instead of providing instructors, designers, and support staff with empty LMS shells or web-page templates, build a standard shell that includes a navigation and content structure that follows accessibility and design best practices, such as a shallow subfoldering structure and alternative-version requirement for media elements. Allow users to change the structure if they prefer (to avoid the “you’re forcing us” argument), and rely on the inherent inclination of humans to adhere to default structures.
Related: How to create engaging online assignments with universal design in mind
Ace #2: Inclusive procurement
CIOs and IT leaders are in a unique position to influence the overall ease of access across all systems supported by colleges and universities. By training purchase-level staff in IT and the accounts office in how to assess Electronic Information Touchpoints (EITs) for extensibility and accessibility features, we can silently increase the ease of use and interaction for the entire campus community. Kirsten Behling and I wrote recently in Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone about an expert-level procurement strategy:
By adopting the mind-set of offering at least plus-one choices for users of EITs, many institutions are using recent legal settlements as a call to proactive action. Some are creating procurement policies that ask the vendors who supply EIT resources to prove, through a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT), how usable their technologies are for diverse populations (spoiler alert: even when vendors have VPATs and claim their products are widely accessible, test anyway, because there is not yet any centralized authority that checks the validity of VPATs). As more institutions ask vendors about usability and inclusive design as a routine part of their procurement processes, vendors are taking a harder look at incorporating UDL into their products.
Ace #3: Slimming the bottom line
UDL strategies help keep costs down across the institution. As a key plank in the approach to open and inclusive pedagogy, UDL reduces learner attrition and keeps more dollars at our colleges and universities because learners stick around when they feel that they can choose their own paths through their studies. As IT leaders, it is when we make this bottom-line argument that we most often convince our colleagues. It’s also key that we frame the argument in terms of access, writ broadly as mobile-device access to interactions, rather than accessibility, which colleagues can hear as applying to only a small segment of our learners.
An expert-level UDL strategy is to adopt a wider perspective at leadership meetings. By talking about how our system- and application-level IT design, procurement, and budgetary decisions expand access for all learners, we actually reduce the need to assign resources intensively to perform accommodations—making one change, one time, for one learner.
Accommodation needs will never go away, but with the UDL framework, we can make the argument for inclusive benefits beyond students with disabilities. Imagine a student who is a single father who has to drop his daughter off at school and then drives 45 minutes across town to work. Giving him a way to do his course readings via alternative formats (say, read-aloud to the Bluetooth connection in his car) can be the difference between dropping out and keeping up.
Adding aces to the hand you’re dealt
Adopting UDL is actually much more of a mind-set shift than it is a change to our established IT processes. It really is like adding cards to the deck that we didn’t have before, expanding our options and resources. IT leaders in colleges and universities can build on existing practices by designing interfaces to be inclusive, implementing inclusive procurement practices, and guiding campus leaders about the cost-saving aspects of UDL.
By quietly playing these aces behind the scenes in an iterative way and from a learner-support perspective, we can both avoid arguments about academic freedom from instructor colleagues and marshal our limited resources away from intensive and unpredictable single-accommodation responses, toward broader design choices that save us, our colleagues, and our learners time, effort, and struggle.
And that’s no bluff.
Thomas J. Tobin is the conference programming chair and faculty associate in the Learning Design, Development, and Innovation department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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