Ethical & Accessible: Addressing ADA Compliance & Copyright Issues in Online Learning

This week, I have read more about accessibility than I ever knew I needed to. Creating accessible online content is not only legally required in many circumstances, it is an ethical obligation to students. 

To illustrate some key aspects of ADA compliant content, I'd like to direct you to a Canvas Course I created. Please, check it out (skip the presentations for now, if you will) and hopefully you'll notice a few features that are common to accessible content:

• All fonts are sans serif and 14pt or above in size as recommended by Rabidoux & Rottmann (2017). All text, throughout the slideshows and narrative, is colored for high contrast with either black on white or light grey/tan, or white on black for easiest reading (Burgstahler, 2017). 

Scripts and serif fonts, particularly in light colors, are more difficult to read!

(If you can't read the line above, you'll understand my point about the light colors and scripted fonts.)

• All links are self-describing (they don't say click here, or www.website.com), and are the only underlined and blue text to make them easily differentiated (Rabidoux & Rottmann, 2017). Standard headers and other formatting norms are preserved to help screen readers or other technological assistants interpret the text (Burgstahler, 2017).

Asking someone to view my course in the text is easier for assistive technology than telling you to click here or see this: link.

• Most of the images are only decorative, and are labeled as such within the Canvas system to help minimize confusion and hopefully allow assistive technologies skip over them. All images related to the content are labeled with alt-text to describe them, which Rabidoux & Rottmann recommend as the best practice when including images (2017).

Even though this image is largely decorative, it has alt-text to help make sure students with screen readers aren't left out.

• I have housed this lesson in the Canvas Learning System, which is screen reader compatible, has streamlined navigation to facilitate keyword-only use, allows users to zoom in, along with other features that help make it accessible (“Accessibility within Canvas,” 2015).

Canvas even includes a "Check Accessibility" feature to help find images without alt-text and other concerns. Looks like there aren't any issues on this page!

• Each assignment allows students to create and upload multiple formats, such as video, images or text responses. This helps to maximize accessibility by providing options for different abilities, which could be entirely audio or visual according to students needs. 

Allowing for audio-only and visual-only submissions allows students to get creative without limiting by ability.

Now, let's address the elephant in the room: the Prezi slideshows followed by Google slides versions. Originally I created my presentations in Prezi, and recorded them as videos with narration. Then, I realized we had a few problems.

First off, Prezi does not claim to be compatible with screen readers and other assistive technology. Big no-no! I also had never thought about how the constant motion could induce motion sickness in viewers, and be distracting *8 Reasons...," n.d.). And as far as my video presentations, they were pretty rife with issues. The text in the video was not a perfect match for the narration, but I was hoping it could provide the same experience for students. However, this was overlooking that captions are required for ADA compliance (Leduc 2020)! I also didn't have a good way to caption the images included in the video. Overall, it was a bad idea. 

So, I redesigned with those accessibility features in mind and produced the Google Slides version, which includes alt-text, screen-reader compatibility, and keyboard shortcuts ("Accessibility of Google Slides," 2020). I have left both versions in the Canvas system so you can check them out. This redesign should make the content available to a wider audience, and it taught me a lot about achieving ADA compliance. So with that, let's call it a day and celebrate our new knowledge with this Creative Commons, alt-text labeled image of a beautiful sunset. 

Ahhhhh. Isn't that nice and accessible?

But wait a minute- what's that about "Creative Commons" you say? Oh yes, this is really my second point. While ADA compliance is certainly a common pitfall for online learning environments, so too is the minefield of copyright law. It's so easy to google images and information and copy and paste them all together, but alas, we must do our full due diligence.

So what is copyright law? The US Copyright Office tells us that copyright protects original works of authorship as soon as they are created- although you must register the work with the Copyright Office if you'd like to bring a lawsuit about infringement ("Copyright in General," n.d.). So even if a blog post or an image doesn't have that little copyright symbol on it, it doesn't mean you can use that image or information without citing it. 

Many of us know not to plagiarize written work. Instead, you can still incorporate those ideas by citing the information. The same general principle applies for media that you want to use, but with some key differences. First, there are a variety of different types of licenses that creators can put on their images. Some of them make them free to use, re-create, or share as you wish, while others are more restrictive. Creative Commons is one of several non-profits that provide less restricted licenses for creators to use, and house a large database of the materials that use the licenses ("What We Do," 2020). Some of these materials need to be attributed, while others do not. You should always check on the individual license to be sure!

This image is free to use and share, but I have to link to its author and license to be compliant with the Creative Commons license.

  

This little hedgehog image has been released to the public domain. No attribution needed!

Well that seems like a good place to end. Thanks for reading!

References

8 Reasons Why Prezi Is Not Recommended For Teaching. (n.d.). Retrieved September 04, 2020, from https://www.brown.edu/sheridan/teaching-learning-resources/teaching-resources/course-design/enhancing-student-learning-technology/prezi 

Accessibility of Google Slides. (2020, February 26). Retrieved September 04, 2020, from https://oit.colorado.edu/services/messaging-collaboration/gsuite/accessibility/slides

Accessibility within Canvas. (2015, April 7). Retrieved September 04, 2020, from https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Accessibility/Accessibility-within-Canvas/ba-p/261501 

Burgstahler, S. (2017, January 30). ADA Compliance for Online Course Design. Retrieved September 03, 2020, from https://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/1/ada-compliance-for-online-course-design

Copyright in General. (n.d.). Retrieved September 08, 2020, from https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html 

Leduc, J. (2020, January 09). Are Transcripts Enough to Make Videos Compliant with Accessibility Law? Retrieved September 04, 2020, from https://www.3playmedia.com/2020/01/08/transcript-video-accessibility-compliance/ 

Rabidoux, S., & Rottmann, A. (2017, May 3). 5 Tips for ADA-Compliant Inclusive Design. Retrieved September 03, 2020, from https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2017/05/03/tips-designing-ada-compliant-online-courses 

What We Do. (2020, August). Retrieved September 08, 2020, from https://creativecommons.org/about/