Accessible Summer Updates
Josh Kaufman, M.Ed
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. No, I don’t mean the holidays, I mean the season where we look to the warmer times and plan for our summer overhauls. And that means planning for what we’re going to add. Of course, this year is very different and as a result, right now we’re still finalizing our plans for the winter break overhaul we’re doing before we can move on to the summer overhauls so I want to instead look at the areas that can be addressed easily during overhauls to improve accessibility.
At the schools where I’ve worked, all in the Northeast, we basically had two types of room overhaul tech only and full room. Unfortunately, in most cases, the accessibility that was added in these rooms was either an afterthought (like adding back the same ALS unit that had been in a previous space) or was done only because the law required an overhaul to include it. This isn’t the fault of the schools, mind you, it was the fault of the law which is broadly written and hasn’t been updated to reflect the changes of accessible technology which have come about since its introduction in 1991. Instead, the requirements still century on accessibility to be added on an as-needed basis, things like loaned out ALS unit and asking fellow students to provide copies of their notes to others who have a disability. The process for obtaining these accommodations is similarly byzantine, requiring students to have proof of a disability, provide that to the university disability office while requesting an accommodation, and finally hand the professor a request for the accommodation provided by the disability office. I’ve been that student, and it’s not easy or pleasant, you feel singled out for being who you are, for being different. In recent years, cases have popped up where faculty take pleasure in denying requests for accommodations that they feel aren’t legitimate, particularly for extra time on exams or to accommodate students with so-called “invisible disabilities.”
So, what does this have to do with summer overhaul season, you may be thinking? Why is Josh giving me a condensed guided tour of academic accommodations? Well, I’ll tell you. During overhaul season is the second-best time to make classrooms accessible, and I don’t mean by adding wider doorways or installing ramps instead of stairs (though those are good too and your school probably should,) No, what I mean is now is the time to start thinking in terms of universal design and universal design for learning.
I’m not going to bore you with an explanation of these principles, suffice to say what I’m talking about is our job is to make our rooms as usable as possible, to the largest number of users as possible. We can’t be satisfied anymore by meeting needs reactively, instead, we need to proactively design the rooms to be accessible. So, here’s my thought, as we consider how to overhaul our classrooms in the summer: look at what accommodations are commonly granted and look at how we can make those built-in and available to everyone. While this isn’t historically an AV job, AV tools are an important component.
So, after all that, here’s what I recommend. As we prepare for room overhauls, we need to look beyond just the AV or the building of the room. We need to engage with our campus disability offices and look at what they offer. At the same time, we need to work with faculty leadership on making lecture capture mandatory for faculty and requiring that the videos be posted to the learning management system. Finally, there are simple modifications we can make to make our classrooms more accessible without making major changes. Microsoft PowerPoint, for example, has a built-in caption tool and by feeding the room audio into the computer, faculty can caption their lectures easily and without requiring the hiring of outside captioning contractors.
At the end of the day, there is a lot to think about when reconfiguring and upgrading classrooms to make them universally accessible. Some of it is cheap, like adding captioning via PowerPoint, and some of it is long term and in-depth. However, we’re all responsible for making sure that our students can benefit from their lessons and as such, we need to look beyond our traditional AV toolkit to do it.
Get to Know Josh Kaufman
Josh Kaufman has spent his entire career in higher ed AV, starting as a student employee at Boston University where he worked for seven years and later moving on to Harvard University where he was the assistant director. He is currently the Operations Coordinator and R&D coordinator at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. He holds a masters in instructional design from the University of Massachusetts as well as two graduate certificates in instructional technology and instructional technology design.
Josh has presented at NWMET in 2019 on the application of Universal Design to AV in order to increase accessibility, as well as at HETMA’s virtual conference in June and at EdSpaces 2020 in November. He had been slated to present at Infocomm 2020 prior to its cancelation on the same topic.
In his spare time, Josh enjoys attending NCAA hockey games, exploring the historic sites of New England, traveling, and spending time with family and friends.