Three student stories: Ben, Sam, and Morgan.

They’re among the 1 in 5 American undergraduates who have disabilities (NCES 1). But you may have never heard their stories, because 65% of these students don’t ever inform their college (NCES 2).

Ben is a rising senior, majoring in history. He was born with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease causing tunnel vision (loss of peripheral vision) and night blindness. He also has dyslexia, making the mechanics of reading and writing more onerous than for his peers. Ben had a couple of classes this year where he knew he only succeeded by making exceptional effort to access materials that were effortlessly available to his classmates. As his vision is deteriorating, Ben’s decided this year is the time to officially seek accommodations, so he can focus his energy on his senior research project. He’s really hoping for a senior year that will let him devote himself 100% to his intellectual passions, and even enjoy some sun on the quad, rather than spending hours every week in debilitating pain from squinting at scanned-paper PDFs.

Sam, a first-year, is thriving on the energy of campus life. They were diagnosed with ADHD as a kid, and they’ve always managed it on their own, relying on their meds, caffeine and adrenaline to power through. But this semester, their usual coping mechanisms are starting to fail, especially as the worldwide ADHD medication shortages continue. Their classes happen to be almost all lecture-based, and during class invariably Sam’s mind is racing through a whirlwind of thoughts – song lyrics, the buzzing fluorescent lights, the unfinished to-do list on their phone… They fidget restlessly, tapping their pen and bouncing their leg, unable to focus on the lecture despite their best intentions. Sam knows they need to pay attention, but the words seem to slip through their grasp like sand; they try to take notes, but their to-do list keeps invading their thoughts before they can finish a sentence. When their professor asks a question, Sam’s heart pounds as they realize they have no idea what’s going on. They increasingly feel waves of self-doubt – can they get the accommodations they had in high school to help them live up to their previous academic performance?

Morgan is a chemistry major and stand-out sophomore defensive midfielder on the women’s soccer team. During last week’s match against Amherst, Morgan collided with another player and was diagnosed with a concussion. Despite her attempts to push past it, her symptoms of headaches, dizziness, inability to sustain focus, and light sensitivity have been making it almost impossible for her to keep up with the pace of her labs and lectures, and with midterms on the horizon, she’s deeply worried that this disability, while temporary, is coming at exactly the worst time for her. Her doctor has advised that she avoid all screens for at least another month. While she knows her professors are sympathetic, she feels ashamed to ask for help, and she’s not sure that they’d have time, at this point in the semester, to do anything that would help her anyway.

One faculty story: you.

You’re excited to be teaching your research seminar again this term. You’ve been teaching this course for five years, constantly refining your lectures, assignments, and multimedia online resources. You pride yourself on creating an engaging and informative experience for all your students, and you’ve received feedback from students to that effect. 

As you scan your inbox on the first day of classes, you see emails informing you that two of your enrolled students, Ben and Sam, have disability accommodations. You feel conflicted: you certainly want to provide a fair and supportive learning environment for all your students, but you also know your course materials are extensive and not exactly designed with accessibility in mind. A wave of anxiety washes over you as you think about the sheer volume of materials you’ve already created. Most of your readings are scanned PDFs of journal articles, and your extensive collection of videos has never been captioned. Your quizzes use a software platform that you don’t really know how to modify as these students need. And you’ve never really paid much attention to the “structure” of your GLOW course – it’s a collection of links that’s grown organically over the years. Some of your colleagues have advice about how to do the bare minimum that’s legally required, but you feel uncomfortable with that idea: you understand that your students aren’t asking for special treatment. But you definitely feel overwhelmed at the prospect of simultaneously accommodating students with different sets of needs, especially since you need to finalize your tenure application portfolio this semester.

Even though Ben and Sam notified you on Day 1, it’s been time-consuming and tedious to constantly “retrofit” materials throughout the semester. The amount of assigned readings has meant that they get their texts 4 or 5 days later than their classmates. This cascades, so you’ve been adjusting due dates for them throughout the semester, which in turn has impacted their ability to participate in group discussions, as well as your own schedule of grading… Even with your own best intentions, the logistics of after-the-fact accommodation have meant that they’ve ended up with a delayed, frustrating, and inferior academic experience. Not to mention the additional crunch when you find out about Morgan at mid-semester…!

Thankfully, you have much more sustainable options to support equity for the 20% of your students like Ben, Sam, and Morgan, without setting yourself up for case-by-case frustration. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) provides a range of equitable strategies to incorporate into your teaching materials and practices from the start. When students take a course you build with UDL, they may never even need to enforce a disability accommodation at all.

Below are 7 specific practices (and Williams College resources) you can easily begin to incorporate into your course design. Want more? Check out OIT’s Guide to Creating Accessible Digital Materials.

Eight UDL practices (and resources).

Looking for quick, just-in-time practices that are meaningful, yet don’t demand loads of preparation?

1. Activate automatic captions in your slide decks. They’re built-in, in both Google Slides and Microsoft PowerPoint. Learn how with OIT’s slide captions guide.
2. Create documents with real structure. Use the built-in tools for headers, lists, tables, and readable links whenever you’re in Google Docs, Word, or GLOW.
3. Give a text description to every non-text item (image, video, audio). Adding “alt-text” to images is a breeze, whether you’re in GLOW, Google, or almost any other platform. Panopto auto-generates captions (which you can easily edit as needed). The OpenVINO plugin for Audacity creates transcripts for audio.
   • Pro tip! Pressed for time? “Crowd-sourcing” captions can help mitigate the workload, and deepen students’ engagement with your materials, simultaneously.

Planning ahead? Consider some bigger-picture changes you could implement in advance of a semester, with long-term impact:

1. Pair flexibility with structure. For example: In a multi-step project, you can build multiple deadlines/check-ins (leveraging GLOW features), and provide a standard “extension request” (e.g. with Google Forms) to help students, and you, handle catch-up work without undue stress.
2. Avoid (or convert) scanned-paper PDFs. For example: Ask your department’s Liaison Librarian to help source “born-digital” versions of readings; or, use Adobe Acrobat Pro to perform optical character recognition (OCR) on your scanned PDFs.
3. Design alternatives intentionally. For example: In assignments where students can demonstrate learning in different ways, make a choice of modes the default expectation, rather than “typed text…unless as a special exception”.
   • As a corollary: Consider using multiple media types (e.g., podcasts) throughout your own materials (always keeping in mind transcripts and captions).
4. Embrace the physical. For example: Collaborate with the Williams Makerspace to 3D print physical models for in-depth, tactile engagement. Lots of students benefit from physically manipulating objects.
5. Support student ease with vocabulary. For example: provide students with important vocabulary ahead of time, and consider using graphical representations of concepts and key terms. 

The story of next semester.

You’re feeling great, having submitted your tenure application portfolio (and, in other news, just gotten notified that your most recent article has been accepted for publication). As you check your email before heading to your first class, you see a note from a student, Jae, letting you know that they’ll need some accommodations due to complications from Long COVID. 

You take a deep breath… and thank your past self for all the thoughtful work you put into applying UDL to your course materials during the semester break! You know Jae’s specific needs will be different, but you also know that you’ve already broken down significant barriers in advance. Even if Jae’s accommodations require some different strategies or approaches, you feel confident that you know who to reach out to for support in meeting Jae’s needs. You’ve already practiced incorporating UDL into your approach, so you know you are ready to do it again.