The session will discuss a cross-departmental initiative supported by state, system, and institutional stakeholders at a four-year institution to implement the Accessible Syllabus Project, lessons learned, compliance improvement data, and demonstrate related tools and resources.
Increasingly, faculty continue to employ digital course materials. As a result, institutions are struggling to engage institutional stakeholders in addressing challenges related to ensuring digital course materials are accessible. Challenges include identifying institutional stakeholders who can provide support, lack of resources, and addressing resistance related to increased workload to ensure digital course materials are accessible.
To address challenges with developing and employing accessible digital course materials, a partnership of state, system and institutional stakeholders was created. The partnership resulted in the Accessible Syllabus Project, a highly focused initiative. The goal of this initiative was to train institutional stakeholders to assist faculty in evaluating and developing accessible, digital syllabi. Digital syllabi were selected for this project as it is usually the first instructional material in any course to be distributed to students.
The Accessible Syllabus Project yielded big gains across one 4-year institution. Digital syllabi accessibility rates among individual departments more than doubled from Fall 2016 to Spring 2017 according to aggregated compliance data. Additionally, bigger gains of this initiative were indicated by positive faculty feedback and a rise in awareness of accessibility issues among faculty. This session discusses details of this initiative, lessons learned, and showcases compliance improvement data across departments.