Disability Awareness
Last Updated: October 2012
Ryerson University is committed to creating an accessible and inclusive community for teaching and learning, and supports equal access for people with disabilities. On this page, the Learning & Teaching Office has highlighted resources for both faculty and students. We hope this information will help break down the barriers standing between students with disabilities and higher education opportunities.
Related LTO pages:
Diversity and Inclusive Teaching
Universal Instructional Design
Table of Contents
For Faculty Working with Students with Disabilities
Teaching at Ryerson
Tips and Strategies for Teaching Students with Disabilities
- Teaching Tip: Seven Principles of Universal Instructional Design.
The Access Centre. Ryerson University.
- Understanding Additional Learning Needs and Disabilities
Bournemouth University
- Helpful Tips for Faculty .
Office for Persons with Disabilities. University of Waterloo.
This page contains information aimed at helping faculty work with students with a variety of disabilities. Each section of the page has information built around a specific disability, from mobility issues to traumatic brain injury.
- Information for Faculty: Instructional Oversight
Accessible Education Office. Harvard University.
Contains strategies to consider when contemplating accessibility and the importance of establishing essential components of courses and curriculum.
- Creating an Inclusive Course & Classroom: Strategies for Instructors
Accessibility Services. University of Toronto.
- Accommodating Students with Disabilities: Guidelines for Faculty
Library Services for Students with Disabilities. Queen's University.
This set of guidelines contains instructional strategies for accommodating students with various disabilities, with suggestions for communication, technological, assignment and examinations accommodations.
- Faculty Resource Guide: Teaching Students with Disabilities
York University.
- Faculty Handbook [pdf]
Office of Services for Students with Disabilities. Division of Student Affairs. University of Michigan. 2008.
This detailed guide lists critical ways faculty can support students with disabilities, covering everything from how to handle field trips to adaptive computing. The University of Michigan's CRLT has also published a relevant Occasional Paper entitled Making Accommodations for Students with Disabilities: A Guide for Faculty and Graduate Student Instructors [pdf].
- Handbook for Tutors: Understanding and Assisting Students with Learning Disabilities
Learning Disabilities Program. Office for Students with Disabilities. UCLA.
- A Faculty Handbook to Accommodating Students with DisABILITIES
University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Starting with "The Accommodation Process," this page contains helpful tips for assisting students with disabilities.
- Working Together: Faculty Strategies for Helping Students with Disabilities, Suggestions for the Classroom, Laboratory, Examinations, and Fieldwork [doc]
American Federation of Teachers-Local 1796. William Paterson University.
- Including Disability as Diversity in Teaching
CIDR Teaching and Learning Bulletin. Vol.8(2). Center for Instructional Development and Research. University of Washington. 2005.
"While the idea of the blind leading the blind is often equated with futility, in the quote above, Brenda Brueggemann argues that the insight of disability can lead us to rethink our classrooms in ways that benefit all students and instructors. Disability is already in our lives and in our classrooms, and including disability as diversity in teaching means creating an accessible teaching environment where all students can succeed."
For Students with Disabilities
Learning at Ryerson
Study Tips and Strategies for Students with Disabilities
Disability Awareness
Accessibility
Assistive Technology
- Blackboard Support: Making Your Blackboard Course Resources Accessible
Computing & Communications Services. Ryerson University.
- Adaptive Technology Available at Ryerson
The Access Centre. Ryerson University.
- Accessible Digital Office Document (ADOD) Project
"The Inclusive Design Research Centre, in partnership with UNESCO and the Government of Ontario, has developed consolidated and publicly-reviewed guidance to help ensure the accessibility of office documents and the office applications with which they are created."
- Writing Effective Image Descriptions for Course Content.
This presentation is also available in PowerPoint, with additional information in the notes field (courtesy of Danielle Landry, School of Disability Studies)
- Access eLearning Tutorial
Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access. Georgia Institute of Technology.
Use this tutorial to learn how to make fully accessible PowerPoint slides, video, Flash, Word documents, Excel documents, PDFs, and Java scripts.
- "How to Create Accessible Documents" by George Williams. Chronicle of Higher Education.
- Creating Accessible Documents
North Carolina State University.
Tutorials for creating accessible web pages, Word documents, PDFs, presentations, and forms.
- Accessibility@Adobe, Adobe TV [video]
This video series provides lengthy tutorials explaining how to create accessible documents using Adobe products. Some examples:
- Fact Sheets on Accessible Distance Education
GRADE Project. Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access. Georgia Institute of Technology.
Learn to make your PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, Word documents, email, HTML and CSS accessible.
- Barriers, Assistive Technologies & Alternative Access Strategies
University of Florida.
This site provides a description of assistive technologies, including text-only browsers, screen readers, screen enlargers, speech recognition, captions, and adapted keyboards.
- A List of Assistive Technology Products
Learning Assistance Centre. Lakehead University.
- Special Needs Ontario Window (SNOW) and the Inclusive Design Research Centre
Ontario College of Art and Design University.
- Assistive Device Companies
Information & Communications Technologies. Industry Canada.
- Adaptech
Dawson College.
Web Accessibility
- Web Accessibility and Web Usability
Digital Media Projects Office. Ryerson University.
- WAVE: A Free Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
Provided by WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind).
Enter the URL of the Web page you want to evaluate. WAVE shows the original web page with embedded icons and indicators that reveal any accessibility issues with your page.
- Evaluating Web Sites for Accessibility: Overview
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0
"Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your Web content more usable to users in general."
- Accessible Web Design
University of Florida.
Covers color, flicker rate, screen refresh, fonts, alt text, extended descriptions, auditory elements, and equivalent alternative for text.
- Designing More Usable Web Sites
The TRACE Research & Development Center. University of Wisconsin.
- Universal Web Design
Office for Persons with Disabilities. University of Waterloo.
Organizations and Associations for People with Disabilities
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