Tuesday, July 30, 2024, 2:45 PM - 3:30 PM CDT
Since 2019, The Center for Distance Education at Mississippi State University has led multiple efforts to increase awareness of and compliance with WCAG standards for online courses. While our primary efforts were intended to provide information and support to faculty teaching online courses, many of our offerings were attended by faculty teaching either both face-to-face and online or only face-to-face courses.
Unexpectedly, many of the face-to-face faculty took multiple iterations of trainings, attended multiple talks, and overall, took a much deeper interest in accessibility across the board, not just online. Then they took it a step further; they got funding. Specifically, these face-to-face faculty secured grant funding for equipment meant to assist in better accessibility for graph understanding, which was then donated to the use of the entire student body and is still in use today for multiple disciplines across campus.
The goal of this presentation is to showcase how efforts tailored to an online audience were taken in new, and awesome, directions, and how we have since modified our efforts to talk about course accessibility as more than just “an online thing.”