Attend Events and View Recordings

The University of Minnesota gathered in celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day on May 19, 2022.

Do you think about student success, and what we might be doing to reduce that success? Khaled Musa will introduce the topic by illustrating the different ways inaccessibility impacts academic success, and Angela Carter from MN Transform will describe how people experience disability on campus and the role of the Disability Resource Center (DRC).

This presentation will provide instructors and students with strategies to improve engagement and accessibility in college coursework. Through Universal Design for Learning, barriers to traditional instruction are broken down, and instructors build learning activities that provide multiple means of engagement, representation of content, and methods to demonstrate and assess student understanding.

How to present data in an inclusive and accessible manner has been a session request for a while. Unfortunately, it has proven difficult to find speakers with experience in this area. Thankfully, this month we are joined by Neha Bansal, senior director of application development in the Office of Information Technology, to discuss accessibility in data visualization.

Videos and teleconferencing are part of everyone’s daily life in a (nearly!) post-pandemic world. But videos by themselves often leave a large gap for those who do not rely on hearing to communicate, or who otherwise have difficulty interpreting speech. This month we welcome back accessibility ambassador Amanda Ryan, academic technologist at the Institute on Community Integration, to share her knowledge of captioning. 

When discussing accessibility, digital or otherwise, there are a lot of things to consider—legal compliance, technical needs, standards, etc. However, at its very core, accessibility is about people. The reason that accessibility is important is because of the people who are affected by inaccessible content.

On April 29, we were very fortunate to have a group of University of Minnesota students who identify as people with disabilities who were willing to discuss their experiences and share how inaccessibility affects them in their lives, careers, and education.