Accessibility in Action

​I completed another professional development course on LinkedIn Learning called, Foundations of Accessible Elearning.  It was an excellent course that gave practical guidelines for supporting learners with disabilities.  The course covered the most common disabilities and provided simple and effective ways to adjust curriculum to meet the needs of learners with those disabilities.  It helped to refresh my understanding of important ways to make learning accessible. I was reminded of one of my first assignments in my Master’s program where I had to design a keyboard for a person who was paralyzed below the neck. 

In one of my last observations at Girls Who Code, I was able to witness a wonderful lesson on Accessibility in Game Design that was created and taught by one of my teaching team’s lead TAs.  It was such a well-designed lesson and the students really came away understanding principles of accessibility.  The lesson was Barbie-themed.  Students were first led through a lesson where they were taught some of the key principles of accessibility and shown examples in game design.  They then had to critique examples of poor accessibility design.  Finally in groups they were challenge to create Barbie and Ken posters that demonstrated good and bad use of accessibility features.  There were four groups total, two were tasked with making a poster with good design and two with bad design.  Then the class voted on the best poster.  The students had a blast!

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