Scheduled at 11:15 am in Independence on Thursday, November 14.
#39512Speaker(s)
- Bruce Walker, Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
- Bella Martincic, PhD Student, Georgia Institute of Technology
- Norah Sinclair, Information and Instructional Designer, Georgia Institute of Technology
Session Details
- Length of Session: 1-hr
- Format: Lecture
- Expertise Level: All Levels
- Type of session: General Conference
Summary
AccessCORPS is a campus organization that trains students to make courses and course materials accessible to learners with cognitive, sensory, and physical disabilities. AccessCORPS leverages training, remediation, research, and outreach to strive for equitable access to higher education. Through our novel process for assessing and remediating course materials, our in-house training program, and our strategy of distributing the work, we are impacting our own, and other, academic communities.
Abstract
AccessCORPS is organization that works alongside the Office of Disability Services and other accessibility advocacy groups on the Georgia Tech campus. AccessCORPS is run by students and faculty who work together to expand access to higher education for those who have physical, perceptual, and cognitive impairments. Specifically, AccessCORPS trains students, from all majors and disciplines, to assess course materials for accessibility. AccessCORPS team members then work with (or on behalf of) instructors to remediate and improve the accessibility of documents, slides, websites, and other materials used for instruction. To accomplish this, AccessCORPS has developed unique training, onboarding, and project management methods specifically for remediating entire courses. Moreover, AccessCORPS engages in research, advocacy, and outreach both within and beyond the university.
AccessCORPS was designed in response to the need for more accessible courses, as well as the unanswered needs and support for students with disabilities on our campus. AccessCORPS is fundamentally built on research, training, remediation, and outreach. We diligently work to train our members in the knowledge and skills necessary to successfully carry out our mission. Examples of our curated curriculum includes understanding accessibility features and technology, as well as hands-on skills for remediating Word Documents, Powerpoint slide decks, PDFs, images, math content, graphs and charts, maps, and more. We also aim to create awareness of our services across campus, and bring in potential collaborators and individuals who want to get involved.
Overall, we are close to replicating our process in local chapters at other schools; including packaging up our curated training materials, finalizing our credentialing and branding process, and conducting research to further support our methods and processes. AccessCORPS is intended to be replicated and scaled to all academic settings locally and globally.
Keypoints
- Awareness of the AccessCORPS model for improving access to higher education
- Understanding the pillars and key components of AccessCORPS and how it functions
- Ideas on how to bring AccessCORPS to your organization and increase accessibility in higher education
Disability Areas
All Areas
Topic Areas
Accessible Course Design, Alternate Format, Artificial Intelligence, Assistive Technology, Captioning/Transcription, Faculty Development & Support, Legal, Teaching about Accessibility in Curriculum, Uncategorized, Web/Media/App Access
Speaker Bio(s)
Bruce Walker
Bruce Walker’s Sonification Lab studies human-computer interaction (HCI) in non-traditional interfaces, such as mobile devices, cockpits, vehicle displays, and multimodal interfaces in education. Particular interests include sonification and auditory displays, which are highly useful for persons living with vision impairment. This has led to decades of work on assistive technology, especially for education. Dr. Walker is passionate about making schools and educational materials more accessible for all learners. Professor Walker teaches HCI, Research Methods, Sensation & Perception, and Assistive Technology. He has over 250 publications, and has worked on projects for NASA, state and federal governments, the military, and private companies.
Bella Martincic
Bella is a first year PhD student at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Bella’s research interests are interdisciplinary include in intersections of psychology, technology, accessibility, education, and art. While she is establishing her specific area of research, she is currently working on projects related to multimodal graphs for blind and visually impaired students and tackling issues related to accessibility in higher education.
Norah Sinclair
Norah Sinclair is an instructional designer, user support specialist and content developer at the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation at Georgia Institute of Technology. She was a content contributor and instructional designer for the Georgia Tech Massive Open Online Course, Information and Communication Technology Accessibility, ICT100X on edX.org and has contributed to the Web Accessibility Group and the AccessGA initiative which seeks to improve the accessibility of the websites of the state agencies of Georgia, through trainings, webinars, and technical assistance. She has provided trainings on document accessibility to Georgia Tech staff, web developers, disability service providers, and staff of the University System of Georgia, and as a part of the Center for Accessible Material Innovation, CAMI and as a member of the Rhonda Weiss Center for Accessible IDEA Data. She was the lead content developer and instructional designer for Inclusive and Accessible Course Design, a course for Georgia Tech faculty and she has provided training on assistive technology software to college students with print related disabilities. Norah is co-facilitator of the Georgia Tech Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) AccessCORPS whose mission is to train students in accessibility to assist in making college courses inclusive and accessible for all students including students with disabilities.