General Tips for Faculty

I'd like to take this opportunity to just make a few general comments about Blackboard and ways to minimize some of it's problems. You've already seen that the blind student has to tab-tab-tab-tab. That there's so many choices and options that it gets bewildering. It's fairly easy for me now sort of knowing what the overview is, but for a blind person approaching a web page like this, it's really the blind man and the elephant. You get hold of a little piece at a time. YOU look at a whole screen and get the gestalt, and then you focus on the pieces. I say, "Oh this looks like a tail... Oh this looks like a leg... a tusk... a trunk. An Elephant!" (laughter) And then I can start making sense out of it.

What can you do? In designing a course you have the possibility of having several features that Blackboard permits you to have: chat room, whiteboard, syllabus, course materials, documents, external links, and I don't know what all... announcements. I don't remember the total list. And I think a lot of the advice I'm going to give is good for not disabled students too. But the... Figure out the fewest amount of features you can use, the fewest possible and still be efficient and do a good job and clean the rest out.

You know, they say that consistency is the tool of small brains or something; I've forgotten the exact quote. (laughter) Don't believe it. Ah, it takes intelligence to be really organized and consistent. So that I really urge you to be consistent in where you post things, under which heading. Follow through in a normal way, a standard way all through the course. So when a student wants something, he knows where to go to look for it. And the more you have the same format and consistency in other courses or other pages you go to, it really makes things a lot easier. And here I speak not only for people who are blind like myself, clearly that's very useful for people with various kinds of dyslexia, cognitive processing disabilities, and you know what? The typical student's going to have a lot easier time the more you are consistent and clear in what you do.

We like in the disability community, we like to talk about electronic curb cuts. Curb cuts are those things in the sidewalk that are made for people in wheelchairs. 99% of the time they are used by people on bicycles, strollers. So that things done for somebody with a disability, turn out to help other people. So, the clearer you make your course for people like me, the better you're going to make it for all your students.