Members from the Centre for Accessible Learning (CAL) and the Dr. Lloyd Morin Centre for Excellence in Teaching & Learning (CETL) want to acknowledge the curiosity, dedication, persistence and effort of individual faculty members over the past year to make course materials and course delivery more accessible for their students.
This Year's Recipients
We recognize that faculty workload is already substantial and we feel that making accessibility a priority needs to be acknowledged and celebrated! Based on the observations and recommendations of CAL and CETL, the 14 recipients of the first Accessibility Recognition Certificates are:
Chris Avis (Physics) & Kristina Andrew (CETL):
Digital accessibility of equations in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) disciplines is a notoriously difficult undertaking. In collaboration with Kristina, Chris applied significant effort to making a first-year Physics course as accessible as possible. In doing so, Chris and Kristina elevated our collective understanding of what is involved in presenting digital formulae that are accessible using assistive technologies, including the technical barriers and challenges instructors encounter trying to achieve this goal.
Chedo Barone (Mathematics & Statistics):
Chedo has worked extensively with CAL, and students continuously provide feedback about his flexibility, kindness and supportiveness. UDL (Universal Design for Learning) is at the centre of all Chedo’s design decisions; he is committed to creating a student-centred learning environment by removing unnecessary barriers for all students.
Allison Betton (Management & HR Leadership):
Allison incorporated new responsive HTML templates to ensure students could access course materials on their preferred devices and she incorporated ALT (alternative) text for all images on lecture webpages. All content webpages in Allison’s BUS 312 course site now have a perfect (100%) ALLY score.
Anastasia Butcher (Community Family Child Studies):
Anastasia evaluates her course design and delivery from a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) lens, including elements like due dates, documentation, group work, and class meeting format, asking herself what barriers might exist for her students and how she can remove them. Over the past year, she updated all assignment instruction documents to comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) standards, collaborated with CETL and liaison librarians to ensure accurate closed captioning for course videos, and created a master course for other instructors to adopt her accessibility improvements.
Jas Dhillon (Applied Business Technology):
Regardless of whether she is teaching on campus or delivering online course content, Jas continuously ensures that appropriate accommodations and accessibility are in place, especially for assessments/exams. Jas is able to troubleshoot the most complex of issues in a manner that instills confidence and calm with both students and staff.
Aidan Dumaisnil (Management & HR Leadership):
Aidan conducted a comprehensive audit of her course, identifying potential accessibility issues, and then sought out training and engaged in extensive self-study to implement the necessary changes. She implemented revisions that led to a significant increase in the ALLY score of her BUS course site, taking it from 60% to 90%.
Bev Lenihan (Psychology):
Bev puts a high priority on making sure the digital content in her Psychology courses meets the standards articulated by Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1). Her D2L Brightspace course sites all have high overall accessibility scores, and Bev continues to work on improving the technical accessibility of her course materials. She launched ALLY’s “instructor feedback” function more than any other instructor this year – and made more accessibility-related fixes on her files than any other instructor too.
Jen Giuliani (Biology):
Jen has worked extensively with CAL, and consistently goes above and beyond in encouraging students and furthering their access to supports.
Jenny Holder (Community Family Child Studies):
Jenny worked with the Multilingual Student Support (MSS) team and CETL to revise the assignment instructions, webpages, and course navigation in all her courses to address navigation barriers and ensure a consistent design and delivery across her program courses.
Frank Jankunis (Philosophy):
Frank’s curiosity and persistence in needing to understand how to make OCR’ed (Optical Character Recognition) PDF files in his courses more accessible generated a focused discussion in the Accessible Education Community of Practice, and prompted the development of a new workshop to help other faculty and staff learn more about the hard work of tagging PDF files to improve their accessibility for students using assistive technologies.
Sonja Kennedy (Management & HR Leadership):
Sonja converted a major three-part assignment into accessible, tagged and fillable PDF forms, as well as updated all course videos and webpages into a more accessible format. She intentionally seeks out student feedback on potential accessibility barriers in her course and connects students with appropriate services (e.g., CAL) to facilitate their success.
brad muir (Visual Arts):
brad demonstrates consistent leadership in supporting student access in his Visual Arts courses and the department. While maintaining a UDL (Universal Design for Learning) focus, he has also collaborated extensively with CAL to implement specialized supports for students.
Dwayne Pettyjohn (Associate Dean, Health & Human Services):
Dwayne has provided consistent leadership, coordination and supports to both students and faculty where complex academic accommodations are needed in clinical health education.