Making Media Accessible: What are Faculty Teaching?

• In Event: Interactive Media & Emerging Technologies - Research Presentations

Abstract

In 2018, Youngblood, Tirumala, and Galvez called for accessibility to be incorporated into the media curriculum, including both lecture-and production-based courses. Around 61 million adults or about 26% of the adult population in the United States live with some form of disability. Over 12% of American adults have a cognition disability, almost 6% have a significant hearing loss, and 5% of American Adults are blind or have serious difficulty seeing. Access technologies like screen-readers, alt-tags for images, closed captions, audio descriptions, etc., are regularly used by people with disabilities to interface with the digital world.,The current study uses a survey to investigate how and if media faculty are integrating accessibility into their teaching practices as well as their knowledge of and attitude toward accessibility. From a course perspective, we focus particularly on production courses such as courses on web design, audio production, and video production. This study addresses the research questions using a survey design to learn about the media faculty’s understanding of accessibility issues, and whether they teach students to create accessible content in media production classes.

Authors

• Lakshmi Tirumala, Drake University

• Ed Youngblood, Auburn University

• Robin Haislett, Weber State University