What is Universal Design?
Universal design is a better concept than accessibility when designing courses. The law requires that our courses are accessible. This means we have to build courses that are usable for people with disabilities. Universal design means that we design courses that are the most useful to the most different types of people. So, we consider disabilities but also primary language, learning preferences, and how students may be accessing our content. This framework will make our courses more user friendly to all students.
In NCSU’s Introduction to Universal Design, NCSU defines the term as “a design concept that recognizes, respects, values and attempts to accommodate the broadest possible spectrum of human ability in the design of all products, environments and information systems.” They identify 7 components of Universal Design:
- Equitable – the design is equally useful to people with diverse abilities.
- Flexible – the design supports differing abilities.
- Simple – the design is intuitive.
- Perceptible – the design offers material in multiple modalities.
- Tolerance for error – the design minimizes possibilities for predictable errors.
- Effortless – the design minimizes repetitive actions.
- Spacious – the design includes appropriate room for users.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
Educators took the principles behind universal design and applied them to learning. There are three dimensions to UDL and they are all about giving students options:
Universal Design for Learning Guidelines Text for use with a screenreader
Universal Design for Learning Guidelines graphic PDF
Graphic provided by UDL on Campus
Another Dimension of UDL
Accessibility is implied throughout the UDL guidelines, most specifically in the guidelines for representation. UDL allows us to think about accessibility as more than just creating accessible PDFs and providing captioning, but rather as the learning experience we are providing for our students. At first, this may sound like science fiction, but re-imagining your class can lead to a more engaged experience for you and your students. You could, in essence, boldly go where no one has gone before! Here’s a short video summarizing the main points of UDL:
Workshop Recordings:
Video: Universal Design (Links to an external site.)
Attributions – adapted from the following:
Curb Cuts and Universal Design, This work is a derivative of @ONE Creating Accessible Course Content by @ONE (Online Network of Educators) is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license and is made possible through funding from the California Community College Chancellor’s Office.
Universal Design for Learning, This work is a derivative of @ONE Creating Accessible Course Content by @ONE (Online Network of Educators) is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license and is made possible through funding from the California Community College Chancellor’s Office.