This workshop will introduce participants to the guidelines of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and will share practical strategies for designing accessible teaching materials, with a focus on visual and material culture. Topics will include offering multiple avenues for accessing visual information, developing alternative text for images, and varying opportunities for direct engagement with artworks and museums. This workshop will also consider how much of the discourse surrounding viewership and audience of visual materials often assumes able-bodied and neurotypical subjectivity without accounting for alternative experiences of these media.

This workshop took place via Zoom in Spring 2023. The workshop and materials were developed by Molly Bauer, Pedro Cabello del Moral and Luke Waltzer.

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Materials

All materials on this page and in the linked google folder are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 4.0 International Public License.

This folder contains outreach materials, workshop agenda, handouts and slides.

Materials Folder: Accessibility & Visual Culture [Public]

Agenda 

4:00-4:20 | Welcome

• Getting Started
  • Please update your Zoom name to include your name and pronouns, and post your discipline and a recent or upcoming course you’re teaching in the chat
• Opening Activity: Free Write (see below)
• Workshop Goals

4:20 – 4:30 | Introduction to UDL

• Guiding Principles of UDL
• What is UDL?
• UDL Best Practices
  • Lectures, Assignments, Exams, Syllabi, Classroom Policies
• UDL Guidelines Handout
• Guiding Questions from UDL

4:30 – 4:45 | Activity: Padlet

• Think about your own teaching. Are there components that already embody the ideas of UDL? How?
• Are there any interventions from UDL that you think you could easily employ in your class to make it more accessible?

4:45 – 5:00 | Accessibility & Visual Culture

• Challenges to teaching visual and material culture
• Strategies for making visual media more accessible
• How can we talk about accessibility in the classroom?
• What structures can we put in place to make learning about visual media more accessible?

5:00 – 5:25 | Activity: Break-out Rooms

• Collectively practice writing alt-text for different forms of visual media
  • Alt-Text Practice (see below)
  • Resource for best Alt Text practices: University of South Carolina

5:25 – 5:30 | Q&A and Exit Slip 

Resources

Free Write Exercise

Select one of these two art works and think about the following: How would you engage with this artwork? How do you think your students would engage with it? Is there a difference in these two viewerships?

Padlet

Respond to the following questions:

• Think about your own teaching. Are there components that already embody the ideas of UDL? How?
• Are there any interventions from UDL that you think you could easily employ in your class to make it more accessible?

Alt-Text Practice 

	Photomontage of The American Way of Life’s series by Josep Renau (1949-1976)
	Martha Rosler, Cleaning the Drapes (1969-1972) from the series House Beautiful. Bringing the War Home
	Gerda Taro, Republican Militia Women Training on the Beach Outside Barcelona, 1936
	Saint Marks Street (NYC) circa 1969
	Valie Export, TAPP und TASTKINO Tap and Touch Cinema, 1968
	Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 108 (1965-67) MOMA
	Rubens Gerchman, detail of album cover Tropicalia or Panis et Cirencis, 1968
	Untitled 1982 work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, estimated at around $70 million, to be offered at Phillips in May
	Greek, Early Hellenistic, Terracotta statuette of a teacher and a pupil, late 4th–early 3rd century BCE
	Shiva as Lord of Dance (Nataraja), Chola period (880–1279), ca. 11th century, Indian (Tamil Nadu)