Substantive Post 3

Accessibility means to remove barriers and to have options that can maximize the learning outcome and maximize the scope to people who can benefit from this. A misconception is that UDL (Universal Design for Learning) is for individuals who need accommodations. That’s far from the truth because not only can captions help deaf individuals, but they can also benefit second language learners, students in noisy environments and individuals who have a tough time understanding material by listening. Captions aren’t the only feature, there are many more, and they benefit other individuals too. Flexible learning design results in better learning experiences for all learners.

Within inclusion, it means to include everyone. Svetlana Kouznetsova does a really good job explaining how just adding captions can increase not only online traffic but also be able to support the learning of others. She stated that including captions is not only for the deaf, as 80% of people use captions who aren’t deaf, and simply adding captions can increase your viewership by 40% because you expanded the scope of your videos/blogs.

Inclusive design to me means creating features that include the widest scope of people and not sticking a niche of people, but trying to include everyone. Trying to add features that can better increase learning and understanding of concepts is an excellent way to create an inclusive design. By adding a playback option, people are able to understand and go through videos at their own pace, which can help them better understand the concepts. Practical design choices such as using simple fonts, plain English, adding captions, giving users full playback controls and making sure that the alt text is descriptive and useful can create an inclusive environment. By creating edge cases, designers are able to anticipate learner variability rather than designing for a niche of people. Designing for learners with language barriers, limited attention, or accessibility needs can often lead to benefiting a much wider audience.

Once something is developed its important to iterate because every time you test/use the design, you can learn something from it and improve it as you go. A personal example is key vs push to start. As someone interested in cars, learning about iteration has made me think about why we go from key start to push to start. What I thought about was how it can be difficult for elderly people to lean in and try to insert the key into something rather small, but by creating a push to start it, this task is easy for them and also benefits others as well.  By iteration, they were able to make an already easy task even easier. This is why it’s important to iterate because you can improve on already created features and improve them even more.