Improving Accessibility of Your Research Communication

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Dr. Casey Boyle, Director of the Digital Writing & Research Lab
Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing
The University of Texas at Austin

Free webinar hosted by CEC’s Division for Learning Disabilities.

Communication is something that all of us encounter every day of our lives when interacting with someone else, working with a team, or communicating to the public. What does it mean to make research communication accessible? Why must we make communication, especially digital media, accessible? Just like a ramp or wide doorways makes a building more accessible for more people, so too does the architecture of communication make that communication more accessible for more people. A lot of this architecture is invisible to most of us–the encoding of a website, styles in a document, descriptions of images. Yet it is precisely this invisibility that renders what many of us see for those who cannot.

As special education researchers, how can we be more mindful of accessibility in the materials that you share? This 90-min webinar will focus on tips and guidelines for improving access to your work. We will talk about PDFs, infographics, slide decks, and social media (e.g., Twitter, Instagram) and engage in several practice activities.