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Accessibility at CUNY
Faculty can make an important contribution to CUNY’s commitment to equal access and employment in its educational programs and activities. Creating courses and course materials according to the principles of accessibility and Universal Design in Learning (UDL) ensures that as broad a student population as possible may access, benefit from, and participate in the University’s academic community. The Accessibility and UDL Workshop was developed to assist faculty in developing the knowledge and skills necessary to carry out the university’s efforts to provide services for all students, including those with disabilities.

Workshop Structure and Format
This two-week, fully online, asynchronous workshop provides an in-depth introduction to accessibility and UDL for online and hybrid education. Rather than simply providing information to faculty on the what, how, and why of Accessibility and UDL, a faculty development approach focuses on a process of exploring and evaluating concepts and resources, as faculty share ideas and observations with their peers and are provided with targeted feedback from the workshop facilitators. The workshop also includes time for hands-on practice creating accessible documents and multimedia. In applying the skills acquired in this workshop to course design and your teaching, you will create an online experience that is welcoming to all learners, including those with disabilities.

Beginnings
In 2016, a team at CUNY SPS – including Antonia Levy and Krystyna Michael (Faculty Development) as well as Christopher Leydon (Student Services) – received a Strategic Technology Accessibility Initiative (STI) grant to develop a self-paced online workshop on Accessibility and UDL. This workshop is now available CUNY-wide, under the “Accessibility Training” tab in CUNY Blackboard. Antonia and Krystyna adapted the workshop materials to create a more in-depth, interactive, facilitated version that was offered for the first time in October 2018 for faculty at CUNY SPS.

What to Do Next
On this site, you can find more information about the workshop content and structure, download a zip file of the workshop to be imported into Blackboard or Course Sites, review guides for implementation, and more.

Licensing Conditions
This workshop is adapted from materials from various sources (all cited throughout the workshop), and from content created by Antonia Levy and Krystyna Michael, both of CUNY School of Professional Studies, Office of Faculty Development and Instructional Technology (OFDIT). The license for this workshop and all materials on this site:

Creative Commons License
Accessibility & UDL Workshop by Antonia Levy and Krystyna Michael, City University of New York is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.