How can you make your teaching and research documents accessible to neurodiverse individuals and individuals with disabilities? Through this workshop, participants will learn to recognize features that might make their teaching and research materials inaccessible, to present content in a variety of formats, and to use specific tools like LaTeX to improve accessibility of their materials. Special attention will be given to teaching and research materials with complex mathematical characters and equations, which have historically presented unique challenges to accessibility. By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Understand the diversity of abilities of learners and researchers and identify challenges to accessibility based on the content and format of technical documents
• Evaluate the accessibility level of teaching and research materials and apply tools and programs to increase their accessibility

This workshop is part of CIRTL’s fall programming on accessibility.

Instructors

Marissa Gee, Cornell University
Anna Malinovskaya, Cornell University
Breanne Kisselstein, USDA Genetic Improvement for Fruits and Vegetables Lab

Workshop Schedule

This workshop meets in Zoom on Fridays, November 17 and December 1 at 1-2:30PM AT / 12-1:30PM ET / 11AM-12:30PM CT / 10-11:30AM MT / 9-10:30AM PT.

Audience

This workshop is designed first and foremost for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, faculty, and instructional staff in STEM/SBE disciplines, but generally relevant to anyone looking to learn about document accessibility broadly and LaTeX specifically.

Registration & Enrollment

No cap. Registration opens Monday, August 14 and closes Thursday, November 16 in order to accommodate some brief pre-work that participants are expected to complete prior to the first session on November 17.

Accessibility

If you have a disability, please let us know your learning needs. Contact Kate Diamond (kdiamond3@wisc.edu), who is supporting this workshop, to let us know how we can help you have a successful experience. In addition to meeting individualized needs, we will also take measures throughout the workshop to support accessibility for all our students:

• Using alt-text on images in reading materials
• Sending pre-session reminders with session information to all students
• Sharing materials for synchronous sessions with students (slides, activity instructions, etc.)
• Enabling live captioning in synchronous sessions
• Incorporating multiple modes of interaction into synchronous sessions

Learning Outcomes

All CIRTL Network programming is designed to help participants achieve familiarity with our Core Ideas. This workshop is designed around the following learning outcomes.

Practitioner: Learning-through-diversity

• Create a teaching plan that incorporates content and teaching practices responsive to the students’ backgrounds