Teaching without barriers
The accessibility approach
Accessibility is about ensuring equal access to and participation in education for people with disabilities and chronic diseases.All regulations (see link, right column) are based on an understanding of disability in which people have individual impairments, but these only result in disabilities through interplay with attitude-related and environmental barriers. The resulting disabilities in turn prevent equal participation. Disabilities can therefore be minimized or do not arise in the first place if the framework conditions are designed to be barrier-free from the outset.
As an approach, accessibility is structurally oriented: It must be proactively created and implemented, and only if this is not the case do 'reasonable accommodations', i.e. reactive individual solutions such as ‘compensation of disadvantages’, take effect. If something is not barrier-free, solutions have to be provided for each individual case, which is on a broad scale always labor-, time- and cost-intensive.
In order to minimize the need for individual solutions, the accessibility approach seeks to remove barriers from the outset so that barriers to participation do not arise in the first place.
Barriers permeate all areas of the university. The necessary removal of barriers also affects lecturers, because they shape the contents and organizational conditions of teaching.
My services
There are many possibilities to reduce barriers in teaching! I am happy to advise and support you in the reflection and barrier-free design of your teaching, for example in the following areas:Barrier-free design of presentations
How to implement the two-senses principle?
How to present spoken and visual content in an accessible way?
Barrier-free educational videos
Which components promote accessibility?
How to plan components to achieve successful implementation?
What aspects can support accessibility if the videos are already produced?
Create automatic captioning and transcripts with Amberscript
This feature implements the second-place winner of the 2020 ‘Ideas Competition for Students' on Prospective Studying.
Barrier-free documents
What are barriers in documents (Word, PPT, etc.)?
How to prepare different types of documents to reduce barriers?
Inclusive didactics
On 24.04. and 08.05., both from 9:00-13:00, lecturers can participate in a workshop on inclusive didactics: Universal Design in University Teaching - Theoretical Approach and Practical Experiences (Designing inclusive courses). For more information and to register, please visit the University Didactics website. The German-language workshop is free of charge and is offered in cooperation between the sub-project 'Teaching without Barriers', the Equal Opportunity and Diversity Unit and the University Didactics.
Further information and support for lecturers
For whom is accessibility important?
What are digital barriers?
How to make digital teaching more accessible for all?
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