Abstract:

Accessibility of web pages, course materials, or media is mandatory for higher education institutions (HEI), not only in the USA but also in Canada or Europe. HEIs need to provide training and information to their staff, faculty, and students about accessibility issues. Also, nearly all Resolution Agreements as part of US DoE OCR Early Complaint Resolutions oblige HEI to develop and maintain accessibility training for their organization's members.

Much research has been published on HEI's websites' overall accessibility, the institutions' policies regarding web accessibility, and access of students with disabilities to the general curriculum. Research on accessibility training covers topics like integrating accessibility into the curriculum of various studies and lecturers' and staff's attitudes towards students with disabilities. Current research notes that staff and lecturers need training in accessible technology, providing accommodations to their students, and preparing accessible course material. However, there is no research on what kind of training HEIs offer to their staff and lecturer on the accessibility of teaching and learning in higher education.

We would like to close this research gap, using topic modeling approaches to answer these research questions:
* What are the topics that HEIs cover in their accessible technology training?
* What do HEIs communicate as important through providing information on accessible technology and inclusive learning to their lecturers and staff?

We selected a total of 40 universities from the US and Canada for our research and collected textual data publicly available. Using the search function on each institution's start page with the term "accessibility," we identified every university's initial accessibility resource page. The URLs of the additional resource pages were determined:
(a) if information correlating to the particular topic were found browsing the accessibility resource pages or
(b) searching the institution's web pages for the topic keyword (e.g., "universal design" for the topic "Universal Design"). We then used a program to download all the textual data of interest.

Data analysis included quantitative text analysis and computer-assisted content analysis. Using topic-modeling, we identified the various topics covered by each HEI. The final analysis is still ongoing, but we would like to present some intermediate results. While some HEIs have no accessible technology training at all, other institutions provided vast amounts of information to their staff and faculty. The HEI's characteristics, e.g., numbers of students with disabilities, do not affect the amount and type of accessible technology training provided. The basics of creating accessible course material, accessible web documents, and accessible video is covered by each university investigated. Less common are information on the basics of accessibility, training on different types of disabilities, and Assistive Technology. Few HEIs cover the topics of pedagogy and instructional design, Universal Design for Learning or other UD-inspired pedagogy, and preparing accessible online courses.

Our research results illustrate that there is a need for discussing how to provide accessible technology training to faculty and staff of higher education institutions. It would also be of interest to research how training on accessible technologies leads to a better and more inclusive learning experience for students with disabilities.

Keywords:

Accessibility (for the disabled), professional development, lecturers, staff, higher education institutions, students (with disabilities), inclusion.