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I imagine I wanted to be a published author and present at conferences ever since I was four years old, watching Men in Black and Pulp Fiction (you know, normal shows four-year-olds watch that make them want to become those things). Probably the biggest barrier to achieving that goal was my mental illnesses: social anxiety, generalized anxiety, panic, attention deficit. Though I struggled to speak in public (and was virtually mute outside home for several of my early years), I was for some reason always a good public speaker (I think because I never had to worry about being interrupted or proven wrong, at least until I was done speaking). I found writing was an amazing outlet to express my true personality (which is much lighter than my facial expressions and voice could convey).

I rarely mention my mental health struggles to anyone, but I want to do so here for two reasons. First, to assure readers who struggle with their own mental health problems that it is possible to overcome them and be successful in life. I am not the only person who will tell you this, but I am the only person whose book you are currently reading. My mental illnesses are extremely well controlled by this point in time (after years of struggling to “fix” things), and in the last three years, I have published nearly twenty peer-reviewed articles, many other edited articles in Library Journal and other publications, and three books, and I have presented at ALA, SLA, MLA, AECT, and LOEX conferences. I hope sharing this may give some comfort to readers who have similar experiences.

I also bring up the topic of mental illness to challenge your perceptions of what accessibility is and should be. From the time I entered middle school until I graduated from high school, I had a grade point average of 2.9/4.0. In the seven years I have been enrolled in higher education since then, I have maintained a GPA of 3.98/4.0, and 4.0/4.0 for the last five years. “They” say students should expect their college GPA to be one letter grade worse than it was in high school. If that is the case, then what happened with me? Did enrolling in college suddenly boost my IQ 40 points? No, it was all about accessibility. Not physical accessibility to buildings or even content accessibility, like captions on videos (thought both of these are extremely important and will be discussed in detail in this book), but accessibility that comes with flexibility in how students learn and how they demonstrate their knowledge.

High school was a prison, with authority figures barking orders and keeping me in line. Having a panic attack? Can I tell the teacher? But what would I say? What would she say?

College was different, because in college learning is your responsibility. For some people, that responsibility is a bad thing. For me, it was not. I did not get some extra benefit—quite the opposite if you ask me; I just needed something different, because what I was being offered was not working. My high school GPA would not reflect that I could one day be a highly published Ph.D. student and professional librarian, but my high school GPA lies. It lies for a lot of people. It is a product of an outdated functionalist paradigm that tests not your ability to be a successful human being, but rather your ability to successfully conform to strict educational and behavioral expectations.

Any time that instruction is not accessible to all learners, whenever it is not flexible for those who learn differently, those who are too anxious (but not too “dumb”) to do a good presentation, or those who are hard-of-hearing, the instructor is helping to create more lies. I do not think any instructor wants to help create lies, but I do think there are many instructors who do not realize they are doing it, or fail to understand what they can do to “fix” it. My hope for this book is that it will help us, as teaching librarians, force those grade point averages to start telling the truth—to reflect true ability and knowledge, not the ability to conform to arbitrary and constricting rules. This is the true aim of accessibility embodied within guidelines like Universal Design for Learning: that all learners are given the best opportunity possible to demonstrate their talents and that no insignificant variable (a disability, learning difference, mental illness) causes a barrier to that opportunity.

This book is divided into three parts. I tried to be a little cute with the part titles, so they create the acronym ACE. If you follow the guidance in this book to a T, you can ACE the design of accessible instruction. It may be a little corny, but, you see, that is the true personality that I mentioned at the outset of this introduction. If the corniness of ACE turns you off, then you are really going to regret having picked up this book today.

ACE stands for Accessibility, Communication, and Evolution. You might think, Well, isn’t this entire book about accessibility, not just one section? Yes, but as the baring of my soul in this preface demonstrates, there is more to accessibility than just rules and guidelines. Rules and guidelines are important—that is why they are discussed in the first part—but rules and guidelines alone will not be enough to actually create change. Library schools can teach students how librarianship works—the “rules,” so to speak—but most of us know that it does not mean anything compared to getting into a library and seeing how things work in the real world. In the real world, if we truly want to promote accessibility for instruction, we must also consider practical factors, like how we will communicate with students outside of the instruction and how we can realistically balance the rules and guidelines with the demands of the content we want to cover. This is discussed in part 2 of the book: “Communication.” We also need to prepare you for future technologies—otherwise this book will go out of date before I can reach the magic number to get a second edition—and this is covered in part 3: “Evolution.”

If I cannot convince you about accessibility, then perhaps the law can do it for me. I cannot think of a better way to start off the book than diving head-first into the history and status of disability law and what it means for public, academic, special, and school libraries, in chapter 1. Do not worry: I will not make this boring. Stay tuned—these laws will have important ramifications for your organization.

Chapter 2 will introduce you to the principles of universal design for learning. This introduction will include some history (it is actually quite interesting how an architectural theory evolved into a theory of teaching and learning), but will focus largely on the principles themselves. On the surface, they can seem pretty vague, and that can easily turn people off. I want to be very clear about what each principle means, including examples of how this principle looks when applied in the “real world.”

In chapter 3, I want to narrow our focus to universal design for learning as it specifically applies to online learning and content. There are other books that describe universal design in the physical classroom, but it is my belief that—generally speaking—most universities, public institutions, and schools have a good idea of what they should be doing to make the physical classroom accessible, whether or not they actually do it. The challenge with online learning is that many instructors are not sure where to start; simply designing course content can be difficult for someone who has limited experience, let alone making it accessible. So, I want to tell you exactly where to start.

Chapter 4 begins part 2 of the book, “Communication.” This chapter focuses on communication with students via the internet. Beyond just the content of a course, communication is crucial to ensure equitable access. This includes synchronous and asynchronous communication, direct communication and recorded lectures, and communicating via the written word and websites/links. It combines universal design for learning principles with principles for effective communication and computer-mediated communication.

In chapter 5, we will discuss how to balance accessibility to courses with trying to make content as engaging as possible to students. Is it possible for course content to be both accessible and interactive, or are our courses doomed to be terribly boring for all involved? I will discuss some of the straightforward ways you can make sure your course content is still fun while also being accessible.

Time changes all things, including barriers to accessibility. In Chapter 6, I will prepare you for when inevitable change to educational systems puts new stopping blocks in your way. The life cycle of technological innovation, and your position within it, will be discussed. I will reiterate the fact that, no matter what technological innovation occurs, the underlying principles of creating accessibility remain the same.

Finally, in chapter 7, I will present several case studies of organizations that have successfully implemented some or all of the principles discussed in this book. This should help put our discussion into a practical context and get your own efforts to evolve your organization’s accessibility off the ground. The chapter will wrap up with a short discussion about the importance of what you have learned. This “send-off” is simply my opportunity to really drive the main points home and issue a call to action.

In a prior book, Casting Light on the Dark Web (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), I was introduced to the idea of using textboxes for asides from the main chapter text (generally, there are a lot of these, because I can get off topic very easily). I will employ them throughout this book as well. These textboxes typically contain interesting facts, historical anecdotes, or philosophical ponderings. It is not necessary to read the textboxes to understand the narrative in the chapter, but my ego would appreciate you doing so anyway.

This book is designed for library, archival, and museum professionals who teach virtual classes or create virtual content; instructional designers and instructional design students; and educators of all kinds. It is a synthesis of evidence-based research from across all disciplines. Regardless of your particular situation, this book will be relevant and bring a windfall of new ideas on how to improve your organization’s accessibility. Hopefully, it will also be entertaining, even a little humorous, along the way.

I like to treat each book I write as though I were giving you a tour of my house. (In the world where I actually have a house, it looks a lot like Michael Scott’s, complete with the tiny flat-screen TV.) Each chapter is another room we pass by, and each is a necessary part to keep the roof over our ahead. As a product of this metaphor, I finish my introductions with a “hearty welcome” as though inviting you into my house. So welcome! Let us begin our tour of Creating Accessible Online Instruction Using Universal Design Principles.