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Join us for the fix your content challenge

April 1, 2021 by Chuck Busby

Missouri State University Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning

Date: Thursday, May 20

Each year, the global accessibility community unites on the third Thursday of May for Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) to highlight the need for more inclusive digital content. We seek to join the conversation by inspiring and motivating institutions across the globe to demonstrate how accessible content is better content.

For more details, visit the event web page.

Register for the challenge!

The post Join us for the fix your content challenge appeared first on Provost Communiqué.

This post originally published on Provost Communiqué.

Filed Under: Provost Tagged With: Accessibility, Provost Communique

Attend the Web Accessibility Summit

May 9, 2019 by Chuck Busby

faculty center for teaching and learning logo

Date: Wednesday, May 29
Time: 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Location: Glass Hall

The Web Accessibility Summit is a one-day conference that is focused on website accessibility. If you are a website or social media content contributor on campus, this conference will be beneficial to you.

The schedule is packed with digital accessibility sessions, including the following:

  • Inclusive design workshop with Derek Featherstone, international authority on accessibility and inclusive design
  • Single-page application workshop with Rachel Cherry, founder/director of WPCampus
  • Social media keynote with Chris D’Orso, SUNY College at Brockport, and Justin Romack, Texas A&M University
  • How to write for accessibility with Kai Raymer and Kevin Agee, Missouri State University
  • Transcribing techniques with Michael Fienen, nuCloud

For more information contact Sara Clark.

The post Attend the Web Accessibility Summit appeared first on Provost Communiqué.

This post originally published on Provost Communiqué.

Filed Under: Provost Tagged With: Accessibility, Provost Communique

New blackboard accessibility tool available in January

December 13, 2018 by Chuck Busby

A new component of Blackboard was announced in Faculty Senate last month called Blackboard Ally. Blackboard Ally automatically scans content loaded to Blackboard and provides an assessment of the content’s accessibility and assistance in increasing the accessibility of course content. Ally uses visual indicators, which provide a measure of the accessibility of your course, which will be very apparent once all courses are activated with the Ally feature. This new product will help to increase awareness of the level of accessibility of our digital course materials and provide tools to help us achieve our commitment to accessibility and promote a more inclusive campus.

Support will be offered for Ally in January 2019.

  • The Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning (FCTL) has developed a knowledge base related to Ally and has created a web page to answer your questions.
  • A list of faculty will serve as Ally Ambassadors to assist you with the implementation of the Ally product.
  • As Ally is activated for all courses, the University will offer additional trainings related to Ally and university accessibility standards.

Please know that as the University continues to implement Ally there is not an expectation that faculty will immediately be able to address all of the issues identified by the Ally product; however, your willingness is appreciated to engage with Ally with the goal of increasing the University’s overall accessibility over time.

The post New blackboard accessibility tool available in January appeared first on Provost Communiqué.

This post originally published on Provost Communiqué.

Filed Under: Provost Tagged With: Accessibility, blackboard, Provost Communique

New blackboard accessibility tool available soon

November 29, 2018 by Chuck Busby

A new component of Blackboard was announced in Faculty Senate last month called Blackboard Ally. Blackboard Ally automatically scans content loaded to Blackboard and provides an assessment of the content’s accessibility and assistance in increasing the accessibility of course content. Ally uses visual indicators, which provide a measure of the accessibility of your course, which will be very apparent once all courses are activated with the Ally feature. This new product will help to increase awareness of the level of accessibility of our digital course materials and provide tools to help us achieve our commitment to accessibility and promote a more inclusive campus.

Support will be offered for Ally in January 2019.

  • The Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning (FCTL) has developed a knowledge base related to Ally and has created a web page to answer your questions.
  • A list of faculty will serve as Ally Ambassadors to assist you with the implementation of the Ally product.
  • As Ally is activated for all courses, the University will offer additional trainings related to Ally and university accessibility standards.

Please know that as the University continues to implement Ally there is not an expectation that faculty will immediately be able to address all of the issues identified by the Ally product; however, your willingness is appreciated to engage with Ally with the goal of increasing the University’s overall accessibility over time.

The post New blackboard accessibility tool available soon appeared first on Provost Communiqué.

This post originally published on Provost Communiqué.

Filed Under: Provost Tagged With: Accessibility, blackboard, Provost Communique

Between the lines

March 21, 2018 by Web Strategy and Development

“Imagine you’re making a pie,” Dr. Telory Arendell says. “You make the crust, put the filling inside and put the crust on top. Then you go around the top and shave off the part that’s extra, the part you don’t need.”

But why do you think you don’t need it? Maybe only because you’ve been told it’s not part of the pie.

“For me, that ‘extra’ is what’s actually most important, even though many people would throw it away,” Arendell says. And she isn’t really talking about pie.

Arendell, associate professor in the department of theatre and dance, uses this metaphor to describe her favorite theatrical experiences – moments that surprise the audience because they don’t quite fit our expectations of a night at the theatre.

“When I write about movement on stage, I try to recreate the action with words that dance.” — Dr. Telory Arendell

“Performance art, experimental theatre, what was called ‘happenings’ back in the ’60s,” Arendell says. “I love that stuff.”

Audiences sometimes worry that without the familiar rhythms of the theatre, without clear heroes and villains and the promise of a resolution by final curtain, it will be hard to understand what’s happening on stage.

But, Arendell says, “You understand it in a different way. Sometimes you know fully that what’s most important isn’t what’s being said, but what’s happening between the lines. That’s my space: what happens between the lines.”

Arendell draws inspiration from experimental artists like German choreographer Pina Bausch, who is the subject of her next book.

“Pina Bausch was wild,” Arendell says. “She took highly technically trained dancers and put them on stage and had them do movement, such as stumbling, that wasn’t technical at all.”

And, according to Arendell, subverting the audience’s expectations was the point. “She was so conscious of what was expected, and then put up something completely different. It was a critique of what people like to call ‘high art.’”

Student performing in class

Photo by Bob Linder

Beyond the ordinary

In many ways, such performances, which don’t conform to expectations, connect with another of Arendell’s research areas: disability studies.

Someone who is living with a disability may experience the minutiae of day-to-day life in ways that are profoundly different from the majority of the population. When performers are free to venture outside expected theatrical norms, they can shift the perspective of audience members who don’t have personal experiences of disability.

Arendell has explored this connection in two books: “Performing Disability: Staging the Actual” and “The Autistic Stage: How Cognitive Disability Changed 20th Century Performance.” Her perspective is grounded in the idea that disability should be viewed as a “facilitating rather than a debilitating experience.”

As she puts it in her writing: “We become richer each time we come to understand these new perspectives, and performance powerfully enables our understanding of them.”

“Even off the stage, in life, people move in space in ways that tell stories. It’s a message that’s communicated with the body.” — Dr. Telory Arendell

For example, imagine watching a play you’ve seen before. But this time, it’s in a language you don’t understand. You could rely on your memory of the story, gleaning additional meaning from performers’ body language and tone. This is not unlike the way someone with nonverbal autism might piece together information that’s delivered through words they find incomprehensible.

Or, another example: imagine a performance where actors contend with props, sets and furniture that are either much too small or much too large – all while trying to perform the play as it was written. This might offer a glimpse of how someone with a physical disability navigates spaces that were designed with only one type of physicality in mind.

And these are just a few instances of how experimental performances, the “wild stuff” Arendell loves, provide opportunities to broaden perspectives. Theatre, she believes, is an ideal place to showcase disability as something other than a deficit. It can instead be considered an “extraordinary experience.” Literally, “beyond the ordinary.”

In “Autistic Stage” she writes, “My own work explores how the performing arts have embraced autism as a set of new perspectives that change the way audiences conceive of space, time, personhood, embodiment, communication, and stage or film imagery.”

Student presenting her story

Photo by Bob Linder

Outside categories

Arendell brings this research into her teaching. In addition to working closely with the disability studies program, she challenges her theatre students to think about their work in radically different ways.

“My class ‘Scripting and Performing’ brings in students who have never done performance art or experimental work,” she says. It offers them the chance to re-envision the scope of their talents.

Returning to the pie metaphor, Arendell says, “Their impulse is to scrape along the edges of the pie tin. I pick up the edges that are set to be thrown away and say, ‘This is the heart of what you’re doing. This is where your story lies, where you’re not trying to fix yourself so you’ll fit into an established category. I say, ’This can be your category.’”

  • Story by Lucie Amberg
  • Main photo by Bob Linder
  • Video by Lucie Amberg

Further reading

Explore theatre and dance programs

Filed Under: Provost Tagged With: Mind's Eye

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