Accessible Teaching Toolkit - Western University

Overview 

The Accessible Teaching Toolkit is a practical, Western-specific resource to help instructors and teaching staff make learning environments, course materials, assessments, and interactions between students, staff, and educators more accessible. These practices can improve accessibility across various course components and across the life cycle of a course.  This toolkit deliberately goes beyond a rights-based approach to accessibility, recognizing that there are limitations to an approach to accessibility that just meets legal requirements. Practices highlight both evidence-based and policy/legislative rationale.  

To learn more about the development process for the Toolkit, visit the Project Background page.

This toolkit is emergent: new practices and updates will be made on an ongoing basis. If you would like to provide feedback or contribute to the toolkit, please Contact Us.

Scope 

This toolkit focuses on smaller, high-impact changes that can be made to increase the accessibility of learning environments. It is a dynamic document, which will be updated with additional practices, resources, and details over time.

Audience 

The Accessible Teaching Toolkit is designed with educators in mind, meaning anyone involved in the design, facilitation, or organization of formal or informal learning materials or activities. At Western University, this includes faculty, librarians, archivists, staff, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars. However, many of the tips are more broadly useful for anyone looking to ensure the materials, communications, or resources they create are accessible and usable by diverse audiences. Additionally, learners may find the toolkit contents useful for increasing their own knowledge of accessibility and advocating for more accessible learning environments.  

The practices in the toolkit do not assume any level of familiarity with accessibility and provide detailed strategies that can be adopted by anyone.

Purpose 

The Accessible Teaching Toolkit provides educators with the tools and sensibilities to support proactive, on-going, accessibility, reducing the need for accommodations, disclosure, and individualised supports. Accommodations represent the dominant approach to access in post-secondary education. Accommodations frameworks situate access as a condition facilitated for students that can prove need by designated professionals with expert knowledge. Critical and justice-oriented approaches frame access as a collective responsibility; from this perspective, access is relational in nature and results from ongoing identification of resources and needs. Different community members bring different resources and share the work of creating access.  

How to Use this Toolkit 

This toolkit is intended as a starting point to help individuals build their own knowledge, skills, and values related to accessibility. The toolkit is designed with multiple navigational paths, allowing folks to access practices alphabetically or by course component. The glossary provides essential information about key terms and concepts.  

What the toolkit can and cannot do 

The toolkit is a practical starting point for reducing barriers and strengthening accessible teaching. It is designed to support professional judgment, not replace it. In particular, the toolkit: 

• supports proactive course design but does not replace individual academic accommodations; 
• provides general policy and legislative context but is not legal advice;
• offers adaptable practices but does not assume that every option will suit every course, discipline or essential learning outcome;
• connects users with Western resources but does not replace consultation with Accessible Education, the Centre for Teaching and Learning, Western Libraries, Western Technology Services or other relevant supports; and
• will evolve as users identify new barriers, practices, evidence and resource needs. 

When a particular strategy cannot be used, the aim is to continue the accessibility conversation by normalizing Access Talk.

Our Language Choices 

Throughout the toolkit, we have chosen to use identity first rather than person-first language to recognize disability as a fundamental part of identity shaped by rich cultures, communities, and ways of knowing. For more information, see the practice on Disability- and Neurodivergent-Inclusive Language.

Land Acknowledgment 

This work, and Western University, has been undertaken on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee and Lūnaapéewak, on lands connected with the Dish with One Spoon Covenant Wampum between the Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee and the London Township and Sombra Treaties of 1796.

We affirm our respect for the longstanding relationships that Indigenous Nations have to this land as they its original and ongoing caretakers. We also acknowledge historical and ongoing injustices that Indigenous Peoples (First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) endure in Canada, and we accept responsibility as members of a public institution to contribute toward revealing and correcting miseducation as well as renewing respectful relationships with Indigenous communities through our teaching, research and community service.

Acknowledging the lands to which we are connected also means acknowledging the ways that colonial systems continue to shape higher education institutions and classrooms. One of the ways that these systems persist is through teaching and learning practices that often privilege particular ways of knowing, being, communicating, and demonstrating learning. For many of us, teaching and learning can be engaged as a practice of justice, by valuing learner identities, values, goals, and access needs, and by welcoming diversity of expression, learner agency, and student creativity.

As you engage with the Accessible Teaching Toolkit, we invite you to reflect on how our teaching practices might contribute to our responsibilities towards Truth and Reconciliation that resists one-size-fits-all measurements and instead centres relationships, respect, and the multiplicity of knowledges educators and learners bring to our shared spaces.

Please join us in considering our responsibilities to the land and to Indigenous peoples around the world, as we work together towards an education system and world that supports mutual flourishing for all.

For more information about the work of Indigenization and decolonization at Western University, please visit the website of the Office of Indigenous Initiatives.

The eLearning Toolkit is maintained by the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL), but development was co-led by the CTL and Student Experience. We appreciate your feedback.