As a part of EDUC 405 we had the honour of having Victoria Woelders from ARC-BC present to us. The Accessible Resource Centre- British Columbia (ARC-BC) “is a BC Ministry of Education and Child-Care funded response to the growing demand for digital accessible format alternatives to hard-copy print learning materials. The goal of ARC-BC is to provide BC students with perceptual (or print) disabilities and their educational teams with high quality digital alternative format materials that align with British Columbia’s K-12 curriculum.” Students with perceptual disabilities can have difficulties seeing, holding, or understanding a work in its original format. ARC-BC has aimed to address these issues by providing students with alternatives such as PDFs, e-tags, word documents, digital textbooks/books, and several other resources for K-12 students. Teachers who have a hardcopy of a textbook can reach out to ARC-BC and be given access to digital copies. Not only does ARC-BC offer alternatives to hardcopy texts, but they also offer workshop opportunities, virtual presentations, and training videos in order to help those who need these resources be able to do so.
Victoria stated that accessibility is not about designing for the few, but rather designing for ALL of us. She also provided us with the Accessible British Columbia (ABC) Act that offers the accessibility inclusion tool kit. This tool kit offers step-by-step guides on how to do work in an inclusive way when using programs such as Outlook, Adobe pdf, Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. As educators it is our duty to make sure that everyone can properly access all of the learning resources being used throughout their education. Designing lessons that work for all students is crucial. Sometimes we often gloss over things that are hampering student development. An example of this would be using a certain colour of marker that a student is incapable of reading properly. That alone could negatively impact a student’s learning. Other things that we might not think about when developing a lesson or worksheet are font choice and size. What is a proper font and size for all students to be able to read and understand? These are questions we need to ask when implementing ARC-BC into our classrooms. The presentation from Victoria was great and I learned a lot about the resources available to me as an educator and will be implementing them throughout my career when necessary.
