In education, "universal design" means the preparation of curricula, materials, and environments so that they may be used, appropriately and with ease, by a wide variety of people. Universal design places responsibility for making adjustments upon the instructors and the school. Only students posing unusual special needs are expected to provide their own accommodations. The Council for Exceptional Children ( CEC) has offered a definition of universal design in education:

"In terms of learning, universal design means the design of instructional materials and activities that makes the learning goals achievable by individuals with wide differences in their abilities to see, hear, speak, move, read, write, understand English, attend, organize, engage, and remember. Universal design for learning is achieved by means of flexible curricular materials and activities that provide alternatives for students with differing abilities. These alternatives are built into the instructional design and operating systems of educational materials--they are not added on after-the-fact. ( Research Connections, Number 5, Fall 1999, p.  2  )"

 

One recent book, The Accessible School: Universal Design for Educational Settings ( Bar and Galluzzo, 1999), tells us to think of universal design as applying to the physical environment. That is a part of what "universal design in education" means (see Chapter 7), but it is only a part of it. Laurel Bar and Judith Galluzzo, both occupational therapists, showed in their book how to apply the principles of accessible design to the built environment of public schools and classrooms. While helpful, that information may not assist many educators, because most of us do not have the opportunity to design buildings or classrooms. Rather, we in this text must look at universal design much more broadly--as applied also to what we do inside the built environment.

 

Universal design in education is based upon the premise that by preparing to meet diverse needs, we will better serve people with no special needs. As a recent report from the National Academy of Sciences ( Biermann, 1997) put it:

 

"Timing for use by every citizen can enhance use by ordinary citizens. Even the seemingly ordinary are heterogeneous: the general population varies greatly in computer skills (e.g., from novice to expert); in the ability to speak, read, and write English; in personal cognitive styles (e.g., from linguistic/verbal to spatial/visual); and in personal propensity for using complex technological gadgets. ( Executive Summary, p.  2  )"

 

That report, More Than Screen Deep: Toward Every-Citizen Interfaces to the Nation's Information Infrastructure ( 1997), suggested that responding to multiple needs means acting along three (3) dimensions:
    Learnability (ease of learning)
    Modality and medium independence (ease of use), and
    Supporting group activities (interconnectiveness). 

 

Briefly: The "learnability" dimension responds to our recognition that initial adopters of technologies--the kinds of people who "must have" the newest, fastest, coolest computers and other electronic gadgets--are different in many ways from late adopters. Most notably, they adjust quickly and effortlessly to the peculiarities of hardware and software. Initial adopters of what became (much later) the Internet comfortably put up with the oddities of UNIX and the demands of command-line interfaces; late adopters would not and did not. Modality and medium independence means supporting a range of input technologies (including speech recognition, natural language processing, and even computer vision and gesture sensing), output technologies (including speech synthesis, high-resolution and flexible displays, and multimodal generation of output), and nomadicity (the usability of the system wherever the student happens to be; now more commonly called "mobile computing"). The very essence of education in the Internet Age is networking. It is essential that we encourage collaboration. In the words of Nathan Shedroff ( 1997), writing in the Screen Deep report: "People are becoming active audiences and participants instead of merely users. They are increasingly communicating with others and creating meaningful things rather than merely 'viewing' and watching" (p.  5  ). 

 

Gregg Vanderheiden, one of the nation's most prominent pioneers in shaping technology so as to meet special needs, explored the concept of "nomadicity" in depth for the Screen Deep report. Dr. Vanderheiden noted that many people have difficulty hearing, some of whom cannot hear at all. He then went on to note that, at some times and in some locations, people who  ordinarily have no difficulty hearing are rendered, for all intents and purposes, hearing-impaired. An example is a commuter waiting at the 42nd Street stop for the "A" train. The arriving and departing subways in this Manhattan subway station make so much noise that people with unimpaired hearing are, temporarily, deaf. They need amplification in order to hear on a phone. This is an example of nomadicity: in our very mobile society, there are times and locales where virtually all of us have special needs. There are other examples, Vanderheiden wrote: times and places when people whose vision is well within normal limits are unable to see, or nearly so; times when people with intelligence that is within the normal range are unable to remember things (i.e., sleep deprivation). For all of these reasons, when designers make educational materials and techniques usable by people with disabilities, they also make them more widely usable by people who have no disabilities.

Consider Biermann ( 1997) point that people differ greatly in their abilities to read, to type, and to use complex devices. Vanderheiden observed that by designing machines so as to make them usable by people who are blind or have low vision, notably by making them "talk," we are also easing matters for people who are illiterate or have little functional reading ability as well as for people who have little experience or knowledge in using electronic devices. This is illustrated in the innovative approaches for designing such touchscreen devices as kiosks, automatic teller machines, and the home appliances that the Trace team has developed (see http://trace.wisc.edu/world/kiosks ). Similarly, the "ShowSounds" feature that Vanderheiden invented to help people who have little or no residual hearing ability can assist people who find themselves in noisy environments. ShowSounds produces visible symbols for sounds, such as warning bells. It is built into Windowstm and Macintoshtm operating systems, such as Mac OS 8.6tm and Mac OS 9.0tm. This technology is also described at the Trace Web site.

People also differ greatly within themselves. I can no longer see as well as I did 40 years ago. Moving one of my daughters into a university dorm room leaves me with muscle aches that take days to go away--aches I didn't even feel when I was their age. Steven Miller made the same point when he noted: "We all need to remember that being among the 'temporarily ablebodied' is a short-term gift" ( 1996, p. 2). (I hope Steve remembers this himself--he is, as this is written, among the "temporarily able-bodied.")

Students vary--and they vary a lot. We prefer not to think about that too much--we have 25 or more students in a class, and it is just easier to teach somewhere in the middle, hoping that the brighter ones, the ones who have more experience/knowledge, or those who have a natural affinity for the subject will not become bored, and that those who are going to struggle will put in the time on their own and somehow keep pace. It is far better, though, to customize. This means PCs and Web sites. These tools offer incredible opportunities to individualize instruction--and make customizing very easy, very fast.