Dr. Jared Colton of the USU English Department faculty is one of six national winners of an award recognizing innovation in education.
He teaches technical communication and rhetoric at USU, helping his students make documents accessible to more people:
“They are creating documents, technical communication, persuasive documents. Anything from instruction manuals to videos. And they are thinking not just, can I make this clear and easy to understand for an able bodied user, but also for people with disabilities.”
Dr. Colton said he encourages his students as they prepare documents to remember those who may have to access the documents in a different way:
“I want my students to think they’re not just creating this document, and later if someone points out they couldn’t access it because of a disability, that they then correct it. I want my students to be thinking ahead and to think of those processes: creating captions, creating HTML that is readable by screen readers, for example, for blind readers. I want them to think of those things as a natural part of the document design process.”
The Instructure Educator of the Year awards were announced last week in Los Angeles.
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