I learned that accessibility isn’t an “add-on” for a few students, it’s core quality and safety for everyone. The module reframed disability for me: many needs are hidden, cognitive load matters, and reactive accommodations can’t fix barriers we designed in the first place. The UDL principles, multiple ways to present information, demonstrate learning, and engage, map naturally to nursing values of equity, patient-centered care, and clear communication.
In my courses, I’ll apply this by front-loading accessibility: locking due dates, posting weekly “Top 3 takeaways,” chunking major projects into milestones with rubrics, and offering equivalent, keyboard-friendly assessments (no mouse-only “hot spots”). All media will have captions/transcripts; images will include alt text; slides will be readable without narration or heavy effects. For students with anxiety or speech/hearing differences, I’ll pair live sessions with asynchronous options, sentence starters, and small-group forums, plus brief 1:1 check-ins when patterns of struggle appear. Beyond the classroom, I’ll model this in nursing practice making patient education materials plain-language, multimodal, and predictable, so inclusivity becomes standard, not special.
