Advocacy Centers and Organizations

The following online resources offer WPAs and Composition instructors additional information about designing a curriculum with the principles of universal design in mind.

The Center for Universal Design formerly advocated for the universal design of a variety of environments and products. Although the Center no longer receives funding, and the website is now obsolete, the website serves as an important resource for historical information about the concept of universal design; it also outlines the seven principles of universal design. This website will be useful to WPAs and Composition looking for background about universal design.

The Center for Universal Design in Education is a resource from the University of Washington, which offers universal design approaches for K-12 and Post-Secondary educators. The website offers useful guidelines for ensuring that computer labs and maker spaces are accessible. As such, this website will be most useful for those WPAs and Composition instructors who want students to take advantage of digital technologies and/or maker spaces in creating multimodal compositions.

Accessibility and Usability at Penn State is a resource providing approaches to making college-level course materials accessible to disabled students. Although the website is targeted with Penn State faculty and staff in mind, the website provides useful information about how to design accessible websites, PDFs, Google Docs, and other education resources. Consequently, this website will be useful for WPAs and Composition instructors, who want to ensure their pedagogical materials are accessible to students.

Center for Applied Special Technology is a non-profit United States based organization devoted to Universal Design for Learning. While targeted at K-12 educators, the website offers a variety of tools to help educators create a universally designed curriculum. Noteworthy is CAST’s Universal Design Curriculum Toolkit, which will be useful to WPAs and Composition instructors designing an accessible multimodal curriculum.

National Disability Authority’s Centre for Universal Design is an Irish government website, which provides resources, advocacy and awareness for Universal Design. The website has pages devoted to universal design in education. They also have pages devoted to explaining the principles of universal design and offering case studies of how universal design has been implemented. This site will be most useful for WPAs and Composition instructors needing additional information about principles of universal design.