Greetings, I am June Gothberg, the State Technical Assistance Coordinator for the National Secondary Transition Technical Assistance Center (NSTTAC). I am also co-chair of AEA’s Disabilities and Other Vulnerable Populations TIG (DOVP). As we worked together on this week’s AEA365 blog, we wanted bring you practical resources, hints, and tricks for including people with disabilities and other vulnerable populations in your evaluations. DOVP is often approached with simple questions of “how to” in this area. My co-chair, Jennifer will be presenting an AEA Coffee Break Webinar on Thursday on how to include Universal Design in your evaluations and we will be also giving a full hands-on workshop at the AEA Conference in San Antonio with another of our colleagues. We would love to have you there!

In the meantime, I would encourage you to get to know the seven basic principals of Universal Design:

1. Equitable use
2. Flexibility in use
3. Simple and intuitive use
4. Perceptible information
5. Tolerance for error
6. Low physical effort
7. Size and space for approach and use

Hot Tips: Today, I would like to suggest tips and resources from Principal 3: Simple and intuitive use. In other words keep it simple.

• First and foremost, know your participants and prepare. If you know you have people involved who have hearing, vision, ambulatory, sensory challenges, make sure to accommodate ahead of time. Prepare materials and activities with them in mind.
• Remember you may enjoy fancy fonts, backgrounds, and graphics, but the best tools are simple black and white. Besides people with low vision, 8% (10.5 million) of males in the United States are color blind making it difficult to read multicolor materials.
• If are looking to include people with low reading abilities either create the evaluation materials with them in mind or create an alternative assessment at a lower reading level. A simple trick is to use the option provided in your word processing program to rate the ease of readability (MS Word uses the Flesch-Kincaid grade level) and keep your evaluation tool below a 4^th to 6^th grade reading level to include more diverse participation.
• If you are looking to include people in a survey who are either non-verbal or low readers by all means create a survey that uses pictorial responses either in the form of smiles to frowns or actual pictures of activities.
• Offer materials, handouts, and presentations in a variety of formats: large print or Braille if needed.
• Be prepared to include a reader or interpreter.

Rad resources – Websites:

• Universal Design Principles: http://www.design.ncsu.edu/cud/about_ud/udprinciplestext.htm
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php
• Presentation Accessibility: http://www.w3.org/WAI/training/accessible

Rad resources – Free picture resources:

• Smiles for surveys: http://www.nsttac.org/products_and_resources/EvaluationToolkit/
• Do to Learn picture resources http://www.dotolearn.com/

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Disabilities and Other Vulnerable Populations (DOVP) Week with our colleagues in the DOVP AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our DOVP members and you may wish to consider subscribing to our weekly headlines and resources list where we’ll be highlighting DOVP resources.

communication, Disabilities, Universal Design

My name is Jennifer Sullivan Sulewski and I am a Research Associate at the Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI) at the University of Massachusetts Boston. At ICI I have worked on a variety of research and evaluation projects related to services and supports for people with disabilities. I currently am most involved with Work Without Limits, a public-private partnership funded by the Massachusetts Medicaid Infrastructure and Comprehensive Employment Opportunities (MI-CEO) grant to strengthen the Massachusetts workforce and advance work opportunities for youth and adults with disabilities in Massachusetts.

Universal Design refers to “the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design” (http://www.design.ncsu.edu/cud/about_ud/udprincipleshtmlformat.html). The principles of universal design can be applied to evaluation to ensure that all relevant populations are included at every stage of the work, from project design to sharing of findings.

Hot Tip: Universal design is helpful to think about even if your evaluation is not specifically focused on disability programs or issues. You will likely encounter people with disabilities or members of other vulnerable populations whatever your focus, so it is good to be prepared. Moreover, good universal design works better for everyone, even those without disabilities or other barriers. Think of bar patrons watching TV with closed captioning on, or people with strollers or rolling suitcases using elevators and curb cuts.

Hot Tip: One key aspect of applying universal design to evaluation work is to think about all the different ways people communicate or access information. For example, if you are conducting a survey on-line, you might offer the option to do it on paper or over the phone if respondents prefer not to respond by computer. Or if you are doing interviews by phone you may find that some respondents prefer to speak in person or respond by e-mail.

Rad Resource: For more tips, join the AEA Coffee Break Webinar on this topic on Thursday, August 5 at 2PM – click here to learn more and sign up. The Disability and Other Vulnerable Populations TIG is also hosting multiple sessions related to Universal Design, including a skill building workshop and a roundtable, at the upcoming American Evaluation Association Annual Conference in San Antonio the first week in November, so look for us there!

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Disabilities and Other Vulnerable Populations (DOVP) Week with our colleagues in the DOVP AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our DOVP members and you may wish to consider subscribing to our weekly headlines and resources list where we’ll be highlighting DOVP resources.

communication, Disabilities, Inclusive, Universal Design