Faculty Academic Accommodation Guide, July 2023
Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Disability Access Office
Project Roles: Graphic Designer, Copywriter, Copyeditor
Our redesigned accommodation guide helps faculty quickly learn their role in providing students with academic accommodations, saving everyone time and meeting student needs faster.
Background
At the start of term, faculty juggle many tasks in addition to their teaching and research responsibilities such as hiring and training teaching staff and preparing for the new semester. They may also need to provide approved academic accommodations as part of these responsibilities.
Determined to help simplify and streamline the process for faculty and ultimately students, the Dean of Student Services asked us to create a booklet for faculty. He wanted the booklet to be eye-catching and informative so that faculty could quickly learn more about each accommodation, and take action if needed.
Design Process
The process for creating the guide involved four phases to funnel and refine the content including: a copyediting phase for the text, a discovery process for the booklet where I reviewed similar designs, developing a design system to highlight key information in the guide, and the final booklet and digital guide.
Copyediting
We started the process by cutting the original text by about 50%.
The original 23-page document included information about why each accommodation was available, key facts about each accommodation, and recommended tips to implement the accommodations.
While all of the information was included throughout the document, it was not easy to skim or find quickly. We wanted to reduce the length for clarity.
We clarified faculty responsibilities in providing each accommodation.
Reading a text-heavy document made it time-consuming for faculty to determine their roles in providing accommodations, especially if they had multiple students in their courses who needed different accommodations.
I connected with the director to clarify each party’s responsibility for all accommodations in the guide and eliminate any unnecessary information. We reviewed each accommodation and created a bulleted list of faculty responsibilities and office responsibilities for each one
I formatted text to make the content skimmable.
I added subheadings to make the faculty member’s role and next steps to implementing the accommodation easier to find.
I edited the text so each section had a common voice, and added elements such as bold text and bulleted lists.
Design Discovery
Stakeholder conversations
The department director shared our project idea with a few instructors and discussed potential format options. While we were leaning toward a booklet at this phase in the design process, we wanted to see if our target audience agreed. After several conversations with faculty, we learned that a booklet was the most preferred format because it can be kept on a desk or bookshelf and referenced easily.
Comparative analysis
The department director provided several booklet designs from other institutions as examples. I flipped through each booklet with her to learn more about why she liked each design and together we identified features that we could include in our own booklet design. For example, I learned that she liked the pocket size of one of the guides due to portability and a flow chart infographic in another because of the way it clarified the process for fulfilling accommodations in a clear and concise way.
Booklet and Design System
In order to develop a uniform visual approach to depicting accommodation responsibilities and processes, I created a simple design system for the guide.
Typography: To create alignment with our home department (FAS Student Services), I needed to design the booklet within the Harvard FAS brand identity. I opted to use the condensed version of Benton Sans to fit more text into the small booklet while keeping a clean layout with ample white space.
Color: I worked within the core Harvard palette of crimson, gold, and black, but added two of the secondary palette colors (indigo and ivy) to help convey required actions within the design.
Cover design: Because we needed to print the booklet quickly, I intentionally added a white border around the edges so it didn’t need to be cropped and we could work with the small local printer a few blocks away from our office. I added a photo of the Smith Campus Center, as this is where the office is located and we had been trying raise awareness about where faculty and students can find us.
Wayfinding: Similar to directional signage, I wanted to create a “wayfinding” system throughout the booklet that would help faculty skim to identify action-items related to student accommodations.
Any time we mentioned an action item in the guide, I added a colored bubble with a symbol to depict the requirement of the faculty member as shown below. Similar to a page flag, these graphics draw attention to key information throughout the document.
Ivy green checkmarks for required items
Gold exclamation points for warnings and indications to read further for more details
Crimson xs when faculty should not do something
Ultimately, the wayfinding symbols and infographics in the guide allows faculty to skim the content, find the accommodation their student needs, and know immediately whether they need to take action.
I used a similar approach to outline faculty responsibilities for each accommodation in the guide. I created a table for each accommodation that shared whether the faculty member or Disability Access Office was responsible and what action was required. The action is located immediately below the accommodation name to make it easy to find and know whether to take action.
Flowcharts: To reduce the amount of text in the guide and create clear steps about what to do when receiving accommodations requests, I designed a flowchart to let faculty know who to contact at each stage of the process.
Designing the flowchart also helped us identify gaps in information. While we listed out the partners to contact when a student’s request was unrelated to a health condition or disability, we did not mention when to refer a student to the different partners. For example, faculty should contact the student’s resident dean when the concern is unrelated to a health condition.
Digital Guide
We wanted to create an accessible version of the booklet that could act as a single point of truth for our communications.
The Digital Faculty Guide provides a single point of truth to direct questions from faculty. We wanted the digital guide to mirror the same design elements used in the booklet, while meeting digital accessibility guidelines. While we were limited by the design of the content management system such as fonts and colors, we worked to make the key features of the guide as similar as possible.
Some modifications included:
Typing out the text of the flowchart so that it could be accessed using a screen reader. We used best practices for accessibility to create the text flowchart such as headings, ordered lists, and unordered to outline steps and decision-making points.
Text-only flowchart next to the flowchart graphic
Creating a table of contents with anchor links to different sections of the page so faculty can access exact location on the page that answers their questions
Digital table of contents
When flagging action items throughout the digital guide, we added a green bubble on the page that said “Action Item” instead of using a green checkmark to keep content accessible.
Accommodation Syllabus Statement screenshot from the Faculty Guide web page
Accommodation Syllabus Statement screenshot from the printed Faculty Guide
Reflections
To improve future iterations of the guide, we should solicit input from faculty and students. While we received a lot of positive feedback on the simplified format, it would be helpful to learn from faculty about any areas of the guide that are unclear and work to clarify the text.
It would be useful to learn more about which format of the guide is most useful to faculty. The guide is both available as a digital version and print version and the print version requires more time and is a higher cost to produce than the digital version.