A Universal Design Infrastructure for Multimodal Presentation of Materials in STEM Programs: Universal Design

We describe a proposed universal design infrastructure that aims at promoting better opportunities for students with disabilities in STEM programs to understand multimedia teaching material. The Accessible Educational STEM Videos Project aims to transform learning and teaching for students with disabilities through integrating synchronized captioned educational videos into undergraduate and graduate STEM disciplines. This Universal Video Captioning (UVC) platform will serve as a repository for uploading videos and scripts. The proposed infrastructure is a web-based platform that uses the latest WebDAV technology (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) to identify resources, users, and content. It consists of three layers: (i) an administrative management system; (ii) a faculty/staff user interface; and (iii) a transcriber user interface. We anticipate that by enriching it with captions or transcripts, the multimodal presentation of materials promises to help students with disabilities in STEM programs master the subject better and increase retention.