Rate My Professor Jon Arakaki

The study emphasizes enabling all students to identify and perceive essential communication elements, including eye behavior, gestures, spatial representations, verbal messages, and auditory or vocal components like pitch, inflection, rate, and pauses. Recommendations include fostering faculty-student interaction to facilitate respectful and inclusive accommodations, incorporating learning units on deaf and blind culture to combat stereotypes and ableism, distinguishing factual descriptions from interpretations to preserve critical thinking, developing alternative assignments such as audio clips for video-based tasks, utilizing alt text and clear descriptions for images in both face-to-face and online settings, and incorporating multisensory elements like tone, speech rate, temperature, acoustics, and olfactics in nonverbal analyses. The group advocated for an SAC repository of accessible assignments and proactive testing of interactive content. Outcomes were shared with the SAC, presented at the Rock Creek Teaching and Learning Center, and Arakaki delivered the methodology at the Instructional Technology Council annual conference in St. Petersburg, Florida, contributing to broader advancements in accessible education.