Before you can start adapting your teaching and learning activities, it is important to check what your students’ needs are. Some aspects may generally be more accessible but may also impede the general quality of the teaching and learning activity. For instance, to make an activity more accessible for students with a physical disability, teachers might remove an activity involving movement around the classroom. However, if within a particular year no student has a physical disability, this may be a missed opportunity to get your students to be more active. Therefore, it can be useful to check with your students in advance to what extent they have special needs so you can adapt your teaching and learning activities accordingly. In your OSIRIS page you should be able to see the special practical provisions and special facilities needed by your students. To find out more, you can also use one of the following methods: 

Before the course starts send an email with a request to fill in a short survey on their needs during the course or ask students to fill in the survey at the first class of a course. Mention that results will be treated confidentially. Examples of questions you could include are: 

• What would you like me to know about how you learn best? 
• How can I best help you succeed in this course? 
• What can I do to best support your learning needs? 
• Do you have any access needs that you would like me to know about? 

The University of Minnesota  provides information about what you can do to design inclusive classroom activities:

1. The Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking and Technology (DO-IT) Center aims at empowering people with disabilities through technology and education. DO-IT  provides strategies for accessible activities based on universal design of instruction framework. See section ‘Physical Environments and `products’: https://www.washington.edu/doit/equal-access-universal-design-instruction 
2. The next link provides a list of some of the common indicators of learning-disabled students and information about appropriate strategies learning which could be taken into account when designing teaching and learning activities for disabled students: https://www.teachervision.com/special-needs/teaching-students-special-needs 
3. Last but not least, the Universal Design for learning (UDL) guidelines offer a useful framework for designing inclusive courses. This framework helps teachers improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights of how we learn. These guidelines offer useful tips to make TLA accessible to all students. Besides providing multiple means of engagement (e.g, to increase interest and self-regulation), the UDL guidelines also includes useful tips to provide multiple means of representation (the “what” of learning): providing options for perception, for language and symbols, and for comprehension) and to provide multiple means for action and representation (the “How” of learning): such as providing options for physical actions, for expression and communication, and for the executive functions). For example, it is important to ensure that key information is equally perceptible to all learners. UDL guidelines advices to: 

• Provide the same information through different modalities (e.g., vision, hearing, or touch); 
• Provide information in a format that will allow for adjustability by the student (e.g., text can be enlarged). 

Such changes make that information is accessible not only to students with particular needs, but it is also easier to access to all students. Find more information about this guideline here: UDL: Perception (cast.org) For a complete overview of the UDL guidelines, see their website: UDL: The UDL Guidelines (cast.org) 

To make sure you are making/have made the right changes in your teaching and learning activities, it is important to ask your students for feedback as they are the experts when it comes to their own needs. This can be done in several ways: 

• Ask for feedback before you make the change: Even for people with the same disability, the things they can do may differ and only the students themselves can determine this for themselves. Therefore, if in doubt whether an activity will still be accessible for one of your students, you can ask them directly whether changes should be made.  
• Ask for feedback at the end of the course: add a question about the accessibility of the teaching and learning activities to the course evaluation 
• Ask the Services for Students with Disabilities for help if in doubt 

For more information on the accessibility of your course, see the section on accessibility of learning materials.