Increasing Accessibility: ensuring everyone can participate in a meaningful way

Increasing Accessibility means ensuring everyone can participate in a meaningful way. We can think about this for work 1:1, and in group spaces (where it becomes a little more tricky!). This information doesn't just apply to music therapy sessions, it can be applied to all types of groups (Storytime, Classroom activities, Therapy groups more! While we support students with high support needs, this information is valuable across a broad spectrum of support needs.

There are several steps we can take to increasing accessibility for students with high support needs, some are simple steps, while others take a bit more prep and creativity. Increasing accessibility may mean increasing access to the physical space, can everyone physically access the space and materials, and participate in what you have planned? It may also mean ensuring sensory needs are met by providing sensory tools like fidgets, weighted lap pads, wiggle cushions, and head phones. We love to meet sensory needs by incorporating sensory input right into our songs and activities, like proprioceptive input (deep pressure movements and activities like squeezing hands, stomping feet, squeezing arms, etc), vestibular input (movements of the head like swaying, rocking, or looking around with our imaginary binoculars!).

Increasing accessibility can look like decreasing unnecessary stimuli in the room so that students can attend to the important information. We always set up against a blank background (or against a room divider), cover materials with a black table cloth, place visuals face-down until we need them, wear a solid color shirt that is high contrast to skin our color, and avoid items dangling from the ceiling.

We turn off unnecessary sounds like iPad charging machines, bathroom fans, and any added sound that isn’t needed in the space. As an example, if a student with cortical visual impairment is surrounded a lot of visual stimuli, they may not be able to access/process the important auditory information.

We can also increase accessibility by making our songs and activities multisensory, proving lots of avenues for comprehension and participation. For example, all of our songs have a combination of multisensory components - music, movements, sign language, visuals, props, and movement props! For groups where you may have students with a variety of support needs, this provides so many ways to engage and participate!

Maybe a group isn’t fully accessible to a student because they are feeling so anxious they are not able to attend to the material. We can increase accessibility by providing structure and predictability throughout the session with things like a visual schedule, or a visual timer (my preference so that I can make changes in the moment). We can add visuals to songs and activities to increase comprehension and participation while providing structure through a predictable set of visuals, showing a clear beginning and ending of that activity. We can also provide tools that help the body to feel calm, like our sensory tools, songs that encourage deep breathing or other techniques likes counting and moving our bodies.

Want to learn more about increasing accessibility? Check out our resource-packed course, Increasing Accessiblity: ensuring everyone can participate in a meaningful way. This course is pre-approved for 7 CMTEs for music therapists.

Here is a bit more information about the course:

• This is a pre-recorded course, learn at your own pace! The course is broken into chapters containing short video sections, making it easy to choose your pace and return to favorites. 

• It is resource-packed with 26 songs, and filled with tips and ideas on how to increase accessibility in your music therapy sessions. 

• Overarching goals targeted in the multisensory songs in this course are: expressive & receptive language, motor skills, and sensory regulation.

In this course we discuss increasing accessibility through:

• Considering Sensory Needs

• Speech & Language and Access to Communication Systems

• Auditory Considerations

• Visual Considerations (with a focus on cortical visual impairment)

• Physical considerations 

*Guest presenter:

Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald, MS, MEd, CTVI

Teacher of the Visually Impaired & Practitioner who provides an introduction to cortical visual impairment in the “Visual Considerations” section of this course.

What’s inside the course?

• 
  

  26 original songs (chords, lyrics, visuals, and notated lead sheets)

• 6-hours of pre-recorded video 

• 174 Page PDF

• 61 High Quality Printable Visuals

• 30-minute guest presenter, a Teacher of the Visually Impaired, introducing cortical visual impairment 

For more details, download the full course promo with outline.

Interested in both this course and our course Make it Multisensory!? Bundle both courses and save $20!