Skip to content
Accessibility at the UW

Defining Learning Technologies’ Role in Accessibility

Recommmendations for September 2025

Prepared by:

  • Marcus Hirsch, Director, Academic Strategy & Affairs Information Services
  • Priya Keefe, Project Management and Business Operations Analyst, Academic Strategy & Affairs Information Services
  • Jake Kulstad, Assistant Director, Learning Technologies, Academic Technologies

Table of Contents

Background

In April 2024, the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued new standards that require the University’s web content, including academic course content, to be accessible by April 24, 2026. To address this need, the University created a task force, which matured into the Digital Accessibility Initiative (DAI) with multiple action teams. The Course Content Accessibility Action Team met to identify and prioritize key areas. One of those areas is the processes of Learning Technologies (LT).

An individual and retroactive approach will not allow UW to comply with the law. We know the future approach will need to be multi-pronged, provide support for faculty, and encourage incremental progress. The DOJ’s ruling requires enterprise-wide and local unit efforts to ensure content complies with the technical standards. This proactive approach means UW will:

  1. Create course materials that are broadly accessible from the first day of class.
  2. Remediate inaccessible existing course materials that will be used in courses after April 24, 2026.
  3. Archive inaccessible course content that will not be used after April 24, 2026.

Scope of this Report

This report conveys options for meeting the mandate from the Department of Justice (DOJ) by adding some work streams to Learning Technologies (LT)’s services and removing some work streams so LT can focus on work related to teaching, learning, and accessibility.

Although there was some accessibility work being done prior to the Digital Accessibility Initiative, this began to change rapidly in the summer of 2024. For the purposes of this report, “current state” refers to the time before the Digital Accessibility Initiative, and Future State refers to a time after the summer of 2025. Realistically, changes will happen in phases.

Current State of LT

Prior to August of 2024, Learning Technologies was composed of three teams that employed five full-time employees and approximately 31 student workers.

LT’s three teams:

  1. Computer Vet
  2. Instructor team/Sound Studio
  3. Canvas Learning Management System suite

These teams support requests made via:

  1. Walk-ins to two service desks in Odegaard Hall
  2. Emails to help@uw.edu
  3. Online scheduled workshops
  4. Online office hours (ten hours a week)
  5. Phone calls
  6. One-on-one consultations for those unable to attend office hours

LT teaches requesters where to click to perform tasks and fix issues themselves; LT does not perform these tasks for requesters.

Accessibility-related requests to LT are currently usually related to the Ally accessibility checker available in Canvas. They receive occasional requests about accessible captions for multimedia. LT does not currently do any document remediation.

Current Resources and Workflows

Computer Vet

The Computer Vet services were terminated in summer of 2025. The student employee hours have been transitioned to other LT service teams. See the Appendix for more information about the Computer Vet services.

Instructor team/Sound Studio

The Instructor team provides free workshops for all current UW students, faculty and staff to develop skills with creative tools like Adobe InDesign, Photoshop and Audacity, or Digital Video Editing systems like Adobe Premiere and iMovie, as well as digital productivity software like Microsoft Excel, “R” and R Studio (when available). Office hours for some of these tools are offered.

The Instructor team is currently composed of two student workers (formerly four), and is managed by one full-time employee. This work comprises approximately 5% of Learning Technologies’ total workload.

Learning Management System Suite

The Learning Management System (LMS) suite team supports Canvas, (including the Canvas learning tools in the Canvas App Center), Zoom, Panopto, and Poll Everywhere.

The LMS team provides white-glove service for Canvas for students, instructors, and teaching assistants; there are only a few niche topics they don’t support. For core Canvas learning tools (LTI), LT will make an effort to assess the issue and direct requests to the vendor, appropriate.

The LMS team currently is composed of 17 student workers (whose hours are capped), and four to five full-time employees. This work comprises approximately 85% of Learning Technologies’ total workload.

Consultation Process

In practice, the workflow will vary based on the request; a general summary of the consulting workflow is below. For a visual representation, refer to the workflow diagram of the current state: LT Current Workflow [PDF].

  1. Requester contacts LT through one of six ways: emailing help@uw.edu, signing up for office hours, clicking the Help button in Canvas, calling, walking in to a service desk, or by contacting a staff member directly.
    1. a. A ticket is created in UW Connect.
      1. i. Note: This is the preferred process, but sometimes a ticket may not get created when the requester contacts an LT staff member directly.
    2. b. Tickets are assigned to LT staff according to their areas of specialization.
  2. Requests are taken by staff, according to their specialties.
  3. LT works with the requester to resolve the request. Interactions and resolutions are summarized in the ticket.
  4. Once resolved, the ticket is closed.
  5. If the issue is not resolved:
    1. a. LT may escalate the ticket by contacting UW-IT via Microsoft Teams.
    2. b. And/or LT may escalate the ticket by contacting the vendor.
      1. i. If the vendor declines to fix the issue, LT works with the requestor to identify a workaround.

Operations

Select LT staff members participate in multiple recurring meetings with UW-IT:

  • Request management practice team
  • Student & Educational Technology Services (SETS) and four of its service teams:
    • ○ Canvas service team
    • ○ Zoom service team
    • ○ Panopto service team
    • ○ Poll Everywhere service team
  • Knowledge management practice team
  • Incident management practice team

Other Work

  • Infrequent tier 1 support for UW-IT JupyterHub and attending service team meetings.
  • LT has created and maintains 800 articles in the knowledge base. They also help maintain 400 public knowledge articles for UW-IT.
  • Ordering licenses for Zoom add-ons. This work is in the process of being moved to UW-IT.

Edge Use Cases

LT receives occasional requests regarding:

  • Push notifications (webhooks) from Canvas for Microsoft Word and Google Docs.
  • Feedback Fruits vs peer review module in Canvas.
  • Plagiarism detection troubleshooting.
  • Peripheral plugins.

Current Issues

Description of Issues

  1. Although Zoom was a teaching tool during the COVID-19 pandemic, the current support needs no longer fit LT’s mission of supporting students and instructors in using teaching and learning tools.) Currently, the majority of the Zoom support requests are for supporting staff in administrative functions. Requests from faculty are few and easy to answer.
  2. Requesters may email LT staff members directly (particularly Jason Smith, who supports Zoom), and these requests may not become tickets in UW Connect.
  3. Any increase in the volume of work will not be sustainable with the current staffing. To add accessibility work to LT’s work streams, some other work streams will need to be reduced.
  4. Although funding for Computer Vet services has been cut in summer of 2025, and email inquiries will now be directed to UW-IT, LT will likely still receive these general IT questions because LT is housed in the Odegaard Learning Commons lab where students will be working.
  5. Student employee hours have been reduced.
  6. There is no department at UW that supports Microsoft Office and Google products. Requests regarding these products often come to LT. Three major formats that are likely to need help with accessibility are PDF, Word, and PPT.
  7. LT provides white-glove service for Canvas, which sets a precedent for other tools. Requester expectations make it challenging to set limits on the services they provide for these other tools.
  8. I&T Governance has charged UW-IT with transitioning Gradescope (an assessment tool that integrates with Canvas) to a centrally-supported, enterprise service in AY26; LT has agreed to provide consultation and support, in parallel with other teaching and learning tools they currently support. Though it is anticipated to be relatively low effort, Gradescope support will add to their total workload.

Current Data on the Issues

  1. The LMS team receives the most requests about Canvas (approximately 70%), followed by Zoom (20–30%).
  2. Estimate: In some months, Zoom requests can consume as much as 30% of all of LT’s workload (not just the LMS team’s workload).

Current Training/Education

Some FTE have received accessibility training, but it did not prepare them to remediate a PDF, which takes an accessibility expert.

Current Technology/Tools

LT staff use all the tools they support (e.g., Canvas and Ally) and Service Now for tickets.

Approaches to Focusing Efforts in the Future

The recommendations in this report sit within the University’s three-year roadmap for a response to the new ADA rules.

Options for Future Central Support

Future Central, Tri-Campus Workflows and Staffing

  1. Learning Technologies will serve on a cross-functional team providing tri-campus, tier 1 and tier 2 support, including:
    1. a. Determining the nature of an accessibility request and where to refer the requester.
    2. b. Instructing requesters regarding how to address their accessibility issues, but not remediating for requesters.
    3. c. Referring requestors to the appropriate support unit in the cross-functional team (e.g., ATS, DRS, SETS, etc.).
    4. d. Escalating an issue to a UW-IT engineer or to the product vendor.
  2. LT will support the following file types:
    1. a. Native Canvas content (pages, assignments, etc.)
      1. i. Will support all Canvas features and functionality.
      2. ii. Will route questions about core Canvas learning tools (LTI) to the appropriate party.
    2. b. Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel files
      1. i. Focus on accessibility checkers and rich content editing to address accessibility issues.
      2. ii. Address content issues that can be flagged by accessibility checkers.
      3. iii. Only consult on content that is uploaded to Canvas for student-facing programs.
      4. iv. Avoid consulting on aspects of these files that do not relate to document accessibility.
    3. c. Google Platform
      1. i. Will refer faculty to documentation or to local support.
      2. ii. Suggest conversion to supported format to receive further assistance.
    4. d. Portable Document File-PDFs
      1. i. Alternatives to PDFs.
      2. ii. Methods for converting or replacing PDFs.
      3. iii. For high volume, high impact, or high frequency PDFs, refer instructors to ATS for remediation.
  3. The future state will need a clear escalation process for accessibility-related tickets.
  4. With a cross-functional team, LT will contribute to support documentation.
  5. Five graduate student assistants (GSA) will help provide support as part of LT. LT will train these GSA.
  6. Move Zoom service management to UW-IT to enable LT to provide these new duties.

Future Central Tools/Technology

Note: TidyUp and UDOIT were launched in September of 2025 and are supported by the cross-functional team providing tri-campus support.

  1. TidyUp is being adopted for deleting and archiving content in Canvas.
  2. Cidilabs UDOIT is being adopted for converting inaccessible PDFs to editable Canvas pages (intended for assignments).

Future Central Training/Education

  1. LT staff will need to be trained to support TidyUp and UDOIT.
  2. The Assistant Director of Learning Technologies is in the process of creating training for LT staff related to the accessibility services they will offer.
  3. Consider working with the Teaching@UW network to raise visibility for pertinent training topics like accessibility in Canvas.

Options for Future Policies

  1. Requesters should be using Canvas or have a documented exception to use LT’s services.
  2. Encourage instructors to create Canvas pages for content instead of Microsoft documents. Canvas pages are easier to make accessible and will be supported by LT.
  3. Identify which accessibility-related services LT will provide and define clear limits to those services.

Implementation

Options for Data and Analytics

Data and analytics can help UW address, prioritize and track progress on institutional goals.

  1. Gather data on the various work streams and staff member workloads. If there is a large increase in Canvas-related tickets, LT will need additional staff hours.

Options for Approach (e.g, Phasing, Prioritization, Implementation)

Caveat: The writers of this report have not seen the three-year ADA roadmap, so the suggestions here, while strategic, may not be perfectly aligned with the ADA roadmap.

  1. In the first year of the three-year ADA roadmap:
    1. a. Implement new policies on the type and amount of accessibility-related work LT will do.
    2. b. Leverage tiered remediation support, with Learning Technologies performing first-tier triage to determine the nature of an accessibility request and where to refer the requester.
    3. c. Gather data on LT’s work and capacity to inform future direction.
  2. For the second or third year of the ADA roadmap:
    1. a. Assess tiered support arrangement with UW-IT, Academic Technology Services (ATS) and Disability Resources for Students’ ATT teams and adjust accordingly.

Conclusion

This report conveys options for meeting the mandate from the Department of Justice (DOJ) by focusing the efforts of the Learning Technologies (LT) department. Solving some of the problems presented in this report will enable LT to provide new, additional support for accessibility issues encountered by instructors. It will be necessary to set clear expectations for service definitions, levels, and priorities so that local responsibilities are not assumed to be central responsibilities. Collaborative partnerships among Learning Technologies (LT), Student & Educational Technology Services (UW-IT: SETS), Disability Resources for Students (DRS), Accessibility Technology Services (ATS), and Compliance & Risk Services will be essential for success.

Appendix

Computer Vet
The Computer Vet was a free, help-desk service offered to UW students, faculty, and staff to assist with software problems on personal computers including operating system updates, anti-virus installation and updates, email forwarding, Duo two-factor authentication (2FA), peer-to-peer software removal (not enterprise software provided by UW) and infected computers blocked from UW network access. These are services not provided by UW-IT. Most requests were initiated by walk-ins to Odegaard Hall.

Computer Vet was staffed by 12 student workers and managed by one full-time employee. This work comprised approximately 10% of Learning Technologies’ total workload. If funding for this service is cut, and email inquiries are directed to UW-IT, LT will still receive these general IT questions because they are staffing the computer lab in Odegaard Hall.