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Accessibility at the UW

Readying ATS to Provide Future Digital Accessibility Services

Recommendations for June 2025

Prepared by:

  • Marcus Hirsch, Director, Academic Strategy & Affairs – Information Services
  • Priya Keefe, Project Management and Business Operations Analyst, Academic Strategy & Affairs – Information Services
  • Mary Mulvihill, Executive Director of Digital Accessibility, UW-IT Accessible Technology Services

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 Accessible Technology Services (ATS).

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 and minimize the burden on faculty. 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 materials that will not be used after April 24, 2026.

Scope of this Report

The Academic Course Content Action Team is charged with making recommendations regarding the accessibility of course content. It must be noted, though, that the work of Accessible Technology Services (ATS) is not limited to course content and is, in fact, quite broad. Any recommendations made by this report must be considered in the full context of ATS’s services.

The DO-IT Center is out of scope of this report. DO-IT is funded by federal, state and private funds, is affiliated with the College of Engineering Dean’s Office, and is organized within UW-IT.

Some ATS services are also not included in the scope of this report. The report does summarize the current state for braille versions of content produced at the Access Technology Center (ATC), but it does not address what the future state might look like.

This report conveys options for meeting the mandate from the Department of Justice (DOJ) by focusing the efforts of the digital accessibility services of ATS.

Current State of ATS

The mission of Accessible Technology Services (ATS) is to work to improve the lives of people with disabilities by empowering their success in postsecondary education and careers, and by leading and supporting the UW community to ensure its digital content is fully accessible.

ATS is comprised of three teams: the IT Accessibility Team, The DO-IT Center, and ATS Operations. The IT Accessibility Team provides technology-related tools and services to support the University; DO-IT runs specialized disability and accessibility-related programs; and Operations provides the administrative structure to make it all happen.

ATS started as a way to encourage people to be proactive in accessibility, rather than reactive. They serve all three campuses of the University of Washington, including UW Medicine, and they serve both staff and instructors, and some students.

Current Resources and Workflows

ATS includes three teams: Operations, IT Accessibility, and DO-IT.

The breadth of ATS’s work is broad and includes:

  1. Multiple services:
    • a. Automated Web Accessibility Testing
    • b. Accessibility Consulting
    • c. Digital Document Remediation
    • d. Captioning and Audio Description Services
    • e. Braille Embossing Service
    • f. Self-service document conversion
  2. Supporting two centers:
    • a. Access Technology Center (ATC) providing assistive technologies
    • b. DO-IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology) Center
  3. Outreach to the UW community, including, but not limited to:
    • a. Monthly UW Instruction Accessibility Meetup
    • b. Monthly UW Web Accessibility and Usability Meetup
    • c. Periodic Digital Accessibility Liaisons meetings
    • d. Individual and unit training
    • e. Faculty engagement sessions
    • f. Maintaining ATS UW web pages with information on how to make materials accessible
  4. Supporting Help requests regarding:
    • a. Deque University’s self-service training content
    • b. The infrastructure of the Ally accessibility tool

For a visual representation of the request-based workflows potentially affecting academic course content, please request it from Priya Keefe at asahelp@uw.edu for a copy of the current state workflow.

Document Remediation Process

Accessible Technology Services currently remediates a limited number of digital documents (e.g., PDF, PowerPoint, Word) without charge through a service supported by UW-IT. Individuals, departments, and other units at the UW are encouraged to apply to remediate highly-visible, high-impact, multiple use, and/or strategic documents. Examples include:

  • Digital documents available to the public on a high-use website
  • Digital documents that will be used multiple times in a course
  • Digital documents developed by several faculty members to be used in several different classes
  • Digital documents available to patients of UW Medicine

The following is a summary of the document remediation workflow:

  1. Requester contacts ATS through one of two ways: Help tickets to UW-IT Help Desk or the digital document remediation form on ATS’s webpage.
    • a. A ticket is created in UW Connect.
    • b. Tickets are assigned to ATS staff according to their areas of specialization.
    • c. Note: Remediation requests may also be referred from the Learning Technologies (LT) department.
  2. If remediation is for student accommodations, the requester is referred to Disability Resources for Students (DRS) and the ticket is moved to the DRS queue in UW Connect.
  3. ATS staff assess the remediation job and determines who will do the work:
    • a. If the ATS has the capacity (staffing and workload) to remediate in-house, students perform remediation if the work is basic, or an FTE remediates if the work is complex.
    • b. If ATS does not have the capacity to remediate the files in-house, the job goes through an internal ATS budget approval process and the files are sent to a vendor to remediate.
  4. Completed files are shared with the requestor via UW Connect, Google Drive, or Dropbox.
    • a. Note: Unlike DRS, ATS does not maintain a library of remediated documents.
  5. The UW Connect ticket is closed.

Captioning and Audio Description Services

The process is similar to the document remediation workflow. Requester contacts ATS through one of two ways: Help tickets to UW-IT Help Desk or the captioning and audio description service application form on ATS’s webpage.

When ATS staff assess the job, they also determine whether the video needs audio description. The videos are sent to the 3Play vendor to caption, which takes around a week. The completed files are often too big to be distributed via UW Connect, so they are distributed to the requester via Google Drive or Dropbox.

Note: A currently underutilized resource at UW is the credit Panopto gives UW for captioning by 3Play; the credit expires if not used.

Braille Embossing Service

ATS can convert UW materials from Microsoft Word into paper braille format. Tactile graphics production is provided in some circumstances. Any UW units requiring braille for faculty, staff, or visitors may request materials from this service. UW Medicine also uses this service. Braille is usually produced at UW, rather than sent to external vendors. Volume varies depending on need, currently ranging between 200-700 pages in a quarter.

Accommodation-based requests for braille typically come from Disability Resources for Students (DRS). Requests for braille sometimes originate from the academic department or the Disability Services Office (DSO) in UW Human Resources, and from UW Medicine.

A sampling of braille requests can help convey the volume: In the past seven years, DRS has had two requests for braille textbooks. In recent fall and winter quarters, other units have requested 951 braille pages.

  1. Requester contacts ATS through the braille embossing request form on ATS’s webpage.
    • a. A ticket is created in UW Connect.
    • b. Tickets are assigned to ATS staff according to their areas of specialization.
  2. Braille materials are embossed at the Access Technology Center in Mary Gates Hall.
  3. Completed materials are distributed to the requester.

Consultation Process

Consulting engagements are often lengthy in duration and labor intensive. Although each consulting request is unique, there are some themes, including:

  1. Ongoing collaborations with vendors and UW stakeholders for testing and providing feedback on product accessibility.]
    • a. Examples: Panopto, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Epic MyChart
  2. Project-based collaborations with vendors and UW stakeholders for testing and providing feedback on product accessibility.
    • a. Examples: RedCap, Canva templates, Concept 3D campus map, Microsoft Copilot
  3. Reviews of vendor products for UW stakeholders.
    • a. Examples: Canvas learning tools (LTI), GitHub, Microsoft Power App
  4. Reviews of websites, web applications, and mobile applications.
    • a. Examples: College of Arts and Sciences’ web template, College of Engineering tools, Institute on Human Development and Disability website, Office of Research website, UW Bothell website
  5. Providing assistance to help units get started with a digital accessibility strategy or to improve accessibility in a particular area.
    • a. Examples: IHME data visualization team, Math department
  6. Collaborating with other institutions on accessibility reviews on products or services.
    • a. Examples: Echo Labs, Adobe API auto-tagging
  7. Reviewing vendors’ Accessibility Conformance Reports as part of the IT procurement process.
  8. Delivering presentations, workshops and customized training
  9. Answering questions related to all aspects of digital accessibility.

In practice, the workflow will vary based on the request; the following is a general summary of the consulting workflow.

  1. Requester contacts ATS through one of three ways: s is similar to the document remediation workflow. Requester contacts ATS through one of two ways: Help tickets to UW-IT Help Desk, the consulting form on ATS’s webpage, or by contacting a staff member directly.
    1. a. A ticket is created in UW Connect.
      i. Note: This is the preferred process, but sometimes a ticket does not get created when the requester contacts an ATS staff member directly.
    2. b. Tickets are assigned to ATS staff according to their areas of specialization.
  2. If possible, ATS staff reply with an email template for responding to simple, common questions.
  3. Usually, further consultation is needed. ATS staff may respond via email or schedule a meeting with the requester.
  4. An initial meeting may be followed by further discovery, testing, and evaluation by ATS.
  5. ATS may generate and disperse documents, such as reports.
  6. For many types of requests, follow-up meetings are needed.
  7. If needed, ATS staff follows up by sending additional resources to the requester.
Procurement (a Subset of Consulting Requests)

The following is the summary of the workflow.

  1. Procurement Services emails a member of ATS directly.
  2. ATS reviews vendors’ accessibility documentation.
    1. a. ATS may participate in contract negotiations if vendors resist UW’s accessibility requirements.
  3. ATS may test the product for accessibility and review Accessibility Conformance Reports (ACRs/VPATs).
  4. ATS documents the results of their analysis and/or testing.

Current Issues

Description of Issues

  1. Requesters may email ATS staff members directly, and these requests may not become tickets in UW Connect.
  2. The limitations to document remediation (high impact, high profile) are subject to interpretation, and therefore, there is no consistent rule that can be applied for determining whether remediation is in the scope of ATS’s charge.
  3. Consulting requests can be very time consuming. The current consulting workflow may not be sustainable with current staffing.
  4. Only the Canvas learning tools (LTIs) deemed high priority may receive accessibility reviews due to ATS staffing levels.
  5. Student workers do most of the remediation in ATS. A lot of time and effort goes into training student staff workers who may only work for ATS for one or two years, and typically work 10-15 hours/week.
  6. There is one staff member assigned to all the consulting questions that are instruction-related. This will not scale.
  7. Any increase in the volume of work will not be sustainable with the current staffing.
  8. The Digital Accessibility Liaisons group has been less active this past year due to needed focus on the enterprise level Digital Accessibility Initiative.
  9. Digital Accessibility Liaisons engage voluntarily and participation varies. Most liaisons work in administrative vs. academic units and many are IT staff across UW. Faculty and academic units are under-represented.
  10. Neither UW-IT nor LT provide tier 1 support for many applications, including the Microsoft O365 suite. Users must rely on vendor documentation or local IT support.

Current Data on the Issues

  1. Estimate: If measured by the number of tickets, the consulting and transactional work streams could look proportional (50–50%), but consulting requests usually take longer to fill and may comprise 80% of ATS’s time.
  2. Estimate: ATS receives more requests to remediate documents than to provide multimedia file captioning.
  3. It takes three to four months to fully train people in ATS (excluding the time it takes to recruit and hire). Many students do not work until their junior or senior year, and they may only work ten hours a week (compared to the allowed 19 hours a week).
  4. Cost of PDF remediation: A student worker takes one hour to do ten pages of PDF remediation; currently, the estimated cost is $25.54. Contracting to a vendor is $8/page, or $80 for ten pages.
  5. Although ATS doesn’t distinguish between requests by faculty and non-faculty, it is known that in the past, academic units were underserved by ATS. One Instruction Accessibility Specialist position was created to engage academic departments.

Current Training/Education

ATS conducts a variety of training and does outreach to the UW community, including holding regular meetups. They also maintain ATS UW web pages with information on how to make materials accessible.

ATS staff understand that performing document remediation can be “a foot in the door” to work with individuals and educate them in creating content that is born-accessible – thus minimizing the need for remediation.

Current Policy and Recommendations

  1. All ATS services are for the UW community only, and require a UW NetID.
  2. ATS will remediate a limited number of highly-visible, high-impact, multiple use, and/or strategic digital documents and videos – without charge – through a service supported by UW-IT.

Current Technology/Tools

Review the ATS tools webpage for a complete list of tools used by ATS staff.

  1. They used to use email but are using UW Connect now (past 5 mo), so now have better data
  2. DubBot
  3. Equidox
  4. Adobe Acrobat Pro
  5. Google Drive to distribute large files

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 Workflows and Staffing

  1. Utilize the Learning Technologies (LT) department for first-tier remediation of academic content, similar to Canvas and Ally today. Support requests are generated via Canvas or Help tickets to UW-IT Help Desk and managed in UW Connect.
  2. Leverage ATS’s expertise to support remediation tools for the UW community and, as staffing allows, do complex remediation (second-tier).
  3. Explore options for employing a staff member dedicated to outreach to and training for the UW community to expand the ability to produce born-accessible content at the unit level.
  4. All software suppliers, including those providing academic content, will soon be required to submit an accessibility conformance report (ACR/VPAT). This necessitates document storage and management in addition to subject matter expertise to review and validate product status and roadmaps. This new additional work will require staffing.
  5. Explore support options for Microsoft applications, including directing users to Deque University and LinkedIn Learning content for training.

Future Central Tools/Technology

  1. Dedicate resources to researching, tracking and contributing to technological changes that will improve accessibility at UW. For example:
    • a. AI captioning and audio description
    • b. PDF AI auto-tagging for accessibility
    • c. AI description of complex images

Future Central Training/Education

  1. Train requesters to send requests via ATS queue in UW Connect, rather than to an individual’s UW email, so ATS can better report on their workload and work streams and provide improved coordination among other support teams including Learning Technologies and DRS.
  2. Refresh the Digital Accessibility Liaisons group as much as feasible. The communications channel was recently changed from an email distribution list to a Microsoft Teams site, allowing for distinct channels for collaboration on meaningful topics with peer support. With the recent name change from “IT Accessibility Liaisons” to “Digital Accessibility Liaisons,” the goal is to encourage broader engagement, especially with academic units and instructors. Of note: due to competing priorities, ATS isn’t able to support a more formal liaison program at this time, but they look forward to more active community engagement and participation.

Options for Future Policies

  1. Define specific, measurable criteria for “highly-visible, high-impact, multiple use, and/or strategic documents” so a policy can be consistently applied.
  2. Define expanded definitions of services to be provided by the future Digital Accessibility Center (DAC) to appropriately set expectations for local and centralized support for academic, administrative, and UW Medicine services.
  3. Pursue an Administrative Policy Statement (APS) to clarify expectations (this effort is underway and being led by Compliance & Risk Services).

Implementation

Options for Data and Analytics

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

  1. Explore ways to improve reporting on consulting and remediation requests. For example:
    • a. How many procurement-related requests are received in a quarter?
    • b. What percentage of requests originate from faculty and what percentage originate from staff?
  2. Gather data on the various work streams and staff member work loads.

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. Likewise, there may be additional support responsibilities required of ATS in the ADA roadmap that are not reflected here, e.g., procurement.

  1. In the first year of the three-year ADA roadmap:
    • a. Improve the data on ATS’s workload and work streams via UW Connect.
    • b. Implement new policies on the type and amount of remediation ATS will do.
    • c. Leverage tiered support, with Learning Technologies performing first-tier triage to determine the nature of an accessibility request and where to refer the requester. LT will instruct requesters regarding how to address their accessibility issues in Canvas, Canvas learning tools (LTI), and Ally.
    • d. Purchase and implement new academic-specific tools in concert with UW-IT’s Student & Educational Technology Services unit and Learning Technologies (e.g., TidyUP and UDOIT). Note: this work is underway.
    • e. Implement the work scoped in the approved Provost Reinvestment Fund (PRF) request. Hire and train students and temporary staff focused on remediation of administrative content. Support pilot efforts from the course content action team recommendations. Purchase and implement tools and services to support academic and administrative functions.
    • f. Follow the direction recently provided by the Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) Co-sponsors to move forward with defining and implementing a roadmap for a Digital Accessibility Center (DAC) which may or may not involve combining with the DRS ATT team in the first year.
      • i. ATS and DRS leadership are currently in discussion to determine the likelihood of a viable transition approach and mutually agreeable timeline while always prioritizing the accommodations process. The student accommodations process cannot be compromised.
      • ii. This will require services definition and scope, gaining an understanding of the work, workload, workflows, skills tools and finances.
      • iii. ATS will likely reorganize this summer to prepare for increased remediation workload accelerated by PRF funds, regardless of a potential consolidation with DRS ATT.
    • g. Gather data on ATS’s work and capacity to inform future direction.
  2. For the second or third year of the ADA roadmap:
    • a. Consider co-locating ATS and DRS ATT colleagues to alleviate friction in handoffs between the two teams.
    • b. Assess tiered remediation support arrangement with Learning Technologies, ATS and DRS ATT teams and adjust accordingly.
    • c. Continue to leverage student employees for remediation, but also strive for appropriate full-time staffing based on support trends and needs. Appropriately balance the overhead involved with student staff (recurring hiring, training, complex scheduling and high turnover). Make appropriate staffing investments based on institutional priorities.

Conclusion

ATS will undergo a significant transition in the next few years as it strives to support newly defined federal requirements within a financially constrained environment. Setting clear expectations for service definitions and service levels and priorities will be important so that local responsibilities are not assumed to be central responsibilities. ATS will need to find the right balance of enablement through training, tools and community support for local level support, and a higher level of remediation to help shift the university from a reactive accommodations-based model to a proactive accessible-first model. Collaborative partnerships among Compliance & Risk Services, Learning Technologies, DRS, and ATS will be essential for success.