Category: News

Cooling temperatures, rainy days, and the start of another academic quarter remind us that fall has arrived. It’s hard to believe six months have passed since we launched the IT Accessibility Challenge 2020 back in May. The Challenge is a university-wide campaign encouraging members of the UW community to take one or more simple actions to help make websites, online courses, digital documents, and videos more accessible to individuals with disabilities. Dozens of individuals, and four departments, took the Challenge and have been working over the last six months to improve the accessibility of their technology resources.

October marks the formal end of the six-month Challenge, and participants will be honored on October 21 in a UW Celebration of Accessibility, hosted online from 1:00 to 2:30pm. October is also National Disability Employment Awareness Month and Washington State Disability History Month so there’s plenty to celebrate.  The event will feature lightning round talks from a wide variety of stakeholders from across the university who are engaged in accessibility-related work, including the Office of the ADA Coordinator, Disability Services Office, Disability Studies program, CREATE, the D Center, UW-IT Accessible Technology Services, and several IT Accessibility Challenge participants who will be reporting out on their experiences, including what they accomplished and lessons learned. The program will also feature two Capacity Building Awards, awarded by the university’s IT Accessibility Task Force in recognition for particularly outstanding efforts to improve accessibility.

This event is designed to celebrate all that we have accomplished so far at the UW in ensuring our university is accessible and welcoming to individuals with disabilities, and to share our vision and next steps as we continue to work together to improve. Please spread the word, and we hope to see you there!

• Date:  Wednesday, October 21, 2020
• Time:  1:00pm – 2:30pm
• Place: Zoom (UW NetID required)
• The event will include live captioning and ASL interpreting.

On July 26, 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). In doing so, he said, “I now lift my pen to sign this Americans with Disabilities Act and say: Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.”

Thirty years later, a lot has happened to make American society, including the University of Washington, more accessible. For example, there are curb cuts, ramps, accessible entrances into buildings, braille signage, accessible crosswalks, and accessible parking spaces. And systems are in place to provide accommodations for students, employees, and visitors with disabilities. However, despite all these gains, there are still shortcomings in all these areas.

Accessibility of information technology is similar. When the ADA was passed in July 1990, the World Wide Web was an idea posed by Tim Berners-Lee, but it hadn’t been implemented yet, and computer technology was many years from becoming the ubiquitous tool and resource that it is today. Technology has grown exponentially in the last 30 years, and the accessibility community has worked hard to keep pace with that evolution and ensure new innovative technologies could be used by everyone. At the UW and throughout society, we have made progress in making IT accessible, including websites, digital documents, videos, hardware, and software. It is technically possible to make nearly all of these technologies accessible today by following standards and best practices. However, many of the technologies in common use today are not accessible, and as a higher education community, we still have a lot of work to do to ensure our IT resources provide benefits, rather than barriers, to students, employees, and visitors who use them.

Anyone at the UW who distributes a document in Word, PDF, or Google Docs; uploads a video; creates a website; or has a role in making an IT purchasing decision; has the responsibility of ensuring that IT resource is accessible to everyone. UW-IT Accessible Technology Services provides this website, and a variety of activities and events designed to support the UW community in this effort.

Over the next week, and throughout the summer, there will be opportunities at the UW to celebrate the positive changes made possible by the ADA and to consider next steps—as individuals, departments, and as a university community—for continuing to improve accessibility.

• Monday, July 27, 11am – 1pm: The Washington State ADA 30th anniversary celebration will include presentations by Governor Inslee and Lt. Governor Habib, as well as disability advocates and community leaders. It will also include historical video footage, an interactive panel discussion, and musical entertainment. The event will stream live on TVW.
• Thursday, July 30, 10am – Noon: Tech Talks, sponsored by UW Tech Connect, will feature a talk by Sheryl Burgstahler, Hadi Rangin, and myself titled ADA Anniversary: 30 Years Of Breaking Down Barriers in IT Accessibility. This session will explore how assistive technology and technology accessibility have evolved over the last 30 years, plus barriers that still exist and strategies for addressing them as we move into the future. For additional information, including a Zoom link, see this event on the Seattle Campus Calendar.
• Now through October: Take the IT Accessibility Challenge 2020! Do your part to help realize the vision of the ADA by completing any of 20 simple actions to make websites, Canvas courses, online documents, and videos more accessible.

This week, on Thursday, May 21, the entire world will be celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). This day was established nine years ago to engage people around the world in talking, thinking, and learning about digital access and inclusion. At the University of Washington, we have an annual tradition of hosting lectures, trainings, workshops, and tours of the Access Technology Center, as well as other events on this day.

GAAD 2020 is no exception, but it’s unique. Given our current situation, teaching and working from home due to a global pandemic, all GAAD events will be offered remotely via Zoom. Nevertheless, we have a full day planned, from 9:00am to 4:00pm, with six talks and trainings on various aspects of digital accessibility. All events are open to everyone in the UW Community (a UW NetID is required for admission). All sessions will include live captioning and American Sign Language interpreting. The full agenda is available on our Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2020 web page.

Another thing that’s unique about GAAD 2020 is that its timing coincides with the IT Accessibility Challenge 2020, a university-wide campaign that just launched, encouraging members of the UW community to take one or more simple actions to help make websites, online courses, digital documents, and videos more accessible to individuals with disabilities. There are 20 simple actions to choose from, and they can all be easily performed from home.

The photo below captures the spirit of both GAAD and the IT Accessibility Challenge, people working together (in this case, students) with a poster hanging in the background that reads:

• Have fun
• Take chances
• Open mind to others’ ideas
• Encourage each other

Please Take the Challenge! Then, attend some or all of the GAAD trainings to help get started with your Challenge tasks. I hope to see everyone at one or more GAAD events on Thursday!

On March 6, the University of Washington (UW) announced that it would no longer be meeting in person due to the threat posed by COVID-19. For the remainder of Winter quarter, classes and/or exams would be conducted remotely. The UW was the first public university in the United States to take this action, but since then, colleges and universities throughout the country have moved to an online delivery model, and the UW has extended its remote learning to include all of Spring quarter.

As higher education institutions, including the UW, prepare to provide students with a fully remote educational experience, it is critical that they take the steps necessary to ensure all students have equal access, including students with disabilities.

On March 17, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Education released a video message reminding educational institutions of their obligations under civil rights law to avoid discriminating against students with disabilities during this nationwide movement to online instruction. The full video is provided below.

As Kenneth L. Marcus, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, says at 1:15, “Online learning is a powerful tool for educational institutions, as long as it is accessible for everyone”.

If you’re a faculty member, instructor, teaching assistant, web designer or developer, administrator, or other stakeholder involved in some capacity in delivering UW content or services online, please take steps to ensure your online content is accessible. The Accessible Technology home page has been updated with a variety of resources that can help. If you need help, please contact UW-IT Accessible Technology Services via help@uw.edu with specific questions. Also, please consider attending an upcoming training or event or joining our growing community of IT Accessibility Liaisons.

There are various groups at the University of Washington (UW) whose primary responsibility is accessibility. Accessible Technology Services (ATS) within UW-IT is one of these groups, and our focus is on the accessibility of information technology (IT). The UW has created, procured, and/or used a massive amount of IT: Hundreds of thousands of web pages; millions of digital documents; tens of thousands of videos on YouTube and countless more on Panopto; thousands of software packages; and hundreds, if not thousands, of classroom technologies and other hardware devices. All of these technologies present possible barriers to certain groups of students, faculty, staff, and/or visitors who need to access them, including individuals with disabilities.

Although ATS staff works very hard to raise awareness, educate stakeholders, and provide accessibility solutions, we’re a small team facing a daunting challenge. Given this, a key to our success is our growing network of IT Accessibility Liaisons. The Liaisons network is comprised of staff and faculty who are out there in the trenches, not necessarily charged with accessibility in their job descriptions, but willing to do their part to try to improve IT accessibility within their scope of influence.

Continue reading “We couldn’t do it without Liaisons!”

Welcome to 2020! We in UW-IT Accessible Technology Services (ATS) are excited for the new year and new decade. We wrapped up 2019 with momentum:

• On November 13, 36 people participated in the Fall meeting of the IT Accessibility Liaisons network. The meeting was a “strategies session,” focusing on implementing IT accessibility within units or departments and including accessibility in staff trainings. Representatives from various UW groups shared their experiences, promising practices, and challenges.
• On December 6, IT accessibility specialist Hadi Rangin was joined by Mary Mulvill, UW service owner of ServiceNow, and Aaron Powell, Vice President for UW Information Technology and CIO, in traveling to San Diego for a productive meeting with ServiceNow leadership, which resulted in ServiceNow taking concrete actions to improve their products’ accessibility.
• On December 12, 38 people gathered for the first ever UW Drupal/WordPress accessibility sprint. Web designers, developers, and/or content authors worked together to fix accessibility issues on their websites. We provided coffee and pizza, and some people stayed for the entire all-day event.

We have already continued to build on that momentum in 2020. Just as New Years celebrations were winding down, I gave a presentation on January 2 called “Web Accessibility in 2020,” presented at the year’s first Web Council meeting, which was attended by 30 people (20 in person and 10 remote). Then later that morning, ATS hosted its first IT Accessibility Office Hours, something we’ll be doing every month in 2020 except February. Please stop by HUB 238 with your IT accessibility questions the first Thursday of each month at 11:00 am.

One of our activities in the new year is this blog. We anticipate having lots of news items to share, and this blog will provide a new channel for doing that.

As I said in the January 2 Web Council meeting, please consider adding accessibility-related goals to your New Years resolutions. We in ATS are here to support you however we can in meeting those goals. Feel free to reach out via help@uw.edu and let us know how we can help.