Sheryl: My name is Sheryl Burgstahler
and I direct Accessible Technology Services
at the University of Washington.
And through our Access Technology Center
and other services, we’re making sure
that the IT that we develop,
procure, and use at the University of Washington
is accessible to all of our faculty, students, staff, and visitors.
Sheryl: In the state of Washington we now have a policy.
Policy 188 addresses accessible technology
and so it requires that our postsecondary institutions
in the state of Washington make their IT accessible to all
students, faculty, staff, and visitors with disabilities.
It requires that we be proactive in doing that
by auditing the software we have,
checking for accessibility, and making plans for making it more accessible
either ourselves for our websites or with vendors if it's a commercial product.
Patrick: My name is Patrick Pow.
I'm from University of Washington Tacoma.
My responsibility is technology.
I'm the vice chancellor for information technology.
When I look at Policy 188
I actually look at it as an opportunity
for us to enhance and do better on our campus.
Sheryl: As one of our efforts at the University of Washington
to ensure that all of the IT
that we procure, develop, and use on our campuses
is accessible to all of our faculty, students, and staff
who have disabilities,
we initiated a task force at the highest level.
And so we include people from HR, people from the disability services offices,
from our communications group, from our accessible IT group,
but many other units as well and we wrestle with how technology
can be made more accessible to people with disabilities.
And so some of the things that we do, for instance,
is have an inventory, particularly of the common
most widely used software, websites, and videos that we use on campus.
Dan: My name’s Dan.
The role that I’m playing in the Policy 188 effort
is to help assemble the inventory of IT on campus.
This is not a one person effort.
This is a multi-person effort.
Sheryl: We document what information we know about those products.
As time allows, we test those products for accessibility
and determine how we're going to make the products more accessible,
often working with the vendors.
Narrator: One of the task force’s priorities
has been to promote captioning of videos used on campus.
Sheryl: We have helped initiate a pilot actually where we
provide free captioning for videos on campus.
It's a limited amount of money so we’re not captioning all videos,
but we're captioning those that have a high impact.
Narrator: Now that pilot has turned into an ongoing service.
Some videos need both captions and audio description.
Audio description is additional narration
that describes the visuals on the screen
for those who cannot see them.
The "Best of UW 2016," a year in review video,
used both captions and audio description.
Gina: I'm Gina Hills.
I'm the web communications director
for University Marketing and Communications.
This year's video was all visual, with music.
We did close caption the video.
The first stage was we put a little thing that said "music" on there.
Terrill: I'm Terrill Thompson.
I'm an IT accessibility specialist
at the University of Washington.
If you watch that video, the music contributes significantly
to the emotion that the video creates,
so it's featuring a lot of the really
wonderful things that have happened
at the university over the last year in 2016
and the music builds and swells
and just becomes much more dramatic as the piece grows.
And so they revised the captions to address that need
and really did an excellent job I think
of capturing exactly what the music is doing
throughout this piece as it grows and swells.
The other thing that's interesting about the Best of UW 2016
is that it was entirely music.
There’s no spoken audio.
Therefore somebody who can't see it
gets nothing out of it other than the music.
So they hear the music,
And, it's a wonderful piece, but to them it's just a music video.
They have no idea that all these wonderful things
happened at the University.
So all those details are missing for them
So that particularly is a video that requires audio description.
Audio description: Words appear, hash tag Best of UW 2016.
The Nobel Medal next to David J. Thouless,
2016 Nobel Prize in Physics.
With President Obama,
Mary-Claire King, National Medal of Science.
UW and Microsoft break record for DNA data storage.
A collage of photos, Inaugural Husky 100.
Gina: We covered all bases, all audiences,
and didn't leave anybody out
in terms of experiencing the previous year at the university.
I think that this is a good model
for what we can do and what we should do
and what we should aspire to.
Narrator: Another task force priority is helping faculty and staff
make PDFs and other documents accessible,
so that someone who is using a screen reader
can have the content read to them.
Sheryl: In our pilot on PDF accessibility
we're working with several large units on our campus
and we're contracting with some consultants
that will make PDFs accessible
so they'll remediate some of the PDFs
that have been developed in an inaccessible way.
Gaby: My name is Gaby de Jongh, and I’m an IT accessibility specialist
for Accessible Technology Services at the University of Washington.
At the University of Washington we have several hundred PDF documents
being uploaded to our websites, probably on a daily basis,
and many if not all of those PDF documents
are inaccessible to individuals who use text to speech assistive technology
in order to access those documents.
Accessible Technology Services has worked with UW Bothell and UW Tacoma
on a pilot project for addressing the large amount of PDF documents
that we have on the tri campuses.
The three campuses worked pretty closely together
using different tools to identify the number of documents that were on the website
and then coming up with a plan for going through those documents,
seeing if they actually really do need to be listed on the website
or if they need to be taken down
and if they do need to be listed on the website
what is the process,
what is the process that we're going to go through
in order to make sure that we’re going to
make all of those PDFs accessible.
Narrator: The task force helps develop and recruit
for capacity building institutes on accessible IT
for participants from units across campus.
Pete: My name is Pete Graff and I work for
the Office of the Chief Information Security Officer.
And a lot of the tools that we develop,
some of them are used on public facing websites
and we want to make sure that we're doing the best job that we can
to ensure that the tools that we provide are fully accessible.
Ana: My name is Ana Thompson.
I'm a learning technologist at University of Washington Bothell.
I enjoy tremendously attending the capacity building institutes
because it allows me to connect with other professional peers
who see the importance of universal design,
and also they help me learn.
They give me ideas on how we can do what I'm doing better.
Narrator: UW’s IT Accessibility Liaisons
are recruited From the UW capacity building institutes.
Liaisons engage online, participate in three training meetings each year,
and promote the accessibility of IT in their respective units.
Jodi: My name's Jodi and I work for UW-IT.
I'm heartened by the commitment that we have across campus
that we're not alone in this endeavor
and that we all want to do it together
and we have central resources to help us do that.
Narrator: Annual capacity building institutes on the UW campus
are also offered to representatives of postsecondary institutions state-wide.
Participants share promising practices for making IT more accessible.
Scott: Scott Towsley from Yakima Valley College.
I’m the IT director, director for e-learning,
and also the accessibility coordinator.
Actually coming to this training here is going to give us some best practices,
some contacts across the state.
Some of the things that we’re all looking at is
what software, common software can we all use?
What are some initiatives that everybody else is doing?
Carrie: My name is Carrie Powell and I work at Centralia College
and I am the Policy 188 coordinator at Centralia College.
It occurred to me that the reason we have so much good,
so many good things going on at our campus is that we,
my disability services director and I attended a
capacity building institute at the University of Washington three years ago
and it sparked an entire,
it led to a lot of amazing things.
But the first, the key thing was, we walked away knowing
that our task was to go back to our campus
and form a work group of interested stakeholders–
people from our IT department, e-learning, disability services,
from our college relations, from our legal services,
we just we got a group of people together
just based on asking and people said, "Sure,"
and so that was a key idea
that we took away from that first capacity building institute.
Bridget: My name is Bridget Irish
and I work at The Evergreen State College
located in Olympia, Washington.
My official position is as curricular technology support to faculty.
At The Evergreen State College,
some ways in which we try to make
our IT resources and tools more accessible
is one, by providing faculty with a template,
a template for use in Canvas
as well as a variety of templates available for use with WordPress.
Carly: I’m Carly Gerard.
I work at Western Washington University as a web accessibility developer.
One of our first starting points in making IT accessible is training.
Once we have people who understand where to begin,
what accessibility features to look for,
we can then help them, you know, manage their websites.
They can look for any accessibility issues.
We host training sessions both online and in person.
So our online training rolled out a few months ago
and we’ve had over 200 people enrolled
before the end of the year who have now taken the training
and they can continue to edit their content
knowing these accessibility features.
We do also offer an in-person training
for those who may not be as comfortable with online learning.
Craig: My name is Craig Kerr.
I’m the director for services for students with disabilities
at Edmonds Community College.
Our professional development committee
what we’re going around to each division
to do trainings on how to make accessible documents.
Working with the professional development committee that’s based
of faculty sharing with faculty
the ways to make their documents accessible
is a key piece because you’re talking peer to peer.
Amy: Hi, my name is Amy Rovner
and I am an instructional designer and accessible IT coordinator
at Shoreline Community College.
We are also working on areas of captioning for our videos,
that’s a big thing to make sure everyone can
hear and absorb the content in the videos.
We've added Ally to our Canvas instance
so that students who may or may not have
an official accommodation
are able to access accessible versions of documents,
audible versions of documents,
even a braille, electronic braille version of documents
right away in real time.
Agnes: My name is Agnes Figueroa.
I work at Renton Technical College
and I’m currently the deputy CIO, chief information officer.
We started with convening an accessibility advisory committee.
In this group we try to gather together
people from various areas of campus
so we have representatives from human resources,
from the library, from e-learning ,
from IT, the disability office,
faculty members.
David: I’m David Engebretson Jr.
and I’m at Western Washington University
and I’m the digital technologies accessibility coordinator.
We’ve made some real efforts to create awareness about accessibility
and I think that’s kind of been the biggest change is that
our community is becoming aware of the need
for accessible and inclusive design.
As a blind person, I notice just little changes
making a big difference in the accessibility.
Headings on webpages and educational materials in general,
captions in videos, and
accessible graphics.
Jeremy: My name is Jeremy Seda
and I work for Big Bend Community College in Moses Lake
as the web and multimedia specialist.
It feels just so much more personal to meet
with other folks around this similar goal
and to really come together in a collaborative fashion to brainstorm
and to really work out the details of a problem that we're all facing.
Clay: My name is Clay Krauss.
I work for Tacoma Community College.
I'm the information technology director there on campus.
One of the most important things is bringing people together
and forming those networks,
the formal networks and the informal networks,
to dialogue and share ideas
regarding accessible information technology.
Zach: My name is Zach Lattin.
I'm an assistive technology and IT accessibility specialist at Clark College.
I have a really personal stake in this because I am,
have been blind since birth, so I use assistive technology myself.
We don't have to make this policy on our own.
We can work with people all over the place
and come up with the rising tide that lifts all boats, I think.