SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: OK, 9 o'clock here in Seattle.
It's a little bit of a cloudy day here-- not a big surprise.
But often, those clouds will burn off,
and it'll be really sunny.
Or at least we'll have some sun breaks.
We like to have sun breaks here in the Seattle area.
I'm Sheryl Burgstahler, the Director
of Accessible Technology Services at the University
of Washington.
And I'm joined by Terrill Thompson and Brianna Blaser
today to deliver this webinar.
And we'll be chatting all morning,
but we're going to have a few breaks
so you can get up and get some snacks
and so forth at those times.
Well, in this new normal of face masks and hand sanitizers
and social distancing, we decided
to offer this webinar or this particular program
online, of course.
But also, we decided that our focus
is going to be almost exclusively
to online applications, although we are going to be talking
about some basic principles about accessibility that
can be applied on site as well.
And we'll mention those periodically.
So moving online has been a bit of a change
for all of us and what we--
the fact that it's totally online, and for many of us
in our jobs.
And I miss some things, like meeting with staff in person
and so forth.
But you know there's a lot of talk about what's
negative about it, but I've found a few personal things
that are quite positive for me.
I think it's nice in the morning.
Only have to dress myself from the waist up.
Pretty cool.
I don't even use the mirror anymore
to see what back my hair looks like, so that's kind of nice.
One thing I really like about it is the occasional child
or pet that ends up to be in Zoom meetings
and just seeing them quietly be around or actually noisily be
around at times as well.
So that's fun too.
It's just a new normal, a new thing.
So this event is part of our dissemination for a grant
that we received from the National Science Foundation
called AccessINCLUDES.
And all three of us are involved in that particular project.
I'll point to one reference.
And Brianna's going to follow up with a message
at the end of this to all of you with a summary of resources
we've talked about.
We'll put some things in chat occasionally and so forth,
but there'll be a follow-up message with all of them
in there, and this will be in there.
It's Universal Design in Higher Education--
From Principles to Practice, actually
funded by an earlier grant from the Department of Education.
And it has 40 authors and co-authors, published
by Harvard Education Press, that talk about universal design,
and some of that is related to IT,
online learning, and so forth, what we're talking about today.
And coming soon, we are going to have a complementary book.
It's not an update of that book, but one
that's more focused on applications called
Creative Inclusive Learning Opportunities in Higher
Education--
A Universal Design Toolkit.
We're focusing on higher education again, but most of it
applies to K-12 and other applications as well.
I host an online community, and it's UDHE CoP
is the title of it, a community of practice.
And if you want to join that community,
you can just send me email--
S-H-E-R-Y-L-B @uw.edu, and I will sign you up for that list.
It's not a high-traffic list, but there are people on it
from all over the world.
So if you're looking at inclusive design
or universal design, that's a good place to be,
particularly if you're in higher education.
I mentioned that I direct accessible technology services.
The three of us represent the two groups within that domain.
We all work at the University of Washington.
One is our IT accessibility team,
and Terrill is the manager of that team.
That team, technically not called that,
but we started efforts as far as accessible IT,
mainly focusing on AT, Assistive Technology or Adaptive
Technology, way back in 1984.
All of our efforts there are funded
by the University of Washington, and much of what we do now
is focusing more on accessible technology design,
like websites and so forth.
But we haven't lost our original efforts
as far as assistive technology as well.
We have a showroom.
Doesn't get a lot of visitors these days,
but it's still there.
We'll be back to it soon I hope.
And so that's one of our groups.
Some people will say, well, how come
the University of Washington's put so many resources
into create things like this and meetings and resources online?
Well, it's not only University of Washington.
A lot of those resources that are benefiting other people
are funded by the DO-IT Center, where disabilities,
opportunities, internet working, and technology is all
that we are about.
And that started in 1992 focusing on the United States
of America-- whole thing.
And it was funded by the National Science Foundation.
And we've had continuous funding from them for various projects,
but also by the state of Washington
and other federal grants, like Department
of Education, Department of Labor, corporate sponsors,
and private funds.
But we went international somewhere along the line
and worked with a lot of different countries.
But DO-IT Japan is the one that has a fully implemented
DO-IT Center at the University of Tokyo.
And you can go there, but unless you know Japanese,
you won't recognize much of the content.
But there are a lot of pictures of kids with disabilities
doing cool things in Japan and sometimes
working with our own kids participating in our country.
And one thing that was funded by the US Department of Education,
and we continue to maintain it, is
the Center on Universal Design and Education.
That started in 1999.
The primary focus is post-secondary education
because that's what we're mainly about,
but it does also apply to the K-12 as well.
We point to resources that have more in-depth resources
in that particular category.
So AccessINCLUDES, it's making the INCLUDES network better
prepared to address disability-related issues
and broadening participation in STEM.
And the INCLUDES network is a nationwide network
hosted by the National Science Foundation that basically
is just a collection of projects that are focusing
on broadening participation.
And sometimes, in some cases, some other organizations
as well, like partners in our projects
that are not really funded by NSF but working with us.
And so we're trying to make all these activities
accessible to individuals with disabilities.
And what we find that probably is no surprise
to most people on this webinar today
is that most of those projects focus
on women and racial ethnic minorities
and don't deal with disability, even
for the participants in their programs
that might have disabilities.
And so we're really about accessibility.
And our projects, in this case, focuses
on working with other INCLUDES projects
to help make their projects more welcoming
and accessible to individuals with disabilities
that they serve.
That includes their resources that they might have online.
So our agenda-- this is all Pacific time,
as that's where we are.
And I'll keep us on schedule--
is pretty simple.
We are going to talk for about an hour
on just a little introduction, mainly
focusing on the universal design perspective and principles
and how it applies to online learning.
A very high-level approach to what
do we need to think about in online learning?
And then, we'll have a quick break.
And at 10:10, Terrill will be talking
about websites, documents, videos, and vendor products.
And then, we'll have a quick break again.
And when you come back, Brianna will be available
talking about online meetings.
She has become our specialist on online meetings because she
hosts a lot of them and has a lot of good boots-on-the-ground
experience to share in that regard.
And then we'll have 10 minutes for resources and discussion.
If you have some individual questions,
we'll remain online for a little while after the presentation,
but we will officially close at noon.
So if you want to make a comment,
you should raise your hand, and we'll
see if we can fit that in.
Most of the Q&A will happen at the end of our presentations,
and so write your questions in chat,
and we will keep track of them and feed some questions
to the presenter at the end.
Hopefully, it'll be more efficient in that regard.
You can also follow up with us after the presentation is over.
We can respond by email.
So at the very end, we'll have some resources and discussion.
So I'm doing the section that is on universal design
and online learning.
Also, the intro, which is the universal design part
of all that.
And I just want to have a little bit about our approach to all
this because we're just taking a slice of what we might want
to talk about as far as increasing
opportunities for individuals with disabilities.
So they're more similar to what other people have opportunities
to do.
And with their Black Lives Matter movement and so forth,
I think we're particularly in tune
to underrepresented groups that are just not treated fairly
in many ways.
And individuals with disabilities is another group.
And so we ask well what could make the success of people
with disabilities in higher education and careers
be at a higher level?
Who needs to do what?
And just as a quick review, the person with a disability
has to be prepared to take advantage
of opportunities that are available to them, of course.
We work a lot with kids with disabilities, for instance,
and getting them prepared for college and careers,
using technology that can help them be more successful.
Their family members-- DO-IT has projects.
We work with parents of our DO-IT scholars
in one of our programs to help them help their child be
more successful and whatever they choose to do.
Peers and near peers, adult mentors, allies of any type
are important as well.
Community groups and special programs, service providers,
like disability support services and community services--
K-12 teachers and counselors have
to help these students get ready for after high school.
And post-secondary administrators, faculty,
and staff employers technology individuals and vendors,
and those are all groups that we need to consider along
with even high level things, like legislators
and policymakers and funding agencies.
And in the Black Lives Matter movement,
which I'm really liking the conversations that we're
hearing from that, listening to people
present different roles that organizations need to play
is a difficult problem.
It means that a lot of people have
to be involved in the solution, and just about everyone
can do something.
So what is an inclusive environment for everyone?
This means something different to different people,
as I have learned.
So what we're talking about is everybody
who meets the requirements, with or without accommodations,
is encouraged to participate in a project, in a course,
in an activity.
And when your staff respond to a student's request
for an accommodation in a startled way, like,
oh, oh, well, we weren't anticipating
that we were going to a blind person sign
up for this program.
That is not very welcoming.
We should encourage people to participate by being
ready for them to participate.
People feel welcome.
And they're fully engaged and accessible and inclusive
activities.
So there is a legal basis for all of this,
and that could be a whole webinar in itself.
But it goes back to 1973 with section
504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and actually
adding to that, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990
and its 2008 amendments.
There are also state and local laws.
But looking at those two federal laws,
sometimes, people are surprised to learn
that there isn't detail about how
to make your online courses or even
your physical spaces accessible in the law itself.
There are standards and guidelines
that have followed those, but it's
because it's civil rights legislation.
We basically say in those laws that people with disabilities
have a right to participate in whatever we offer.
Whether it's a course or resources on a website
or whatever, they have a right to be there,
and we need to make those things accessible.
Now, some of you on this list are disability service
providers, and you have to be very familiar with these laws,
and also even definitions of disability and common
accommodations and so forth.
Most of us are not in that role.
Particularly in my case I teach online as part of the things
that I do.
But for us, I think just think about ability on a continuum,
that we just assume that in our course
there will be a range in abilities
to understand English, to understand social norms.
It might be a cultural issue.
It might be a disability issue.
But there might people that have not much experience
in that area, and so they might be toward the arrow
on the left, which is not able, and others might be very able.
So all we do as instructors or resource operators
is just assume that there are people that
are using our resources or taking our courses that fall
on that continuum.
The ability to see--
many of us were born with very high ability to see.
And as we get older, we become less able.
So we're not stable on this double-edged arrow
throughout our lives.
And then others are just born with various abilities to see.
So again, as service providers and content providers,
we need to think there are just a variety of people
in our course or looking at our resource,
all the way from can't see at all to very good sight,
on and on, where the ability to hear, or walk, or read print,
or write with a pen or pencil, to communicate verbally,
to tune out distraction, to learn and manage
physical and mental health.
Again, some of these, like tune out distraction,
you might say, well, that must be
related to attention deficits.
And it is, in a way, because that affects
that particular ability.
But again, there are other people
that might have difficulty tuning out
distractions that wouldn't be considered having a disability.
And we don't even know that.
We just have to assume a variety of people in our classes.
The accommodation focused approach
that we typically use on our campus
as our primary approach is to provide an accommodation
to students that sign up for a particular class
and those accommodations are approved by the Disability
Support Services Office.
But what they actually do at that point
is they adjust an existing product or environment
for a particular person.
Common accommodations when we're looking at online resources
are creating accessible documents--
actually, remediating documents that are not accessible
might be a better way to word that--
and captioning videos.
And so we'll be talking today about universal design, where
you look proactively at the product itself
because sometimes it's the design of the course
or the website or whatever else we're providing
that we should be scrutinizing.
How come the design is not built-in to be accessible,
like captions on videos?
Some of you have seen this before.
Some people who know we are tired of seeing this image.
I love this image.
"The Coffee Pot for Masochists" out of the Catalog
of Unfindable Objects.
This is no longer in print, but I
have the Psychology of Everyday Things and also this catalog,
and it's really a fun thing to look through.
It has a lot of products like this
that aren't very well designed.
And so you have the spout and the handle on the same side.
And if you were using this coffee pot at an event
or something, I don't think you would just casually
say, OK, fine.
I suppose you could pour the coffee out the other side
so you don't burn your arm or something.
Or if you are an engineer, if any of you were engineers,
you would probably put plastic tubing--
you've probably designed it already--
through that spout in there, and you'd
have some kind of a engine or something that
would pull that out.
But anyway, it's a ridiculous product.
And you could look at some of our online learning
and look at it on ourselves.
We don't criticize each other.
But say, well, this is really not very accessible.
Maybe I could work on this a little bit better.
When we talk about that, we're talking about universal design.
And so the definition of universal design
by the Center on Universal Design at North Carolina State
University was defined many years ago as the design
of products and environments to be usable by all people
to the greatest extent possible without the need for adaptation
or specialized design.
Notice it doesn't mentioned disability.
It's talking about all people.
And so people in our online class or using our resources,
English may not be their first language.
They might be colorblind, which is not a disability.
So universal design, even though people connect it
with disability, is not that way.
We may focus on disability, which is what art project does.
That's what we do.
But it's more general than that.
And then, if we take a look at online products
and environments then, what we're talking about today--
activities or resources or whatever.
We look at those.
We can just use the same definition.
There are a lot of definitions out there for this, that,
and whatever where we apply universal design,
and maybe because I like to look at things simply,
I just use the same old definition,
just change the wording a little bit
if I want to provide emphasis.
So I would say a good definition for what we're doing today
is the design of online products and environments
to be usable by all people to the greatest
extent possible without the need for adaptation or specialized
design.
So we might have to provide accommodations.
It doesn't say we never do.
It's just that we should design it
so that we don't have to pry very many, and maybe none.
And so we don't have to provide that specialized design.
Proactive design terminology-- there's
a lot of that out there.
And I'm just going to hit some of the highlights
here that I run into the most.
And sometimes, they're used synonymously
with universal design, but I don't think
they are actually synonyms.
But people use them in different ways.
When I use this accessible design, I think about it
and how it's typically used, it's
about people with disabilities.
It is specifically making products and environments
usable by individuals with disabilities.
It's used differently, So.
It's not in stone, but that's a way I think of accessibility.
Another step is usable design.
And we have usability experts in this area, where you're
actually testing the product to see if you can actually use it
for the purpose that it was designed for.
Someone on our staff, Hadi--
some of you know him--
happens to be blind himself.
And he was telling me not long-- well, it was a while back now.
But some software package, he was
joking about this software package
that he was checking for accessibility.
And the company had just built in a lot of shortcut keys
so that you can work around all the inaccessible features
if you happen to be using a screen
reader as a blind person.
And anyway, there are over a hundred of them.
And so for Hadi, that product was technically accessible.
He could access all the features.
But I don't think any of us would think that that's usable.
It's not reasonable for someone to have to memorize
100 or more shortcut keys.
Where would they be?
Next to him in a Braille document or somewhere online
that he would have to use for every feature.
So that was not a usable design.
And then, there's inclusive design.
Sometimes a design is totally separate for individuals
with disabilities or some other group.
That wouldn't be inclusive.
And so I look at universal design
is being a very broad category, where
it has the capability or the characteristic of being
accessible and usable and inclusive.
And so if an approach or a resource
needs those three characteristics,
I would call that a universally designed
product or environment.
Barrier free design is another term often used.
And I see it more often used when
we're talking about the physical environment,
and then more appropriately for people
who have mobility impairments or other impairments that affect
their engagement in a physical environment,
although I've seen people use that term for universal design
as well.
And then, design for all-- some countries, including India,
use that.
And as far as I can see, it's exactly the same thing
as universal design.
So proactive approaches-- all these approaches [AUDIO OUT]
so you worry about them at the beginning stages of design,
and they make things inclusive of everyone.
This has been around for a long time.
People didn't call it universal design way back when.
I have an image on the screen of a person in a wheelchair.
This picture was of this person in the "UW Daily"
on the front page in 1970.
It says underneath it, "Forging a stream of humanity,
this silent protester carries his campaign on his back.
His goal-- to end high-rise sidewalks."
It says "Ramp the curbs.
Get me off the street."
And so this was back in the '70s.
And people were campaigning, protesting
to get curb cuts put in sidewalks
so people were in wheelchairs did not
have to be out on major streets or not
be able to get from one place to another.
Now, I'm assuming that some people back
in the '70s thought that was unreasonable
because there were so many sidewalks in the world that
didn't have curb cuts.
But I think we're at a point now where
everybody just assumes they'll be built into a sidewalk.
It's a lot of extra work to go back and retrofit a sidewalk
so it has a curb cut.
We know about that at the University of Washington
with our old campus.
But it's very easy to build it in the original design,
and that's what universal design is.
I also like to point out and really emphasize
the idea that universal design is inclusive.
On the screen now, you see a typical entrance to a building.
This is at the University of Washington.
It has two steps to the front entrance, and to the left,
it looks like an ADA-compliant ramp that goes up for someone
who cannot maneuver those steps.
And so we have an ADA-compliant, very accessible, quite usable
product, but it's not inclusive.
Why?
Because if I'm walking side-by-side
with someone using a wheelchair, we will usually part ways
as we go into that building.
And I've actually tried walking in front
of the in a wheelchair or behind, and it's very awkward.
And so you don't want to do that.
So it really is not inclusive.
You're giving to operate opportunities,
but you have to choose one or the other.
Where this last image is another building on our campus
that actually is much an older building that
has just a single entrance.
It's a ramp, a sloping ramp that goes into the building.
You'll notice it's quite wide.
And so I can walk down that ramp with a person
who's using a wheelchair or a walker side-by-side.
We can continue our conversation to get into the building.
There are steps in that building, by the way,
but it's not the primary entrance.
And so that's what universal design is about.
It's not that anything's terribly wrong with the image
on the left.
It's just not fully inclusive.
So universal design takes us to a higher standard
than ADA-compliant.
We take a look at technology, universal design of technology
will build in accessibility features as much as possible.
The best example is our smartphones.
You could change the color of your screen, and text,
and it talks to you.
Actually, mine talks to me too much.
I get my iPhone talking to me, and I can't figure out
how to get it to stop talking.
But anyway, it does that.
And there are a lot of accessibility features
not necessarily used by people with disabilities.
But also, universal design requires
that there's compatibility with assistive technology.
Assistive technology being products
that a person with a disability might
be using, like a screen reader that will read content
on the screen clear to a person who is blind,
assuming that content is in a text-based form.
And so we need compatibility with existing products,
like Braille embossers, and other assistive technologies,
like alternative keyboards and so forth,
that a person with a disability might want to use.
And there are a lot of people that
benefit from universal design.
A simple example is just videos.
If we take a look at YouTube videos or other videos
that we can access, the captions benefit
people who are any unable to hear the audio, of course.
And that could be because a person is deaf,
but it also might be that they're in a situation where
they cannot hear the audio because it's really noisy
or it's noiseless.
Like in a baby's room, you want to watch a video,
but you don't want to wake up the baby.
And so they might be English language learners,
and they need to see the spelling of the words.
Again, it could be a noisy or noiseless location.
It could be a slow internet connection,
why someone's not using the image in the video,
and they want to know the spelling of words.
If you look at a video on YouTube on chemistry,
if those computer-generated captions have not
been edited by a professor, I bet
there are a lot of really long words that are spelled wrong.
And a lot of people just simply don't
know that they can go in and edit those captions.
Now, there might be other ways to make them
more elegant and synchronized.
But at least people who post their YouTube videos
should edit the captions and get the punctuation
and the correct spelling in.
And then, we might want to find content quickly.
And of you could scan through the text of captions,
you could actually do that.
And so that's the nature of universal design.
I'm going to talk about online learning now.
And I think I'll just start real quickly with three people that
might be in your class.
And just think about them a little bit.
Anthony-- all these people have been participants
in our other projects.
He works at Prentke Romich Company,
which develops and distributes assistive technology.
Anthony happens to have cerebral palsy that
affects his mobility, his dexterity,
his ability to speak with his voice.
And so it also has contributed to a learning disability.
So he has difficulty reading and composing
messages and documents.
So he uses a spellchecker and a grammar checker,
just traditional ones that other people would be using.
He does use a synthesized voice on a communication device.
He uses a touch screen, and he uses
a computer-based environmental control unit and phone access.
And I don't think a lot of people
would just think of Anthony and his functional capabilities
and think he would be a person providing phone support,
but he does.
He provides telephone support for Prentke Romich.
And a lot of the people he talks to, he tells me,
are parents where their child has been recently diagnosed
with cerebral palsy or some other condition
that affects their ability to speak and perhaps operate
a keyboard.
And he gives them advice for products that they can use.
And I have to smile when I think about those parents
and how it might be very encouraging for them,
as they're worried about their child,
to see somebody who is so successful in a technology
field who has a disability somewhat of their own.
Nicole could be in your class when she was younger, perhaps.
But she's beyond that now have a bachelor's in computer science
and graduated from Stanford.
We tried to make an offer at the university,
and we didn't get her.
But she's been involved in our programs ever since
and works for Google.
She's blind.
She uses speech output screen reader
so she can hear the content presented on the screen
If it's presented in text.
She uses Braille translation software
and can produce her own Braille materials on a Braille display.
She also uses a standard printer if she wants to print something
that a sighted user would use.
And the last case is Jessie.
She's graduated in informatics at the University of Washington
and works at Amazon.
And she has multiple learning disabilities
that make it difficult for her to understand reading material,
but also to compose her thoughts in an email message or document
or something.
And so she actually uses speech input and output.
So her computer will talk to her, and she dictates to it.
And so she might compose an email message using her speech,
but then she can hear back with the speech output system
text-to-speech software what she has said.
And she uses grammar and spellcheckers as well.
So those are three people you might want to think about.
And as I said, with universal design,
you just assume you're in the class.
Some people will ask me, well, should I survey all my students
and see if anyone has a disability or whatever--
besides getting the letters from the Disabilities Service
office.
Well, I don't object to surveying your students,
but why would you do that?
Well, somebody might be blind in my class.
Well, if you've prepared your class
for students who are blind to succeed in the class,
then you don't need to do that.
You don't require that they share their disability
with you.
They just might choose not to.
So some people think they have to learn
a lot about assistive technology to design accessibility,
particularly in an online class.
And that's actually not the case.
Assistive technology has functionality,
but it also has some limitations.
And so what you can do--
although it's really fun to go and learn about a lot assistive
technology, so I would encourage you to do so.
What you can do is know what the limitations and capabilities
are of that technology, and then design accordingly.
For instance, we know with a lot of assistive technology
that people who are blind and people
who have some mobility impairments use
will emulate the keyboard but not necessarily the mouse.
So what does that mean?
Well, for a web designer, it means
that you need to create products that can be operated
with the keyboard alone.
It doesn't mean you can't create products that are
operated with a mouse as well.
But when you're pulling down a menu or something and people
are generally using a mouse that you work through the process
to figure out how to do that in an alternative way,
maybe using arrow keys or something on the keyboard.
And that's true of software and other IT products as well.
A screen reader cannot read the content presented in images.
They can only read content presented in a text format.
And so if you're showing an image on the screen,
it's important to provide alternative text
so that their screen reader can pick up on that text.
That screen reader can also tab from link to link.
It also can skip from heading to heading
if software is formatted with headings structure.
So in your links on your website or in your course content page,
when you're linking to a video or some other resource,
make sure that that alternative text is descriptive.
So a person using a screen reader
could go through that page and see
what it links to without going through every word on that page
so that they can see the crowd surrounding text.
So when you see a website that all the links are
very consistent, and they say click here, click here, click
here, that's what a person who's blind using a screen reader
will hear if that person hasn't provided descriptive
text for those links.
And the screen reader then is reading the links
so that the person can see the overview and the products
that it's linking to.
Similarly, your headings, like, say, in a Word document,
use the styles function.
But if you're creating other documents
or in the content page of your learning management system,
make sure that the headings are labeled as heading one, heading
two, again, as structure because a screen reader can then
skip through and read all of those headings to the user.
And they can get an idea of how the page is organized.
And we've already talked about computer-generated materials
may not be captioned accurately.
And so we need to caption our video.
We need to edit the captions that are created by a computer,
and so forth.
The next presentation, Terry is going
to talk about technology content in more detail.
But I'm giving an overview.
The other overview I'm going to give
is the principles for making your course are
online resources welcoming and accessible to people
with disabilities and other populations.
Actually, part of a different project, Access Cyberlearning,
has done a lot of research in the area of what principles
can help guide us in making IT, like a learning management
system, but IT that we create ourselves,
like videos and content in an online learning
course, welcoming and accessible and usable by everyone.
And we've landed on three--
universal design principles, universal design
for learning principles, and the principles
that underpin the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
So I'm going to go through them very briefly here.
Some of you may know some of them but not all of them.
But there's plenty of online resources for further reading,
including our Access Cyberlearning
whitepaper that Brianna will be able to put in the follow-up
email.
So the principles for universal design of learning--
many people just point to those in making things accessible--
multiple means of representation,
providing multiple means of engagement
and multiple means of action and expression.
These are developed by the Center
for Applied Special Technology, CAST.
And they have guidelines and prints and practices
and so forth that go with those.
But we also can look back at the basic principles
of universal design that came before UDL because it
adds some detail to that short list of principles.
So the principles the universal design are equitable use.
That means that everybody can use whatever product you're
creating.
Flexibility in use-- multiple ways to do things
are in that category.
Simple and intuitive use--
I sure wish some of our software would be simpler
and more intuitive to me.
I know that.
Perceptible information-- everybody
can perceive what the content is, for instance, regarding
of what assistive technology they're using.
Tolerance for error, low physical effort,
unless you're teaching bodybuilding.
Space and size for approach and use--
an example would be a computer lab
that makes a space for left-handed users.
So this is the Center of Universal Design, again, that
came up with these principles that were designed to cover
any product and environment.
We could apply this to IT.
But I've come to believe that IT is
important enough and specialized enough that it's also
good to look for specific principles
in the design of IT, where we have our third set of print
principles that guide us in universal design.
So underpinning the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
are four principles that tools and content is perceivable.
Everybody can perceive the content.
That it's operable-- you can use all the functions
of whatever the website is.
It's understandable for a variety of people
with different abilities.
And it's robust, that it doesn't matter what web browser you
use, for instance.
Your product will still work.
It isn't just used with a PC.
It can also be used with a Macintosh.
That would be the robust part of it.
And so we'd like to look to those principles,
and there are, as many of you know,
a lot of guidelines and practices that go with that.
And so the Principles of Universal Design,
Universal Design for Learning, and the Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines, those principles
are important to consider.
And in our resources you'll find a lot of detail
on all of those.
But in summary, this is the way I like to look at it.
You don't need to memorize any of those principles actually.
I look at it in this way.
You provide whatever you're doing multiple ways to learn,
and that includes just gaining access to content,
but also learning in a class.
Multiple ways to do that-- using a video,
using printed materials, and so forth.
You provide multiple ways to demonstrate
that learning, for instance, in a training or an online course.
How is this participant showing that they
have learned the content?
If you're only providing multiple choice tests,
look at alternative ways to test what they've learned
and multiple ways to interact.
And it's also important to ensure
that each action and resource is accessible to people
with disabilities.
For example, some people will say
they're applying universal design when they say, well,
I've got a video that shows some content,
and then I've got a PDF file here that does as well.
And so that's it, multiple ways to do things, right?
Well, that's a step in the right direction perhaps.
But you should look at the video,
and make it accessible by using captions and audio
descriptions perhaps.
And you should look at that PDF and ask
if that's accessible to everyone,
including people using screen readers.
And so it's not enough just providing different options.
Those options should be accessible in part
because you want your user to be able to choose the option.
You don't want to pre-choose it by providing distinct options,
but some people can't use both.
I'm going to quickly go through a handout that's actually
going to be on the resources.
And this handout is a one I put together for faculty, actually,
on 20 tips for making an accessible online course.
And I did this because people were getting overwhelmed.
Faculty were getting overwhelmed with that they needed to do,
and paralyzed.
And it's like, so they didn't do anything.
So I don't have time to do that.
I can't do that.
Anyway, so I put this together.
In the online version that you'll have a URL for,
you also have links to resources for each of these things
that I'm going to present now.
And so it's a pretty rich resource.
So it has nine tips that are about web pages, documents,
images, videos, what Terry is going
to talk about, real soon here.
But then, the rest of it is 11 tips,
and it's about instructional methods.
So a lot of this is in the hands and in the control
of the instructor or the designer of a course
or of a website, for that matter.
It doesn't require high-level technical skills.
You will see quickly, even in my list,
but also more so when Terry talks, is that we need
IT accessibility specialists.
All of us aren't going to learn all these technical details.
And so you need on your campus somebody
that can provide that resource as well.
So again, the resources will be provided in the online version.
So let me just go through quickly.
I'd like to start with something that
is, really, you can't do this?
Things that faculty absolutely can do--
clear, consistent layouts and organization schemes.
What I find people, particularly now
when they're turning their on-site courses online,
they're pretty much taking resources from different things
they used before.
And they don't go back and make them
consistent in their format, and that can be really confusing,
particularly to a student with a disability that
has a hard time organizing that content on their own.
And so really we really look back and say is it clear?
Is it consistent?
Do I use the same organizational as schemes
when I'm working in those resources
that I'm sharing with my students?
Structured headings, I already mentioned
why that's important--
so that someone using a screen reader
can go from heading to heading and see
the organization of the document or the content
in your page on a learning management system.
Descriptive wording for hyperlinks-- again,
making them descriptive so the screen
reader can read with the resource is you're going to.
Terrill will talk about accessible documents.
My advice to faculty is just don't create PDFs.
PDFs can be made accessible, absolutely,
but there are some difficulties along the line.
And they're difficult to remediate if you don't
do that right in the beginning.
And particularly to avoid scanned in PDFs.
Accessible HTML is ideal.
And that is what you're doing, by the way,
when you're putting in content one of your content pages
in a learning management system.
Use that for your primary content.
On our website, if you notice some of our resources
that we'll link to, we use PDFs, but we don't use it
as a primary source of content.
So our handouts-- and we have about a hundred of them,
I think, different publications.
We put the accessible one, the most accessible one first,
and that's HTML.
We make sure that the web page is fully accessibly designed.
But then, you'll notice we have a link to the PDF.
It's accessible too, if you go there,
because we like to do the best of this.
So we have that as well.
But we're primarily provided it for people
who want to print it.
And so you can get a nice printed copy.
We use that all the time when we're
giving on-site presentations and we just want to have a handout.
You just like it to look fairly professional.
And so we use that that's a good use of PDF.
In an online course--
I teach online.
And the only time I provide an attached document at all
is for the syllabus because students actually
want sometimes to download that document.
Otherwise, I put everything in HTML.
And in that case, I put it in the content page so it's HTML.
And then, I have an attachment, which is a Word document.
That way, the students can take that document.
They can edit the syllabus to suit them,
take out some material on the syllabus that doesn't
apply to them and so forth.
And I actually encourage them to do that.
Some people will say, well, yeah,
but there are all these other PDFs.
What about that?
Well, if you're linking to other people's PDFs,
it's worth looking to see if that article might
be available in a HTML format or other format that's
more accessible.
And you could contact the company or the source
to see if they make things more accessible.
But if you don't even deal with that aspect of it,
if you haven't created more PDFs,
you haven't given the disability services office
more resources to remediate.
They'll just have to remediate those others.
Text descriptions of content and images--
we talked about important that is.
And learning management systems will generally
remind you to do that and sometimes tell you why,
anytime you post an image.
Large, bold fonts, uncluttered pages, plain backgrounds--
I'm demonstrating that today.
High contrast color combinations,
problematic ones for those who are colorblind avoided--
and you'll see in the online version
I point to some resources we can check
to see what colors are problematic.
Green and red that's one that's a combination that's
quite problematic for many people,
but there are other combinations as well.
Content and navigation is accessible
using the keyboard alone, and we learned why that's important.
Videos are captioned and audio described and so forth.
So that's the technology part, and Terrill is
going to elaborate on all that.
But here's some as far as instructional methods.
Address a broad range of technical skills.
In my class, the class I'm teaching
at another institution, but it's in Blackboard--
I hear all the time from instructors, well,
all the students know how to do Blackboard because that's
our standard at our institution.
Ours is Canvas on our campus.
Well, what I come back with, my pushback
is, well, what if it's a first class
they're taking on Canvas or Blackboard?
You can point them to the help screens,
but there's so many items.
So what I do is I say, if this is your first time using
Blackboard or another class I teach on Canvas,
here's a good place to get started
in learning about the capabilities of this learning
management system.
I don't send them to the whole, huge collection
of help options.
I send it to one or two to get started
in the things that are most important
in my particular class for them to know.
And so you can address different technology skills,
in this case a lower technology skill than you would hope,
in that class without slowing down the rest of the class.
It also tells a student you're welcome here.
I assume students would come and not
have those technical skills.
Make sure content is presented in multiple ways.
We talked about that.
Make sure that you spell acronyms and jargon
and define it.
I like to use the expression low hanging fruit a lot.
And in this one class, I teach, I use that expression.
And then, I say if you haven't heard that expression before,
what I'm referring to is some of the simpler things
that you can do to make your website accessible.
And so I don't need to survey the class
to know if people know that word.
Another way people do it is they just have links to some
of the words in their class.
And so a student can go there if they
don't understand the jargon.
Instructions and expectations clear--
when I work with students with disabilities, often in surveys
and so forth, and disability service providers often
say one of the biggest problems is
that instructions and expectations are not clear.
You can include all of your assignments in your syllabus,
for instance, or at least in another document
toward the beginning of the class,
and make sure you have a rubric for your grading,
but also the instructions are very clear what
you expect the student to do.
Examples and assignments are relevant to a diverse audience.
Outlines and other scaffolding tools are provided.
How can you somehow help your students get to the level
that you want them to be at?
If they're writing a term paper, could you
provide an example of a term paper
someone else has written, as a scaffolding device and also
a link to a document that tells them
how to create term papers in case
they need some more help in that regard.
So you're not lowering your standards.
You're just helping students be more successful.
Giving them adequate opportunities for practice--
so you don't want to overwhelm people that don't
need as much extra practice.
You can include, for instance, a link to-- you
can call it optional.
If you'd like to do market work in this area,
I suggest, or here are some more examples or whatever.
Just put optional there so that people
don't have to go to it if they don't want to or need to.
Provide adequate time for activities, projects and tests.
Getting your assignments in the syllabus
actually helps do that because students
know what's going to be expected through the rest of the class.
You also can put your syllabus up
early so that they can take a look at it.
Provide feedback on parts of projects or term papers,
and then give corrective opportunities with some credit.
So students at the end of your class
don't turn in their project and have a totally misunderstood
understanding of what that project was,
and you have to figure out how to grade them.
Options for communicating and collaborating-- on a syllabus,
I'll say you can meet with me one-on-one at any time.
And I like to meet by Zoom.
But rather than say that, I say to myself, Sheryl,
it's not about you.
It's about them, and they may have
a different opinion about that.
So I say we can meet one-on-on.
We can use Skype, Zoom, email, the discussion
board in our learning management system, whatever.
So just let me know how you'd like to meet.
It also sends that message right at the beginning
of the syllabus that I expect to be flexible in what we do
and how we can communicate.
And the last one, options for demonstrating their learning
using portfolios, tests, term papers, projects, group work,
rather they have just a couple of things that people get
graded on.
So like I said, that's kind of a quick overview of the topic.
And Terrill will now fill in the details for those first nine
in the IT area.
So when I look at universal design,
I think of it as an attitude, first of all,
that the attitude is, well I expect
it's my responsibility to think about how
I can make what I'm doing and be inclusive of a lot of people
with a lot of different characteristics.
It's an attitude.
You own that, but that's something
you're going to work on.
It's a framework, and so there are
step-by-step things you can do.
There's a there is a definition.
There are guidelines, and principles,
and there are practices that are well-established.
And that's the framework that you're using.
And you did develop some process where
you continue to use that framework as you
develop your materials.
It's a goal that whatever you're doing
is welcoming and accessible to everyone.
But it's not one that we probably
will ever totally reach.
It's just that we can get better and better
as we apply more practices.
And it's a process, and part of the process
is being proactive, where you do the universal design as you're
doing other practices.
For instance, there are many proven practices
in how to deliver good online learning.
Many of those articles-- most of them, I'd say, that you read,
they don't address disability at all.
And some of the practices they're suggesting
aren't even accessible to people with disabilities.
But you can combine some of those ideas
and make them inclusive using universal design to come up
with the practices you use in your class.
It'd be nice if they were tested,
but they aren't necessarily going to be.
So universal design, it values diversity.
That's important.
It also values equity.
And it values inclusion, that people are working together.
One example is you could give an assignment in small groups.
And they're going to create a project together
to ask that group as their first item of business
to decide how they're going to communicate with one another.
And so that way, they have to provide
it to be accessible to everybody in the group,
and you don't have to dictate that.
And it gives them an opportunity to talk about differences
and figure out what people want to do.
And it doesn't require that a disability is disclosed.
A person might just say, well I prefer that we use email,
even though it in part is because some other way
of communicating is difficult for them.
It promotes best practices, and it absolutely
does not lower expectations.
Faculty need to hear that more than once.
It's proactive, and it can be implemented incrementally.
Hopefully, every time you offer the course,
it's a little bit more accessible
than it was the last time.
And it benefits everyone or most everyone.
It shouldn't interfere with the experience of people
in your course, and it minimizes the need for accommodations.
Again, like I said at the beginning,
there's nothing wrong with accommodations.
We absolutely on our campuses should provide accommodations.
But it's my feeling that we provide more than we need.
In some ways, you can look at what accommodations
we are providing.
I mentioned earlier remediation of PDFs and captioning videos
there too.
And with techniques that Terry will talk about,
what about if you just captioned all your videos,
and you didn't use PDFs, and you made whatever documents
you are using accessible?
Then they wouldn't need that accommodations, would they?
And so that's important to consider as well.
And if you're just getting started,
you might want to focus on the first week of class.
Make sure your syllabus is accessible.
Make sure your videos are accessible, and your documents
for the first week or two.
At least then, you're giving the disabled student services
office and the student a little time
to make the rest of the course accessible.
So that's not a perfect solution,
but you can prioritize what you do and when.
I'm going to close with a quote that I really
like from a Vietnamese Buddhist monk.
When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well,
you don't blame the lettuce.
You look for reasons it is not doing well.
It may need fertilizer or more water or less sun.
So again, the idea is you first look at the product
before you look at the individual
and consider their limitations or their functions,
capabilities.
And so you look at the product first
is the idea with universal design.
So that's universal design in a nutshell.
Let's see if we have any questions.
I also will point out I tried to apply these practices
in the presentation.
And one example of that is did you
notice when I had that cute little red coffeepot up
on the screen, the only thing I did to describe it, really,
was saying that the spout and the handle
were on the same side.
In my view, that's all you really
needed to know about that image if you can't see the image.
I didn't want to go into great detail
because it was irrelevant that it was
this, cool bright red color.
So Brianna, do we have any questions?
BRIANNA BLASER: We don't.
I just want to encourage folks, if you have questions,
to go ahead and type them in the chat or raise your hand.
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: OK, so while we're waiting for that,
I have a few examples of applying universal design.
And one I've mentioned is a course
I teach at City University of New York, which
is universal design in higher education.
One of the activities that the students need to do
is go off and look for on the internet--
I have a lot of internet activities in this class.
Look on the internet and try to find an image that's
not labeled as universal design but is
a good example of a universal design
feature in a physical environment.
And then, write in the discussion forum
a message to the whole group with an attached image,
and explain why you think that image
is an example of a universal design feature.
Now, I looked at that assignment.
I go that's kind of cool.
They'll get to do something visual
and be out there on the internet.
I try to have action and almost like field trips in my class.
And so I really like that activity.
But I pause for a minute, as I do with all my activities,
and I said, well, who wouldn't be able to do this?
Well, the most obvious one is a person
who is blind and can't see those images.
Now, if everybody used alternative text,
it might be all right.
But they also might not put in the alternative text
some of the features that I'm looking for them to identify.
One option is to provide that as an accommodation
if I learned that a person who is blind is in my class.
That would be one approach.
Leave it up to disabled services or disability services
or leave it up to that person identifying themself as blind
and asking me for an accommodation.
Rather than that, right in the lesson,
I kind of describe it, as I just mentioned.
But then, right at that point, alternatively, I start out,
alternatively, think about a physical environment
you have experienced and where you
felt that something that was provided in that environment
was really representative of the universal design philosophy.
BRIANNA BLASER: There's a couple of great questions in the chat.
One is can you describe the turning point
for your university to really support universal design
and provide resources that might help other folks trying
to get their university to support this?
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: Well, I don't
think we've reached that curve.
We are not had that major turn.
We have a lot more people talking
about universal design on our campus,
and so it's a gradual process.
And we just talk about it all that we can.
We have a group of liaisons, IT accessibility liaisons
supporting our teams' efforts.
And they're like 150 people, and they
get training on accessible design and design
of online learning that is accessible.
And we count on them to spread the word.
We give a lot of presentations.
We don't have a lot of pushback on universal design.
More and more people know about it.
Is it's actually practicing it is a problem.
It's like, well, I don't have time, especially lately.
The 20 Tips publication can help.
For instance, on our campus with the pandemic,
we went online just literally over overnight.
And I thought that's not a good time
to approach faculty that are just panicked over this
and converting their courses to have a lot of information
about universal design.
But we made a big effort around all these campus websites
that started appearing and departments and colleges
and schools on helping their faculty convert to online.
We made sure that our resources, which
included the 20 tips, because that's a way to get started.
And then, that publication was a link
on their list of resources.
And our more general IT accessibility,
technology sensibility website, which
includes technical details, much like what
Terry is going to talk about next, was on there as well.
And I think it's a journey.
We're certainly progressing on that journey,
but we're not at the end of that journey by any stretch
of the imagination.
BRIANNA BLASER: There's a few questions in the chat
about accessibility of PDFs.
And I know this is a teaser for Terrill's presentation.
Terrill, I don't know if you want to jump in.
Some of the questions are whether searchable PDFs
are relatively inaccessible?
Are Word documents with good heading structures better?
What do you do about journal PDFs that are inaccessible?
And I know you're going to talk about some of this later,
so I don't want to steal your thunder too much.
TERRILL THOMPSON: Yeah, these are all excellent questions.
Also, the question I'm seeing there about alt text
as it applies to more complex graphics--
bar graphs, scatter plots, et cetera.
I can try to build in some discussion about all
of those things in my segment.
I think we should have time to cover those,
so I'll make a note of those questions
and try to address that in my talk.
BRIANNA BLASER: Excellent.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: Go ahead.
BRIANNA BLASER: I was just going to say
somebody asked about accessibility
of journal articles.
And I just this morning was reading some emails
on our student mentoring list where
a student who was trying to access some computer science
PDFs from journals found they were all inaccessible.
And there was a resulting conversation
where another person said, yeah, this professional organization
isn't great at making PDFs accessible.
So it's a problem.
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: It's a huge problem.
From the student perspective, what we do on our campus
is we have a contract with SensusAccess, which is
a tool that can convert PDF--
well, it can one format to another.
And it will take a PDF and do a computer generated
version of an accessible PDF.
It's not pretty, necessarily.
It might not have the headings structured and so forth.
But it allows a student who's working at midnight on Saturday
night with no access to the disability services office
to do remediation.
And that term paper is due on Monday.
They have a right to procrastinate as well.
But they can access some resources
that they really need.
We also have Ally, which is an add-on by Blackboard,
but it's with our Canvas, that does something similar to that.
And then the other thing is you can contact your librarians.
They might be able to help you get an accessible
version of that PDF.
You've seen an article or something that's
it's available on the website on the internet
in different formats, and you might
find a more accessible one.
Otherwise, I think contacting that organization,
encouraging them to produce accessible documents.
You have to decide how much you're
going to be an advocate in that regard.
Otherwise, it's left up to the disability services office
to do the remediation.
I actually, in my class, choose not
to use information that's not designed in an accessible
format.
So that's another, but maybe too big of a drastic measure
in your case.
But my course is on universal design,
so I have to hold myself to a higher standard.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Oh.
BRIANNA BLASER: There's one last question
that I think is really interesting,
but I think you just covered this,
so maybe you can give a quick answer to this.
Meg Ray asked how do you deal with tools
that may make learning more accessible for some students
but less accessible for others?
And then she gave an example of Flipgrid
in place of discussion, or it's which
allows folks a variety of ways to answer,
but it makes it less accessible to folks need captioning?
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: Yeah, well, Terry
will talk about accessible software,
so you want to see if there's an alternative that you can use.
Another thing you can do is you can have a tool that you really
like using, but maybe it's not accessible to students
who are blind.
And if a student who is blind signs up for your class,
you can just quick like a bunny use a different tool
to make it accessible to that specific class you have.
Because it might be accessible to everybody
that's in your class, but you've got
to do that in a seamless way.
I've heard of faculty that make a change,
and they actually point that out.
We're making this change because this person
is blind in the class and so forth.
But Terry we'll talk more about accessible tools.
For multiple reasons, I keep it real simple.
I use asynchronous tools.
All the tools I use are pretty simple.
I hear from students that they get really confused when
the faculty member uses a whole bunch of tools they think
are really great.
So really look seriously about whether you need to use
that particular tool.
Sometimes you can stretch an accessible tool
to do some of the things that you really
like about that tool.
But we're done for now.
And at 10 after, Terrill is going
to start talking about the technology stuff.
So see you then.
BRIANNA BLASER: See you in a bit.
TERRILL THOMPSON: --for those of you where it is still morning.
Good afternoon for those of you that have slipped over
into the other side.
I am going to be talking about a variety of things.
This was originally advertised in the agenda,
I think, as documents and video accessibility.
But there is really so much more that can be talked about,
and so I wanted to also include website and vendor
products in the mix of things that I'm going to talk about.
As Sheryl mentioned, I am the manager of the IT accessibility
team, so we deal with all of these sorts of things
on campus.
Our charge is to promote technology
accessibility campus-wide.
And so we work with our own university
to try and ensure that our websites, documents, video,
and vendor products are accessible.
And so there's a lot of other training,
consulting, collaborating, and just working
to educate the campus community and build capacity.
We do a lot of this on our own campus
at the University of Washington.
And then, through the grant funding,
such as AccessINCLUDES, and part of my position
is funded by an NSF project called
AccessComputing, which is dedicated to broadening
participation of students with disabilities
in computing fields.
And so I do a lot of the same sort of work
on the AccessComputing project dedicated
to improving accessibility among our partners on that grant.
So within an hour, we'll cover just a little bit
of each of these topics.
But I do want to allow time for questions,
and I want to answer some of the questions that
came up in the first session, and point you
towards some resources where you can continue learning more
about each of these things.
So first of all, and we are talking about diversity.
This is a big focus of AccessINCLUDES.
And specifically when we talk about technology accessibility,
we're talking about technology diversity and the diversity
among people in the way they interact
with computing tools, information--
electronic and digital information.
So the historical model is you've got some data somewhere.
Now, we call it the cloud.
There's data out there in the cloud or on the internet,
or somewhere there's data that you need access to.
And traditionally, you would get access via monitor, a screen.
And you would communicate back to the computer using keyboard.
That was the original interface.
But then, also, a mouse was introduced later.
And so this kind of then became the traditional model
of a keyboard and mouse for input,
and a monitor for output.
But that's an old fashioned model.
We see more and more people interacting
with their mobile devices in order
to get access to information.
And within mobile devices, you've
got a wide variety of different platforms,
different shapes, sizes.
You've got tablets as well.
A lot of different shapes, sizes, and platforms
when it comes to tablets.
You've got people who are listening
to content rather than accessing the output visually
through a monitor.
Traditionally, this has been the domain of people who
are blind using screen readers.
But also, now, since we're becoming more mobile
and relying more on hands-free interfaces
and eyes-free interfaces, then we're
using speech output in order to access technology, as well as
speech input.
That too has been traditionally the domain
of people with disabilities, particularly
people with physical disabilities
who are unable to type or to use a mouse.
They could use speech input in order
to dictate documents or control the interface.
And now, more and more people are using speech input as well
speech output.
Some people interact through a tactile interface.
So on the slide here, we have a refreshable Braille device,
which can be used both for input and output.
It's got Braille keys that they can type in order
to produce input, and then a refreshable row of dots
that they can use to receive the output.
And they can explore web pages and software
and documents using the Braille dots
as they continue to change.
So I ran out of slide space here.
Otherwise, I could have gone on and on with all
the different assistive technologies people use
and different devices people use to access technology.
But bottom line is there's a huge variety.
And this is really what accessibility hinges upon,
that we want to create information,
content, applications that work for people,
regardless of what their interface is
like, what sort of devices they're using,
or what sort of configuration they're using.
So even if we just look at a visual interface,
people are using the monitor.
They have a lot of flexibility in, for example,
their screen resolution.
This is all the screen resolutions
that are available to me on my MacBook Pro.
I can go anywhere from 640 by 480 to 1680 by 1050
and all points in between, stretched and not stretched.
And my choice of resolutions means
that what I'm seeing on my screen
right now is probably very different than what
you're seeing on yours.
And as you're producing content, you
can't depend on people having the same configuration as what
you have.
The same is true of font size.
This is a screenshot from Firefox.
The default is 16, but I've got font sizes
anywhere from 9 to 72.
So I can make the text smaller if I wanted
to squeeze more text into the available real estate,
or I can make it larger if I have trouble
viewing the text at size 16--
all the way up to size 72.
And so with that kind of variety,
people are going to have very different visual experiences.
And of course, some people are going
to have experiences that don't use visual output at all.
So already, Sheryl introduced you to Anthony, Nicole,
and Jesse I think it was.
So you've met a few of the students and scholars
that we've worked with over the years.
I wanted to introduce you to a few more,
specifically focusing on the technologies that they use.
This is Jennifer.
She, last I knew, had an associate's degree
from Yakima Valley Community College.
And she was working with the Yakima Valley Community
Seeds, which is an organization whose goal is
to respond to unmet needs of local adults with disabilities.
Communication, I think, was her major and her strong suit.
As you can see, she's got some different technology
that she's using here.
She has a mobility impairment that
prevents her from using a traditional keyboard/mouse
interface.
In her right hand, she's holding a stick.
And she's using an IntelliKeys keyboard,
which has larger keys than a typical keyboard.
And those make a perfect target for her
since she has limited dexterity.
But with the stick held in her right hand,
she can hit those larger keys.
So she's navigating almost entirely then with keyboard.
She's not using a mouse at all.
She's using this stick and large keyboard combination.
This is Courtney.
She has a bachelor's degree in communications from the UW.
And she works as a creative production assistant
now at Rooted in Rights, which is a program of disability
rights Washington that focuses on creating media centered
around disability rights.
She's been a really strong advocate
for the rights of individuals with disabilities,
and she in her role at Rooted and Rights
writes for their blog and has written for other publications,
like the Braille Monitor is one that I know of.
And she maintains a personal blog as well.
But she's seen here using a refreshable Braille device.
And here's Courtney again, but she's
with her friend Conrad, who graduated summa cum
laude from Seattle Pacific University
but then came to the UW and got a law degree.
And his list of accomplishments is pretty long
but worth mentioning, I think.
When he was working on his law degree,
he interned in Washington, DC three different times,
once with the American Association of People
with Disabilities, once with The Heritage Foundation,
and once with the Alliance Defending Freedom.
And he's won many awards, including
the Carlson-Parker award from Pacific Justice
Institute in 2016, the Ron Adams Outstanding Advocate
Award from the Northwest Access Fund in 2017, Public Service
and Leadership Award from Young Lawyers Committee of Washington
State Bar Association in 2018.
He founded his own 501(c)(3) nonprofit disability rights law
firm in Seattle and is quite well-known in Seattle
as a civil rights lawyer focusing primarily
on disability rights.
He's the outgoing chair of the Governor's Award subcommittee,
a member of the coordinating committee for the Washington
State Governor's Committee on Disability Issues
and Employment.
And I could go on and on.
He's an avid Seahawks fan.
You can see he's wearing the number 12 there.
But he has very limited use of his hands.
And so he is using a sip and puff
device, which allows him to control a lot of things,
including on-screen access.
He can manipulate the cursor.
With a device such as a sip and puff switch,
you can program it to meet your individual needs.
But a sip may click, and a puff may double
click, something like that.
And he also is a big user of speech recognition technology.
So he uses Dragon NaturallySpeaking
to do a lot of his computing, so dictating documents,
as well as controlling the interface.
And this is Hannah.
She graduated from the University of Washington
with a computer science major but also
had physics and math minors.
She spent some time studying in Paris while she was at the UW.
She also played piccolo in the UW marching band.
She was awarded the UW President's Medal
for the 2015-'16 academic year, won the Boas Scholarship
for physics in 2017-2018, and interned at Facebook
in software development and now works for Facebook.
And she's shown here with her screen magnified.
So she's using ZoomText to zoom in and make the font larger.
And she does this.
You can use ZoomText in a variety of ways.
But she is zooming everything.
So she makes everything bigger, and she
is looking at studying program code here, which, of course, is
what her specialty is.
But when you're zoomed into just a small portion of the screen,
that means things that are happening elsewhere
in the screen are not visible.
And so that's something that needs to be kept in mind.
So again, we could go on and on introducing you
to more and more of the students that we've
worked with over the years.
But I think Jennifer, Courtney, Conrad, and Hannah all give us
some ideas about just the differences between people
and how they interact with technology.
And we need to then keep those users in mind,
keep that diversity in mind as we ask questions
like is my website accessible?
Are these digital documents accessible?
Are each of those individuals that we just
met going to be able to use those technologies?
And so let's step through each of the categories
and talk a little bit about what makes websites,
and digital documents, and videos, and software,
or third-party products and services accessible.
I have an example website here.
This is the NSF INCLUDES national network website.
And there may be some of you who represent this organization
or have something to do with this website.
So I just picked this for its relevance to the meeting,
not because it's good or bad.
And I'm not necessarily going to delve
into this particular website.
But as you're looking at websites, and you're asking
is this website accessible, then some things that kind of jump
out are images.
If you have images, then they need to be described.
So again, there was the question earlier about alt text,
and we'll talk a little bit more later about alt text.
But there is at least one, maybe two, maybe three,
actually, images on the slide.
We've got a logo at the top-left.
We've got the NSF logo.
And we have an image that's kind of front and center
that features a silhouette of people gathered
around the table and some iconography that represents
some of the key ideas or concepts that
are covered by NSF INCLUDES.
So the question is what is good alt text for those images?
How can you describe them succinctly
in a way that meets the needs of somebody that can't see them?
And for a logo, it may simply be something like "NSF INCLUDES"
or "NSF INCLUDES logo."
Or in the case of the NSF logo, it
may just be "NSF" or "NSF logo."
The other images are a bit more complex,
and therefore that would require a little bit more
thought into how best to communicate what's
happening in this picture?
What is the key takeaway within this picture?
And that really requires the person
who owns the website who is having
this communication with their audience,
it requires them thinking about that
and answering that question.
As an outsider, I see the silhouette of people,
and it looks like a diverse group of people gathered
around the table, including one wheelchair user who's
sitting at the table.
But there are also some key concepts
in the iconography above.
In fact, some of those are expressed with words--
vision, partnership, goals, metrics, leadership,
communication, expansion, sustainability, scale.
So wherever there are words in an image,
if those are playing a key role in the communication,
then they need to be included in the alt text.
So that's one thing.
You've got images that need to be described
for people that can't see them.
Another thing is headings.
It really is important to have headings that are
coded properly for the content.
So on this page, we've got "About us--
NSF INCLUDES" as a prominent heading.
I would say that, arguably, is the main heading of this page,
and therefore it should be coded with an H1 tag in HTML.
And we'll talk in a bit more detail
about headings coming up.
Other things that jump out at me here
are that we've got a menu that has--
looks like dropdown menus.
I can tell by the little arrow that's
beside some of the items on the menu
"About Us" and "Groups" and "Events."
And if that is a dropdown menu that is triggered by a mouse,
particularly by hovering with a mouse,
then I want to know can I access those menu
items with a keyboard?
And if I'm tabbing through this page--
like a couple of the people that you met a moment ago are not
mouse users, so they're using a keyboard
or they're using speech input.
Can they trigger the menu with the mouse?
Can they access the menu items?
So that is a key consideration.
Also, color contrast is important.
And I question-- again.
I'm not here to critique this particular website, but I do
question whether the subtitle--
"Broadening Participation, Expanding Opportunities,"
that lime green on white looks like content
that might fail the accessibility requirements
for color contrast.
And that would be something to check.
There are lots of free tools available for checking
color contrast.
We'll talk about the tools and about the requirements
in a moment.
So here's another website.
I actually just tossed this in.
It has all the same issues.
It raises all the same questions.
You've got a menu that has dropdowns,
and so you want to know whether you can access those keyboard.
It also has a clear, visible heading structure.
And so hopefully, it's coded in a way
that where accessible technology at the UW
is the heading level 1.
And then, you've got a couple of subheadings--
"Experiencing Inaccessible IT" and "Accessible Technology"
over in the sidebar.
Both look like they are secondary headings, which
would be heading level 2.
But mainly, I just wanted to introduce this website
because this is really a great go-to resource.
This is how we communicate with our campus community
on accessible technology.
But us.edu/accessibility-- I'll be referring to this page
on several subsequent slides.
So that's just a few of the things
we can look at with accessible websites.
And we'll come back to those in a bit.
I first want to give you a high-level overview.
And accessible documents have a lot
of the same issues with documents as with websites.
And they all really come down to structure.
So here, we have a course syllabus.
This is the Introduction to Physics Course Syllabus that
includes a lot of the things you'd
expect to find in a syllabus, like the course objectives
and a schedule with reading assignments
broken down week by week, and some information about how
the grades are determined.
But if you are a sighted person and you're
trying to make sense of this, it doesn't
make a whole lot of sense.
It's just a blob of text.
And if I were to ask you what is the reading assignment in week
three, then you're going to have a really hard time coming up
with that information.
Even if I ask you something relatively simple,
like how many course objectives are there?
That's really difficult to answer that question, given
the way this is presented.
So if we present it in a different way--
this is the exact same document, but now we have structure,
where you have a main heading--
Introduction to Physics Course Syllabus.
You have subheadings, Textbook, Course Objectives,
Class Schedule, and Grades.
You've got a list of objectives, and you
can see very easily that there are three objectives by looking
at that list.
And then you've got your class schedule, which
is organized in the tables.
You get rows and columns of data that
help you to understand the relationships between all
the parts.
So the message that I'm wanting to communicate
with this slide versus the previous slide
is that for somebody who can't see the visible structure,
if the headings are just big, bold text but they
aren't actually coded as headings,
then this is what you get.
You get a blob of text.
If you can't see the fact that text is big and bold
and you're depending on the underlying structure,
then this is what you get.
So if you think about the implications of that.
This is a tough course, and this is only
the syllabus of that course.
And the student is taking many tough courses.
And if every document is going to be this hard to read,
imagine how challenging it's going to be
to complete your education.
So if you've got the headings coded as headings,
and the lists as lists, and the tables as tables,
and everything is properly marked up,
then a person who can't see gets the same content,
the same document, essentially, as somebody who can.
So all that structure enables them
to understand the relationships between parts.
And screen readers have the ability
to allow their users to jump from heading to heading
to heading, for example.
And when they enter a list, it informs
them of how many items are in the list.
And there are shortcuts for navigating through the rows
and columns of a table.
And so having good structure is really the most important thing
to making websites accessible and to making
digital documents accessible.
And structure is supported by every major document format.
So whether it be HTML for web pates, or Word, or PDF,
you've got structure built into those platforms,
but it's not automatic.
And so as a document author or website author,
you have to understand the importance of structure
and make sure that you tag things appropriately or author
things appropriately so that that structure is present
and is appropriate for communicating the content.
So we'll come back to that.
But just, again, a high-level overview initially.
Now, an accessible video--
of course, we need to have captions.
So if there's audio content that a person can't hear,
then they've got access to that audio content.
A lot of people aren't aware, though,
aren't thinking about how a person who can't see
accesses video.
This is a video from YouTube from the UW.
It's one of our more popular videos
as scientists witness underwater volcanic
eruption for the first time.
There is some narration, which is captioned.
But there's also a lot of content that is visual only,
so nobody's talking.
We're just watching this volcanic eruption happen.
And so if somebody can't see, they
don't get a full understanding of what's happening,
what exactly is going on in this video, which
is where audio description also is an important thing
to consider.
If you have a video that has important content that
is communicated only with visual information,
then somebody who can't see that doesn't have access.
So there are techniques called audio description
which enable you to communicate that to people that can't see.
Another piece of the video accessibility puzzle
is the player itself that there are
a lot of different media players out there, video players.
And if you are not a mouse user, you still
need to be able to click the play button or any
of those other buttons.
And so can you do that with the keyboard?
Can you do that with speech input?
Those are questions that you have
to consider as you're choosing how you're
going to distribute your video.
And the YouTube player, it seems like a lot of video
is being distributed via YouTube these days or Vimeo.
And both of those are controllable with the keyboard.
And so that's a pretty good choice
that you can't access those.
And the buttons are labeled well for screen reader users.
Accessible vendor products-- let's take Zoom for an example.
Here's a screenshot from a Zoom meeting.
In fact, I just finished my slide deck this morning,
so you've got today's Zoom meeting shown here
on this slide.
But obviously, you've got captions,
and so that's a good thing.
We know that if there are people who
are deaf or hard of hearing that read captions,
then you've got access to those.
So Zoom provides that, and that's good.
Zoom also provides access to almost every feature
via the keyboard.
So you don't have to be a mouse user to access things.
You can test that yourself by tabbing around and exploring
the interface.
You can usually see where you are.
There's clear, visible focus as you're tabbing.
And there are also keyboard shortcuts
to almost every feature.
And the Zoom accessibility website
documents what those keyboard shortcuts are.
So this is a vendor product, where
it's a pretty good product when it comes to accessibility.
The question came up earlier about pitting one disability
group against another when you're making choices.
And ideally, we want a product that meets everybody's needs.
But this is one, actually, where we
do have to make some compromises because it's not
great for somebody who uses sign language.
The way sign language works in Zoom
is a sign language interpreter signs in, just
like any other participant.
And they've got a little video, just
like any other participant.
And the person who needs that interpreter
can pin that person's video so that it is always visible.
And they can do side-by-side mode,
where you've got a pretty large video of the presenter
or of the interpreter, maybe next to the slides.
But a problem is you can only pin one video, one person's
video at a time.
And so you can't look at the presenter
and the interpreter both.
One of those is going to have to be small,
while the other is pinned.
And usually, interpreters work in pairs,
depending on how long the meeting is.
And so when an interpreter hands off to the next interpreter,
then you've got a challenge as a user
because you've lost your interpreter.
You have pinned one interpreter, but the other is out there
somewhere interpreting.
And in a meeting like this where we have over 100 participants,
then it can be very difficult sometimes
to find your second interpreter.
So you've lost several seconds of communication
by the time you find them and pin them.
So Zoom, actually, is working on all these things.
They have done a lot of work to make
their product accessible to screen reader users
and to keyboard users.
But they still have some room for improvement
when it comes to deaf and hard of hearing.
And so we have had to make that compromise,
but we make it based partly on culture,
that we trust Zoom because they have expressed a commitment
to improving, and they have a roadmap,
and we have a good relationship with them.
But all of these things have to be included
as you're choosing products.
Particularly now, as we're doing more and more things online,
we're seeing a lot of products that
are purchased quickly and without enough due diligence
to ascertain whether this is a product or a service that
is accessible, and how accessible is the company?
Do they really care about accessibility?
And what are they working on?
How do they build accessibility into their workflows?
These are all things you'd have to know when you're selecting
a product, and we'll talk about that more in a moment as well.
So how is accessibility defined?
We've looked at a high level at what do you
mean when we're talking about website accessibility
and document accessibility and so forth?
Well, there actually are specific standards
that we need to meet.
Typically, standards related to the web and to technology
are from the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C.
This is an organization that Tim Berners-Lee,
the founder of the web or the creator of the web,
founded this organization back in the early '90s.
And they are the keepers of the HTML specification,
for example--
Hypertext Markup Language, the language of the web.
And that, by the way, has a lot of accessibility built into it.
HTML has always had accessibility built into it.
So that in and of itself is a good language
for supporting accessibility.
The W3C also is the author of the Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines, or WCAG.
That's been around since the late '90s.
They actually started working on it in the early '90s
very soon after the web became a thing.
They were aware that there was the potential to erect barriers
with the web, and that was totally contrary to what
the vision was.
The vision was to break down barriers and make information
available at your fingertips all over the world whoever you are
and whatever sort of computing technology you're using.
And so the fact that there could be
barriers introduced by the web was not
something the W3C wanted.
And so they created a group within the W3C, the Web
Accessibility Initiative, who began
working on these guidelines.
And so there have been many versions since the '90s,
and we'll talk about versions at a moment.
But WCAG is the standard for web content accessibility.
And the W3C also has developed a relatively new specification
called ARIA, which is Accessible Rich Internet Applications.
This is a markup language that makes
it possible to make pretty complex,
dynamic, interactive web applications
accessible to communicate what exactly is going on in a way
that assistive technologies can pick up on that
and relay that to their users.
So I mentioned that there are different versions of WCAG.
I said many, but really not that many, given how long it's been.
But WCAG 1, the first version, was published in 1999.
And then, version 2 was published in 2008.
And then, the latest official version
is 2.1, which was published a couple of years ago.
And I've got WCAG 2.1 bolded now because that is the most
recent.
But anything in the 2 dot is where we need to land
and we're talking about accessibility expectations
from a legal standpoint and a policy standpoint.
There have been a very large number
of legal complaints, lawsuits, in some cases,
related to web accessibility.
And almost invariably, the resolutions or the settlements
that come out of those cases require
that the defendant meet WCAG 2.0, or more recently,
WCAG 2.1.
So that's the version that we're standardized on.
So if we look more closely at that new version,
WCAG 2.1, as well as WCAG 2.0, there
are four broad principles that serve as the entry point.
In order for content to be accessible,
it needs to be perceivable, operable, understandable,
and robust.
So rather than explaining each of those principles,
it's sometimes easier to delve into the details.
And the finest level of detail within WCAG
are the success criteria.
There are 79 of those in WCAG 2.1.
And those are the nuts and bolts of add alt text
to images, that sort of thing.
Add headings to your document.
They express a little differently than that,
but those are the ideas that are captured
at the success criterion level.
And each of those success criteria
is assigned a level, either A, AA, or AAA,
depending on how critical it is for making sure
that you don't just completely shut out
particular groups of users, but also how difficult it is.
There are some things that fall to level AAA,
just because they're extremely challenging to implement.
I have level A level AA bolded here
because those same legal cases over the years
have clearly expressed that level AA is the bar, that that
is what we're expected to meet is WCAG 2.0 or 2.1 level AA,
which also means we need to meet the level A success criteria.
So that is our standard.
We're trying to meet the latest version of WCAG,
and there are 51 success criteria at level A and level
AA that we need to meet.
So let's just focus in on how do we do this?
I'll provide a few simple tips that give you the how
to of each of the technologies we've looked at.
First of all, with websites, you start by identifying your goal.
And that, in many ways, has been set
for us because of all the legal resolutions and settlements.
Because WCAG 2.1 has now been around since 2018,
that is now the expectation that we
would meet WCAG 2.1 level AA.
The big difference between 2.1 and 2.0--
there are a few.
But probably, the biggest is that it now
includes mobile devices and accessibility
on mobile devices.
Since so many people are using a mobile device now rather than
a desktop, then your website needs
to be accessible on a mobile device.
And so there are some specific success criteria in 2.1
that address that.
So another tip then is if you're outsourcing your web design
or development, then include the accessibility requirements
in the contract.
So you define your accessibility as WCAG 2.1 level AA.
Make sure that whoever is doing the design and the development,
whether that be internal or external,
they need to know that that's the target.
This is what your expectations are for the website
that they deliver.
Another tip is to take the #nomouse challenge.
And we've got a hashtag for that.
So if you do this and you're a social media person,
then tweet about it and help us to spread the word.
But taking the #nomouse challenge
is a really simple way to check the accessibility
of your website.
Just try using the keyboard to access your website.
Don't touch the mouse.
Just use the Tab key to navigate through the website,
and then use other keys that make sense, like Enter or Space
to activate buttons or links.
And sometimes, other keys make sense, like arrow keys
or the Escape key.
If it doesn't work with keyboard or if you
can't tell where you are with keyboard,
then that's an indication that you probably
have some deeper accessibility problems that you're
going to need to check out, investigate more thoroughly.
Another tip is just to learn more about web accessibility.
And so the website that I mentioned earlier,
our own website, uw.edu/accessibility is
our effort to teach our own web design development community.
There's a lot of information out there
on our website about web accessibility,
including a page that has a number of free accessibility
checkers.
There are lots of them out there--
website accessibility checkers, color contrast accessibility
checkers, lots of different toolbars
and downloadable software and websites.
And this is a hand-picked list of checkers
that we use and we like a lot, and it's annotated
so you can see description of each one.
So to access our list of tools, just go to the main website,
uw.edu/accessibility/tools, and that's where you'll find that
list.
For accessibility of documents, always
ask what's the best format for delivering this information?
We see so frequently people disseminating PDFs.
And it's just text that doesn't really--
a PDF is not in the best format for delivering
a lot of content.
So it's probably the best format if the format,
if the actual visual structure of the document, is critical
and you need to make sure that that's preserved.
Like on a lot of federal forms, this is a requirement.
But if that's not important, then PDF
might not be the best choice.
Wherever possible, use HTML, because I mentioned,
HTML has accessibility really built into the specification.
And it works across all platforms, all browsers.
Accessibility is very well supported.
There was a question in the earlier
session on Word versus PDF.
With PDF, it is possible to create an accessible
PDF that has an underlying structure that's
similar to HTML.
It's called a tagged PDF.
So your goal if you distribute PDF
is a tagged PDF with tags that are the right tags.
So the tags have to communicate heading 1, and heading 2,
and this is a list, and this is a table.
And there needs to be alt text on images.
And so having tags and having the correct tags
is what it takes to have an accessible PDF.
So that's a little bit challenging.
It can be difficult to tag a PDF properly.
But also, it's important to know that tagged PDF is only
supported in Windows.
So Windows screen readers support it.
It's not supported on a Mac, and so it's never
going to be as good as HTML, no matter how hard you work at it.
Whether Word is better depends a lot on the content.
Word is probably better for cross-platform,
so it's more likely to be accessible in Mac in addition
to Windows.
You can do headings.
You can do alt text on images.
You can do accessible math and Word documents,
whereas you can't in PDF.
So it really depends a lot on the nature of your content
whether Word is going to be better than PDF.
But HTML is better than both, so wherever possible, use HTML.
The keys-- headings, I stressed that many times.
And that is probably the most important accessibility issue
in both websites and documents.
Also, add meaningful alt text to images.
There's another slide where we're
going to talk about alt text, and I'll use that opportunity
to answer the question about long descriptions
for complex images.
And just about every authoring format
has an accessibility checker.
So as you're creating your digital documents,
this is a really good place to start.
If you're in Word or if you're creating a PowerPoint,
then use the Microsoft Office built-in accessibility checker,
and it will--
there's some limits to what accessibility checkers
can automatically identify.
But this can go a long way to help
you understand what the issues are
and guide you through how to fix those issues.
If you have a PDF, including a PDF
that you have acquired from some other source
and you don't have the original source to work with,
then you can still make that accessible in Adobe Acrobat.
You have to have Adobe Acrobat Pro,
but it includes an accessibility checker,
and it includes a variety of tools
that can help you fix the accessibility problems
within that document.
Once again, another tip is to just learn more
about document accessibility.
There's a lot to know.
And a good starting point is our own website,
uw.edu/accessibility/documents.
So you can see there's a trend here.
Just add slash something to the end of our main URL,
and that will get you to documents or to tools
or various other things.
So I wanted to give you just a couple examples that apply
to documents specifically.
Here we are in Word.
And I chose the Constitution of the United States
because it has a really good structure,
and so what I really want to communicate here
was heading structure.
And the structure of the pieces that I've excerpted here--
Constitution of United States, first of all,
is the main heading.
That's the title of the entire document,
so that would be the heading 1.
And in HTML, you would use an H1 tag.
In PDF, with a tagged PDF, you would want
an H1 tag, similar to HTML.
In word, you use styles.
And so here I am in Microsoft Word on the Home tab.
And I've got a bunch of styles visible.
So I can choose the style for the particular text
that I have highlighted.
And Word's styles include headings,
so heading 1, heading 2, heading 3.
It's really important to use those headings styles
for your headings.
So Constitution of the United States in this document
is heading 1.
The Preamble is a secondary heading
underneath that main heading.
And later, Amendments to the Constitution
is also a heading level 2.
So as you're using headings, it's really important
to think about the outline.
Your goal with headings is to communicate
the outline of the document so that the person who can't see
gets that structure.
They understand that this is a subheading underneath this.
And when you get down into Article 1 or the First
Amendment, that's a heading level 3,
which is a subheading under Amendments to the Constitution.
And so really important to preserve the outline.
And it also has advantages for the author because you
can change the style.
If you've got a bunch of heading 2s,
a bunch of heading 3s in your document,
then all you have to do is right-click on that Style
button, and you can change the appearance.
So you're not attached to the way it looks, and you shouldn't
make your decisions about headings based
on the visual representation because you
can very easily change that.
And when you change it, it applies to every heading 3
in the entire document, which is really, really
handy for you as an author.
For adding alt text to images, in Word--
you can now-- the latest version of Word, actually,
this happens automatically.
So this is where we've got automatic captioning that's
happening now.
We've got automatic alt text.
But you always need to check.
Whenever there's automatic captioning,
you need to check that because it makes mistakes.
And you need to check automatic alt text.
You always need to add alt text to your images.
But you always need to check if that alt text is
being added automatically.
So I added an image to a document
here in Word that is professor Richard Ladner.
Some of you may know him as a computer science
professor-- very active in the National Science Foundation.
And he's shown here communicating
with a group of deaf students, and they're all sitting
in a group using sign language.
And the automatic alt text that Word provided
was "a group of people looking at a computer," which
really does not--
it's actually not bad as automatic alt text goes,
but that's not happening here.
They're not looking at the computer.
There are computers present.
But they are very clearly looking at each other.
They're communicating by sign language.
And it seems to be a very lively conversation.
And so all of that needs to be communicated in this alt text.
And there's some key information that's missing.
So your alt text is going to vary based on context.
And you always have to ask what is it
that I'm trying to communicate here by providing this image?
And what are the important takeaways?
The question came up earlier about graphs
and charts and images that have a lot of complex information.
Alt text really is not designed for that kind of description.
It's designed for short and sweet.
So in an academic journal, for example, you
might have figure 1 with a caption,
and then you've got a complex image.
The alt text would be a place to just say figure 1,
and then say something like description provided elsewhere,
and reference where the person can find the description.
There have been various techniques,
depending on whether it's on a website or a PDF document
or a Word document, different techniques
for providing a short description, which
is alt text, versus a long description.
So those are kept separate, and they're
coded in different ways.
But the standard recommendation these days
is wherever possible to provide a communication
of the key points of the graph or the chart in the text.
So not everybody processes the visual information,
processes graphs and charts well.
Even people who are sighted don't necessarily--
if they look at a flow chart, for example,
they can't necessarily track what's
happening in the flow chart.
So having a text description in the body of the article
or the piece of content, having that text description there
for everybody to benefit from, and then just using the alt
text to reference that section of the page
is a recommended best practice at this point.
So let's move on to video.
The first step is to finish your videos.
Then, I'm going to argue a video isn't complete
until it's captioned.
And so if you've got a video, and you've put it up,
and it doesn't have any captions,
then people who can't hear it, maybe
because they're deaf and hard of hearing,
maybe because they have their sound turned down.
They're in a noisy environment.
They can't hear.
Or they're in a quiet environment,
and they can't turn their volume up,
and they don't have their headset with them.
There are lots of reasons why you need captions.
Captions also make videos searchable.
And that certainly is really a handy feature.
And therefore, if you don't have captions,
you're not finished yet.
It's a necessary part of the video production process.
Also, a lot of questions come up about automatic captions.
If you upload a video to YouTube,
it is automatically captioned.
If you capture a Zoom, record a Zoom meeting or Zoom webinar,
that too can be automatic caption.
You have to turn it on, but that does
get automatically captioned.
But automatic captions are not accurate enough
to be relied on.
Even though they're getting better and better all the time,
they still make enough mistakes that a person
who's depending on them can miss some really important details.
Think about the importance of the word "not."
It completely reverses the message.
And if the automatic captions miss the word not,
then you get the wrong idea from what's being said.
And so it really is critical to go in and edit
those automatic captions.
And that then can be a much easier process
than captioning from scratch, depending
on the quality of the original.
But before you publish, edit those captions,
either in the YouTube caption editor
or in the Zoom caption editor.
Both tools provide that service.
And then, also, I mentioned earlier audio description.
Some videos need it.
Some don't.
But it's important to ask as you are for producing or providing
a video, is the important content
of this video clear through audio alone?
If somebody is not looking at it, do they get the message?
Do they understand what's being said,
and do they understand who's saying it?
Because that can be critical too.
If you've got an on screen graphic
that identifies the speaker but that isn't apparent anywhere
just by listening to the video, then that may need to be audio
described.
And there are lots of ways for delivering audio description.
But probably the easiest way and the best way at this point
is to send it out to somebody that specializes
in audio description.
And there are a number of vendors in this space.
They can return to you a separate video
that has audio description.
Then you've got a version with description and a version
without, and you link to both of them.
So wherever you provide the original version,
you can say also available with audio description and link
to that.
Once again, you can learn more about video accessibility
by going to--
you probably could have guessed it--
uw.edu/accessibility/videos.
And then, here's just a screenshot of adding captions
to videos on YouTube.
If you could find your way here to the subtitle and closed
caption manager, then it's just a matter
of following the prompts.
In this case, you would click on the Add New Subtitles,
and it would prompt you for a language.
And you select the language, and then you can upload a file.
There are various ways that you can
capture a video within YouTube.
And YouTube's captioning features
are really well documented.
So you could find that on our website,
as well as on the YouTube help docs.
So vendor products-- always ask the vendor about accessibility.
So as you're shopping for a piece of technology
that you are going to deploy now, as you're teaching online,
or you're moving conferences to online,
or whatever it is that you're doing,
and you need some sort of tool to support that, then you've
got to ask the vendor about accessibility.
If they don't hear this from all of us--
there are 112 people in the meeting now.
If every one of us asks about accessibility,
then vendors are going to get the message
that, wow, my target market really
cares about accessibility.
We've got to take this seriously.
Otherwise, if we don't ask, then they
don't think it's important.
And so the question is not are you accessible
or is your product accessible, but how
do you know your products are accessible?
Or what is your process for ensuring that your products are
accessible?
What sort of testing have you done?
What do your engineers know?
What sort of training is provided to them
about accessibility?
Also, you can request documentation.
And you've defined your specific standard
that you're trying to meet, which
probably is WCAG 2.1 level AA.
And you can request documentation
of how they meet that, and they should be able to provide it.
There is a standard form called a VPAT, the Voluntary Product
Accessibility Template, that vendors often
use to document their level of accessibility compliance.
It's important when you get a VPAT back
to know that the vendor is providing this.
So it's self-report often.
Sometimes, they have a third-party accessibility
consultant fill it out for them, and that's
going to be more trustworthy, more credible.
But if they have filled it out themselves,
then you can't necessarily trust it,
not because they're dishonest necessarily,
but because they may not have the accessibility expertise
to fill it out on their own.
They need somebody who really understands
accessibility to do an honest and thorough assessment
of their product.
So given that, VPATs are a conversation starter,
not the final word on whether a product or service is
accessible.
So you look at the VPAT, and you try
to come up with questions based on what you're seeing.
What do you know about whether this product can
be used by somebody who is using a screen reader,
or somebody who can't use a mouse,
or somebody who's using speech input?
And if the VPAT doesn't give you that information,
doesn't give you a thorough understanding
of what sort of barriers this product
is going to create, if any, then you need to ask those follow-up
questions.
Also, you need to include accessibility requirements
in the contract.
So if they are not accessible, they need to improve,
and you need to agree upon a roadmap
whereby they are working toward better accessibility,
and there is some guarantee in that it's
written into the contract, and they've
got a timetable where you're expecting them to meet
accessibility guidelines.
We've got all this spelled out in our own accessibility
and procurement page.
And so you can go to uw.edu/accessibi
lity/procurement.
So we're getting near the end.
I do want to do a plug for another learning opportunity.
And this is mostly for web developers.
In fact, entirely, this is designed for web developers.
And if you're not a web developer
but you know web developers, then
please encourage them to attend.
HighEdWeb, which is the association
for higher education web developers and designers,
they're hosting their first ever accessibility summit.
It was going to be face-to-face in St. Louis,
but it's online now.
It's next week, the same day next week, and only $25
to register.
And with that, you get 12 sessions, or 6
because they're concurrent, but really good
sessions that is a deeper dive into accessibility.
And so I mentioned very briefly accessible web navigation menus
as I was looking at websites.
That's a topic that I'm going to be exploring in great depth,
looking at code and really exploring what the best
practices in a session, along with 11
other really good sessions.
So you find out about that at a11ysummit20.highedweb.org.
So I apologize I didn't leave much time for questions.
But Brianna are there some that I can answer
in a short period of time?
BRIANNA BLASER: We do have a lot of questions.
And I do want to leave a little time for a break.
But there was some questions about the accessibility
of various conferencing meetings software other than Zoom--
Google Meet, GoToMeeting, Adobe Connect, WebEx,
Microsoft Teams.
TERRILL THOMPSON: Yeah, this question comes up a lot.
And we've been focusing primarily on Zoom,
so that's the one I'm most familiar with.
But I've seen a lot of conversations
among other institutions who are asking the same question.
And Zoom really seems to be the frontrunner when
it comes to keyboard accessibility
and screen reader accessibility.
So they really have embraced that
and have rocketed above the competition in that regard.
I think Microsoft is taking it pretty seriously too, so Teams.
And there's actually-- I don't know, Brianna,
if you pasted is the resource from our colleagues
that we were discussing.
BRIANNA BLASER: I did, the one from AccessSIGCHI,
and somebody else shared one from NAD,
National Association of the Deaf,
if I got that abbreviation right.
TERRILL THOMPSON: Yeah, so I would consult both of those
because they're going to come from slightly different
perspectives, probably.
And you do, unfortunately, have that reality where you're
sometimes balancing screen reader
accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing accessibility.
I don't want to endorse Zoom necessarily,
but we've been collaborating very closely with them
for years.
And like I said, they are now paying attention
to deaf and hard of hearing issues
more than they had been in the past.
And so I feel pretty comfortable with the path
that we're on with them.
BRIANNA BLASER: There is also a discussion about captioning
and the amount of labor involved in editing
captioning versus the cost of sending it out.
Maybe you can talk a little bit about the strategies
that UW has been using in that regard.
TERRILL THOMPSON: Yeah, the state of Washington
has a contract with a third-party caption provider,
so we've got a pretty good rate.
And so it may, in fact, be easier and more cost
effective just to send out to a captioning vendor.
And that question really rests on
whether you have people available at the university.
It could be a student job to edit captions.
But also, if the quality is good of the automatic captions,
then it can be pretty quick and easy to go in and edit that.
And so it really depends on those things,
whether it truly is quick and easy
and you just have to fix a few small things
and whether you have the labor available to even do that.
BRIANNA BLASER: Excellent.
One last question, and then we'll give everybody a break.
Can you talk a little bit about accessibility pitfalls
within Canvas?
TERRILL THOMPSON: Well, I mentioned the sign language.
So that really is the biggest-- oh within Canvas, sorry.
I was on still on Zoom.
Canvas, actually, that's another collaboration
where we have worked really closely with them.
And there actually are 100 institutions,
close to 100 institutions that are part of that collaboration.
And so they actually have been very supportive
of accessibility and built accessibility
into their platform.
The biggest challenge, though, is
that even with an accessible learning management system,
you can break accessibility in your course
by uploading inaccessible content.
And so that's where accessible documents especially
comes in, that you really need to pay attention to that.
And also, if you use plug-ins, you can
you can very easily break accessibility
by adding an integration or plug-in that is not accessible.
Accessibility is complex and involves
a lot of different parts.
But Canvas as a whole, it has been pretty accessible.
Now, that said, they've just recently got acquired.
There's some questions about their commitment
to accessibility ongoing.
But we continue to be optimistic,
and we're still interacting with them
and hoping to continue having a positive relationship
and keeping them on our side in making sure
that the platform is accessible.
BRIANNA BLASER: Great, and I think
we should probably end it there so that we have a chance
to take a break.
And we'll be back around 11:20.
And we'll be talking about accessibility
and universal design of online meetings
since we're all in so many online meetings these days.
So we'll see you all in a few minutes.
TERRILL THOMPSON: Excellent.
And I'll take a look at chat too and reply via chat
if there are other questions that people have.
BRIANNA BLASER: Oh, great.
Thanks, Terrill.
TERRILL THOMPSON: Yep.
BRIANNA BLASER: So when you're preparing for the meeting,
again, think about the diversity of your audience with regard
to some of these characteristics that we've spoken about.
But there's some other things I think
are important to think about as well.
Something that I've certainly experienced
in the last few months is in meeting with various folks
that may not have high bandwidth at their homes
and how to navigate that.
So at times it means knowing things like, well,
if somebody calls in on the phone line
versus connects to the audio via the internet
that they will have a more smooth connection.
Or it might mean that they can't turn the camera on because they
don't have high enough bandwidth at home to support that.
One of the things I like to think about when you're
thinking about our audience is that some folks may choose
not to turn their camera on for a variety of reasons,
and I need to be--
particularly in the context that we're in right now--
respectful of that, right?
So it might be that you have a chaotic house.
Your kids are running around in the background.
It may be that your house isn't clean.
It may be, again, this bandwidth issue.
That you may not want to share that aspect
of your personal life with whoever is in this meeting.
So understanding and respecting that, I think,
is important as well.
When you're preparing for a meeting,
you might consider whether or not
you're going to record the meeting.
There's a variety of reasons you might record it.
If you know that some folks aren't
going to be able to attend, that can be helpful.
But again, whether that's really going to add something or not
is a different conversation.
The other thing that we like to do in our meetings,
particularly when we have a large meeting,
is designate someone who can manage the meeting in terms
of muting and unmuting people, in terms of checking the chat,
making sure things are attended to in there separately
from the presenter.
It really divides your attention to try and follow and attend
to those different tasks at the same time.
I often find if I'm running a meeting,
I might also be getting emails from people during the meeting
because they can't get on, so figuring out
how you can make sure that folks can attend
to those separate things.
And then, a really important part of preparation
is thinking about accommodations as well.
So when you have a meeting, make it clear
how somebody can request accommodations.
And it's also important to be mindful
that those needs might differ from what somebody might need
in an in-person meeting, right?
In an in-person meeting, somebody
may have less trouble hearing, but they
may need captions or something like that
during an online meeting.
So again, you can encourage folks--
if you have folks register, put it on the form.
Have a blank there where they can request accommodations.
Encourage folks to email you.
Just make sure that everybody knows how they
can request accommodations.
And then, know how to respond to those requests.
So I frequently hear from people with disabilities
that are attending meetings, both in-person and virtual,
that I told them what accommodations I needed,
and then I never heard anything.
So that can be a little bit anxiety-inducing
when you're trying to figure out whether or not
you're going to really be able to participate.
And it certainly doesn't feel particularly welcoming.
So again, the things that you might prepare people for--
somebody who is blind or somebody
who likes text-to-speech might ask for an electronic version
of the presentations so they can access those,
as well, because their screen reader won't necessarily
be able to read things that you are sharing on your screen.
That's a fairly easy thing to figure out how to respond to,
how to share those with folks.
You might also get requests for sign language,
so knowing how to request that.
Oftentimes, at our university, we
can just request it the disability services office.
We tell them what our budget number is, and they arrange it.
And again, captioning as well, knowing how to arrange that.
Again, we work through disability services office.
But there are also companies you can find online
that will caption meetings.
And this is a question too.
We've talked a lot about captioning this morning
in different contexts.
And when you're thinking about a meeting,
I think it's a fair question whether captions are serving
as an accommodation to provide access
for somebody who is deaf or hard of hearing,
or if they're an example of universal design.
So when we run meetings, we frequently
caption them proactively because we anticipate,
given our interests, that there may be folks
who need them in the audience.
But I also know I turn on the captions.
I've had the captions on all morning.
I don't have any difficulty with hearing,
but it helps me pay attention better.
It means that if I get distracted,
I can look at the screen and see what's going on, and again, all
of those other reasons we've talked about why somebody
might want the captions on.
And then another question, and then we've heard this as well,
this morning is whether the AI-generated captions
are sufficient.
And they may be sufficient if you're
using captioning as an example of universal design.
But as Terrill pointed out, there
are frequently lots of words that are misheard,
and that can be particularly true for somebody
who doesn't have clear speech or somebody who has an accent.
So you really want to think about
whether those are going to be useful to folks
or a distraction, yeah.
So again, thinking about software,
and Terrill talked about this a bit,
is not all meeting software is accessible.
So we're talking about the sorts of things like whether they
interface with screen readers or other assistive technology,
whether they support captioning.
And then, if you are the host of the meeting,
take some time to become familiar
with accessibility features of your software
so that you can answer questions folks
might have if they've never connected with that software.
And make sure you share that information with participants.
You might share it generally with everybody,
or share it with folks that are specifically
requesting information about accommodations.
As I mentioned in the chat earlier,
AccessSIGCHI, which works on accessibility within SIGCHI,
which is that Computer Human Interaction Special Interest
Group of the Association for Computing Machinery,
has a resource that goes through some
of the various commonly used meeting
softwares and their accessibility features.
And then, again, thinking about presentation materials.
So preparing and sharing an accessible version
of your agenda ahead of time lets folks know what to expect.
That can help folks with invisible disabilities who
might benefit from that structure
and knowing what's coming.
It can also help keep the meeting on track.
If folks know, well, I want to talk about XYZ,
and I see that's on the agenda later,
they can save it until that time.
And again, sharing presentation materials
with folks that might need accessible versions
is important.
The other thing that's particularly important
when you're presenting is, if you're sharing a video,
make sure you're using a captioned version
of that video.
If you have a video you really want show,
and it's not captioned, are you really going
to show that video, or are you going
to decide not to show it because it's not
going to be the ideal accessible experience for everybody?
You might consider providing, particularly if it's
highly technical, any of those materials ahead of time
to interpreters or captionists that you're
using so they know things like jargon that you might be using.
So delivery-- a few things I like
to do when I'm running meetings is I
look through the names in the participant list.
Sometimes folks will be connecting to Zoom
for a variety of reasons.
So I have seen things that are like nicknames people use
in a game that they may not want to use
in a professional setting.
I've seen some that come up as gobbledygook
for whatever reason.
I know folks that use multiple accounts,
and they might be logged in as somebody
else in their household.
So if it's a small meeting, sometimes I
will change other folks' names that I see
are incorrect if I know them.
I look at my own name to see what's there.
You can encourage folks to change their names
so that their pronouns show where their name is as well.
So it's worth taking a look there.
I also encourage folks to use headsets.
Often, audio quality is better if you're
using a headset versus not.
So it's something to consider.
I know there is at least one of our colleagues in our office
who says she has a much easier time hearing and participating
actively if everybody in the room is using a headset.
And I don't think they even have to be fancy.
I'm just using today what came with my iPhone, right?
And again, thinking about muting participants
who aren't speaking, so whether you have everybody
automatically muted as they're joining.
But background noise can really be distracting.
It can interrupt the meeting, but also
make it much more difficult to hear folks as they're talking.
So encouraging folks to mute themselves
and unmute themselves.
The side issue there is that then I
find myself watching the screen to see who is talking,
but I can't hear them to remind them to unmute themselves
when they want to talk.
We think about things like telling participants
how they can ask questions.
So you might encourage folks to use the chat function,
or you might also allow them to ask questions verbally.
Using both is an example of universal design for folks
that are more comfortable doing one or the other--
utilizing things like hand raising functions
in your software.
We like to allow time for introductions
at the beginning of the meeting if it's a small meeting so we
all know one another.
Thinking about how you can incorporate
a variety of method instructional methods
in your meetings.
So in a meeting that we hold regularly,
we might have somebody give a presentation.
We might have some time for large group discussion.
And then we've been using a lot of breakout rooms
recently, particularly if we have
a meeting of 20 or 30 people.
Taking a few minutes at the beginning or the end
of the meeting to go to breakout rooms, have some small group
discussion is particularly friendly, but also
can lead to important conversations
that you don't necessarily have when
you have a whole bunch of people in one room.
One of the things we encourage folks to do in any presentation
that they do and that you may have noticed Sheryl and Terrill
and I doing this morning is speaking at a key content
that's presented visually.
So a lot of folks will have a bunch of information
they toss up on a slide.
And then they say, well, you can see here.
And the problem with that is, first of all,
there's the folks that can't see it,
but then the folks that are also trying to read
that while listening to you.
And it really asks people to divide their attention.
So any content that's presented visually
should be spoken as well.
Consider whether you want to use automatic captioning tools.
Again, so within both Google Slides and Microsoft
PowerPoint, there are automatic captioning tools
that do a decent job.
So if you don't have a captioner,
you can utilize those as you're presenting.
I encourage you to identify somebody to take notes.
So that might be jotting down resources,
action items, follow-up steps throughout the meeting
to share with everybody.
That way, it's only one person who's
collecting that information and sharing it afterwards.
We frequently encourage participants
to speak their name every time that they
speak as a means of helping folks who may not know who's
speaking, particularly folks, again, who may not
be able to see that the screen highlights that person who's
speaking.
And then, after meetings, we consider it
good practice to follow-up with folks,
so following up with things like URLs and resources
that are mentioned, action items via email.
Gather feedback from folks that attended about accessibility.
If you were doing something like captioning or sign language,
how did it work to them?
And how did it work for them, and figuring out
how you can make some adjustments to future meetings
to make them more accessible.
So that's all I wanted to share about that.
We have a resource we've written that shares some more
information about these tips that I
will put the link for in the chat
and in our follow-up notes.
So I'm happy to take questions that folks have.
And I know Sheryl and Terrill are still on the line as well
to take questions.
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: Sure.
I've got one for you, Brianna.
It's about platforms.
This actually might be better for Terry,
but you two can decide.
Best practices for platforms for highly
interactive and collaborative meetings-- you talked
about breaking up into groups.
That's probably the biggest thing we use for collaboration.
So you can comment on that, or Terry
can if there are some platforms that are better than others.
BRIANNA BLASER: I don't know about breakout rooms
and other platforms, but I will share that I have just
enjoyed it and found that, particularly when
we are all at home during this pandemic,
it has been an opportunity to have some networking type
conversations during meetings that you might not
have otherwise.
Terrill, I don't know if you know more about breakout rooms
on various platforms.
TERRILL THOMPSON: Unfortunately, I don't really.
I, like you, have been focusing on the tools that we use.
And so yeah, we're getting the most out of Zoom and the fact
that you can use the breakout rooms and sort of mix it up,
so you get big group discussions,
and then go off into breakout rooms, and then come back
and have big group discussions as follow-up
can be really useful.
There's a question in chat right now--
does anyone know if Zoom does captioning in breakout rooms
too?
And it does.
The captionist-- if you do breakout rooms, right now,
since we have a live captioner, then
we would need to make sure to assign
the captioner to an appropriate breakout room.
So if you've got somebody that you know who needs captions,
then that would be a little bit challenging to organize,
depending on how many there are.
But anybody who you know is using captions
needs to go where the captioner goes.
So that becomes a bit of a management issue,
depending on how large your group is.
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: And an interactive tool
that we use a lot with Zoom and you can use it on Adobe Connect
and other conferencing packages as well is the poll function.
And we didn't do it today, but if we had,
it would have been at the beginning when you came in,
rather than putting your information in chat, which
is what we had decided to do, that you put
your name and your organization and the title of your position
or what you do.
And other than that, an alternative
is to have a poll that would've been up on the screen.
And it probably would have been something like check all
that apply.
In my job I--
and then it says I teach online.
I help others teach online.
I design courses.
I'm an IT specialist.
I'm an AT specialist, or whatever.
And then people would indicate their position.
And then I, as the speaker at that time,
would have summarized that.
But they would see it on their screen.
I like doing that.
So that's another way to get people to interact as well.
So I do know in meetings--
I have more experience in this in meetings that don't--
well, I guess professionally and not
professionally Zoom meetings is a smaller meeting--
not the size of this one that we have today, but having
everybody communicate.
And there are various ways you can do that to interact.
One is just look at all of the people on the screen,
and somebody facilitates.
And you just go down.
Terrill talks now, and then Brianna, then Terrell, then
whatever.
And there's an more informal, maybe friendlier way
to do that, where one person takes
ownership of making sure everyone
contributes in some way.
So they might call on them, but let people voluntarily
talk and share their story, maybe the answer
to one question or something.
And then that person keeps track.
And so if she noticed that, well, Brianna
didn't say anything, she could say, well, Brianna,
do you have anything to add of that?
It's a friendly way to get people to interact.
So that can help as well.
So I think that handles that.
Oh, tips in getting to everyone-- well,
when I do that-- when I--
if I do the infor-- if you do the formal way where you just
go one person to the other in the order
you see them on your screen, that's
the easiest way to make sure everybody contributes.
The informal one, when I've done it,
it's been a relatively small group,
like maybe 20, 25 people.
And I make a little note on a piece paper
and keep track that way.
BRIANNA BLASER: I have found that if we want people to speak
in an online meeting, what Sheryl's talking about calling
on particular people, making it clear
how the flow of the conversation should go
makes it run a lot easier than just waiting
for the next person to talk, because then nobody knows
whose turn should be next.
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: Yeah.
Yeah, it does take facilitation either way, actually.
But that second one, where if there's a pause,
they can say, OK, well, Terrill, you didn't say anything.
Why don't you say something now?
But one reason I like the more informal one, too,
if it's a fairly small group and you know the people,
then if someone hasn't contributed,
you might know something that they
could contribute that's relative what you're talking about.
And you can actually prompt it then and say, oh,
you were telling me--
John, you were telling me last week about such and such.
Could you share that with the group?
So you facilitate the communication.
So it depends on what your style is.
And--
BRIANNA BLASER: I think not everybody necessarily
wants to share with the large group,
and that could be related to a disability, say, anxiety,
or whatnot.
And so that's another place where
those breakout rooms and utilizing multiple forms
of interaction allow some folks to share in a way that's
more comfortable for them.
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: Yes, absolutely.
BRIANNA BLASER: Kate mentioned Poll Everywhere
as an effective tool to use.
I know a lot of folks really do like that.
It's visual.
And she pointed out that then the moderator
can read that out loud.
And I think that's another thing we didn't talk about,
but doing things like reading questions from the chat
out loud as you were responding to them, much like you might
repeat questions from an audience to make sure everybody
heard them in an in-person presentation,
again, that could make sure that everybody is on the same page.
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: OK, any other questions about meetings?
As I mentioned earlier, Brianna is the pro here
because she runs many of our meetings
and she does a great job of doing that.
And you can tell that she just thinks about a lot of things.
And that's what a universal design is all about.
I have a couple of things that I wanted
to make a comment on that came up in the chat,
and maybe we covered at some level,
but things that are interesting to me.
One of them is this whole idea of whether you
are required to caption videos in a course where a student--
where you don't have a student who's deaf.
Captions benefit a lot of people,
but the law requires that we provide captions
for a student who is deaf or sign language
interpreting, some way that they can have access to the content.
It kind of depends.
And the person who asked the question kind of tied it
in-- what it--
does-- is-- do we have to-- is it then part of WCAG 2.1?
Well, captioning videos is part of WCAG 2.1.
So meeting those-- that level, level A, in that case, of 2.1,
or level AA, as well.
You would capture them.
It's just a standard or a guideline.
You either do it or you don't do it.
But I think what this person meant is, is it
legal or compliant with ADA?
Well, ADA-- again, civil rights legislation.
So anybody in your class that needs an accommodation in order
to access content in your class needs to be able to--
needs to be provided one, and it has
to be a reasonable accommodation.
And there's a lot of case law that decides these issues.
And I'm not a lawyer, but I can say these things can
go one way or another.
And so if you have a student who's deaf in your class,
you need to provide access to all that content, which
would probably be captions.
But suppose you have a class of 10 people,
and you knew the people.
Maybe it's a graduate course.
You know them in person, and there isn't anybody there
that requires captions.
I don't think the Office of Civil Rights
is going to come after you for that particular class.
It might not be best practice of instruction
because I think you would caption too
as a best practice of teaching strategy in keeping
with universal design.
But it depends on who you're providing that video for.
If you decide, oh, yeah, that's a great video.
I'm also going to put it up on YouTube for anybody
else who wants to watch it.
As soon as you provide something to the world,
the world includes people who are deaf,
so then you're obligated to provide captioning.
Harvard and MIT received civil rights complaints
about not captioning a whole lot of videos
that they had put up for the public.
And as I understand it, some of those videos
were actually used with federal funds to create.
But anyway, they wanted to provide these videos
to the population.
Everybody in the world could access them.
Well, they were really kind of irritated, some of the members
there, when the Office of Civil Rights came along and said,
well, you have to caption all those videos.
And they thought it was really unfair.
And some people were saying, well,
gee, here, we were trying to just make
something available free to benefit people,
and then we get this kick in the stomach for not capturing them.
Well, my response to that is, well, you're
the ones who said you are making them available to everyone.
That's your decision.
You didn't have to do that.
But once you do that, you're committed to make
it available to everyone, which includes people who are deaf.
And so it's who you're making that a video available to you.
There's another issue, and that is
what happens when you get a legal complaint
about the overall inaccessibility
of your IT on a campus, I would say, post-secondary campus.
There are hundreds of these complaints now.
They're either made through the Office of Civil Rights
or the Department of Justice.
And we have access to examples of these legal cases
up on our website, the IT accessibility
website that Terrill gave you the URL helpful,
and you'll see it in the after product.
So what happened then is the Office of Civil Rights--
I think was out of the Department of Justice.
It can be one or both--
came to them and said, well, we have a complaint
from individuals in the deaf community,
but also from a deaf support organization
representing that population.
So you need the caption all those videos.
And there are other resolutions from other campuses as well.
And when those come out, sometimes they just
say you have to caption all your videos in your courses.
And so then, you're kind of getting an added requirement.
So anyway, that's kind of wandering around here,
but you do have to provide captions to a student
with a disability who needs them.
That would likely be a student who's deaf.
And you need to provide them when anybody in the target
population, like if it's a MOOC or whatever,
could possibly be deaf, where if it's
a self-contained class where you know the people in it
and there isn't a person who is deaf,
I am not aware of any legal challenges
to that particular scenario.
BRIANNA BLASER: Kay Strover asked a great question
in the chat about recruiting people
with disabilities to programs both within and outside
the university.
So I have a few ideas, and I know
Sheryl has lots of ideas on this topic as well.
One thing that we do is sometimes
recruiting specifically through educators
that might be working with students with disabilities, so
whether that's going through our disability resources office
on campus and asking if they can share information
with their students, whether that is reaching out
to special education teachers or other educators that
work with students with disabilities
in our communities.
Of course, we know that not every student with a disability
is going to be, for example, on our campus, registered
with the disability services office.
So we also try and send out announcements broadly
because you never know where you're going to pick folks up.
Sheryl, do you going to talk a little bit more about that?
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: About recruiting?
BRIANNA BLASER: Yeah.
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: One thing that you
might want to consider doing is if you have
a particular reason where you'd like the impact or the input
from people with disabilities, let's say,
for your class or something you're doing-- maybe you're
teaching a class.
We actually will pay students with disabilities
to engage with you.
We don't pay them a lot, by way-- $50 or something,
for instance, if we wanted to put together
a panel of students with disabilities
to appear as guests in your online course.
So we do have that money to do that.
And we can actually pay them out-of-state.
And you can just email one of us so we can
see if we can make that happen.
Usually, we do it in person.
It's like if you're teaching in class on sociology
of education, we can see if we get round up maybe four
students with different types of disabilities
to be a panel in that class and answer questions
from the students and faculty member as well.
So one thing that we do related to what Brianna was saying
is we recruit on campus.
We put together opportunities, newsletters we call them,
with campuses that we're actually working
with in the DO-IT project.
We can distribute that newsletter
that we'll put together with all kinds of opportunities for them
through the disabled student services office.
Now, some people back up and say, well, wait a minute.
They can't provide you with information about
who's registered there.
That's private information.
Absolutely, but I have yet to find a disability services
office that does not have an email-based discussion list
so they can distribute information
to people who are registered in their office.
So what that means is if you put together
a paragraph of recruiting to what--
what are we recruiting for.
They will most likely forward that to those students.
And then they will get in contact with you
if they're interested.
But again, even though they keep the privacy,
there are ways to communicate with those students
like the one I just described.
BRIANNA BLASER: As we're wrapping up,
I want to encourage folks, too, to ask
other questions in the chat.
Terrill was quite active answering some questions
from earlier.
Terrill, do you want a comment on any of those?
TERRILL THOMPSON: Not necessarily.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm doing my best to catch up and keep up.
But, yeah, check the chat for answers to your question.
And I'm still trying to see what all has gone unanswered.
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: One thing that just came up
is that some states require captioning
by law in higher education--
absolutely.
When I had that slide on legal issues,
the two federal laws, and then afterward,
state and local and campus requirements too.
It might not be a legal requirement by federal law,
but it might be a requirement because of efforts
that your state is making and your campus specific.
One question that sometimes comes up these days
when I'm delivering presentations
is people will comment, at least on our line drawings,
of students with disabilities using computers and so forth.
We make those freely available to the public.
All of those images were--
line drawings were created, most of them,
by students with disabilities in our program or as a student
helpers in our programs.
And we can make them available to you.
Brianna will include in that list of references
that we will distribute the URL where
you can find tons of line drawings
like that because we do have people that
want to create publications or websites
and have some images of individuals with disabilities
but don't particularly want to use
real pictures of those students.
Obviously, they'd have to have permission to do that.
But they're mainly trying to make a point.
And so I like the artistic line drawings,
and we have a ton of them.
I don't know, 60, more than 60, I bet.
Anyway, so you'll see the URL for that,
and feel free to use them.
We do ask that you give us credit.
Give credit to the source, which would be the DO-IT Center,
but there's some wording on there for making that happen.
BRIANNA BLASER: Great.
Any closing thoughts, Sheryl?
I did put up the resource slide with some of these links
we've talked about.
As we've said numerous times, we'll
follow-up with an email with more resources as well.
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: A question often
comes up is, well, what if I'm using a commercial video
and there aren't captions?
We always recommend to go to the company
and try to get them to provide captions on their video,
so that's always a good thing.
But what if you're using it the next day?
There are some tools on the internet
that actually allow you to caption somebody else's video.
And Amara-- isn't that the name of the one we often use?
And Terrill, do you know of any others that
allow you to do that?
TERRILL THOMPSON: There are quite a few.
Amara, which is A-M-A-R-A dot org.
Is one that we use.
DotSUB is another.
It's Dot, D-O-T-S-U-B, dotsub.com.
There's a free tool called Subtitle Horse,
and I think probably several others as well.
SHERYL BURGSTAHLER: OK, we're going
to share the slides and the recording
and also short list of web resources after the fact.
We would like you to complete an evaluation when you get access
to that.
And within that, you can provide ideas for further programs
you might want to provide, or perhaps
repeat this one or something similar to it to a large group
that you can put together, like a large group of people
at your institution or multiple institutions in your region.
If you get a pretty large audience,
we generally will do that because we have deliverables
on our projects to reach out to people, which
is what we're doing today.
But don't hesitate to ask, and we might be
able to do something like that.
TERRILL THOMPSON: Just a footnote, too--
I just pasted a link in the chat.
There's quite a bit of discussion
about long descriptions of images, complex graphs
and charts and that sort of thing.
And the difficulty of, as I mentioned,
describing the takeaways within the text,
sometimes that's not appropriate,
given whatever the need happens to be,
or impossible given the complexity of the image.
So sometimes, providing access to the raw data can help.
There are tools that blind people have access
to that can sonify data, but they need access to the data
in order to do that.
So providing access to raw data--
if it's a simple data set, they could read the table
with a screen reader user with a screen reader.
But there was also the link that I provided--
this was grant-funded research by the National Center
on Accessible Media on effective ways
to describe scientific images.
And so it goes into a lot of detail,
providing very specific examples about how
one could describe the images and graphs and charts
and so forth.
So in some cases, these examples may be applicable to you,
and I encourage people to check that resource out.
BRIANNA BLASER: Great, thanks for sharing that, Terrill.
Thanks, everybody, for joining us.
We'll be in touch.
Have a good rest of your day.
TERRILL THOMPSON: Thanks, everyone.