Teamwork: Making IT Accessible at the University of Washington and Statewide

>> Sheryl: My name
is Sheryl Burgstahler

and I direct Accessible
Technology Services

at the University of Washington.

And through our
Access Technology Center

and other services,
we’re making sure

that the IT
that we develop,

procure, and use at the
University of Washington

is accessible to all of our faculty,
students, staff, and visitors.

>> Sheryl: In the state of Washington
we now have a policy.

Policy 188 addresses
accessible technology

and so it requires that our
postsecondary institutions

in the state of Washington
make their IT accessible to all

students, faculty, staff,
and visitors with disabilities.

It requires that we be
proactive in doing that

by auditing the
software we have,

checking for accessibility, and making
plans for making it more accessible

either ourselves for our websites or
with vendors if it's a commercial product.

>> Patrick: My name is Patrick Pow.

I'm from University of Washington Tacoma.

My responsibility is technology.

I'm the vice chancellor
for information technology.

When I look at Policy 188

I actually look at it
as an opportunity

for us to enhance and do
better on our campus.

>> Sheryl: As one of our efforts
at the University of Washington

to ensure that all of the IT

that we procure, develop,
and use on our campuses

is accessible to all of our
faculty, students, and staff

who have disabilities,

we initiated a task force
at the highest level.

And so we include people from HR,
people from the disability services offices,

from our communications group,
from our accessible IT group,

but many other units as well
and we wrestle with how technology

can be made more accessible
to people with disabilities.

And so some of the things
that we do, for instance,

is have an inventory,
particularly of the common

most widely used software, websites,
and videos that we use on campus.

>> Dan: My name’s Dan.

The role that I’m playing
in the Policy 188 effort

is to help assemble
the inventory of IT on campus.

This is not a one person effort.

This is a multi-person effort.

>> Sheryl: We document what information
we know about those products.

As time allows, we test those
products for accessibility

and determine how we're going to
make the products more accessible,

often working with the vendors.

>> Narrator: One of the
task force’s priorities

has been to promote captioning
of videos used on campus.

>> Sheryl: We have helped initiate
a pilot actually where we

provide free captioning
for videos on campus.

It's a limited amount of money
so we’re not captioning all videos,

but we're captioning those
that have a high impact.

>> Narrator: Now that pilot has
turned into an ongoing service.

Some videos need both captions
and audio description.

Audio description is
additional narration

that describes the visuals
on the screen

for those who cannot see them.

The "Best of UW 2016,"
a year in review video,

used both captions
and audio description.

>> Gina: I'm Gina Hills.

I'm the web communications director

for University Marketing
and Communications.

This year's video was
all visual, with music.

We did close caption the video.

The first stage was we put a little thing
that said "music" on there.

>> Terrill: I'm Terrill Thompson.

I'm an IT accessibility specialist

at the University of Washington.

If you watch that video,
the music contributes significantly

to the emotion that
the video creates,

so it's featuring
a lot of the really

wonderful things
that have happened

at the university over
the last year in 2016

and the music
builds and swells

and just becomes much more
dramatic as the piece grows.

And so they revised the captions
to address that need

and really did an
excellent job I think

of capturing exactly
what the music is doing

throughout this piece
as it grows and swells.

The other thing that's interesting
about the Best of UW 2016

is that it was
entirely music.

There’s no spoken audio.

Therefore somebody
who can't see it

gets nothing out of it
other than the music.

So they hear the music,

And, it's a wonderful piece,
but to them it's just a music video.

They have no idea that
all these wonderful things

happened at the University.

So all those details
are missing for them

So that particularly is a video
that requires audio description.

>> Audio description: Words appear,
hash tag Best of UW 2016.

The Nobel Medal next to
David J. Thouless,

2016 Nobel Prize in Physics.

With President Obama,

Mary-Claire King,
National Medal of Science.

UW and Microsoft break record
for DNA data storage.

A collage of photos,
Inaugural Husky 100.

>> Gina: We covered
all bases, all audiences,

and didn't leave
anybody out

in terms of experiencing the
previous year at the university.

I think that this
is a good model

for what we can do
and what we should do

and what we should aspire to.

>> Narrator: Another task force priority
is helping faculty and staff

make PDFs and other
documents accessible,

so that someone who is
using a screen reader

can have the content
read to them.

>> Sheryl: In our pilot
on PDF accessibility

we're working with several
large units on our campus

and we're contracting
with some consultants

that will make
PDFs accessible

so they'll remediate
some of the PDFs

that have been developed
in an inaccessible way.

>> Gaby: My name is Gaby de Jongh,
and I’m an IT accessibility specialist

for Accessible Technology Services
at the University of Washington.

At the University of Washington
we have several hundred PDF documents

being uploaded to our websites,
probably on a daily basis,

and many if not all
of those PDF documents

are inaccessible to individuals
who use text to speech assistive technology

in order to access
those documents.

Accessible Technology Services has worked
with UW Bothell and UW Tacoma

on a pilot project for addressing
the large amount of PDF documents

that we have on
the tri campuses.

The three campuses worked
pretty closely together

using different tools to identify
the number of documents that were on the website

and then coming up with a plan
for going through those documents,

seeing if they actually really do need
to be listed on the website

or if they need to be taken down

and if they do need to be
listed on the website

what is the process,

what is the process that
we're going to go through

in order to make sure
that we’re going to

make all of those
PDFs accessible.

>> Narrator: The task force
helps develop and recruit

for capacity building institutes
on accessible IT

for participants from
units across campus.

>> Pete: My name is
Pete Graff and I work for

the Office of the Chief
Information Security Officer.

And a lot of the tools
that we develop,

some of them are used
on public facing websites

and we want to make sure that
we're doing the best job that we can

to ensure that the tools that we provide
are fully accessible.

>> Ana: My name is Ana Thompson.

I'm a learning technologist at
University of Washington Bothell.

I enjoy tremendously attending the
capacity building institutes

because it allows me to connect
with other professional peers

who see the importance
of universal design,

and also they help me learn.

They give me ideas on how we
can do what I'm doing better.

>> Narrator: UW’s IT Accessibility Liaisons

are recruited From the UW
capacity building institutes.

Liaisons engage online, participate in
three training meetings each year,

and promote the accessibility of IT
in their respective units.

>> Jodi: My name's Jodi
and I work for UW-IT.

I'm heartened by the commitment
that we have across campus

that we're not
alone in this endeavor

and that we all want
to do it together

and we have central resources
to help us do that.

>> Narrator: Annual capacity building
institutes on the UW campus

are also offered to representatives of
postsecondary institutions state-wide.

Participants share promising practices
for making IT more accessible.

>> Scott: Scott Towsley
from Yakima Valley College.

I’m the IT director,
director for e-learning,

and also the accessibility coordinator.

Actually coming to this training here
is going to give us some best practices,

some contacts across the state.

Some of the things that
we’re all looking at is

what software, common software
can we all use?

What are some initiatives
that everybody else is doing?

>> Carrie: My name is Carrie Powell
and I work at Centralia College

and I am the Policy 188 coordinator
at Centralia College.

It occurred to me that the
reason we have so much good,

so many good things going on
at our campus is that we,

my disability services director
and I attended a

capacity building institute at the
University of Washington three years ago

and it sparked an entire,

it led to a lot
of amazing things.

But the first, the key thing was,
we walked away knowing

that our task was to go
back to our campus

and form a work group
of interested stakeholders–

people from our IT department,
e-learning, disability services,

from our college relations,
from our legal services,

we just we got a
group of people together

just based on asking
and people said, "Sure,"

and so that was a key idea

that we took away from that
first capacity building institute.

>> Bridget: My name
is Bridget Irish

and I work at The
Evergreen State College

located in Olympia, Washington.

My official position is as
curricular technology support to faculty.

At The Evergreen State College,

some ways in which
we try to make

our IT resources and
tools more accessible

is one, by providing
faculty with a template,

a template for use in Canvas

as well as a variety of templates
available for use with WordPress.

>> Carly: I’m Carly Gerard.

I work at Western Washington University
as a web accessibility developer.

One of our first starting points
in making IT accessible is training.

Once we have people who
understand where to begin,

what accessibility features
to look for,

we can then help them,
you know, manage their websites.

They can look for
any accessibility issues.

We host training sessions
both online and in person.

So our online training
rolled out a few months ago

and we’ve had over
200 people enrolled

before the end of the year
who have now taken the training

and they can continue
to edit their content

knowing these accessibility features.

We do also offer
an in-person training

for those who may not be as
comfortable with online learning.

>> Craig: My name is Craig Kerr.

I’m the director for services
for students with disabilities

at Edmonds Community College.

Our professional
development committee

what we’re going around
to each division

to do trainings on how
to make accessible documents.

Working with the professional
development committee that’s based

of faculty
sharing with faculty

the ways to make their
documents accessible

is a key piece because
you’re talking peer to peer.

>> Amy: Hi, my name
is Amy Rovner

and I am an instructional designer
and accessible IT coordinator

at Shoreline Community College.

We are also working on areas
of captioning for our videos,

that’s a big thing to
make sure everyone can

hear and absorb the
content in the videos.

We've added Ally to
our Canvas instance

so that students who
may or may not have

an official accommodation

are able to access accessible
versions of documents,

audible versions of documents,

even a braille, electronic
braille version of documents

right away in real time.

>> Agnes: My name is Agnes Figueroa.

I work at Renton Technical College

and I’m currently the deputy CIO,
chief information officer.

We started with convening
an accessibility advisory committee.

In this group we try
to gather together

people from various
areas of campus

so we have representatives
from human resources,

from the library,
from e-learning ,

from IT,
the disability office,

faculty members.

>> David: I’m David Engebretson Jr.

and I’m at Western
Washington University

and I’m the digital technologies
accessibility coordinator.

We’ve made some real efforts to
create awareness about accessibility

and I think that’s kind of been
the biggest change is that

our community is becoming
aware of the need

for accessible and inclusive design.

As a blind person, I notice
just little changes

making a big difference
in the accessibility.

Headings on webpages and
educational materials in general,

captions in videos,
and

accessible graphics.

>> Jeremy: My name is Jeremy Seda

and I work for Big Bend Community College
in Moses Lake

as the web and
multimedia specialist.

It feels just so much
more personal to meet

with other folks
around this similar goal

and to really come together in a
collaborative fashion to brainstorm

and to really work out the details
of a problem that we're all facing.

>> Clay: My name is Clay Krauss.

I work for Tacoma Community College.

I'm the information technology
director there on campus.

One of the most important things
is bringing people together

and forming those networks,

the formal networks
and the informal networks,

to dialogue and
share ideas

regarding accessible
information technology.

>> Zach: My name is Zach Lattin.

I'm an assistive technology and IT
accessibility specialist at Clark College.

I have a really personal stake
in this because I am,

have been blind since birth,
so I use assistive technology myself.

We don't have to make
this policy on our own.

We can work with people
all over the place

and come up with the rising tide
that lifts all boats, I think.