Procuring Accessible Technology at the University of WashingtonAlright. Well, this is Sheryl Burgstahler and I'm from Seattle, the University of Washington, but I happen to be in Hawaii right now on vacation.

So you can appreciate how dedicated I am to my job and to supporting you folks across the country.

Actually, my husband and I have been here for two weeks and we're leaving, we return back to Seattle today so I'm a little bit sad but this will be a good segue into my work life again.

I'm going to be talking about procuring accessible IT at the University of Washington.

When I asked to do this, I wanted to make sure to provide background, what our business was like...

[Zoom facilitator steps in to let Sheryl know her audio is cutting out a little bit].

Okay, it will maybe if I talk a little bit slower, but it should... my connection on this side should be good.

But how am I doing now?

Better.

Okay. I'll talk a little slower so if I cut out a little bit here and there, you probably can fill in the gaps.

So I thought it was real important for you to know where we come from, our background, the policy we developed, the guidelines we developed, a checklist, and resources, all in the context, all related to procurement.

And so at the beginning if you think when is she going to get to procurement, I... trust me, I'm going to get there.

On this next slide, you'll see that this talks about two centers that I direct, so this is about me.

I direct the Access Technology Center, which we founded in 1984, which was very early for access technology centers around the country. We were one of about a handful of them at the time so I work within the UW IT organization. The central organization that provides technology and internet access and so forth to the campus.

And so all of our activities in the Access Technology Center are funded by the University of Washington for faculty, students, and staff to ensure that we have access to technology for all of our faculty, students, and staff and actually visitors to our websites and so forth.

But I also direct another center, which is more well known, which is the DO-IT Center. And DO-IT stands for Disabilities, Opportunities, Inter-networking, and Technology. This was founded in 1992 with a large grant I got from the National Science Foundation and this center has been funded ever since.

So we're supported with federal, state, and corporate funds, even private funds. We even have a DO-IT center in Japan, which started in 2007, and they're just getting started in Singapore as well.

We have a small program in Malaysia. In that program, we are a little more broadly based and we are helping individuals with disabilities achieve success in particularly college and careers using technology as an empowering tool.

So what I'm talking about today has to do with our access technology center, not the DO-IT Center.

So here's what we have our basis on.

So we ask what is the legal basis for all of this, what do we point to? Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

People on our campus and elsewhere are often surprised that we've had legal obligation to provide access to our resources, including those provided on the internet or using other IT since 1973.

Not a new thing.

The Americans with Disabilities Act, which is more well known, came out in 1990 and then its 2008 amendments which does not change anything in regard to accessible IT.

And then we all have to meet our state and local laws. I'll share ours. And individual policies in the state and so forth.

In Washington State, it's Policy #188 if you can look that up.

But another important concept is what accessible actually means. We say that our IT needs to be accessible on our campus and, on this next slide, we have the definition that we use.

There are lots of definitions out there about accessible but the one we use is actually used in some of the Office of Civil Rights resolutions and Department of Justice cases where they have found a post-secondary, specific post-secondary institution not providing accessible IT on their campuses to the degree that they should.

So this what the Department of Justice and the Office of Civil Rights say. What they think accessible means. So this is a good one to look at.

So as far as IT, accessible means a person with a disability is afforded the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as a person without a disability in an equally effective and equally integrated manner, with substantially equivalent ease of use. The person with a disability must be able to obtain the information as fully, equally and independently as a person without a disability.

Some people get frustrated with this definition because they want it to be more specific, like what exactly does this mean. But I, personally, I like this definition because it sets the stage.

Whenever we're deciding if something is accessible enough, we can look at this definition and ask ourselves how are other people leveraging this information, what do other people other than those with disabilities get to do using this service, and that's what the goal is then for a person with any type of disability.

So, stepping back a minute, there are actually two approaches to access that we at our institution focus on.

The first one is assistive technology, sometimes called AT, and assistive technology has been around for a long time.

So as I said, our center started in 84. There was assistive technology back then for microcomputers. Back then it was the Apple 2 computer, in the early PC days.

But, anyway, this is special technology that might be used by individuals with disabilities so they can access technology that the rest of us use.

And so people who are blind for instance might be using screen reader technology to read the text on the screen out loud. That would be assistive technology.

As we know, sometimes this technology is built into technology these days, mainstream technology such as the iPhones. And this is in the category of accommodation.

Accommodation is something special we do to make something accessible to a person with a disability.

And then there's universal or inclusive design. In contrast, this is proactive steps that are taken within technology for that category. What do we do to make our technology accessible to people with disabilities, including what do we need to procure to make sure that our campus is accessible with respect to technology.

So both are important but let's look at for a minute the most common accommodations. This is probably true of your campus and others across the country.

If you look at online content, and even more specific, online course content, this would be course content delivered using a learning management system like Canvas or Blackboard. Or course content put up on a website that a faculty member might have and provides access to their students.

Okay, there are two very clear winners as far as the most common accommodations and the ones that are most expensive for the university to provide.

One is creating accessible documents. These would be mainly PDF files, but also Word files, and other documents that might be up on websites. Board of Regents or Faculty members showing their students different articles they want them to read.

And on our campus, between 2014 and 2016, we reformatted documents 20,000 pages on average each quarter. That's a lot of pages that have to be reformatted into an accessible format so a format for instance that screen readers can access for a student that's blind or for a student who has dyslexia to read the content aloud rather than to have it in print form.

That's a lot of money, a lot of documents.

The second most common accommodation is captioning videos. These would be captions for people who have hearing impairments and each quarter, we have about almost 200 hours of captioning done for deaf students on campus.

In 2016, specifically, 191 hours of videos were captioned for students who are deaf, costing over $34,000 in Fall 2016.

So that's a lot of money, a lot of pages, a lot of hours for those two things.

Now we're going to be talking about universal design and what that means.

What it would be in these two cases is that by the time a deaf student entered one of those classes, all the captions would be on those videos and all the documents would be in accessible format and so forth. You would provide them as a universal design feature.

Universal design. The definition is the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaption or specialized design.

So the question becomes what can we do on our campuses with respect to IT, including procurement to make them, our IT products usable by people with disabilities and everybody else.

If you look at the qualities of universal design, universal design products are accessible, technically accessible, they're usable, they're inclusive, so we don't have everything separate for students with disabilities and call that good.

So what we mean by those three characteristics. Well, technically accessible means that someone with a disability can access the technology. However, sometimes accessible is not usable.

An example I can give is one of the staff members in our Access Technology Center is totally blind himself and he was describing to me a product that is used by higher education that is technically accessible.

So it would meet maybe the minimum requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

I don't know as I'm not an attorney and I'm not talking about a specific case but here's how the product developer made it accessible.

They have a very inaccessible software package and so instead of trying to make it universally designed from its design, what they did is they made it accessible by having shortcut keys. So he could use the shortcut keys.

Well, there were over one hundred shortcut keys that he would have to memorize in order to do that. That's accessible to him, but it's not really very usable. For him to have to do that, it's not very realistic.

And then the third category, inclusive, means that individuals with disabilities can work side by side with other people on projects, not having to work in isolation because of the way they'd have to get access.

And the next slide, I have some pictures to illustrate what we mean by universal design.

The first set of examples is universal design in a physical world. In the first case, we have a picture of what appears to be a young man in a wheelchair trying to open a door.

To me, it looks like he is probably technically going to be able to open that door, he looks like he's able to reach the handle, and he's pulling it so probably, sort of accessible to him.

The next picture shows one of the buttons a person could push to open the door automatically.

This young man looks like he has enough function in his arms that he could probably push that button and it would be more accessible to him.

But there's still some people that would not be able to push a button or be able to push a button in the location it happens to be on the wall so the third picture shows a woman walking through one of the automatic doors that we've grown to expect at a grocery store and she's just walking up to the door, the door senses the presence of a person or a being (it could be a dog or some other character), and it automatically opens.

So that would be universal design where we've shown three steps where something is minimally accessible, more accessible, and even more accessible.

So universal design is a goal, but you can practice universal design on a continuum.

Compare that to videos. If you have a video that's uncaptioned, it's not very accessible.

But if you caption, it's going to make it more accessible and if you provide audio descriptions, it will be even more accessible.

Look at these two images of iPhones.

If you look at this slide, one characteristic of universal design is it builds in accessibility features when appropriate.

For instance if you have a smart phone, it talks to you and you can talk to it. You can change the size of the characters and there are other accessibility features that are built right in.

Those I would classify as universal design features.

But it's not reasonable to build in everything.

For instance, I don't really want to have a braille printer or embosser connected to my iPhone just in case I want to print something in braille. That would be unreasonable.

There's not enough of us that would want to use that technology to drag it around.

So that's kind of an extreme example, but it shows that some products will always be, probably always be in the assistive technology category. AT.

And an embosser that produces materials in braille is one of those.

So what we need from a universally designed product is to recognize that people will be using assistive technology and ensure compatibility with the commonly used assistive technology.

So we don't ignore assistive technology, we require compatibilities.

That iPhone would be able to interface through bluetooth with a device that might be a different input device or might be a braille embosser that is set up externally.

So let's take a look at what we are doing at Washington regarding all of this.

As I mentioned earlier, we have Washington State Policy #188 on IT Accessibility. It was passed last August so it's been around for more than a year.

Some people kind of assume, oh well, we didn't have to have accessible technology until that policy.

Absolutely not.

We were required under the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 before it to ensure equal access.

Washington Policy 188 makes it clear all state agencies, including post-secondary institutions in the state that IT must be accessible.

It establishes the expectation for state agencies that people with disabilities have access to and use of information and data and be provided access to the same services and content that is available to persons without disabilities.

So extremely broad statement, but it includes more wording. You can look it up if you'd like to but that's the gist of it.

So what's covered under Policy #188.

Well, pretty much all IT.

Websites, web applications, software, electronic documents, e-learning, online learning systems, multimedia (like videos), programmable user interfaces, any software that we buy, either administrative or academic application.

So that's very broad.

What are these efforts guided by at the University of Washington? And by our state?

First of all, the University of Washington, we have a, and I'm sure you have one too, a vision statement.

When I look at our vision statement, it makes it pretty clear that at the UW that we are to educate a diverse student body, that we value diversity (which includes disability), excellence (which includes people with disabilities), collaboration (which includes collaborating with people with disabilities), innovation (where people with disabilities can provide unique perspectives in that regard), and respect (we respect everyone and actually value a diverse community).

So we have a pretty broad vision that makes it pretty clear to me that we want to include students with disabilities, faculty with disabilities, visitors with disabilities in the IT and other services we provide.

We're also guided by the Department of Justice and Office of Civil Rights resolutions that they have provided to post secondary institutions who have received serious complaints about the inaccessibility of their technology.

And on our website, we have a list of examples of those complaints that you can take a look at. On the screen now is a picture of our accessibility website called Accessible Technology at the UW.

There's another guideline that we point to on the website that you might want to take a look at.

A few years ago, Educause came up with a document and it's linked to from our website that summarizes what the findings are of these resolutions I mentioned among other institutions.

So we very much are guided by the examples of other resolutions.

We don't have one because we haven't had a, at this point, a serious OCR complaint about the inaccessibility of our technology, although we have a ways to go before we feel comfortable in saying that we're a model of any sort.

So on our website, we have our policy, we have documents on getting started, we have deadlines on accessibility, and checklists and so forth. Our policy is an aspirational policy. Most policies include a lot of different details.

We've taken a different approach at our University and we built a policy that's aspirational and that links to guidelines and standards and checklists and so forth.

See, at the University of Washington, it's similar to the policy at the State of Washington and definitely consistent with it.

The University of Washington strives to ensure that people with disabilities have access to the same services and content that are available to people without disabilities, including services and content made available through the use of IT. I

T procured, developed, maintained, and used by the UW should provide substantially similar functionality, experience, and information access to individuals with disabilities as it provides to others.

So there's that example that condition again that we're providing them with what other people are doing. If people are using it on our campus, we need to make that available to people with disabilities. If no one is using a particular product, then we're not dealing with that with accessibility.

Then the last sentence, "Examples of IT covered by the policy include websites, software systems, electronic documents, videos, and electronic equipment, such as information kiosks, telephones, and digital signs.

So then linked to our policy, we have the IT Accessibility Guidelines and you can link to that from the website. What you'll find there is our statement of purpose (which points to the policy), the definition (which is the definition I already gave you. We use the same definition as the Office of Civil Rights and Department of Justice and I encourage you to do the same), the scope (that's all the different types of technologies it covers).

Then the new thing here that we haven't talked about yet is it includes the standards.

Some people include standards in their policy. We include it in our guidelines in part because those guidelines might change over time, where the policy likely will not change very often.

So the standard we use is the one commonly used particularly in these resolutions I mentioned.

It's the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 (which is the current version) and they have three levels: A, AA, AAA.

And we are at the Level AA standard, which all these other resolutions or most of them end up pointing to.

And this is produced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that acts as a consortium for institutions and other organizations from all over the world.

So it's a good standard to point to and you'll also find on our website a section called Progress and Plan. In there you will find little items.

You might want to look at this - on the progress we've made toward IT accessibility going all the way back to 1984.

So if you want to know what the steps we've gone through, you'll find them there.

And then the plan points to future dates on when we expect to have things accomplished.

And then we have Resources and we have resources and support for IT accessibility (at the University of Washington and elsewhere), additional campus resources (for instance, the Disability Resources for students), and then the legal and policy requirements.

I mentioned that earlier, where we point to other resolutions around the country. So Policy #188 then, we have been given deadlines and so we had to by December 31, 2016, have certain things done. We had to have by June 2017… we had to have some other things done in 2017.

And so, we have met those deadlines.

You can look at those in the policy on ADA if you want to look that up but I think we'll skip to the UW Leadership and how we were able to get there and continue to improve our accessibility, including procurement.

We have an IT accessibility coordinator. That happens to be me.

We have an IT accessibility team which under my direction (the Access Technology Services that I mentioned earlier).

We have an Access Technology Center and so forth (that's an already existing unit. We did add some resources to it lately) and we have an IT Accessibility Task Force, which I co-direct, which includes representation from all over the campus.

We meet once a month and we try to promote accessibility on campus.

And we have about a hundred IT Accessibility Liaisons.

These people have signed up, they've volunteered to promote IT accessibility in their unit and beyond. We meet three times a year and our next meeting is next Wednesday. They have to continually learn about accessibility so they can make a difference on our campus. The key aspects of our approach on this slide are pretty simple. Promote accessibility within the context of Universal Design, civil rights, and inclusive campus culture.

I think it's so important that you tie it in to what your university already believes. We build on current policies and procedures within the University as you've seen.

That's our vision. We model IT accessibility compliance after IT security compliance.

We have gone through similar efforts as your university has too starting about ten years ago where we have made a lot of steps towards security compliance and if you look at those steps your campus is

taking, you'll probably find like I have that they're very similar to what you need to do as far of accessibility.

So you have a model right there.

We undertake efforts that are both reactive and proactive.

So we make sure we provide assistive technology, we have a showroom of it by consulting on it, but then we proactively promote the accessibility of websites and videos, etc.

We work bottom up. We work top down.

We create annual reports from our Task Force through informing top administration of what we are doing and what we think they should do.

And we continually enhance our website that has resources and plans and progress.

On the second page of aspects of what we do, we are increasing training, and consultation, and we have captioning parties.

We have capacity building institutes to promote accessibility.

We do activities on Global Accessibility Awareness Day and other events.

We support multiple user groups, including a web accessibility group.

We proactively test existing websites, PDFs, and train staff to remediate them.

And we offer incentives.

We actually have a program where we'll provide free captioning to high impact videos right now.

So we have made a dent in that aspect.

So we've captioned over a hundred and fifty hours of videos that are most important on our campus and get high traffic.

And then we have a PDF remediation pilot and those two pilots actually connect with the biggest accommodations that we make in terms of IT.

And we conduct state-wide capacity-building institutes to bring together other state organizations in this effort.

So our procurement of accessible IT then is built on all of this and we have a requirement on our website, you'll see it, that people procure accessible IT.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on who you are, we have no central enforcement of it.

Why? Because IT purchases are made at the local level. The unit level. Either at the college level or the department level or even just individual level.

Most IT purchased on our campus are by UW credit cards. It doesn't even go through procurement.

We do have a procurement procedure on our website as well and we tell people in departments to solicit accessibility information.

They can use independent 3rd party, they can complete the UW checklist that we developed and you're welcome to use that checklist, or the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template that is provided by the federal government under Section 508, their rule.

Then they need to validate that. Is that really true?

We can help with that and do some accessibility testing through our group.

And then the third thing we ask them to do is a contract to include accessibility assurances in the contracts.

And so what we expect them to do is put a statement in the contract that says the company will strive to make their product accessible, meeting the guidelines (remember, that's the WCAG 2.0 AA guidelines that we have on our campus) and that they will work with accessibility consultants on campus (that's my group) to truly make their product accessible.

Why do we have that wording in there?

Well, first of all, if you test a product for accessibility, like say Canvas, our learning management system, which we did, it was barely accessible when we first developed the contract, and then over time, some of those accessibility features were eliminated when they upgraded to a new version of the product, which as you know, happens all the time.

So we want the commitment on the part of that company that they will work with us on accessibility throughout the contract.

And so they're put on notice and this is really important to us. I mentioned that we have resources we point to on our website as well. So we tell our campus that we have this website, we have our accessibility center, how we have consultants, and we have discussion lists (AccessibleIT and AccessibleWeb discussion lists).

We have a Capacity Building Institute for people on campus that are people learning about accessibility. And then we have the liaisons.

And so that gives you the overview of what we're doing on our campus and the rest of the time we can spend to see if you have any questions or you want to discuss any of these things.

[Moderator steps in to mention that folks online can drop any questions into the chat feature, she can repeat those and asked if folks in the room had questions. Two people in the room raised their hand. Moderator had Matthew Mattingly go first].

Matthew’s question: At UMass, we're in the beginning stages of crafting a similar policy and workflow and set of resources and guidelines and so on. And what we're trying to work into it which is based on actually our state policies is that if there's something that's not accessible about the product, but the product is designed for or possibly unique in other ways, we can adopt the product, but they have to commit to a mitigation plan, they have to do more than strive, to say we will in six months or whatever

period of time have made this aspect of it accessible. Whether we will be able to get that into the policy or not, that's our hope. Did you have something like that in your policy and was that a possibility?

Sheryl: Well, we, because we are so distributed and because most products are not fully compliant with WCAG 2.0 AA, one because sometimes a product is not fully accessible but their primary features are. We have not, and because we are so distributed it's hard to have any sort of policy, but we get, our group gets involved with these contracts and we handle the statement that's in the contract through the organization.

For instance, we're using Workday for our new, relatively new way to keep track of work hours and W2s and all that sort of thing and it was somewhat accessible when we started working with them and my group who has been working with them for actually two years now to make their product more accessible, we have been very firm about specific guidelines along the way, not in the contract.

The contract is pretty general, but along the way, we have letters usually from our own CIO here at the University to Workday with a bulleted list of what we expect by a certain date. So we include, we are really firm about certain things, but we like to tailor it to the product.

For instance, with Workday, there were some issues with the videos not being captioned. Well, we decided that's an easy thing for us to do and we're committed to making it work, so the few videos that we wanted to share with our campus on how they can use Workday, a few of them we used our own central money to caption those because they weren't going to be captioned in time by the time we would have launched.

Some people might say well that's their job. They should have done that.

Absolutely.

But who's legally required? Who will be on the call if the Office of Civil Rights or Department of Justice comes?

Not Workday. It's not illegal for them to create an inaccessible product. It's illegal for us to be using an inaccessible product if it's inaccessible to our faculty, students, and staff.

And so we do have an investment here.

So that's an example where we actually put forth something because we wanted to protect our campus and also people with disabilities on our campus because we made the decision to go with Workday so we have to be a little bit on the hook.

I would love to be able to say everything had to comply with 2.0 AA, but if we did, there would be absolutely very little compliance.

What we take when we do test products to is we take a prioritized approach so with Workday, we don't just go through our checklist.

We ask ourselves "what are the most important things that people are going to be doing with WorkDay?" And then we itemize the most important things to fix if they are not fully accessible.

And those are things that we harp on with the company, rather than saying make it fully 2.0 accessible. Because what they might do is work on some little parts that might be easier to fix, but we want to make

sure that the major things get fixed so it's complicated. It's a very inaccessible world out there when you look at IT.

But I will say here from IT companies we have an initiative across the country now led by Microsoft and Google and Amazon and other companies that's called Teach Access. And they're putting pressure on post-secondary institutions, computer science and IT departments to teach about accessibility, because they say that their problem is they can't find new or older IT graduates that can deal with accessibility.

So they're getting the message to make their products more accessible so the pressure is on.

But anyway, I agree with you.

It would be nice to have those strict words but you have to ask yourself how are you going to enforce it. I don't like to have any policies that I can't enforce or any standard wording for instance that we can't really enforce.

So it's tricky. Now we do look at each contract.

Matthew replies: The hope on our side is to make it clear where liability lies. So for instance, the vendor, if they want to sell us this system, then they will assume some liability for how it performs in terms of accessibility because we can't go in and fix their stuff necessarily.

Sheryl replies: I think the Department of Justice and the OCR would say you are the ones that are most, or completely liable. It's your problem from their perspective because you chose an inaccessible product. About all you can do is not buy it.

But I agree with you that you want the commitment from them to work with you towards accessibility.

And however you can do that, like I said, with Workday, we give them specific deadlines and so forth.

Did they meet all of them? No. Did they meet a lot of them? Well, they did pretty well I'd say. But did we, did we not launch on the day we planned on it at the university? We launched.

So what did my group do? Well, we quickly put together an accessibility plan and an accommodation plan. We identified for the university where are the problem points and how are we going to provide an accommodation quickly for someone that finds that feature inaccessible to them.

So engaging in accessibility and universal design does not mean you don't still have to provide accommodations for some people.

But you need to be right on it.

[Moderator asks Jody if she has a question].

Jody: Yes, this is Jody. It does take a village and I'm in Disability Services, I'm not an IT person.

So clearly you've been working on this at the University of Washington for quite a long time. Can you just speak to those IT accessibility liaisons. Were they already stakeholders or did you recruit and train these folks?

Sheryl replies: Good question. What I started with, what we started with, was a plan.

We always had an ideal stage plan where we have a list of things we want to accomplish. We work toward them.

And we added some - the Policy #188 requirement - to that plan for instance.

And we decided that there were... we looked at levels of support.

We have our accessible technology center and the people that work for me that are highly technical, highly qualified on accessibility.

And then we have you know, fifteen thousand faculty and staff on campus, most of whom do not know about accessibility.

And we felt there need to be some middle ground.

We're not going to be able to reach all those people.

So we were going to have each department and college around campus identify some... a contact person. We were going to call them the IT liaison for their group.

That was vetoed. That idea was vetoed by my superiors. The CIO specifically in our IT organization.

Why?

Because of the… just the way we work.

We don't do top down all that much because of this distributed environment. And he didn't think that would be a good idea.

And I could see, I actually could see that, so we didn't give up on the whole idea, but what we did is we came up with a different plan.

We have people we were working with that we call liaisons, kind of informal liaisons and there were probably about oh I'd say thirty to fifty of those already that my staff worked with regularly.

And so I said, let's take those people as our core group and ask them if they'd be willing to be official IT Accessibility Liaisons.

We came up with three things they needed to do. Continuing to learn about accessibility. To come to three meetings a year (half day meetings). And to promote accessibility in their domain of where ever they are.

And we had, then those people had signed up and then we have these capacity building institutes I mentioned earlier where we bring together usually 30 to 40 people that we'll train them on IT accessibility and that's all voluntary, but we find people and we recruit them on campus. We do that.

And so we recruited the next group of IT liaisons of Accessibility liaisons through that Capacity Building Institute because they received some training and most of them signed up.

And then we've told our IT Accessibility Liaisons through our online list where we communicate with them to recruit other people.

And so it's ended up to be kind of a hodge podge but they are all people excited about accessibility.

I have somebody that represents the business school - that's a big group.

And then I have people that represent small work groups and some people are... there's more than one in their work group. Say a group within the library. We have a couple people interested. So you can both join.

And so we've been very open about it.

Like I said, it wasn't our first idea. It was our second idea.

Let's let this grow organically rather than try to prescribe.

What we do do however is we see what groups are missing, we look at this list periodically and say, wait, wait, we don't have anybody from such and such department.

Let's make a contact there and see if we can recruit them to come to a capacity building institute and then become a liaison.

Jody: Just one follow up question. Do you provide any incentives for training for accessibility at your campus for the faculty?

Sheryl's reply: No. Well, I guess we do. The liaisons incentive is kind of, kind of like we take more of a cheerleader approach, like we're changing the campus and so those are the types of people we recruit to that group.

I think, well, I guess you can say there might be two things from an incentive perspective and we'll continue them to some degree.

One of them is I secured some central funding to do free captioning on videos to the end user.

Obviously, they aren't free. We're paying for them from 3PlayMedia, our contracted closed caption service.

But we have this central fund and we have a little group that decides which projects are worthy.

We have very low thresholds for applying in that you can apply and complete a small survey.

It's described on our website by the way if you go to videos.

You can apply if you are on campus here and you can apply to have your video freely captioned and you have to have a video that's going to be seen by a lot of people or is being seen by a lot of people. So it might be on YouTube and they get a lot of traffic.

Or it's in their, some unit that at the college of engineering they're sending out to prospective students.

So it's going to reach a large group and add a value to the University.

What wouldn't you get funded probably?

If you use something for lecture captioning a class and you are video taping all of your lectures and you are only going to use them once, probably not.

Not enough impact.

Do we think you should caption them? Definitely.

But you'd have to find a way to do that, either yourself or your department.

So that's an incentive.

Other videos we might capture are ones that are used over and over again or maybe two faculty members getting together and they are going to create a video that has high impact.

The second one is similar in that we provide some contractor that would do PDF remediation and we pick two units, or two branch campuses and select a certain number of PDFs and have them remediated as part of a pilot.

They had to agree to have us do significant training of their faculty and staff on document accessibility.

So it wasn't a free lunch.

We're out there training these campuses and they had to agree to become independent of us in terms of making their PDFs accessible and other documents after the pilot.

And so we in that pilot, we remediated hundreds of documents on those campuses. Meanwhile, in the project, we learned about the best ways that we can share to the campus, particularly through our liaisons, and how they can set up a workflow for remediating PDFs and other documents and for the development of future documents that are accessible from the get-go.

Moderator: Any other questions that folks have. Anyone on the line. No additional questions. Well thank you Sheryl. I know you have to catch a plane so we'll let you go. Thank you so much. I will share these slides out with everyone so I think it was extremely helpful.

Sheryl: And I'm available online so feel free to send me an email message and I'm pretty accessible. You'll even notice when we talk on our website. It says leadership and it includes me and other staff and what their specialties are.

We post-secondary institutions are in this together. So don't hesitate to email like our PDF specialist or our person that's working on videos to talk about our offering there and you know just continue this communication or as a question comes up later, just send me an email and I'll answer it that way.

So thanks for inviting me. Good luck with your efforts.

Moderator: Thank you, Sheryl. Safe travels.