 Good morning, good morning for those of you who are in the Americas. Good afternoon for those of you who are in Europe and Western Asia and good evening for all those of you who are in Eastern Asia and Oceania. And happy, happy global accessibility awareness day for everyone and thank you. Thank you for taking the time to attend this presentation. And thank you for the quick intro. For those of you who don't know me, that's correct. My name is Humberta Hernandez and as she mentioned, I am a Colombo American Accessibility Activist and a Systemic Technology Instructor. I have worked for organizations, of course, in the private and public sector to break down barriers for individuals with all types of abilities. And I am a front-end web developer certified and hygrid peer reviewer and university-designed advocate. For those of you who don't know me, I've also dedicated significant part of my professional life, assessing and remediating websites, educational courses and also authorizing tools and to make them accessible for individuals with disabilities. And as part of my professional endeavors, I've also have created some nationwide programs like the BEVs or the Breaking Down Employment Barriers for individuals with disabilities. And well, it's been more than 10 years actually working for this population of individuals with disabilities. And just wanna let you all know that, of course, currently I'm working as an Instructional Designer for our university here in the state of New York. And I volunteer as an Accessibility Consultant, Accessibility Trainer and a Systemic Technology Instructor for different organizations here in Western Europe too. So, that's basically a quick intro about me. And then let me start talking about my research. So, this research that I'm about to present was developed as part of a thesis project I had to create or build to obtain my master's degree. And it is about a topic that I'm very passionate about. And it is Assistive Technology, HigerEd, and Students with Disabilities. And more specifically, how does the awareness of assistive technology impact students with disabilities success at a college level? And I would like to start by talking about the person on the screen. Her name is Haven Germa. And Haven was born deafblind, just like her older brother. When her grandma took her brother to school in East Africa, they told her deafblind children can go to school. But there were simply no chance for them to be part of educational experiences. Her family then decided to move to the United States, where Haven was born deafblind. When it was time for Haven to join school, her family was amazed by the opportunities afforded by the Americas with Disabilities Act. 30 years later, Haven became the first deafblind individual to ever graduate from Harvard Law School, thanks to the supporting mechanisms built around ADA. A lot that I will be talking about later during this presentation. The picture on the screen shows that Haven using a piece of technology called Braille Note or Braille Display. Deafblind individuals utilizing their daily lives to have access to the world that hearing and sighted people have access to. Without it, Haven would not be able to read, communicate and experience life as she would if she had this piece of assisted technology available. Therefore, she is a success case that shows that when university professors are aware of the assistive technology and program and curriculums are created more accessible, usable, perceivable, operable, understandable and robust, as students with disabilities can succeed at the college level. And this is our brief agenda for today. I'll start with an introduction to assistive technology. Then I'll move to the literature review, the methodology. I'll show some data facts as part of the research findings. I'll disclose those. After that, I'll talk about the limitations of this research and provide some recommendations. And finally, I'll close with the TREO perspective and the references. So let's start from the very, very beginning. You know, what is assistive technology? So assistive technology is any piece of equipment that is used to increase, maintain or improve the functional capabilities of an individual with a disability. Gancho and his colleagues grouped assistive technology into three categories, low-tech, mid-tech and high-tech. So low-tech devices are non-electric devices that require little or no training, for example, walking canes, magnifying glasses, high contrast notebooks or rulers. Mid-tech devices are those that are electronic and require minimal training and basic maintenance. For example, digital recorders, adapted or high contrast keyboards. And even for instance, if you have ever used the auto correction or auto field feature on your phone, you have used a mid-tech assistive technology tool perhaps without even knowing. High-tech devices include robust micro-electronics that require training and ongoing maintenance. For example, screen readers, text-to-speech software, small Braille keyboards, Braille notes, et cetera. So this wide range of assistive technology tools provide individuals with disabilities equal access to educational opportunities than non-disabled students have. And in fact, Alcani argues that assistive technology is the difference between experiences, success or failure in educational settings for students with disabilities. And it can increase students' participation in education activities. This, for example, is a quick list of the most commonly used assistive technology tools in higher education settings. JAWS or job access with the speech. JAWS, as we know, is a screen reader software that is perfect for students with ADHD as he had lights word by word or sentence by sentence as he reads. This, for example, can help these students better concentrate. This is, it is also natively used by individuals who are low vision or totally blind. NVDA stands for non-visual desktop access and it's also a screen reader. This one happens to be free and it is also open source. We also have Fusion and ZoomText, which are screen magnifiers and readers software combined. So the literature review includes three main topics. The first one is higher education jurisdiction of framework as students with disabilities. Why? Because we need to know what are those laws that protect students with disabilities in the US. The second one is effective accommodations for students with disabilities because we need to know what is that that those laws guarantee for students with disabilities. And the third team is universal design for learning and its implications in assistive technology because we need to understand and know what is beyond effective accommodations. So we'll start with the first one, the jurisdiction of framework around students with disabilities in the US. The first highlight we need to mention is what the US Department of Justice has made very clear and is that people with disabilities have the same rights as any other individual without a disability. There are two laws that ensure equal access to opportunities for individuals with disabilities in the US. The Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973. July 26th, 2020 marked the 30th anniversary of the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This landmark civil rights law protects access and opportunity for people with disabilities across community life, including education. This law is also used to eliminate discrimination and demand inclusion of disabled students in academic activities. Section 504 works together with ADA to protect children and adults with disabilities from exclusion and unequal treatment in schools. In association with these jurisdictional regulations, there are three other pieces of federal legislation that influence higher education in the United States. The Section 508 of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Telecommunications Act of 1966 and the Assistive Technology Act of 1998. Section 508 is a law created to eliminate barriers in information technology for people with disabilities. The US Access Board, which is the entity that enforces this law, reorganized the Section 508 standards to harmonize them with the World Wide Web Consortium, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or also known as Quackac 2.1 or now 2.2. The adoption of these web accessibility standards is perhaps one of the biggest advances made towards digital inclusion for people with disabilities in the US because it makes Section 508 the only US legislation that uses a globally recognized voluntary consensus standard for web content and information and communication technology, according to the General Service Administration. The Telecommunications Act is enforced by the Federal Communications Commission and requires all educational telecourses to contain close captioning for individuals who are hearing impaired. And this includes a streamed over-the-internet educational activities event. The Assistive Technology Act provides federal grant funding to generate awareness about assistive technology via demonstrations, technical assistance, trainings and advocacy events. For example, each state here in the United States is mandated to provide support to customers, their families and interested professionals to increase access to and awareness of assistive technology devices and services. Therefore, there are federally funded assistive technology trainings available for faculty, administrators and staff in higher education settings via local centers of assistive technology that universities kind of start taking advantage of. Now that we have reviewed the legislative side, we can move on to the second theme. Effective accommodations for students with disabilities. Unlike in high schools here in the US, students with disabilities need to register with the university's Office of Accessibility Resources and disclose they have a disability so they can request effective accommodations in higher education settings or in a higher education setting. Now, for an accommodation to be effective, three criteria needs to be met according to the US Department of Education. The first one is timeliness of delivery. The second one is accuracy of the translation. And the third one is provision in a manner and medium appropriate to the significance of the message and abilities of the individual with a disability. So perhaps let's imagine the following a scenario that explains the importance of providing effective accommodation for other students with disabilities. So let's imagine a student's arrives to the Accessibility Office and requests a PDF to be made accessible via screen reader. The Accessibility Office representative says, okay, yeah, I can have it done, but it may take up to Friday. Well, the question is, is that an effective accommodation? Yeah, the answer is no. And no, because it is not timely on delivery. The delay or basically this delay will cost the student not to be able to participate and access the educational activity that he's heard their non-disabled classmates have access to right away. The same applies for accuracy of the translation. Let's say the Accessibility Office says, I can have it done for you today, but it will not include X, Y, and Z content of that document. Well, then that accommodation is not effective because the accuracy of the translation has been compromised. And a similar case could happen with provision appropriate to the abilities of the individual with a disability. Let's imagine the Accessibility Office tells the student, I can have it done today, it would include all the same content. However, I will give it to you in Braille, not digitally. Well, perhaps that doesn't fit the student's abilities either. Therefore, the educational experience of the student is being impacted by the lack of effective accommodations. So this may explain the reason why lawsuits have quadrupled against higher education institutions in the last decade, according to the National Council on Disability. And basically all of this has a name and it is called Medical Model of Disability. And it is explained by the work of Burke Stollard. Her work says that professionals identify an individual's functional limitation and prescribe an adjustment that allows this person to fit into an established environment. Through this process, the accommodation model does not always provide an equitable experience for students with disabilities and can also lead to unnecessary dependence of on a student's Accessibility Office. And this takes us to our 13 universal design for learning and its implications in assistive technology. And this theme starts by explaining the social model of disability. This model of disability suggests that what makes someone disabled is not their medical condition, but the attitudes and structures of society. For example, what this model of disability says is that what makes a student requests the PDF in an screen reader accessible form is not that the student is blind. It is that the course was not designed with accessibility in mind. So we think that area of focus, a fundamental concept evolved and this concept developed by Cheryl Buchstollard is known as universal design in higher education. And universal design in higher education is the design of educational products and environments to be usable by all people to the greatest extent possible without the need for adaptation or specialized design. It is basically the proactive approach to create accessible content. What the application of this concept does is to reduce the need for individual accommodations and opens really the scope to solutions that one, yield universal design that are aware of the requirements of assistive technology and two, assistive technology that are aware of the affordances of an universally designed programs. Assistive technology users are heavily dependent on affordances and some of you may be thinking, well, what is an affordance? So an affordance in this universal design world is a perceived signal or a clue that an object may be used to perform an action. And perhaps allow me to provide an example here so that you exactly know exactly what this would mean. So imagine you're blind and you enter a building. Do you know someone is waiting for you on the 10th floor? Do you manage to find the elevator? Do you enter the elevator? I noticed the buttons are not braille. Do you not know what button to press to go to the 10th floor? I mean, you can always press all the buttons until you eventually get to the correct floor. However, that is not efficient and most likely is going to be a very unpleasant experience for you. The button in this case is the affordance or that perceived object that performs an action. The problem is that that button that performs an action is not braille. So the person with a disability has no clue what that button is going to do. So at the end, this person will be confused, disoriented and frustrated. Well, the same happens to students with disabilities in a digital environment when affordances are not taken into consideration during the course design process. It creates unnecessary burdens for students with disabilities because of this, students with disabilities will not be able to navigate the content. Their educational experiences will be negatively impacted and they will not be able to have access to the same educational opportunities that non-disabled students have. Kindering so, their ability to succeed at the college level. Once faculty members know about affordances, they can test, assess and remediate course content for students with disabilities. This universal design in higher education approach supports the social model of disability and the idea that design of educational products and environments need to be usable by all people to the greatest extent possible without the need for adaptation. Now, this does not mean that accommodation should not exist. Effective accommodation should be readily available when needed. However, they should not consume most of the accessibility department and our faculty efforts. So this takes us to the point that instructors need to be aware of common assistive technologies and how they can better integrate them in the design process. Now, let's talk about the methodology of this research. The survey collected addressed specific learning processes current students with and without disabilities experience in the college level classroom. It was a survey collected by the NACI or also known as the National Survey of Student Engagement, which is the mechanism used to measure the level of a student participation at universities and colleges in Canada and the United States. I see it relates to learning and engagement. The survey was collected at a liberal arts college in the northeast of the United States. A quantitative analysis was performed and the survey results and the literature review argued the need to understand the impact of assistive technology. The following research findings could be summarized by saying that students with disabilities responses showed significantly lower scores for questions that reflected high level of engagement, collaboration and interactions. But from a critical analysis of data, the results of this research can be articulated to show evidence of Lef's social constructivist theory, correlative relationships to universal designing higher education central ideas and assistive technology considerations to increase a student's participation in educational activities. With regards to Lef's social constructivist theory, data consistently showed lower scoring responses for learning activities that included one-to-one peer review work, group discussions and real-time interactions compared with data from non-disabled students. Data was evident that students with disabilities lack teamwork in educational activities. And, you know, perhaps this is a point to reflect upon because the literature review delineated how effective and timely accommodations help students with disabilities engage and be part of the learning process according to Walker. So this makes me wonder, would this IOCOM or data would have been different if assistive technology had been used? That's something definitely to reflect upon. Well, the real crux of this research finding is that barriers of inclusion for students with disabilities still exist. With regards to universal design in higher education concepts, you know, findings that emerged from the NASA survey related to information about engagement indicators and interactions between the students and instructor. Two themes emerge out of that, learning disability and experiences with faculty. Responses of often and very often were recorded for learning disability, perspective taking and internalization across the board. So as students with and without disabilities do connect those teachers with personal and societal problems. On the other side, 100% of the students, 100% of the students with disabilities replied never or almost never about whether they worked with a faculty member on activities other than coursework. Well, 30% of the non-disabled students participated often or very often. And, you know, in this type of extracurricular activities, of course. So similarly, students with disabilities discussed course topics at lower rates compared to students who were non-disabled. With regards to the research findings about assistive technology, we can say that the literature review research supports the fact that assistive technology provides independence means for students with disabilities to overcome curriculum barriers and increase quality of learning experiences. However, the NASA survey did not include nor discuss information regarding assistive technology. We discussed that assistive technology tools provide individuals with disabilities equal access to educational opportunities as non-disabled students have. Nevertheless, professors lack awareness or lack knowledge and experience with this type of technology according to Fitchin. And that's the problem. That is a problem because there is a profound relationship between assistive technology and class engagement for students with disabilities and in the application, nothing happens. Nothing happens. So to this end, the civil rights of individuals with disabilities are violated under US law by intentionally or unintentionally creating barriers that hinder their professional, personal, and ultimately human development. So it is the professors, the colleges and the university's responsibility to design perceivable, operable, understandable and robust educational experiences that are accessible for some and usable for all. This takes us to the discussion points which are that assistive technology is used to create a more egalitarian system in human development. However, faculty members do not know about it or how to incorporate it into their class, include their classes. Therefore, students with disabilities experience lower levels of class engagement and never work with faculty members on extracurricular activities. And that's why they need to be, these courses need to be accessible. They need to be universal design in higher education accessible. And they need to have and consider, faculty need to consider these affordances so their impact can actually be measured. There were of course limitations of this research because only one institution was canvassed. And the assistive technology profound impact in learning goals was not measured. Hence a deeper investigation of the educational activities and practices may have presented a broader understanding of the assistive technology impact. Those are some of the preliminary thoughts that take me here to the recommendation slides where I acknowledge that more research is needed to contribute to a more thorough understanding of the impact of assistive technology and it's awareness by professors in the process of human development and learning. That's why I also hope this body of work can be used for the benefit of students with disabilities. Another recommendation is that training in assistive technology and its affordances is conducted at universities. Centers of assistive technology that receive federal funding here in the US are mandated to generate public awareness about assistive technology via assistive technology demonstrations, training, technical assistance and advocacy events as part of the assistive technology act. So colleges can take advantage of those. Additionally, another recommendation is that assistive technology based questions are added to this national survey of student engagement NACI assessments to actually assess the role and impact of assistive technology in the success of students with disabilities. And the last recommendation is that higher education diversity efforts include individuals with disabilities. A lot of the times we hear universities here in the US wanting to increase diversity and enrollment of underserved populations. And we only hear about Black, Browns, Asians but we do not hear anything about students with disabilities or individuals with disabilities. And actually the largest minority group in the United States is people with disabilities with more than 56 million people according to the US Census Bureau. So I do believe that it is time to tap into that market of students who are eager to study and work but do not find accessible or flexible universities that are willing to work with them. And this takes you to my three EO or my three eyes open perspective. And three EO is a practice in which you focus your leadership attention and efforts on three things, your actions, your immediate circle and the system. And my three EO perspective start with me being more aware of these individuals' needs and the technology available to make their lives easier. And from a department perspective, I see myself utilizing this knowledge to design accessible content from scratch. And from a system level, I recognize that there are changes to be made and awareness to be spread. And hopefully this body of work serves that purpose. And to finalize this presentation I would like to read this quote by Haven Grima. I was inspired to go to law school. And in 2010, I entered Harvard Law School. Harvard told me we've never had a deaf-blind student before and I told Harvard I've never been to Harvard Law School before. We didn't have all the answers but we pioneer a way using assistive technology and high expectations. It is okay not to have the answer as long as you try, try one solution. If that doesn't work, try another solution and we kept doing that and in 2013, I graduated. I hope this presentation and this quote had inspired you to learn a little bit more about what assistive technology and individuals with disabilities. I hope you spread awareness of assistive technology from your respective roles in society. And finally, I hope you find ways to incorporate assistive technology and individual with disabilities empowerment efforts from your different capacities. And remember what Haven said. It is okay not to have all the answers as long as you try, try one solution. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was really an informative talk. Yeah, you can go ahead with the questions. Yeah, so this question is very close to me because I am starting to learn word accessibility. So what would you tell to someone who's new to web accessibility and wants to start learning? And since in our universities, it's not a particular subject. So how would you suggest to go about with this? I think the first thing I would say to this person is find a friend or an ally that is disabled so that you can learn from them because that's exactly what I did. And I think it was the best way because a lot of the times people think, you know, I'm gonna start this accessibility journey and they start taking all these courses and learning about all these things. But if they don't have someone who can really relate and can really, really be there and say, this is how I experienced this. This is not what the theory says, but this is how I, from my eyes, I'm seeing this or from my perspective, I'm seeing this. If that is not included there in the accessibility course, you are not doing something right. So I think the first thing I would say is, find an ally, find someone that can mentor you, can assist you that most hopefully, or that perhaps have different type of abilities than the ones that you have. And from there, learn from them because those natively, those native assistant technology users have really other perspectives and experiences for being users for life. And they can really teach you a lot more than just a course online. Yeah, that's really informative. It's very good to have a person that you can go back to so that you keep learning tomorrow. And I would be very interested to know like how did you get into accessibility and how was your journey if you could share? Oh, absolutely. So I'll start from the very beginning. So back in when I was doing my undergrad, I had actually a classmate who was low vision, very low vision. And he used on a screen reader to actually go over all of his class materials. And I remember, it's gonna sound very rough, but I remember the university where I was studying, they, unfortunately, the professor never provided PDFs or PowerPoints or Word files that were accessible for him or even websites that were accessible for him. And, you know, he really, really, I really saw him struggling. And perhaps that was the first time that I started kind of like reflecting upon accessibility and noticing that, wow, there is a lot of things that need to be done for him to be able to experience education as I am experiencing and my experience in it. So that was my first glimpse to it, you know, kind of like seeing, unfortunately, from his end, his struggles and because of seeing his struggles, you know, I started to dive in a little bit more into accessibility. Then I moved to this company where I was working as a corporate trainer and we launched, you know, a hiring initiative that included hiring individuals with disabilities. And we had actually a high influx of individuals who were screen readers who applied to these jobs. And we were like, ooh, I don't even know if our authoring tools like Salesforce and SugarCRM and all of these customer management systems are accessible. So we, you know, I had, you know, some, by then I had some exposure to this accessibility world and this assistive technology world. So we launched these initiatives to ensure that we were making, you know, our processes inclusive and accessible and usable. So we were, you know, we had to work with them to ensure that all of these websites and authoring tools were accessible. And, you know, I can go on and on with all the journey but basically that's how I started and, you know, it's shaped in many ways, you know, by working with, you know, as I said, you know, with websites and course educational courses, training curriculums and all of these things that we had to make accessible to ensure these individuals were able to experience the same educational and professional and personal and human, you know, opportunities as any other person without a disability. Yeah, great. It's great to hear that empathy drove you to like working towards it. One last question, do you mind sharing any resources that, especially for students so that they can head start their accessibility journeys, something that they can look out for? I'm sorry, you said a, like a resource they could start looking into. Yeah, yeah. Anything like, they could just not delay and head start it and go on with their journey. Yeah, and not a new marketing for anyone here but definitely I will tell you what I found myself, you know, personally, you know, useful out there. Definitely, you know, DQ, you know, trainings are fantastic, you know, or Dukai University is fantastic for all of the accessibility training and edX, you know, specifically the World Wide Web Consortium edX course in coding and also accessibility is extremely informative. And I will say that if you just kind of want to start, you know, dipping your toes into this huge sea of or ocean of accessibility, I think those two courses would really, or those two points of reference would really give you, you know, a holistic sense of this arena or this area or field and that would be a good start from all of you. Great, great. I think there is one question on YouTube by Krishna. He says, what to consider for neurodiversity user when we are building accessibility products? You know, I would tell you, you know, if you are not utilizing individuals with disability during your testing process, you know, when you are testing, assessing and remediating, you are not utilizing individuals with disabilities. In anything that you are trying to make accessible, whether it is a website, a course, a authoring tool, a CRM, anything, if you are not actually utilizing that authentic review by individuals with that are natively or native, you know, assistive technology users, there is something that you need to reconsider. And I think that's something I've said, you know, for forever. And I think that's something that I would definitely say is that perhaps one of the most important thing that, you know, needs to be taken into consideration as you perform all those reviews. Great, thank you so much. It was a wonderful to have you here. Absolutely, no, thank you so much for the invite. Thank you to all of you. Happy, you know, global accessibility awareness day to everyone. And thank you for the invitation. It was great to participate in this event. Thank you. Thank you so much.