 We are committed to the notion that everyone should have an opportunity to participate in higher education, whether it be from the learning perspective or the research perspective, or an opportunity to work here at this institution. We benefit from that because we get to enjoy the talents and the skills of those people who come in and also their perspective, which in many cases will be different from the perspective of others on campus. So accessibility becomes a very important value at the university. Michael K. Young, president, University of Washington. Images of a teacher and students in classrooms and at computer stations. Texts adjust through a CCTV. Words appear. IT accessibility, what campus leaders have to say. Tracy Mitrano, director of IT policy, Cornell University. We're a leading university globally. We want the best talent in the world for our students, our staff and our faculty. And we want to be sure if that talent has a disability that they know that we are a welcoming community. I'm competing with prestigious and highly accomplished institutions. We want to make sure that we can target the right candidates to join our community, regardless of their disability status. Edward Ray. In fact, we genuinely believe that excellence is achieved through diversity and that a commitment to equity and inclusion really enriches each of our lives. What the university offers and makes available has to be offered to everybody. We can't afford to waste the talents or the brilliance or the minds of anybody. And making things accessible allows everybody to engage the university. Think about accommodation as really the beginning of the conversation about disability. It was the appropriate measure that was taken in the Americans with Disabilities Act that was passed in 1990. And that's well over a generation ago. I think now we really have to think less about how we're going to measure specifically this accommodation or that accommodation and recognize that we can make accessibility open and available so that individual staff, faculty or students do not have to go to get an accommodation. It will be automatically available in the web page that they visit and the device that they use. Jerry Hanley. The first step really needs to be an assessment of where we are so we can then inform our planning process, develop plans, implement a project, and then really assess the results of it. The key to our approach to making sure that our campus and our technology is accessible to people with disabilities is to ensure we do this by design. This is not an afterthought that we do after we have implemented a new classroom. Instead, this is something that we do from the initial conception of a new project or idea. The same way we do this for privacy and security, we do this for accessibility. A policy really is an important way to go because it will focus everyone's attention. It's also probably the way that you have to go now that there are legal pressures on higher education in this area. The second thing I would say about the policy is there are really two types in general. One is a policy that you have because you have a law. For example, the Family Education Rights Privacy Act policy. So you want to be clear and sure that you're going to have compliance on your campus. There's another kind of policy that I would call aspirational policy. And maybe accessibility fits a little bit in both, but you most certainly can err on the aspirational side. An aspirational policy is something you establish for your institution as a path moving towards something, moving forward. It does not have to have 100% compliance because it's really a direction that you're setting strategically for your institution. So we begin with our vendors saying, A, this is not only important that this is required for working with the CSU. Every student who comes into our institution, we have to provide equally effective access to those services, and you are a partner in delivering those services to us. So we will tell you what we need, and then we will help you inform your staff, educate your staff, provide them some consultation and guidance in partnership with us so you can deliver the successful service for us. Bruce Moss. If we go about things on an ad hoc approach. CIO and Vice Provost. We're not likely to get the same results. For information technology. We want to work together as a community in higher education to work with vendors to improve accessibility for everyone with regard to the products that are offered. That's a much more pragmatic approach rather than institution by institution. University of Wisconsin, Madison. Making accessibility a priority in their development roadmap is going to be driven by the market demand. And if an institution never says a word, the vendor isn't going to do anything about it. So if we begin to communicate our demands collectively, then the vendor will recognize the market value of accessibility. Accessibility requires effort on the part of everyone in the higher education community, faculty, staff, technology vendors. If we all do our part, our institutions can provide everyone with an equal opportunity to participate. And we all benefit from the perspectives of a diverse group. I would say to those out there who are just getting started or maybe struggling to figure out how to use technology to advance accessibility on their campuses that there's no such thing as a bad time to start. Words appear. This video presentation was created as part of Access Computing, a collaboration of the Dewitt Center and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Described by audio eyes. For more information, consult www.uw.edu.accesscomputing. Access Computing is funded by the National Science Foundation as part of the broadening participation in computing program of the Directorate for Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering. Grants number CNS-083-7508 and CNS-104-2260. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Copyright 2013, University of Washington.