 Let's give people a few more seconds. Actually, no, it's the top of the hour. Let's begin the forum. Welcome, everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you here today. We have a great session on one of the most important topics that we've got with a couple of great guests that I'm really looking for in our conversation. I mean, it's really important to remember that the internet has given us perhaps the greatest single expansion of information and content in human history. It's a truly astonishing amount of stuff that we make and have access to. But at the same time, everybody has access to all this stuff and maybe for reasons of the digital divide and maybe for reasons of not having physical access but also has to do with ability and disability. And as a result, we have to think very hard about how to make our digital content accessible to all potential viewers, readers, listeners, and so on. So this week, I'm very, very proud to host a couple of wonderful people. Ray Mancia, who is assistant director of online learning at the University of Pittsburgh and Barbara Fry, who's a center consultant and instructional designer, also the University of Pittsburgh. They're the authors or the editors, rather, of a brand new book on digital accessibility, which is now become my go-to tone on how to understand how to make accessibility work in higher education. So without any further ado, let me just start bringing folks up on stage so we can have this conversation. And here we should have coming to us from Pittsburgh, director Mancia, hello. Hello, good afternoon, everyone. It's 2 p.m. here in Pittsburgh. Well, it's very good to see you. And it's a nice t-shirt, this quality matters t-shirt. Quality matters. There you go, there you go. And where are you today? Where have we found you? I am in my home office that was created pre-COVID. Oh, nice, nice. Well, it's really, really good to see you. Ray, we have a tradition of people introducing themselves in the form by describing what they're working on next. Now, what does the next year hold for you? What are the projects and what are the ideas that are uppermost for you? So I do come from the land of instructional design, and I would say that I'm always learning. So currently, Barbara and I are working together on a series of papers on mentoring for instructional designers. So that's our latest and greatest topic, and we did an extensive data collection, and we'll be sharing out hopefully through some publications our research on the strategies and the needs for instructional design professionals. Oh, wow. Oh, that sounds really good. Are you gonna be doing any workshops or presentations in that? I sure hope so. We're always happy to do presentations, especially with Quality Matters. I do work with the Quality Matters Instructional Design Association, and my colleagues and I do workshops with Quality Matters. And in addition, Barbara and I are hoping to put this publication out through a scholarly forum. So it's almost finished. We have a goal for the end of the month to finish our writing, but that is our newest research focus. Well, let me know, all seriousness, once it gets to some new forms that are shareable, and we can bring you back to talk about mentoring. Certainly. Now, hold on right there. I need to bring up on the stage your colleague here, Barbara Fry, and let me add her to our discussion. And good afternoon, Barbara. Well, hello, it's nice to be here. Oh, I'm so glad you can join us. Where have we found you today? I'm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania too. I am in my den. Oh, excellent. We're locked trying to keep it quiet. Well, we'll see what we can do. I'm afraid we're gonna be making noises on our end here. Let me ask you the same question that I just asked, Barbara. What are you gonna be working on for the next year? What are the big ideas and projects that are uppermost for you? I guess I'm really, really happy with where I am. So I hope for the next, I'm gonna be doing the same things that I'm doing now, collaborating with Ray for one. I have actually two or three jobs after 20 years at the University of Pittsburgh. As a senior instructional designer, I am now at Pitt part-time, and I've been part-time now for maybe three, three and a half years around the beginning of COVID. I love doing that. I love the instructional design work. I very much respect all the people that I work with, the instructional designers and then multimedia specialists that I work with at Pitt. So I hope I'm still doing that. There is no better way to keep learning than being an instructional designer. I also teach, I teach with Point Park University in their program for learning design and technology. So I teach one course every semester and I'm acting in quality matters. I've also got my quality matters teacher on. Oh, brand, all right. Yeah, I'm a research colleague, a facilitator and a peer reviewer. So I've been active with quality matters almost since the very, very beginning of the Fitzy grants that started quality matters. Wow. Well, this one, you sound super busy, sorry. Yeah, but this is not retirement. I just wanted more control over things. And I get bored easy, so I'm real happy to have different projects to work on. But in the next year, I want to continue. I really want to be an advocate for, well, instructional design as well as accessibility. I want to do a little publishing. A lot of professional development right now I'm really into this artificial intelligence arena and especially as it relates to research and the quality analysis of data. Excellent. That's where I am. Well, those are two big themes, especially AI here on the forum. And we'd love to have you join us for more conversations of that. Here, let me just the screen a bit, make things a little more balanced. And thank you both for joining us. Friends, if you're new to the forum, the way this usually begins is I ask our guests a couple of really basic, almost underheaded questions to give them a chance to really cut loose and explain and explore more about what they're working on. But after I do that, the time is for you to ask your questions and to put forth your ideas and your comments. So as we're going back and forth, see what you think. See what is really connecting for you. And by the way, if you're new to our two guests and their work on the bottom left of the screen, you should see a kind of tan colored box that's guide to digital accessibility. And also another one is QM digital accessibility white paper series. So you can click on that series and get all kinds of great short documents about accessibility. And of course, if you click on the guide to digital accessibility, you can be taken to the Brutledge page to grab a copy of their book. So to begin with, let me just ask, your book goes into so much detail. All of the authors that you've assembled have really given us just clearly written up-to-date material. I like everything from the history of accessibility to all the different examples of policy. Let me ask a broad question right now. First, what's the best way or what are the best ways that you've seen for a college or university to really support accessibility? You know, what can academic institution do to make all these digital stuff accessible for you and your audience? Ray, you want to start? Sure. Brian, I just want to acknowledge, while we're here that I see several of the authors from the text here. So we are not the only experts in this room. I just want to let you all know if there's a question that comes up that you would love to field, you're most welcome to take a stab at it. We did have 23 chapters in our book and 43 different authors. So we are really pleased to see some of you here today, among other colleagues that we're familiar with. So I just wanted to put that out there. In addition, in response to your question about institutions, we really believe that creating a policy around digital accessibility is critical for starting this work at an institutional level, not to discourage the individual who would like to make change within their own department or within their own school. There are of course initiatives that you can launch at a school level or a department level or as an individual faculty or staff member, but to really garner traction, it's important to have policy. So creating awareness that policy is necessary at the institution, taking advantage of national forums like March's National Disability Awareness Month, calling those events to the attention of the administration can begin to create awareness about the importance of policy and the importance of making the materials accessible for all. And that brings funding. Typically brings funding. So policy and funded policy. And can I jump in? I'm back to a little bit, but digital accessibility, let me just give you our definition because our definition is it's a subfield of web accessibility. And because our background is in online courses and the book is talking mostly about hybrid and online courses, we're talking about the ability for all students to be able to navigate electronic materials in their course. So whether it's video, audio, interactives, multimedia, whatever the asset is in the course, we want students to be able to access that. So if I go back to actually 2011, I totally denied it a survey to see how many institutions had accessibility policies. And it was very low. It was something like 13%. And then Ray and I, after 10 years, we just wanted to revisit the topic because accessibility has become a much more prominent topic in the last decade and even a little more. And it was almost a 50-50, meaning that 50% of institutions had accessibility policies. It was a little less, I don't know, is it 40? Yeah, 48%. And that was in 2019. So that would be pre-pandemic. Right. And of the people that did not have a policy, there were 13%, 15%, something like that. Quite a few were working on a policy. Oh, nice. So I think we are making progress in this field. And I hope Ray and I can continue to be advocates for just building awareness of digital accessibility. So, well, that helps a lot to know. I mean, the curve is definitely a positive one so we can take comfort in some progress. And one quick question, who usually issues those policies? Was that the Dean, academic Dean level? So traditionally, they really should it be institutional because the institution is held responsible for ensuring that education is accessible. So they should be issued at the level of a chancellor, for example, or academic provost. Typically, you would see a policy for an institution. Of course, at our university, the University of Pittsburgh, each school is held responsible for compliance with the university policy. So there are mechanisms in place to ensure that our benchmarks are being met as an institution. But again, that typically starts either as some sort of committee. It might come out of the Office of Disability Services. It might come out of a diversity, equity and inclusion office. At the institution, so it really depends. Oh, that last one gives me a quick question to ask. Are you seeing during the most recent wave of anti-DEI policy in many states and universities, is that catching up and weakening campus accessibility offers? Well, certainly not at our institutions. Now, no, we are not seeing that. Thank goodness, oh my gosh, thank goodness. That would certainly be a step backwards and very upsetting, yes. I think at our institutions, we've seen an increase in dedicated personnel and expertise in the field of digital accessibility, especially as positions are opening in digital marketing, for example. There are lots of crossovers. So as online education just continues to grow, I think we see more and more personnel being allocated. And the specialization needed. Excellent, excellent. I'm seeing in the chat, we have one of our friends from Florida who says they don't wanna comment on this and I appreciate this. But I also do on another serious note from Florida, Shelby, Katie and Eileen, please take care in the tornado warning and the flood warning. I hope you all are safe. We're recording this, so if you get knocked offline, you can find the recording on YouTube, probably within a couple of days. But please be safe, friends, be safe. Well, thank you for answering my first big question. I guess the second big question is, and this is about third of your book, is how can we best support and develop faculty in this? I would say it's probably true that the majority of faculty emerge from grad school without a trace of practice and accessibility and they have to work with a wide variety of content coming from other sources that they might not have any control over. How do you get instructors of all kinds from adjuncts to tenured full professors to shape their materials to make them more accessible? We have a chapter that talks about some keys to accessible course development and I think these address some of the things, just some proactive things that institutions can do. And one of the things that I think is just a great idea is having an instructional designer who specializes in accessibility. So maybe a senior instructional designer who just kind of has extra expertise in accessibility and kind of leads the initiative for that team. All the instructional designers need to have a strong foundation, but one person who makes it their job to just stay up to date with everything, that's a great idea. But then you have to provide training and job aids and templates and tools. All those things have to be readily available for faculty so they don't have to go out and create anything. That it's already, you know, the syllabus for the template is already accessible and the faculty member just has to fill it in and make it as easy as possible as we can for them. And we also have some chapters on professional development. Barb, I would add as well that we do see faculty often reticent to get involved because they think it's going to take a lot of time and perhaps skills that they don't have. So making it accessible to them, the training and we always start with what we would consider low hanging fruit. So we do workshops at our institution on basic practices that you can implement. And we look at what is high impact, low effort, what is maybe high effort. And we always encourage our faculty to start with what will take low effort, make some meaningful changes and continue to iterate. So for example, changing a hyperlink so that it has a meaningful name. That is a small change with a great impact. So we would encourage the faculty members and teach them these core practices. And of course, there are some institutions that don't have internal digital accessibility expertise. And there are trainings available on the web. There are third party providers that can provide a training. So WebAIM also has some fantastic asynchronous modules that you can go through. There are some press books out there. One of our authors, Heather Caprette, has a wonderful press book that is free to the public and goes through a myriad of different practices and it's very practical. So in a Word document, what do you need to do to have an accessible document design on a PowerPoint slide? We spend a lot of time teaching our faculty members how to use the accessibility checkers in the Microsoft Suite as well as in the learning management system. And those checkers are not foolproof, but they come a long way. And you are able to run those checkers and to identify barriers. And oftentimes there are hints that are provided for improving the accessibility of the content. So it is an instructional tool as well for faculty or course developers. Lots of people can make use of these tools on campus. Oh, great, great, great. So we have instructional designers getting some of them to be full-time experts on this. And Barbara, when you were saying that in the chat, Laura Fawley typed in, that's become my role. And then right after that, Katie Prefeta said, me too, Laura. I also think it's important for instructional designers to partner with the disability services office. Somebody, I signed up for a workshop long ago, way back at the beginning of maybe 20 years ago. And the woman would not let you register for her workshop unless she partnered with somebody from in the instructional design office. And that's how I started. And that's how I started this conversation about, okay, what do you see when you're working with students? What are the big barriers you see on our campus? And it was, you know, PowerPoint, it was PDFs. But I mean, she gave me the actual numbers of what were the barriers. So we had a place to start when we were working with faculty. Excellent, excellent. And then you mentioned other resources online. Bray mentioned the press book link and Auraful Hulk-Chaniel asked about it and Ray answered before he even get to it. They put a link to it right there in the chat. And then Grace Hall put a link to the guide to disability books. So we can see that as well. But then Barbara Birch mentioned quality matters, accessibility and usability resource site, which is right there. So we've got a fistful of hyperlinked. There are these lovely volunteers on that the Quality Matters website who will answer questions. So if you are stuck with something, you can go to that website and post your question. And, you know, may not be instantaneous. These are volunteers, but they will get back to you and tell you, okay, here's a suggestion. Oh, that's cool. And I have to say, Brian, that as Barbara and I were working on this book, we came across accessibility questions that we were expected to answer because the publisher didn't have all of the answers at the time. And we use the R site to tap in and crowdsource as well. So there's always more to learn. And we have found ourselves networking with vendors and technology companies and providing feedback on tools. And we felt like we were teaching the publisher about accessible content when we were working on the book. So there is a lot to learn and you can advocate in many different ways. Excellent, excellent. Well, that's a really, really great answer. Both answers, thank you both so much. Now, I wanna stop talking so much. And I want to point to questions that people have and one of them came up from our good friend, Charles Findlay. And let me just put this on the screen. This is an example of a Q&A question. Can you provide some real world experiences of non-accessible and accessible practices in online classes? I think it's real world, not real worth, but examples of non-accessible versus accessible practices. What are some examples then? So I have one on the top of my head thinking about when you are crafting a document and you want to indicate a title. And instead of using a style to do this, you underline the text or you bold the text and you might make the font 16 or 18 font to show that this is a distinctive piece of text from the others. However, that's not accessible to a screen reader technology. You would have to use the ribbon in the Microsoft Suite or in your editor in the learning management system to place a heading text to be able to semantically structure that text. And I see that very often as well as the use of color to convey meaning. So when you want to show this is very important, you might want to highlight it in red or blue, it is very blue and gold. We bleed blue and gold. And so everything in our templates is blue and gold and the faculty love to use these colors to highlight and call out, but those are not accessible. We would want to show emphasis in other ways. For example, using italics or bold text to convey emphasis. So those are just a few examples that are kind of top of mind. I'm sure Barbara has more. Oh, thank you. You already mentioned the ribbon, right? So let's stay with that for a second. You would want to use all the features in the ribbon. If you're making bullet points, use the feature in the ribbon. Don't just put an asterisk in there and think that you're cool. Or a dash or something like that. Use the features. Because I know it may look the same to you, but there is coding behind the scenes that a screen reader reads. I was going to say Roman numerals jump to mind. Like rather than using Roman numerals, use real digits. Or if you have to do an outline, do ABC. Because again, think of the screen reader. It's trying to make the mark out of that. It's saying it's Roman numeral one. It's saying I. It's not saying I. Sure. And I'm kind of thinking about forums such as this, like a Zoom room or maybe a Microsoft Teams meeting. We often take for granted that users may need captions for those meetings. So you can enable live transcription. You can enable captioning. So we often see our online courses have a synchronous meeting once a week. And in conjunction with the disability services, we can request a live captioner. Faculty can also enable captioning and transcription in their meetings. So it's a button. It's pretty easy to push. And sometimes it's just you don't remember to do it. Or faculty don't know that the button is there to select. Multimedia are very prominent in online courses. So it's important that in addition to documents, we have accessible multimedia. Those are great examples. And by the way, I'm just thinking of some of the things I've been trying. I blog in WordPress and I've been trying to remind myself to always use the header function. But I have years of just, well, I'll make it bold. You know, I have to keep remembering. No, no, no, I have to do the header. In the chat, people have just been on fire. A couple of things I wanted to bring up. Jennifer Bennett-Gentler showed a link to a project. Jennifer, are you in New Zealand right now? If so, good morning. I'm glad to see you there. To a really interesting publishing document there. Laura Foley adds that headings and lists are the lowest hanging fruit of accessibility. Jennifer, well, if you're in New York, the great publishing city, I'm glad to see you on our time zone. We have a question from our dear friend, Michael Johnson, who has also been a guest on the program twice now, who asked us this, if you could please speak to the issue of university policies for ensuring accessible content for required textbooks. So what are the university policies that ensure accessible content for required textbooks? I admit I don't have any experience in this area. I do have faculty who tell me all the time their textbook is not accessible, which is concerning, but other than talking to their vendor or their wrap, excuse me, I really don't have any suggestions for them. And we don't have a policy that I know of. I guess that would go with the technology office that would be under their arena. And I'm thinking about our work at the school level in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. We were required to provide the VPATs, the voluntary product accessibility templates for all of the tools, including the publishing materials that we were using in our courses to the institution. So I would say that all publisher materials should be vetted by the electronic information technology committees at your institutions as part of ensuring that the textbook content is accessible. As Barbara mentioned, it's not the first time that we've heard this, we were using a 3D medical textbook available through Elsevier, and we created a long list of inaccessible materials and brought that to the vendor to provide product improvement opportunities. So we were told that the 3D videos were captioned and available in accessible formats. And as it results, they were not all accessible. Only those that were created by the publisher and not pulled from their third parties and integrated into their materials were accessible. So I would say that the VPAT is an important tool to ensure that the materials being deployed in courses are accessible. I do believe that the Office for Disability Services can assist individual students who self-disclose by making their materials accessible. But that is more of a case-by-case basis and not from a universal design for learning perspective, which is really where we want to be. Interesting. Interesting. Just with the faculty I work with, I have always gotten the impression that they have the final decision on my textbook they use, what materials they use, and it doesn't go through the Office of Technology. I just don't think that is. Oh, no, that shouldn't be. In the chat, we've had some interesting notes. Paula mentions purchases on their campus, must be vetted for accessibility compliance. Paula, which campus are you at? Brenda Boyd says that procurement can be involved in acquiring materials. And Susan points out quite rightly, and this is something I was hoping to mention that libraries struggle with this too. Many of the databases they subscribe to have accessibility issues. I keep thinking there's more that regional creditors could do. And Paula's Binghamton. Hello Paula, I hope you're getting some nice spring there. Bobby Might has to require their materials for accessibility. Yeah, there's quite a bit on this. In fact, Michael asked that question, and let me bring up on stage, because he wanted to follow up with this. Let's see if he can fit up on stage with us all. Good afternoon sir. Oh, good afternoon everyone. Thanks for having me. Good to see you. So I just wanted to, I appreciate the candor in your response of, hey, I don't know what's going on with the textbooks because that's outside of your remit, so I thank you for that. I just wanted to bring up two things. I work for Benetech, we're a charity which is focused on making digital content accessible for people with disabilities. So there's two things that we do that might be useful to the two of you and to anyone in the audience. The first we have a program called Bookshare, and there's 1.2 plus million titles in there. They're not all fully accessible. We apply what accessibility we can to make them more accessible, including being able to translate into digital braille and doing some fomenting for Dixlexia and things like that. This service is free for any educational institution in the United States and any student in the United States. So it should fit in your even tight budgeting times for each and still fit in there somewhere. The other to the publishing folks in the audience or to anyone who wishes to have that difficult conversation with the publishing community, we run a program called Global Certified Accessible where we actually teach the publishers through an iterative process how to create all their content fully accessible from John Street. So from the point of sales and distribution, if you have a GCA certified publisher, then they have adopted their workflow to ensure that every book they're purchasing from that day forward is fully accessible. So it's not a commercial, just a statement. We're a charity anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter, but just wanted to let everybody in the community in this call know that there are a couple of options for you. We work with DSOs certainly or students can come directly to us individually. So that's it. Thank you, Michael. Any questions from Michael from Barbara, Ray? Right, I just want to say thank you, Michael. And this is a prime example of how we continue to evolve in this space. There's so much to learn and the new resources that are appearing, it's fantastic for others to share with us as well. Yes, our publisher could have used you. I think that may as a connection to happen. Michael, you had some questions in the chat. You might want to bounce on, but thank you. And thanks for doing all the great work there for accessibility. Friends, that's an example of a video question. So if you just want to join us on stage, as you can tell, you don't necessarily have to have a beard to be on stage for the program. Just click the raised hand icon at the bottom of the screen. By the way, also in the chat, Jennifer Bennett-Ginthner, I hope I didn't magnify the name too badly, Jennifer, play out something really important for software. In general, publishers are working with end design, which is technology is not accessibility friendly based on its built-in cascading style sheets. We're crossing our fingers that Adobe catches up with this and updates end design to operate better. That's a great point, Jennifer, thank you. Had not thought about this. We have more questions piling up and I want to make sure everyone gets a chance to ask. And this is a really, really good one from Bill Weber, who asks, what kind of carrots do you use to get instructors to do accessibility work? I found structures are reluctant to recreate materials they've previously created. I think the biggest carrot comes from the administration. So we did recently launch an initiative and we had to have the backing of the dean who supported the program directors and department chairs in ensuring that the faculty were taking part in the initiatives. But Barbara and I have also been involved in several initiatives where we look for student voices and voices of people with disabilities who share their experiences and personal experiences with disability and online materials or digital materials. And that personalization and that element and understanding why it is so important that they have access to the materials can often motivate some resistant faculty to start to take the steps. I mean, truly we're looking at this as this is an ethical obligation but it's also a legal obligation. So there are compliance components and of course it does not have to be a student with a disability who reports inaccessible content. So we have all seen examples of high profile lawsuits in this space and the results, the ramifications of not making the material accessible and one of the key components in our unit as we work as instructional design partners with faculty is them taking ownership of the course. So although the instructional designers review materials and consult and can do a range of tasks, the faculty is the face of the course. So that faculty member does become ultimately responsible for the material being accessible and any complaints that are registered from that course. I usually tell faculty to start with today. I really think it's difficult to retrofit a course that's already been designed and you've been teaching. So start with today from today forward every time you update a document, clone your course and add a new video from today on everything you put into your course and want to make sure it's accessible. But I wouldn't worry too much about going back to a video that you created two years ago and making that now accessible. Let's just start with all the new material because it is, it's overwhelming. Some things can be extremely time consuming. And faculty needs support. So some of the departments that we work with, they hire student workers, they hire interns and they try to assist faculty in creating an audit of all of their content. So an inventory for one course, for example, and this time that the course is offered, we're going to work on the PowerPoints and those assistants will assist in remediating the content in all of those PowerPoints, for example. And then they will continue to iterate so that they work toward 100% accessible. So supporting the faculty in this process is really critical. I had a faculty member who was pulling her hair out over making a transcript for a podcast. She had a technology that would convert the audio into words, but then you had to go in and check all the words and the spelling and add the concentration and the paragraphs and all that. You know what, she said the next time I pick a podcast, I am going to be more careful and maybe pick a TED talk or something that does this for me because I don't want to have to do this again. There's a lot of work here. But thank you both. And thank you for the really good question. Again, if you're new to the forum, that's an example of a Q and A question. And in fact, we have another video questions coming from our dear friend, Brent Anders at the American University of Armenia. And let me bring him up on stage. Hello Brent. Hello, hello, welcome. Good to see you, sir. Good to see you. Okay, so my question is, and I used to work with a lot with accessibility at the previous university I worked at. At my new university, it's kind of a new concept, right? I'm not in the United States. I'm in the country of Armenia. They're slowly starting to understand the importance of this. And one of the things is that my focus now is mainly dealing with AI integration into education. So my question is dealing with AI, generative AI, have you started to look into that as far as how generative AI can be used as a tool for instructors to help with accessibility, as well as the agency that it gives students to be able to do more because now they have generative AI as a tool that can assist them in their learning, that can help them to describe what an image is when an image isn't properly described, that could help them with transcription, that could help them as far as being neurodivergent as far as explaining things in a different way. AI can do a lot. Have you started to look into that? No, we have not, but you just gave us an idea. I mean, we certainly could use some AI to do exactly what you said. Here is a video or here's a podcast and can you help with the transcription? Can you help with creating the subtitles? That's certainly possible. But it's also gonna take a lot of human time because it does make mistakes and you are gonna have to go back and really check that very carefully. I'm also thinking about the potential for using that with a complex image. So we use alternative text to describe a simple image or we mark it as decorative. But oftentimes we have complex charts. We have a flow chart or a really detailed image. We deal with anatomical images all the time in the School of Health and Rehab Sciences and detailed processes. So I can imagine asking ChatGPT to make a description for me that could accompany the image. Of course, as Barbara said, there would be some review needed, but I'm certain that it could help with work like that or also tables describing really in-depth tables. So we know that we're not supposed to be merging cells in the tables. And of course there are times that we do that. And we see that in research articles often, especially when someone is presenting their research. So maybe using ChatGPT to provide a summary of a very detailed table that could be accessible. Yeah, and that's, I think you're really hitting it because it's the same thing with what I'm doing with AI literacy, right? I'm really trying to work to attack it from both ends. So that means that trying to get the instructors to understand this and then also trying to help the students understand this because if let's say I'm a student and I'm going through a course and my instructor hasn't properly caught up with the disability enhancements that need to be there, well now because of AI as a student, I would have more agency in that I could assist myself. Again, of course that's not the A answer but that's still an answer for the current situation. Okay, well, thank you very much. I appreciate the answer. Well, thank you Brent. And by the way, Brent asked that question. There were about four other questions along those lines of AI. So I think Barbara, you just stepped into a gigantic whirlpool of AI. Barbara thought she was leaving the world of digital accessibility. It's the, it pulls you right back in. In the chat, Laura Foley says that she's played with AI for generating alt text for complex images with some good results and some mixed. And our good friend, George Station on the West Coast says as we wrestle with the ethics of AI, the tremendous use of resources, et cetera, it would be great for institutions to consider the impact of bringing AI and accessibility space, which I think is terrific. I think there are a lot of parallels here too because what we see institutions doing in AI is starting to craft policy, beginning to craft policy, maybe a grassroots effort. And we saw that with the digital accessibility. And so when we look at like, what will this look like over time? I imagine that we'll see policies for AI continue to evolve like we've seen with digital accessibility. Very good. We have a few more questions that I'm afraid we only have 13 minutes. So I wanna make sure that people get a chance to answer this. And by the way, everyone in the chat, the resources here are terrific. Please let me know in the chat if you would object if I blog this. So what I'm thinking of doing is not only having the recording, but also just going through the chat and pulling out all the good bits and then anonymizing it. So if you have any objections to that, please let me know and I can resist. I do wanna just add about all texts for images. I mean, I do think the faculty member has to be heavily engaged in this. They know the purpose of why they put that image in their course. And sometimes it's not just describing the image, it's the purpose of the image. So that has to be considered. You know, an image for, I don't know for a graphic design course might have a very different alt text description than an image, the same image in economics course. Oh yeah. Oh, Barbara, that's brilliant. That's so important. Thank you for saying that. I think, you know, originally, and I'm going back 15 years, we had this brilliant idea of having student workers help with putting alt text into some part slides. And it just didn't work. They, I mean, they could describe what the image is, but they didn't know the purpose. So that just didn't work. That was a really bad idea. I see, I see. So here's a car, but we don't know why it's been, I see, I see. We have a question from Marjorie Azluqi. Who says, what I'm hearing from instructors about them not making their course accessible is quote, I don't have a student with a documented disability. So I don't have to. We've heard this one. How do I combat this? Especially when the higher-ups don't support the instructional designer. Yeah. I'm sorry. It is, it is definitely a challenge. I usually say you really don't know. You don't know if there's anybody in your course who has a disability, because if we did this all right and the course is accessible, you could have a student in your course with a disability, but they just didn't have to disclose their accessibility. They only, the only reason they would disclose is if they're asking an accommodation. Otherwise they don't need to. Well, and we also look at this and we say, captions on a video might not be helpful only to someone with a disability. They might be helpful for someone in a loud room. I think my children watch movies with captions on more often than not. If we think of someone accessing courses on a bus or a gym, I've been in, on campus facilities and students are taking their courses on their phones and it's noisy and they need access. So looking at how these practices can benefit everyone and not specifically, this is only for a student with a disability. And as Barbara said in many cases, we know that the number of self-disclosures is lower than the number of students who are actually, who actually have a disability. So there may be a lot more individuals in the population. Thank you. Laura fully mentions is the curb cut analogy, which I love. If you're not familiar with that anybody, that's when you take a curb on a sidewalk or a road and you put a cut into it for a ramp for someone who has mobility disabilities. But it turns out that people who do not have those disabilities benefit a great deal when they're lugging carts or that kind of thing. It's a great analogy when I'm very fond of it. Thank you both for the answers. These questions are just terrific. And I was thinking, Brian, I was thinking about AI and the crossovers that we've been talking about. And we have had instances where students take transcripts that are from the lecture recordings and then they use those with AI to create guided notes for themselves and study guides. So that's something that our faculty members are starting to do. And so you might say, well, the student doesn't need captions. Well, they are using the captions for other purposes as well. That's well said. We have a question by a specific story here. And this comes to us from our friend, Andrew Bray at Indiana Tech. And he mentions an interesting business development show what I just heard about a couple of days ago. We were acquiring electronic books from Access Text who just closed unexpectedly. Might anyone know of a similar provider? Also, could the fellow who just spoke of the bookstores give that name again? Andrew, that's Ben and Tech and they can put you in touch with him if you want. So what's the deal with access source or access text? What happened with them? And is there anybody else that we should consider instead? Not familiar with access text. Not either. Maybe somebody in the... Please, and in the chat who's had experience and raise your hand if you'd like to join us on stage to say more about that. While people are thinking about that, while people are working on that, let me ask or any pose a different question. And this is, oh gosh, I'm hoping I'm getting this right. The Arufo Hulk-Chanille from the University of Manitoba, it's always good to have more and more Canadian friends, I think. Ask this, quality matters has a general standard on accessibility and usability. Do you recommend accessibility and usability review to enhance accessibility? I'm not sure I understand. The specific review standards are for the review of content. Oh, okay, well, that might be an answer then. Please, Arufo, if you'd like to expand on your question, please feel free to. Yeah, there are, I think, seven specific review standards under that general standard, eight on accessibility and usability. And think of them as criteria or checklist. And if you would wanna review all those standards as you look at your course, and I would say that Brenda, I know Brenda Boyd wrote the chapter on the evolution of the quality matters rubric for the book and really explored how that standard has grown over time and been expanded to be more comprehensive and more detailed. So as Barbara mentioned, it has a lot more, it does provide a more comprehensive checklist to ensure that the material is accessible. Very good, very good. In the chat and in direct messages, people have recommended bookshare.org as an alternative. And Ray, you posted that. That was from our colleague, Michael. Well, I'm glad that we've got that. I'm glad that we've got that in this alternative. So thank you for the question, Andrew. And we'll try and follow up and find out more of what's happened with that because that's not a happy story. We have, let's see, we're done to about six minutes and I'll make sure people have a chance to ask the questions they have. And I actually did wanna put in one question while people are still thinking and their brains are still smoking. One question is roughly what proportion of students today has some form of disability that reduces their access to digital content? I think in your book, I saw several different figures who were sitting 8%, 9%. Is that where we are right now about? So we're going from sort of national numbers, but 19% of undergraduate students is what the current figures indicate. 19% of, yep. And that's the National Center for Education Statistics. Well, that's the gold standard. And that doesn't include graduate level students and oftentimes our graduate students aren't as well connected to campus resources. That's a good point. So one in five, that's a huge number. That's an enormous number of people. Well, thank you. And so what are the major leading disabilities? So we have blindness, we have color blindness. We also have, I'm sorry, camera, the next phrase, low visibility. Are there others that we should know about for this? Most common disabilities that are reported to the Disability Services Office are the cognitive disabilities. Or prominent than the physical disabilities, which are the vision and motor. But that would be, I mean, it could be ADHD. It could be dyslexia. I can't remember what it's called, but the dyslexia for numbers. Dyscalculia. Yes. Dyscalculia, yeah. Okay, so I mean, that those are all, I mean, there are probably a dozen different disabilities that relate to cognitive issues. Okay, well, thank you. That helps me. In the chat, Paula had this point of good news. SUNY, it's the State University of New York System, Institute of the Electronic Information Technology Accessibility Policy, or EITA. A few years ago, each campus has a designated EITA officer to assist with awareness and compliance, which that's great news. That's a lot of people. It's like 63, 66 people. That's a lot of people. It's a major step. So 64, thank you, Paula. Bobby Mayer mentions there are a lot of neurodivergent disabilities. Good point. And Brenda Boyd sequences that. Stephen Crawford adds motor control, Paula adds autism. Thank you very much. And Laura Foley says that ADHD has the highest prevalence. And Bobby Mayer cautions us that they're pulling these numbers from those that identify as ADA. So the number is likely still higher than that. Well, I'm curious if I could, looking ahead a bit, what happens to a campus that takes everything that you recommend very seriously? So they've got lots of staff whose job is to do this. There's a university or college-wide policy that does this. Faculty are getting lots of support in making the materials accessible. And let's just hit fast forward on this video. What does that campus look like, say, five years from now? How would it be different from the campus today? That's a great question, Brian. Yeah, this is a stumper. At the University of Pittsburgh, I really don't know if it would be all that different. I think we've been pretty proactive in diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as accessibility. We have a policy, in fact, there's a chapter in the book where the person who was leading that initiative talked about how she led a committee and developed the digital accessibility policy at the University of Pittsburgh. So I really think, I don't really think things would be that much different. I think we're just gonna continue with what we're doing. All the instructional designers are certainly well-trained in accessibility. I don't come across any faculty member who ever tells me that they think this is a waste of time. It's usually the opposite. Now, it's because they have support. I think if faculty were on their own doing this, it would be probably a different story. But because they're working with an instructional designer, they always emphasize how much they want to have their courses accessible to all students. I think it would become second nature. So a lot of the practices that you put into practice, they become second nature. So when we're designing a course or a document or an artifact, a learning object, we're already thinking about these things. So if we look at what would the future look like and everybody's been trained and everyone has access to all of the tools that are needed and all of the content is 100% accessible. I mean, the material would all be accessible because everybody would be utilizing these practices on the daily as part of their routine as they develop course materials. And I like to think that we would see fewer reports from disability services of materials that were inaccessible or students who were experiencing barriers and had to wait. There's often a delay when materials are made accessible. There's a delay between when the students need that material and when it's actually created in an accessible format. So I like to think that in the future, all students would have access to their materials at the same time so that they would be equally as successful. Oh, very nice. We had a terrific practice a couple of years ago in our office. There was somebody in the disability services office who was blind and did use a screen reader. He had a nine-month contract. So we were able to take him for the summer months. Our pit online team was able to offer him another contract for the summer months and bring him in. And he sat down with every single instructional designer on the team and he showed them what their courses looked like. And he navigated their courses with a screen reader. Fantastic. And there's nothing, that's what makes it personal. And that's when you really realize, look what I did here. I created this barrier for a student and I didn't mean to. And all I had to do was change the colors or just something, hopefully it's something that is doable by the instructional design team. But I think that's really a wonderful thing that we did. And I really think that got a lot of buy-in from the team. Oh, that's great. What a, I'm afraid, friends, we're just past the top of the hour now so we have to wrap things up. But I think it's wonderful to end Barbara at such a great, great high note. Let me ask the two of you, what are the best ways to keep up with your work? On mentorship and accessibility, how can we find you? I guess through Google, but we try to publish in sources that are open and free so that there isn't a subscription generally. So typically at a Google search, we'll call up our current work. I would say that quality matters also has a LinkedIn site and anything we do would be shared on the LinkedIn site. So that might be another way to keep up with us. Oh, that's great. Well, let me just conclude then by saying, thank you both so much for sharing so much of your experience, your knowledge, your work. And above all, your attitude, your optimism, your love for the learning and also your desire to keep learning and keep on learning. I think the two of you are just so admirable. Thank you both for joining us. Thanks for inviting us today and for everyone who came and attended and all of these fantastic questions. Now, these are great questions. Well, again, Ray and Barbara, please, when you get your next round of publications out, let us know so we can bring you back. Barbara, there's no way of escaping. We've got you. Okay, thank you. Barbara will never retire. No, we know. Okay. Thank you both and take care. Be safe. All right. But everybody else don't run away yet. Let me just wrap things up by saying thank you all for the questions you heard from our guests. How good they were. I can tell you that as well. If you'd like to keep talking about these issues of accessibility in different ways, we can do this on social media. You can see here a few of the different versions of that. Let's use the hashtag FTTE so we can find them. If you'd like to look into our previous sessions, including some on accessibility and the digital materials, just go to a forum archive at tinyurl.com slash FTF archive. Thank you again for all the consideration. This has been a terrific session. I'm looking forward to sharing it asynchronously soon. I hope everybody's well. I hope you stay safe. And in the Northern Hemisphere, we've got some spring. Please enjoy it. Until then, we'll see you next time. Take care. Bye-bye.