 My name is Cheryl Burgstahler and I direct accessible technology services at the University of Washington. And through our Access Technology Center and other services, we're making sure that the IT that we develop, procure, and use at the University of Washington is accessible to all of our faculty, students, staff, and visitors. Teamwork, making IT accessible at the University of Washington and statewide. In the state of Washington, we now have a policy. Policy 188 addresses accessible technology. And so it requires that our post-secondary institutions in the state of Washington make their IT accessible to all students, faculty, staff, and visitors with disabilities. It requires that we be proactive in doing that by auditing the software we have, checking for accessibility, and making plans for making it more accessible. Either ourselves for our websites or with vendors if it's a commercial product. My name is Patrick Powell. I'm from University of Washington, Tacoma. My responsibility is technology. I'm the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology. When I look at Policy 188, I actually look at it as an opportunity for us to enhance and do better on our campus. As one of our efforts at the University of Washington to ensure that all the IT that we procure, develop, and use on our campus is accessible to all of our faculty, students, and staff who have disabilities, we initiated a task force at the highest level. And so we include people from HR, people from the disability services offices, from our communications group, from our accessible IT group, but many other units as well. And we wrestle with how technology can be made more accessible to people with disabilities. And so some of the things that we do, for instance, is have an inventory, particularly of the common, most widely used software and websites and videos that we use on campus. My name is Dan. The role that I'm playing in the Policy 188 effort is to help assemble the inventory of IT on campus. This is not a one-person effort. This is a multi-person effort. We document what information we know about those products. As time allows, we test those products for accessibility and determine how we're going to make the products more accessible, often working with the vendors. One of the task force's priorities has been to promote captioning of videos used on campus. We have helped initiate a pilot, actually, where we provide free captioning for videos on campus. It's a limited amount of money, so we're not captioning all videos, but we're captioning those that have a high impact. Now that pilot has turned into an ongoing service. Some videos need both captions and audio description. Audio description is additional narration that describes the visuals on the screen for those who cannot see them. The best of UW 2016, a year in review video, used both captions and audio description. I'm Gina Hills. I'm the Web Communications Director for University Marketing and Communications. This year's video was all visual with music. He did close caption the video. The first stage was we put a little thing that said music on there. I'm Terrell Thompson. I'm IT Accessibility Specialist at the University of Washington. If you watch that video, the music contributes significantly to the emotion that the video creates. So it is featuring a lot of the really wonderful things that have happened at the university over the last year in 2016. And the music builds and swells and just becomes much more dramatic as the piece grows. And so they revised the captions to address that need and really did an excellent job, I think, of capturing exactly what the music is doing throughout this piece as it grows and swells. The other thing that's interesting about the best of UW 2016 is that it was entirely music. There's no spoken audio. Therefore, somebody who can't see it gets nothing out of it other than the music. So they hear the music and it's a wonderful piece, but to them it's just a music video. They have no idea that all these wonderful things happened at the university. So all those details are missing for them. And so that particularly is a video that requires audio description. Words appear. Hashtag best of UW 2016. The Nobel medal next to David J. Tholes. 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics with President Obama. Mary Claire King. National Medal of Science, UW and Microsoft break record for DNA data storage. A collage of photos, inaugural Husky 100. Covered all bases, all audiences, and didn't leave anybody out in terms of experiencing the previous year at the university. I think that this is a good model for what we can do and what we should do and what we should aspire to. Another task force priority is helping faculty and staff make PDFs and other documents accessible so that someone who is using a screen reader can have the content read to them. In our pilot on PDF accessibility, we're working with several large units on our campus. And we're contracting with some consultants that will make PDFs accessible so they'll remediate some of the PDFs that have been developed in an inaccessible way. My name is Gabie De Young and I'm an IT accessibility specialist for accessible technology services at the University of Washington. At the University of Washington, we have several hundred PDF documents being uploaded to our websites probably on a daily basis. And many, if not all of those PDF documents are inaccessible to individuals who use text-to-speech assistive technology in order to access those documents. Accessible technology services have worked with UW Bothell and UW Tacoma on a pilot project for addressing the large amount of PDF documents that we have on the tripe campuses. The three campuses work pretty closely together using different tools to identify the number of documents that were on the website and then coming up with a plan for going through those documents seeing if they actually really do need to be listed on the website or if they need to be taken down. And if they do need to be listed on a website, what is the process that we're going to go through in order to make sure that we're going to make all of those PDFs accessible? The Task Force helps develop and recruit for capacity-building institutes on accessible IT for participants from units across campus. My name is Pete Graff and I work for the Office of the Chief Information Security Officer and a lot of the tools that we develop, some of them are used on public-facing websites and we want to make sure that we're doing the best job that we can to ensure that the tools that we provide are fully accessible. My name is Ana Thompson. I'm a learning technologist at the University of Washington Bothell. I enjoy tremendously attending the capacity-building institutes because it allows me to connect with other professional peers who see the importance of universal design and also they help me learn. They give me ideas on how I can do what I'm doing better. UW's IT accessibility liaisons are recruited from the UW capacity-building institutes. Liaisons engage online, participate in three training meetings each year and promote the accessibility of IT in their respective units. My name's Jodi and I work for UW IT. I'm heartened by the commitment that we have across campus that we're not alone in this endeavor and that we all want to do it together and we have central resources to help us do that. Annual capacity-building institutes on the UW campus are also offered to representatives of post-secondary institutions statewide. Participants share promising practices for making IT more accessible. Scott Towsley from Yakima Valley College. I'm the IT director, director for e-learning and also the accessibility coordinator. Actually coming to this training here is going to give us some best practices, some contacts across the state. Some of the things we're all looking at is what software, common software can we all use? What are some initiatives that everybody else is doing? My name is Cary Powell and I work at Centralia College and I'm the Policy 188 Coordinator at Centralia College. It occurred to me that the reason that we have so much, so many good things going on on our campus is that my disability services director and I attended a capacity-building institute at the University of Washington three years ago and it sparked an entire... it led to a lot of amazing things but the key thing was we walked away knowing that our task was to go back to our campus and form a work group of interested stakeholders, people from our IT department, e-learning disability services, from our college relations, from our legal services. We got a group of people together just based on asking and people said sure and so that was a key idea that we took away from that first capacity-building institute. My name is Bridget Irish and I work at the Evergreen State College located in Olympia, Washington. My official position is as curricular technology support to faculty. At the Evergreen State College, some ways in which we've tried to make our IT resources and tools more accessible is one by providing faculty with a template, a template for use in Canvas as well as a variety of templates available for use with WordPress. I'm Carly Gerard. I work at Western Washington University as a web accessibility developer. One of our first starting points in making IT accessible is training. Once we have people who understand where to begin, what accessibility features to look for, we can then help them, you know, manage their websites. They can look for any accessibility issues. We host training sessions both online and in-person. So our online training rolled out a few months ago and we've had over 200 people enrolled before the end of the year who have now taken the training and they can continue to edit their content knowing these accessibility features. We do also offer an in-person training for those who may not be as comfortable with online learning. My name is Craig Kerr. I'm the director for services for students with disabilities at Edmunds Community College. Our professional development committee, what we're going around to each division to do trainings on how to make accessible documents. We're working with a professional development committee that's based of faculty sharing with faculty the ways to make their documents accessible is a key piece because you're talking peer-to-peer. Hi, my name is Amy Roefner and I'm an instructional designer and accessible IT coordinator at Shoreline Community College. We are also working on areas of captioning for our videos. That's a big thing to make sure everyone can hear and absorb the content in the videos. We've added Ally to our Canvas instance so that students who may or may not have an official accommodation are able to access accessible versions of documents, audible versions of documents, even a braille, electronic braille version of documents right away in real time. My name is Agnes Figueroa. I work at Renton Technical College and I'm currently the deputy CIO chief information officer. We started with convening an accessibility advisory committee. In this group, we try to gather together people from various areas of campus. So we have representatives from human resources, from the library, from e-learning, from IT, the disability office, faculty members. I'm David Engebretzen Jr. and I'm at Western Washington University and I'm the digital technologies accessibility coordinator. We've made some real efforts to create awareness about accessibility and I think that's kind of been the biggest change is that our community is becoming aware of the need for accessible and inclusive design. As a blind person, I noticed just little changes making a big difference in the accessibility. Headings on web pages and educational materials in general. Captions and videos and accessible graphics. My name is Jeremy Sedda and I work for Big Bend Community College as a Slake, as the Web and Multimedia Specialist. I feel it's just so much more personal to meet with other folks around the similar goal and to really come together in a collaborative fashion to brainstorm and to really work out the details of a problem that we're all facing. My name is Clay Krause. I work for Tacoma Community College. I'm the Information Technology Director there on campus. One of the most important things is bringing people together and forming those networks, the formal networks and the informal networks to dialogue and share ideas regarding accessible information technology. Final Thoughts Well, my name is Zach Latin. I'm an Assistive Technology and IT Accessibility Specialist at Clark College. I have a really personal stake in this because I have been blind since birth so I use Assistive Technology myself. We don't have to make this policy on our own. We can work with people all over the place and come up with, you know, the rising tide that lifts all boats, I think. To learn more about IT Accessibility consult uw.edu slash accessibility. This video was funded by the Global Technology Services UWIT Copyright 2019, University of Washington. Permission is granted to copy these materials for educational, non-commercial purposes provided the source is acknowledged.