2022 Update
Greetings from the Technology Accessibility team in The University of Alabama Office of Information Technology! 2022 has been a busy year with a focus on giving campus partners ways to maintain site and process accessibility. We also perform ongoing benchmark reviews of campus websites and continue to offer accessibility awareness and education training opportunities. Some notable projects include:
- Working with our colleagues in Enterprise Development and Application Support (EDAS) to maintain and add features to the Web Accessibility dashboard for campus tech accessibility liaisons. This dashboard gives liaisons a comprehensive list of sites under their purview, along with a high-level summary of site accessibility status.
- Addressing accessibility needs for business process automation (BPA) used to complete several institutional activities. We are working with EDAS and external vendors to make sure forms, reports, and other resources generated through automation are accessible and usable for all.
- Improving website template accessibility for official and individual UA web sites. We work with UA’s Office of Strategic Communications makes our institutional WordPress site templates as accessible as possible. We are also refreshing our Weebly templates and policies for people.ua.edu sites, drawing on internal expertise and external consultants to make the platform a better option for our campus.
- Expanding the accessibility grant offerings to include document remediation for complex PDFs and live captioning services for virtual events. We also continue to provide captioning and transcription grants for public-facing or campus wide media.
- Hosting and sharing accessibility education opportunities including Accessing Higher Ground, the Legal Digital Accessibility Summit, and others.
We look forward to working with you in 2023 and appreciate your allyship and advocacy in making our campus and our community more inclusive and accessible.
Spring 2021 Update
The University of Alabama Technology Accessibility team, housed in the Office of Information Technology (OIT), continues to lead the initiative to provide our technology users, including those with disabilities, a functional and accessible technology experience and to help our institution’s faculty, staff, and students develop digital resources that are accessible to all. Since March 2020, we have been exerting much of our efforts to help make sure newly virtual and remote resources and events are as accessible as possible. We have seen substantial growth in the use of captioning grants for public-facing and campus wide media. Captioning grants for live public-facing or campus wide virtual events are also available now. Additional efforts since January 2020 include:
- Launching Blackboard Ally for Learn, which provides students with accessible versions of course content, offers instructors guidance on course content accessibility and remediation, and gives institutional insight into accessibility progress for course content.
- Resolving more than 1500 tickets in the HelpSpot customer service/support ticket system.
- Offering workshops and webinars, including offerings on web accessibility; best practices for creating accessible documents, presentations, spreadsheets, emails, social media, and other digital content; Universal Design for Learning; and other accessibility-related topics.
- Captioning and/or transcribing over 12,000 minutes of media through UA captioning grants. Captioning grants may be used to caption and/or transcribe UA-owned video and audio that will be shared on public or campus-wide websites.
- Running 2000+ Accessibility Management Platform reports. Accessibility Management Platform (AMP) is a comprehensive accessibility and reporting tool freely available to members of the UA community.
- Continued education, outreach, and enforcement around the The University of Alabama Web Resources Accessibility Policy, which adopts WCAG 2.0 AA to address the accessibility of public-facing web resources, campus-wide web resources, and web resources needed to conduct core University administrative and academic function, including equally effective alternate access and non-compliance plans.
We continue to:
- Maintain a campus technology and web site inventory, including technology accessibility status.
- Conduct site audits, sharing evaluation reports with area liaisons who can handle remediation with our assistance.
- Provide technology accessibility policy guidance to stakeholders who select, create, or share digital content.
- Facilitate accurate captioning and or transcription of all public-facing and campus wide media, including the administration of captioning grants and training.
- Work with campus stakeholders and accessibility liaisons to ensure the accessibility of instructional content housed in Blackboard Learn or other enterprise instructional technology tools.
- Manage licensing and support of enterprise assistive technology tools (currently ZoomText).
- Consult with and assist campus liaisons and other stakeholders with all technology accessibility concerns and questions.
Plans for this coming year include the continued implementation of The University of Alabama Web Resources Accessibility Policy, including compliance reviews, as well as partnering with the University’s IT Enterprise Development and Application Support team to develop a web inventory portal for accessibility liaisons.
Mid- 2019 Update
The Faculty Resource Center’s Technology Accessibility team, housed in the Office of Information Technology (OIT), continues to lead the initiative to provide our technology users, including those with disabilities, a functional and accessible technology experience with our web presence and our instructional and emerging technologies. A major accomplishment this year was the approval of The University of Alabama Web Resources Accessibility Policy, which adopts WCAG 2.0 AA to address the accessibility of public-facing web resources, campus-wide web resources, and web resources needed to conduct core University administrative and academic function, including equally effective alternate access and non-compliance plans. Additional efforts since our last update include:
- Resolving 825 tickets in the HelpSpot customer service/support ticket system.
- Offering 56 workshops and webinars, including offerings on web accessibility; best practices for creating accessible documents, presentations, spreadsheets, emails, social media, and other digital content; Universal Design for Learning; and other accessibility-related topics.
- Captioning and/or transcribing over 7000 minutes of media through UA captioning grants. Captioning grants may be used to caption and/or transcribe UA-owned video and audio that will be shared on public or campus-wide websites.
- Running 2000+ Accessibility Management Platform reports. Accessibility Management Platform (AMP) is a comprehensive accessibility and reporting tool freely available to members of the UA community.
- Hosting Texthelp experts who offered intensive training on literacy support tools freely available to all UA students, faculty and staff: Read&Write, a literacy support solution with tools for reading, writing, research and studying; EquatIO, an application you can use to type, handwrite or speak to create equations, formulas, and other math and chemistry expressions; and Snapverter, an easy to use add-on for Read&Write for Google Chrome and iOS app that transforms papers and files into readable PDF documents.
- Partnering with the College of Continuing Studies to plan and present a cross-campus Invisible Disabilities workshop.
- Hosting the Accessing Higher Ground Virtual Conference.
Additionally, as of May 2019, both our Technology Accessibility Specialists have now earned IAAP Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC) certification. The CPACC credential represents broad, cross-disciplinary conceptual knowledge about 1) disabilities, 2) accessibility and universal design, and 3) accessibility-related standards, laws, and management strategies. We continue to:
- Maintain a campus technology and web site inventory, including technology accessibility status.
- Conduct site audits, sharing evaluation reports with area liaisons who will handle remediation with our assistance.
- Provide technology accessibility policy guidance to stakeholders who select, create, or share digital content.
- Facilitate accurate captioning and or transcription of all public-facing and campus wide media, including the administration of captioning grants and training.
- Work with campus stakeholders and accessibility liaisons to ensure the accessibility of instructional content housed in Blackboard Learn or other enterprise instructional technology tools.
- Manage licensing and support of enterprise assistive technology tools (currently Texthelp and ZoomText).
- Consult with and assist campus liaisons and other stakeholders with all technology accessibility concerns and questions.
Plans for this coming year include the continued implementation of The University of Alabama Web Resources Accessibility Policy, including initial compliance reviews, as well as partnering with the University’s Department of Human Resources to add accessibility-related content to the new UA LMS comprehensive professional development library.