2022 Accessibility Initiative Update

2022 Accessibility Initiative Update

• December 16th, 2022
• in UA11y News

Dear colleagues and allies,  

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.