A Texas-Sized Accessibility Presentation for DigitALL Learners

So I’m going to go ahead and get started. Again, welcome everyone to our TxDLA webinar. I am Dr. Rhonda Blackburn. I am the Chief Information Officer for TxDLA, and also the Co-Chair of Professional Development.

And love doing these. I haven’t been able to do them in a while, but I love doing these webinars because I learn something every single time. So that’s amazing. I want to remind everyone that we do have our resources on our website, Learning Knowledge Center, and it has our webinars, podcasts, articles, all kinds of wonderful things from our experts across the field. Starting in November, we are going to take our webinars back to 12 to 1. We thought we would try to shift it a little bit, hopefully getting some other people, but we’re finding that the 12 to 1 is what people are looking for.

And so starting next month, we are going to go back to 12 to 1. Want to remind you about our conference, From the Ground Up: Building Digital Learning for All. It is March 5th through the 7th in person at Embassy Suites in Denton. Our virtual conference is March 31st through April 1st.

This is a Zoom meeting, so we are recording it. And we have the chat available, as you can see, and we do ask everyone to be on mute unless you open it up to with our presenters. So now I would like to refer to Ray and Mary, a Texas-sized accessibility presentation for digital learners. So take it away, and I will stop sharing. See if I can share.

Hi. Ray Rose. This is Texas-Sized Accessibility. Please pay attention to a couple of things. I’m just posting in the chat again the link to these slides.

So you should have no problems on getting them, and I’ll talk a little bit about why I’m posting the link as we get just a little bit further along. How are we doing on participants? I see 21. And so what do we say? Another minute, and then we’ll get started with this? That’ll be fine.

Think of this as a community, folks, and there will be people who are interested in learning more about accessibility, but you may have some commonalities between different people that are here. So, the reason that I was trying to share the slides is pretty simple.

If you have people with a disability, they want to be able to get access to the slides, and looking at them on the screen doesn’t necessarily help them. So, as one of these steps when you’re thinking about accessibility, and you have slides, and you’re presenting to a group, it is always nice to share those slides with the population, with the participants at the beginning.

Okay, so we want to do introductions. We’ll do that in a second, but this is just the general agenda for what we’re planning on doing today. What is accessibility? Why digital accessibility?

How long have you been waiting for– How long have we been waiting for accessible digital materials? What do we mean by accessible digital materials? What are some areas of typical concern for schools? What is WCAG, and how do you know if a product is accessible? And then… Whoops, I can’t do that, can I? It has to stay there. A Q&A.

We’ll hang around after the session to do some things. So accessibility when you’re presenting. Don’t just show the slides and expect people to read them. Read or paraphrase what is on your slide, so that people who have some disability can cope with that. So, Mary, I’m going to ask you to introduce yourself, but the other folks, while we are doing this introduction, introduce yourself in the chat.

If you’ve got specific things, like Boland College is looking for some– Okay, thank you, Mary. Mary’s got the URL for the slides. I can always depend on Mary for help on these things. Mary, would you like to introduce yourself? I would.

So my name is Mary Rice. I’m an associate professor of literacy at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. And I started out working at the Center on Online Learning and Students with Disabilities at the University of Kansas when I was a graduate student. And back then, we were just sort of trying to figure out who was online and why and when. And, honestly, we worked back then with a lot of virtual school programs. Some of them were embedded within public schools, and some of them were charter school programs.

And states were kind of nascent in their policy development. And actually, we supported the first federal guidance, along with Ray Rose, who was on our grant committee support and was working with us, along with us, to basically go through and say that when students are working online, that they still have rights through IDEA.

And then I’ve just come forward from that. So we had a pandemic, maybe you heard of it, and a lot of kids ended up working online, and then some of them wanted to stay afterwards, and then we sort of had some, I think, digital backlash, where a lot of teachers came back in the classrooms and said, “I don’t want to do anything online.” And then there’s been this slow churn of thinking about what technologies look like, and AI then came and kind of knocked us in the knees and presented different sort of accessibility considerations.

There’s Title II now that we’re going to talk a lot about today. And so here we are in a storm. So, okay. So I’ve been doing this for a while longer than Mary. I was part of the first virtual high school, and that was last decade.

Last decade? Last century. Gee, it was that far back. And as part of that, and then subsequently some other things, I was the project director for a Department of Education-funded online virtual teacher professional development program. And we were doing videos and having teachers look at those videos online to help improve their instruction.

And I remember that when we got the grant, the CEO signed a letter saying that we don’t discriminate against civil rights issues. And I know that just about every institution, public institution, colleges, anybody that gets federal money, somewhere along the line, somebody has to sign a statement that says they do not discriminate, and it’s an annual statement.

And I know that people sign that statement and don’t know what it is that they are really saying. But I asked my program director about videos and captioning, and they said, “No, we don’t know anything about that.” I looked around and did some searching, trying to find somebody, and remember, this was in the last century, trying to find somebody who could help me with captioning.

I finally ended up with WGBH Captioning Center, which was a small group at that time. And we got some of our videos captioned, and I was showing them to teachers and saying, “Which of these videos do you understand best, the captioned one or the uncaptioned one?” And you know the answer to it.

I mean, it was captioning. And these were not people who had disabilities, at least not that anybody admitted to, but they found that captioning made their videos more accessible. So that was where I began the journey, and starting doing that, and then learning more and more. Once you start on this trip for accessibility, there’s not an ending. There’s not, well, you’ve learned it all, and you’ve got it.

That just does not happen that way. So some of you are starting this voyage. Some of you, I think you’re experts. You’re probably experts, but there’s always something that you can learn about accessibility. Okay, I’m going to do this one. I like this one. Just so you have an understanding. OCIR is the Office for Civil Rights, Department of Education. They still exist. They may or may not stay within the Department of Education, but they continue to exist, and they do compliance reviews, and within most of their compliance reviews, they make this statement for their operational definition for accessibility.

And it’s, “Those with a disability are able to acquire the same information and engage in the same interactions and within the same timeframe as those without a disability.” So if you’re looking for a definition of accessibility, that’s one that you can play with, which has some legal backing but is not the law statement Mary, you wanna do this next one?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so recently there have been some updates to the 50-ish-year-old laws protecting access to programs and services, and these revisions to the Americans with Disabilities Act have been collectively referred to and known as the Title II Regulation Final Rule.

And it applies to web content, mobile applications, and tools in public institutions such as universities. And originally, they were going to take place in 2026, and then there has been a shift in the date, so now we’re all aiming towards April 24th, 2027. And so this is why we’re talking about digital accessibility in this moment.

People sometimes ask if this is going to stick this time. I don’t know if this date will stick, but I do think that there is a sense that higher education is going to be expected to do this over the long haul because it makes it easier for documents and things like that to be searched using AI programs when things are accessible.

And that is something that right now is wanted by various entities. And so my sense is that even if people aren’t having concerns about making sure that people with disabilities have access, there is an interest in making sure that documents are searchable, so they can find words that they are looking for.

And so it seems that whether the date moves a little bit or not, probably going to happen. And the reality is that there’s been a long history of legislation related to accessibility going back to ’73 with Section 504, the Rehab Act.

1990, Americans with Disability Act, and ADA is the basis for the rule that Mary was just talking about.

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act actually directed federal websites to become more accessible. If you’re saying, “Well, but nobody ever told us anything,” and your president says they didn’t ever hear about this, in 2010 and 2016, the Office for Civil Rights sent out “Dear Colleague” letters to all academic institution leaders based on their listings.

And they got a letter that described information about digital accessibility. Now, you may have changed leadership, but those things are out there, and you can still actually go and find them on the OCR website as long as that OCR website continues to exist. There’s an organization, WCAG. You’re going to see us reference this a bit.

WCAG is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. There is an international group, that’s the WC3, that has been producing guidelines to show things that are accessible. And in 2018, they put out WCAG 2.1. This is relevant because legislation Title II of the ADA references WCAG 2.1. And 2024, WCAG 2.1 AA, there’s the rule that came out 2024.

So this stuff has been ongoing. If you are a private institution and you don’t take federal money, today, you probably don’t have to be completely in compliance. If you are a public institution, meaning you’re part of the state or local governments, you’re covered by that, and you need to be in compliance.

Actually, you should’ve been in compliance way back, but we’ll give you a break for the time being. Mary? Yeah. So when we talk about accessible digital materials, I work with a lot of different states and a lot of different institutions, both in K12 and in higher education, and I also have worked on my own university’s committee for talking about digital accessibility.

And so I’m going to present five things that come up often in these conversations about, particularly for instructional materials, what it’s most useful for instructional folks to know or to think about. And then Ray is going to talk about commonly cited items from OCR, and so that’s the next portion of the presentation.

So the number one is there a video? If so, it needs captions and audio descriptions. So captions are the real-time transcription of words that are being said in the video, and they give information about how things are said, and they give clues about sounds in the background. Audio descriptions, on the other hand, are different. They provide information about what’s in the scene when there’s no words or music.

So, if you get the slides, another reason to give them to you is so you can click on these links later, but there’s an example of a video with captions and audio descriptions. I think it’s from “The Lion King,” so there’s all these things going on at the beginning of “The Lion King” where an audio description is very useful and necessary. And so people who are deaf or have hearing differences use the captions to access the spoken information, and people who are blind or have vision differences use the audio descriptions. And so there’s different groups who benefit from one versus the other.

So the videos have to get captions and audio descriptions where appropriate and necessary. The second one is if there’s images in the class materials, they need alt text. So alt text or alternative text describes an image. The image is embedded within a file. So if you are in an area with strong internet bandwidth, then the alt text is actually the only information when you get when the internet won’t load it.

So even if you are not a person who relies on a screen reader and you’re just in an area of low bandwidth, then alt text is actually a thing that you can benefit from, but we don’t talk about that as much. We probably should. And I’m using this school closure announcement to show you that this is an image that was copied and pasted out and then slapped on. It says, “Closure announcement: all schools are going to be closed on February 20th, 2023 in observance of President’s Day.” And a screen reader cannot read that.

Some AI actually can, but screen reading technology cannot. And so it will not have alt text. The screen reader will not be able to understand that unless you provide alt text for it. And it’s actually a pretty important announcement because you don’t want the people who rely on screen reading technology to access information to not know that school is closed.

And if that’s their only way to get that info, then they’re not going to have it. So it’s better actually to just write, “School is closed,” so that people will know. So got to think about that. And if you’re going to use AI for something like that, then obviously you’re going to want to check it and make sure that it’s right.

You’re going to want to make sure that it’s actually doing it and some of those sorts of things. So that’s number two. Number three, oh, actually, a little bit more about alt text. So thinking about illustrations from an instructional point of view, like the instruction and determining which visual materials to use as instructional decisions should be based on what helps learners understand the context. So if you’re writing an alt text, you should consider why it was used in the first place, because sometimes you don’t need the image at all.

So if we go back and look up at one of the very first slides that talks about why accessibility, it’s that stamp. If that purple stamp, let’s see if Ray can go grab that. If it says revision, revision, that is not a necessary image to the stamp, to the slide. And so even if it has alt text on it, it’s nice, it brings some color, but it’s not necessarily the most educative.

And so it’s important to think about when you’re writing that alt text too, you can put the colors in the image and the arrangements of items, the name of the people, descriptive elements, but it’s not always extremely useful. And good alt text is not overly long either. And so because myself, I am a redheaded person, I’m a redheaded woman right now, and I’m in a red sweater.

And when I am talking about myself, I sometimes mention that because redheaded people have a stereotype of being ornery, and I’m definitely that. And so sometimes that’s relevant and sometimes it is not. And so you have to think about those things when writing alt text. And I’ve taught third graders to write alt text before, and they do a pretty good job.

And also, again, if you’re going to let AI write the alt text, then the AI may not know what the instructional purpose was. Okay, so number three. Whoops. So if it doesn’t have to be a PDF, don’t make it one. This is very hard. So somebody asked a question about PDFs on the file when you registered.

So school uses a lot of files to download and read the syllabus, assignments, instructions, articles, and many of these files are probably in a portable document format. It’s very difficult to make it accessible. That is on purpose. So portable document formats emerged in about the ’90s or so because people started to design things on the internet and then print them. But then we stopped printing stuff and we just left things online, and then you were supposed to be able to turn stuff into a PDF so people couldn’t mess with it.

So guess what? You can’t mess with them very easily. And so with more accessible PDFs, because there are sometimes ways that if you hire a designer or if you have PDFs, Adobe with certain features that you pay for, then sometimes that is helpful. Or if they’re very simply designed PDFs, then that could be easier.

But with more accessible ones, you run your cursor over words and phrases, and it will let you highlight and copy out of it. And so even so, if you’re making or uploading a file and it doesn’t have to, it’s mostly easier to do another file type. And so there’s an article that we link to about PDFs. I think there’s more information about PDFs on the next slide. One of the things that people ask about is, “Oh, how do I just tag a PDF?” So I took a whole course on tagging a PDF.

It was five hours long. I didn’t come out of it with much more knowledge than going into it. And remediating PDFs is extremely time-consuming business. And I actually think that when people have money for accessibility remediation, that’s a really good place to throw it is to, because Ray’s shown me some Grackle Docs companies and some other places where they will remediate a certain amount for you or where you can get people to turn stuff into formats that’s not a PDF anymore and those sorts of things.

And so if you’ve got budgeting money and you’re trying to think about where you want to put it, then I actually think that’s one of the best places that you can put it.

Ray can tell me if he thinks differently. I agree. But otherwise, I think find an HTML version online, change it to a different file format, change the PDF to a non-text or low-text medium, such as a PowerPoint or a podcast. So I’ve done this with some of my teaching materials where if you’re going to use AI, that is actually an interesting use of it, where you have this academic article and you feed it into something that changes it into a PowerPoint or a podcast and give the students that instead.

You have to make sure that it gets it right, just like you have to do with all kinds of stuff with AI. But change the modality of it, change the genre. And then very useful to think about if you are– What’s the stuff that has to be PDFs? And then go from there. So I actually did a review of AI policies for states.

Most of them made PDFs. I don’t think I found any that were accessible. So we’ll see about how things go on the PDFs, but there’s something like two billion of them in use in higher education at any given time in the United States. And I had an article published, took that through the finalization process a couple of weeks ago, and they wanted to put alt text on some of my images, so that seems promising, but I don’t know about how soon people will be able to go back and remediate all of those PDFs that we use, especially in higher ed.

All right, so where are we at now? On number four. So organization mattering. So we went through and we put numbers on all this stuff for you. And whether materials are fully online or you’re going to use an LMS like Canvas to support in-person teaching, then students need organized source materials.

And a lot of instructors, you have older names for students, like stuff to read or assignments, and it makes it harder for students to find work. And so taking the materials and organizing them into weeks or module numbers or something, dates or something like that is incredibly important for thinking about that.

And that is part of WCAG. Sometimes people don’t understand all the pieces and parts that are listed on WCAG, and there’s a lot. There’s like, I don’t know, first time I ever looked at it, there were 72 pages of stuff. And so I’m very much like, I really did take the things that people that come up the very most in these conversations that I’ve had and try and distill these things for you.

And so, all right. What is the next thing? Number five, many programs and applications actually have accessibility checkers. It’s a good idea to use those. They will not find everything, and they are not perfect. But if you see right now, one of the reasons why I think Ray left these slides kind of open rather than pulling up the slides is because on accessibility, it says good to go, which means all of our images have alt text, and all of our things have headings, and all of our slides fit the WCAG requirements for ordering of information on a slide.

And our color contrast also fits the WCAG standard, which it tests for on this. And I know I’ve used things like Canvas and I’ve used Blackboard before, and they will tell you when stuff is needed to be improved, and then you can go in and do it.

So sometimes they do give false positives or false negatives, but you should try it because it will help tremendously. So I think I froze for a second, so I stopped talking. And I think my last one is people asked about suggested remediation priorities.

Here are my suggested remediation priorities. So I think that it’s important for people to consider the materials that individuals with disabilities most desperately need Such as emergency services, and that’s the most important place to start in terms of how are you going to make sure that if class is canceled or if there are active shooters or if there’s things like that, that you’re going to send out digitally, then make sure that all of that stuff is accessible.

The second thing is, in which spaces are the most individuals with disabilities being served or anticipated to be served, and that’s such as your website about accessibility. So that’s where people with disabilities go quite constantly. Or if you have a special education department in your school, work on that.

Put your energy there. If you can’t do multiple things at the same time, those are things to cover first. And then think about the stuff, the courses and the classes, and the items that are required for everyone to use. So if everybody’s got to take Math 110, then you got to work on Math 110. Everybody has to eat lunch, and so at a public school, K-12.

And so then if you can only get a lunch ticket with an online program, then you got to fix that, then that’s got to go high up on the list. And so think about those things. Like I said, if you have to make a triage, then those are the things to think about. And then, most of the time schools have regular updates for various programs and services such as curriculum.

And so if you know that you revise your math schedule every so often, then you can do your accessibility update when you are already going to revise it. But if you only get social studies texts every 10 or 20 years, like my school used to, then maybe you’ll have to plan to do that one sooner. So, to me, those are the most important things to think about. And there are a lot of checklists out there, and some people say other things that are quite a bit more complicated, but I’ve heard a lot of things, I’ve read a lot of things, I’ve listened to a lot of people.

I stand by this as a way to begin thinking about remediation priorities, and then if you end up having other things to think about in your individual context, then great, then that’s a good idea. But I think that this is useful to begin.

All right, and now we will listen to Ray talk about OCR. So before I get there, look, you made a great point about the activities and keeping it simple at this point. Colleague Michael McElroy from Texas Computer Educators Association, did an article a couple of weeks ago about accessibility, and he had so much information, things that you had to do.

I was overwhelmed. I didn’t know what to do, but he had lots of papers and things, articles, checklists, and things. We’ll try to keep it a little bit simple for you today, but here’s the key point, and we did say it earlier. We’re talking about digital accessibility for all digital resources. It’s not just the website, it’s all content.

By the way, Title II ADA includes mobile devices, and they also have to be fully accessible, and that’s going to be a pain. Think about the applications that your institution may have for students to use. Got to be accessible. Mary talked about PDFs. You have a PDF for the student handbooks that are required for all students to have.

If it’s not accessible, you’ve basically provided them with no resource. So what are the most common areas that you see for non-compliance? And I’m going to run through this very quickly. If you’ve got questions about it, ask them at the end. But Mary also just talked about alt text. All images need to be tagged with an alt text, or if they are just pre, they need to be tagged as not important, and it’s just something that a screen reader won’t cover.

We talked about document– This is looking at a series of non-compliance reviews that are OCR and pulling these things together. So alternative text, documents not posted, pay attention to PDFs, lack of captions on all videos, inability to operate video controls using assistance technology.

So one of the tests that we frequently recommend people do is if you’re looking at a website and you want to find out if it fails to be accessible, number one, don’t touch the mouse. You should be able to navigate that website just using your Tab key. If you can’t do it, that website is not accessible. So you have video items on the website. If you’re expecting somebody to be able to select play using the mouse, you’ve got a problem.

And then requiring a mouse to navigate. You should be able to go to your institution’s website, hit Tab, and move through it. Shift + Tab to go backwards. Data tables. Oh, people love to use data tables or tables that are technically data tables to lay out text.

That’s not a good use of a data table. Learn to use the word processor that you’re using. And so this gets to be interesting because some of you said you’re interested in this for training, some of you are interested for personal, trying to find enough information for you to survive with these. Mary referenced this, improper contrast between background and foreground.

How many times have you looked at a website and had trouble reading it? There are rules about color contrast. You need to have those in mind. Oh, one of my favorites, and this I got caught on with the project that I was talking about. One of my programmers put together directions, and he had buttons, a red button for go and a green button for… No, sorry.

Red button for stop, green button for go. And they weren’t labeled. And I get different data on how many people have color blindness, but there is a significant piece of the population that has some form of color blindness. You cannot just use color to differentiate. Use the red arrow and the green circle, so you’ve got two items. But just two objects, circles, stars, doesn’t make any difference, and the only thing that you’re differentiating is color, it’s a no-no.

Then we get into a little bit of technical stuff here. Frame is not titled, and as a screen reader comes along, it’s looking for information. And having things labeled makes it easier for the screen reader. And if you don’t know what a screen reader is, we can talk about that a little bit later. You want to talk about WCAG, Mary?

Sure. So the WCAG is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and they’ve been around for a little while. So they’ve got these four parts of it being perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. And so those are sort of the principles that they operate on. Like I said, those guidelines have been– They’re quite extensive. They’ve been revised a couple of times. Every time they get revised, they get longer. They- Go to the website and you’ll see information …

Go to the website, look them up. Yep. It’s a lot. And I’m not sure that, like I said, I’m not sure that they’re necessarily the purview of everyone that’s involved in instruction. But people who are in leadership should be fairly familiar with them, and then you would be hiring designers That probably would know quite a bit about them.

So I was wondering if it might be useful to, because I think Edward had a question about the back in the alt text, and if you wanted to go to the image, and if you’re able to, and we don’t have to do this right now, we can wait till later, but show under it where the alt text pops up. So I don’t know how many people haven’t ever seen that before, but. But- But we can finish first. I just- PowerPoint and the basic tools that you use, accessibility tools, will ask you on images what you have for an alt text.

And AI does a wonderful job of describing the image, but as Mary said earlier, not necessarily the way you want to use it in the content. So don’t just automatically accept AI descriptions. Think about why. Now, this gets to be interesting when you’re doing training with folks.

Or in the next slide, when we’re talking about… Remember I said all web content needs to be accessible? If you are dealing with third-party vendors, you’re dealing with educational folks, educational publishers that want to provide you with materials, have some fun with them.

Start off, “So what do you know about WCAG?” And see if they understand what you’re talking about. If you get a blank stare at that point, back up very carefully, don’t deal with them. The WCAG piece, I had a meeting a couple of weeks ago with a company where they’re starting to produce, this is a project, and they’re producing some materials.

And so I met with the project director, and I said, “So what do you know about WCAG?” And he was able to cite WCAG and what the term meant, and then I said, “What about a VPAT or an ACR?” He said, “We’ve got a VPAT, and we’re not 100% complete on it, but we’ve got that, and we’ve got an ACR.” That made me feel good about that project. When I go to conferences, I will walk around and talk with the vendors, and I will use those same terms with them.

And if they don’t know what the terms are, I said you don’t want to have to deal with them. Your institution is required to review those materials before purchase. If you purchase materials that are not in compliance, that affects you at the institution. It does not affect the vendors. The laws apply to educational institutions and their things.

So VPAT is a voluntary product accessibility. Voluntary means that the company produced it on their own, and it’s something that they just decided to say. That gets used for the ACR, the Accessibility Conformance Report, which gives you a sense of how accessible that material is. You need to be asking questions of your vendors. Think about all of your faculty that are making selections for apps for their classrooms.

They need to check those. It’s going to be hard. You know, we made it most of the way through. And I actually put the ACR for Gmail because I thought that would be something a lot of us would be familiar with as an example that you can go through and look and see what those things actually look like. So, it’ll tell you certain interesting things about that.

But usually they can provide them to you, but also a lot of times you can look up a version, and you can see what most recent version is available online, too. For a lot of very popular stuff, such as Canvas, such as Nearpod, so if you work in K12 and use that. Such as quite a lot of- So on our paper, there are some links for just some resources.

There’s an article that I did, short publication that I wrote. Then OCR has short videos. OCR still exists, I told you. They have short videos that are on a variety of topics you can use. There’s another paper that I think Mary and I did, “Connecting Accessibility, Third-Party Curriculum, and Student Success,” and “Accessibility and AI.” So there are some resources out there.

Again, you need the link to get there. And then free accessibility checkers. Mary talked about using the products that are built into the tools that you’re using. I use the first one.

WAVE is my favorite, and I’ll tell you how I use it. I look at a website, and I do this in town here. I look at the town website, look at the website, and I run WAVE on it. WAVE says they’re about 30% to 40% accurate. They just miss things. It’s not that they cite things that are not. But if I get a description that says, a report that says there are problems on the page, then I can turn around and just take a screenshot of that and send it to the organization, the institution, the whoever is relevant to this and say, “Your stuff isn’t accessible.

Here. It’s not just me saying it. Here’s a report that says it’s not accessible.” And that’s a way that I use the tool a lot, and I have fun with it. And Mary said she’s honorary. I’m the troublemaker. She’s nice. Siteimprove is another one that I use.

These are commercial products, provide for a cost. They can do a full evaluation of your website. Whether you want to go there or not remains to be seen, but there are tools out there that can give you some information on things, and you have to decide what it is that you’re after. This is our contact information. Rhonda, how are we doing on time?

Good. It’s almost 5:20, so we have 10 minutes left before the open session. Mm-hmm. We do have a question from… Oh, looks like Mary answered it. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, because it’s not that you can’t use a particular color, it’s when you color code things to make meaning.

Because like a person with color blindness, then when you say, “Click on this red button,” in order to do something, and they don’t know which button that is the red button. Or this happens a lot when people are trying to teach reading, and they kind of color code the blending sounds. So you’re trying to teach the phonemic awareness, and then the sounds are all color-coded.

When you’re trying to teach kids how to make graphophonic connections, then that’s the kind of stuff you want to avoid. So in terms of color contrast, it just has to be dark enough because even if the student experiences red as more of a brown, as long as they can see it in order to make a letter, then that’s not a problem. I have a couple of apps, or I’ve had a couple of apps on my phone that are color blindness checkers.

What they will show you what the image is, use a camera, what the image looks like for somebody with a specific type of color blindness. The last one that I had had four different types of color blindness and showed the differences between them. So if you really want to see that, take a look at the color blindness checkers that are available for your phone. I had some other stuff I was going to mention.

Picking a PDF and converting it. If you have a friendly AI, and I use Chat for this, and I actually asked Chat earlier today about that. Let me see if I can find that. Chat says, “Yes, I can help convert an image only or scan PDF to a more accessible document.” And- Yeah.

AIs like to, LLMs like to tell you, “Yes, I can do this,” and you’ll say, “Oh, can you tag this document?” And it will say yes, and then sometimes it said it did, and it did not. Yep. So it is actually kind of important too. If you’re going to do stuff like that, then you have to test it afterwards and make sure that- That’s right …

it actually did what it said it was going to do. Always don’t trust, verify. Oh, yeah. Edward wants to see the conversion of a document from PDF to Word. Okay. Wait a minute. He wants to see, could I convert a PDF text document to MS Word? If it’s a PDF text document, it’s easy because it’s just using, a PDF tool, or actually Microsoft Word will read a PDF and give it to you in Word as long as it is an OCR PDF.

If it is a visual image, you’re not going to get it done with any of these tools. You’re going to have to go to a converter, and that’s either an AI converter, there are a variety of them, and there are some commercial ones too.

But it’s not going to take a PDF that’s a graphic and convert it. Word won’t do that. There’s not an easy way to do it. This is where Chat GPT says it can do it, and it can. And as Mary said, be careful, but it is there to do that. If you open a PDF document, then most of the time, depending on what kind you have, it’s just called export a PDF, and if you hit that button, it’s usually green.

If you hit export a PDF, and then you can choose to make it Word or PowerPoint or Excel or some other image format and then have it convert to a Word document, then it will come up as a Word document for you. So the problem is, is if that document has an image in it, then it still won’t be accessible just because of that.

You’ll still have to go add that alt text to that image. I’m thinking right now, I’m looking at a document that has a logo for a educational organization on it, and it would bring all of that stuff into Word, but then I still just have to go through and make sure that the headings are marked as headings- Yep … because it won’t do that for me, and then also make sure that I put the alt text in it.

Another thing that is very important to understand is that I have spent a lot of time making Word documents accessible, and then when I put them in as a PDF, it doesn’t convert any of that over. So I will put alt text behind all of my images, and I will make sure that all of my headings are marked as headings in Word and do all of those things that I’m supposed to do in order to make sure that document is accessible.

But as soon as I turn it into a PDF, none of that matters anymore. I still would have to go through and retag it and re-add the alt text. And so that is the level of proprietariness that those companies have, and that is the level of non-interoperability that they have ensured in order to make things inconvenient for the rest of us.

And as far as I know, there’s no plan to do that. So here the question says, “If the image is not visible, can you put an alt text image?” So I’m not sure what that question is. Edward, you want to open up your mic and just- So are you talking about decorative images?

Yes, I’m talking about a decorative image or a picture. So- If the picture isn’t crucial for understanding the reading, could you just put in the alt text, “The image is not important”? Rather than doing that, because a screen reader would get to it and say, “Image, image not important,” you tag it as a decorative image, and then the screen reader just jumps over it and doesn’t care.

Okay. Good. Yep. By the way, if you’re not familiar with Zoom, if you want to get a copy of everything that’s in chat, you can save that before we close and get that as a file on your computer. And you may or may not have been tracking transcript.

I generally run transcripts with it as well as captions. But you can save the transcript so that you can have a transcript of this. It doesn’t give you the pretty pictures, but it will be another way to capture what information we’ve tried to convey here. Yeah. But I can’t see my clock. How are we doing?

Yeah. So we probably need to go ahead and close out this part of it. Yep. And then we can start the open part. Are you going to do a commercial? Yes, please. Do you want me to stop my sharing? Please. Never stop sharing, Ray. So I definitely want to thank both Ray and Mary for such important information.

It’s great to always be reminded. There’s a lot of things and it’s like, “Yeah, I remember that.” And then there’s others that’s like, “Oh, yes, we need to do that now.” And so thank you all so much for all that information. If you are interested in learning more, TxDLA does have a digital accessibility certificate. These are the dates, January 4th through February 8th, March 23rd through April 27th, June 14th through July 19th, and September 20th through October 25th.

I believe the first two are already on our website to sign up for. If your institution… The micro courses we put together for faculty, please reach Lisa at txdla.org. Coming up next month, we have Brad Denison. He’s going to talk about the AI didn’t decide to hack anything, understanding what AI actually does.

Again, we’re moving our webinars back to 12 to 1, so we’d love to see you there on November 11th. Remember that we post all of these wonderful webinars and podcasts and articles that we put together on our Digital Learning Knowledge Center. And don’t forget about our conference, March 5th through the 7th at Embassy Suites in Denton, and our virtual is March 31st through April 1st.

It’s From the Ground Up, Building Digital Learning for All. Could not do any of this without our amazing sponsors, all the way from our Diamond Partners of Blackboard and D2L, and our Platinum PartnerBlock, and our Gold, Silver, Bronze and Vendors. If you are not part of TXDLA, we would love for you to join us. It’s only $50, and you can go to txdla.org/membership. And you can also follow us not only on our website but on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

So that was my little commercial for you. Good. And so now we are going into our last 30 minutes, which is about asking questions. If you have any questions you want to ask Mary and Ray, or anything else that you would like to talk about, we would love to sit and chat. So take your computer off mute.

If you want to ask a question, you can do it orally. Nobody has questions yet? Come on, guys. Oh, just for fun, Texas public colleges and universities have a state law too, that requires you to be fully accessible. So it’s state and federal issue on both sides.

And actually, the Texas law requires higher ed institutions, that meaning not community colleges, but four-year institutions, are supposed to have a person assigned as a digital accessibility specialist who reviews materials. So if you are at your institution, you are a public higher ed institution, you should know who that person is, if it’s not you, and enlist their support.

They are probably the person who is reviewing the products that your institution wants to purchase. At least those are the folks that I’ve been talking with mostly. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And we’ve also talked about, Ray and I have, about implications and potentially as Texas revises requirements for bachelor’s degrees to make them shorter and to do more three-year programs, and how it’ll cause a need for a lot of materials to be revised anyway.

And also for thinking about what kinds of materials for our students are going to be necessary in order to help them actually get through programs in that amount of time.

So because actually some programs, even though they’re supposed to be four years, may be more like five. Yeah. I know we have that problem, so… So I just posted something. I got it hung up because I tried to put too much text in it. But at the end, there is a link that is to LF Legal, and that’s Lainey Feingold, and she is a lawyer that is out in the field, and she is an accessibility specialist.

Lainey has a website, and on the website, she does legal updates. So if you’re looking to find out what the latest legal situations are, what have been complaints, you can see those on LF Legal.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Because I know with math particularly, then sometimes there’s big questions about, as you try to make the math work more accessible, then you actually end up giving away the problem and the solution. Yeah. And so then it can become a trick when you’re trying to write alt text and do other kinds of support.

And at my institution, there’s also been a lot of rethinking about things like music. Yes. We had a Texas institution that ran into trouble with their music program. And so that’s been something to think about. And then we also have thought a lot about multilingualism and translation, and even though it’s not part of WCAG to make things available in other languages, but when people are speaking other languages, then sometimes it does get translated.

And so then that stuff has to be accessible, and then what are the implications there? There’s also a lot of map making, map explaining sorts of things that have come up at my place.

And so I just find that there is an endless source, an endless fountain of very interesting things. So there was a person that was trying to teach a class where they wanted to use woodcuts. So like medieval back, they cut into the wood, and there was woodcuts. And so then they were trying to figure out how you’d write very extensive alt text for that.

And so because a lot of people at my institution initially considered that maybe they would just have to stop using stuff at all, and we were trying to get them to not think that way as much as possible, but instead, what resources do you need in order to keep using the things that you think are the most important?

Now, if you’re looking over a curriculum or you’re looking over services and things, and you actually decide, “You know what? We probably don’t need to have the students engage with a 500-page PDF because we are really only using two pages of it, or it’s very old anyway,” or something like that, then those are probably really good instructional decisions to make. But if teachers, instructors are deciding not to use things just because they’re discouraged, then that’s kind of not what we want.

And so those are the kinds of things that I think people need the most support on, is when they’re actually trying to use things that they think are instructionally valuable, and they just need a bit of time to think through how to make them accessible. So I see some comments coming through talking about there’s so much information on WCAG.

Is there a place to find a summarized version or a checklist? I actually started to make one myself because I thought, “Oh, I’m just going to distill it. I’m just going to boil it down.” And then I got it down from 75 pages to, I don’t know, 30 or 40, and then I’m like, “This is not really helpful because it’s still incredibly long.” WCAG website has guides that are small and concise.

Yep. But if you just go to the actual WCAG website and just look at the guides that they have- Yeah … that’s probably the best way to get the most concise information, and it will be the most updated. The other place that I send people to is WebAIM. WebAIM is a nonprofit. They have been around for a bunch of years, and WAVE, the accessibility checker that I mentioned, is one of their tools.

They have guides for WCAG, and it’s webaim.org, and if you haven’t been looking at chat, I’ve been throwing some other stuff in chat, so you might want to remember, save chat before you go. Get whatever’s there. Mm-hmm. And just as a point, one of the things about Zoom is that chat only picks up when you’ve been there. So you don’t get whatever has happened before you logged on.

So just keep that in mind in the future when you’re wanting to get information, save information in chat. The nice thing is the transcript keeps the whole thing. So you can go backwards. Yeah. And then I’m an advisory board member for the Encatena Project, which is about supporting state and local agencies in delivering timely accessible digital materials. And they do more thinking about specifically K-12, but they’ve created actually a lot of accessible content and a document starter kit, and they have some really good- …

modules to teach some basics and things like that as well. And so if you are interested in checking that out and seeing if that happens to be useful to you, then- Mary, could you drop in the URL for the PowerPoint again, please?

Brenda’s asking about will it be shared with the recording. No, the recording is separate from this, sorry. But- Yeah, I’ll drop that link in again for the PowerPoint for this. Lisa, can you include that as a separate link on when you send the recording out? Got Lisa by surprise here. Nope, can’t get that answer there.

Okay. There’s the full link and not the thing. There’s the full link. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. What else? It’s tough when you’ve got a group of people. We had over 100 people sign up for this, and we looked at the big items that people were concerned about and tried to cover as much as we could in as little time as we have, but starting off from the very simple to the more complex.

And as I said at the beginning, you’ll discover as you get into this, if you’ve been doing it for a while, you start being more aware of the accessibility issues. Looking at curb cuts, looking at the bathrooms in your institution to see if they’re accessible, thinking about door openings, thinking about ramps.

There’s a whole lot of stuff that is not directly digitally accessibility issues, but I also bet that your institution has display screens around providing information. And how does somebody with a disability, with a visual disability, get that information? So there’s a lot of stuff going on. Meta has glasses, you may have seen the ads, and they have cameras built in, and there’s some questions about that stuff.

But in the best sense, there are people who are visually impaired who can use the Meta glasses and help to get navigation around. And you don’t have to have Meta glasses, you can get that on a phone, on a cellphone as well. So there are tools out there, but you’ll become more aware of these things as you get more involved with accessibility. Yeah. There’s a question from Janelle about AI and accessible outputs, so any assistance with AI in helping with remediation and creation of new course materials.

So you can do some things in terms of prompting AI in order to make things more accessible. I think the thing that AI is the best at right now is in generating captions and things like that, but that’s actually a thing that has been in use for the longest period of time.

You still have to go and look at those captions and make sure that they are correct, because they’ll mess up people’s names every once in a while, and- If there’s an accent, it gets to be hard for them. Yeah. Some of them are more adaptive than others, so they can get used to your voice and your speech manner, and then adjust to that. But like we said before, that AI is getting better at writing accurate-ish alternative text for images.

It likes to go long on it, and it likes to be pretty descriptive about the image itself. But what you have to do is then go behind it and make sure that it’s attending to the instructional purpose by which you decided to include the image in the first place, because it generally doesn’t know that.

And again, you can prompt for that, and it’ll do a better job. But you’ve got to guide it. In terms of saying, “Here’s my course materials, make these accessible,” it’s not going to do that. No. So like you- There are companies that will do it if you pay them lots of money. Yeah. And if you have money to throw at these things, then there’s ways to do that.

I actually did an autoethnography of myself revising a course for accessibility, and it was one that I hadn’t taught in a while, and I already had some things done because I care about that even before it was required, but it took me 100 hours to do. Yeah. And so I foresee this as being a significant point of conversation over instructor labor, and it’s something that I hope leaders will plan for and think about a little bit.

There’s sort of a advisory or a consultancy class that’s rising up around these issues regarding accessibility and the use of AI and compliance and things like that. And some of those people, I think, are more knowledgeable than others. Like Ray and I know some people that have legal backgrounds and that have worked at OCR and that have done some good work with various entities and agencies.

And then there’s other people that I’m not sure that I would hire or recommend to folks. But there is a bunch of people that are like, “Please give me your educational dollars,” and they promise to make accessibility go away. But I don’t know if you buy your way into accessibility. I think you have to cooperate and collaborate your way to accessibility.

So one of the groups that we have spent a little bit with is Quality Logic, and I’m not trying to sell Quality Logic, except that they have been willing to do an online Zoom session for institutions to do a demonstration of screen readers. And so if you are looking to have faculty understand the screen reader, they will look at your website, the institution’s website, a couple pages, with a screen reader person who knows it.

I used to have a screen reader. I didn’t use it. I couldn’t figure it out. You need to have somebody who lives with a screen reader to be able to do a good assessment of what the website looks like. But Quality Logic will help you with that. So that’s a slight commercial. They’re not going to try to sell you something out of that, but they will have your name, and they’ll come back at you.

The other thing, though, there are some vendors out there that will say, “We can provide an overlay for your website.” And what they do is tweak a little bit on the front end, and then when you go in with one of the web tools that I talked about, it won’t do anything on the website. Some overlays are very dangerous. There have been web cases, there have been court cases where people using an overlay have been cited for non-compliance.

They have then subsequently sued the overlay company. But Lainey Feingold, again, I mentioned her earlier, she has case law on overlay companies. And the general recommendation is if somebody’s offering to do an overlay for you, turn around, walk away. Yeah. And going back to the screen reader issue, I was working with K12 students a lot last year, and when the students couldn’t successfully use the screen readers, they would blame the screen reader.

They’d say, “Oh, the screen reader doesn’t work.” Yeah. And they would get upset. And then I would come to them and I would say, “No. It’s because the site isn’t designed to be compatible with the screen reader, and that’s a different problem.” And so they’re helping people understand who they’re supposed to complain at, who they’re supposed to ban at, and then where they’re supposed to go complain is actually a pretty important thing.

Because they were just very frustrated, like, “Well, none of these screen readers work.” And no, this site is a problem. User, yeah. This site has not been designed to allow a screen reader to read it.

And then, go complain. When you can go complain. And that’s been one of my things all along, remember, as an ornery redhead, is that you’ve got to be able to figure out who you’re supposed to complain to. Yeah. And that’s one of my big problems in the last few years is that increasingly our places to complain to have been disappearing. And so if you really want to do something for people, too, in a leadership space, is that make a complaint department, right?

Make an avenue for people when they have questions or when they have accessibility issues that there’s somebody that they can ask or somewhere to go to. I just posted NVDA. It is a free screen reader. If you really want to torture yourself, try to use it.

I used to have it, I’d mentioned earlier, because I was trying to learn how to do some things, and then talking with somebody from OCR who said that they don’t use any of those tools to look at and check how accessible things are. They have somebody who is a screen reader user, who loves screen reader, to do the checks. So as you’re developing resources to look at websites, to look at webpages to see if they’re accessible, if you can find somebody in your institution who is a screen reader, use them.

Have them show faculty what their pages look like with a screen reader, and have the screen reader describe the problems that they’re having, and that could be a good professional development situation for you. And you don’t have to talk a whole lot about the accessibility issues if faculty can see that students would have trouble with it.

And the ultimate question that we’ve been playing with a bit is, if you don’t want to deal with accessibility, who is it that you don’t want to educate? Mm-hmm. Because you’re cutting out somebody if you’re not going to do the accessibility piece. I think we’re up to time. Rhonda, are we out of time here?

Yeah, I think we are coming up to the very end, but this has been great. I love the conversation and the various information that people have shared. So, I think we can definitely wrap it up. Thank you, Ray and Mary. I don’t know if y’all have a few words y’all would like to wrap up with. Well, I’m a complaints department, so. A few words, Ray. A few words. Yeah, if you have questions, we’ve given you our email addresses.

You can ask questions there. Mm-hmm. Make a suggestion to TXDLA if you want more of these things. Mm-hmm. Because Rhonda’s always looking for new topics as part of the professional development. Yeah, we did a very wide overview today, but if there is something more specific that we- Yeah, we could do a three-hour gig.

Yeah. And we can hone in on something like alt text or AI-supported accessibility or something like that. Just let us know, and I always love hearing from people. And Ray and I, we’ve been working together now for what, 10 years, and we’re an endless source of magic and fun.

Yeah. So Ray’s been a great person to have in my life, so. I tend to be the heavy end. Mm-hmm. Mary does the instructional stuff, and I don’t do instructional stuff anymore, so it’s a good combination. I will do the legal side. And just one quick thing. I used to be a civil rights specialist and did compliance monitoring in Massachusetts for State Department of Education. One of the things that I always discovered, or I discovered and then used always, was that if you’re looking at an institution, you want to do a review, and they miss the basic legal requirements, you can expect that there is all sorts of problems.

And if they’ve taken care of the basics, then they might be a little bit better. You and your institution should know who your 504 coordinator is. That should be public information. That should be updated annually.

You should know how to contact them. If that is not on your website, you’ve got a compliance problem beginning right there. Well, thank you all so much. Thank you. And thank you all for joining us and sticking around and thank you all so much. Have a great day. Bye.