7 Questions on Engaging Faculty in Digital Accessibility
Keown: As a particular example, when we first started going into this realm, people weren't used to using alt text for images and having to explain it so that a JAWS or a screen reader could tell a blind person that hey, this is a picture of a lake.
Roberson: One mistake that we noticed with the alt text was that at first people thought they had to write a long paragraph explaining an image. We had to let them know that no, you don't have to write every single thing about an image in detail. Just write what is important — what information you want people to gain from the image. It can be short and sweet. It doesn't have to be a paragraph or two. Then again, you have the ability to mark images as "decorative," and I used to have to go in hard on that with people — do not mark every image as decorative. You have to put a description on those important images.
Keown: We encourage the faculty to think, why do you even have that image there? If it's needed for instructional purposes, then that's great. And every now and then we do like for stuff to look pretty. But students nowadays want stuff streamlined, they want it simple, they want to be able to look at it on their phones. So we just try to encourage faculty to create that best learning environment that's not going to frustrate the students.
CT: How you engage faculty in accessibility training? Is it geared more toward building awareness, enforcing policies, or probably a little bit of both?
Keown: When we started this five or six years ago, we front-loaded a lot of this stuff. We wanted to prove to faculty the benefit of ensuring that their classroom was accessible, their virtual space was accessible. But we also showed them the requirements. This isn't just something that we made up; this is something that has standards that are out there, that have to be met. We wanted to ensure that they understood the importance of it, and so we stressed that from the get-go. That gave us a great foundation to build on.
Roberson: We have provided lots and lots of training for faculty in the form of webinars, tutorials, office hours, workshops, handouts — anything you can name, just to get the resources out there. A few years back, we also did Universal Design for Learning workshops with Blackboard (now Anthology), where the trainer would visit some of our colleges to conduct sessions. And we're constantly building awareness of accessibility with the help of Anthology Ally. Their Fix Your Content Day event has helped us a lot to bring awareness and enthusiasm to accessibility. That event is a very big day for our colleges, so we look forward to it every year.
From the time they send out the notification of when Fix Your Content Day is going to be, I start promoting it heavily. I do marketing materials for it, push it out there, let faculty know it's coming, get them ready. I set up different trainings and webinars for faculty to attend ahead of the event so that they understand what we're doing on that day. I'm also in constant contact with our Blackboard administrators at our colleges about what's going on. I go through each college's Ally report, see what their accessibility scores currently are and what their top issues are, and then send those to them so they know where they stand on Fix Your Content Day and can get their strategies together to tackle those issues. So a lot of planning goes into to Fix Your Content Day, but the colleges are always excited. They're always ready to go. And we just look to dominate that leaderboard every year.
CT: Is it hard to get people to change their practices for the long term, and rethink the way they're doing things to make them more accessible?
Roberson: In the beginning, we did get a little pushback from faculty because of the time it would take to make all of their digital files accessible. But we try to push the fact that once they get it done, then moving forward, we can just be proactive in making the files accessible as they are created. It just takes a lot of encouraging and getting them to understand that it's not hard — it can be done very quickly. We tell them, okay, tackle these easy fixes first — put your alt text in there. Once they fix those and see those files drop off of their accessibility report, then they're like, okay, this isn't that bad — I can get through this.