UAD1: Web Accessibility: How Higher Education is Responding to the Need

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You are listening to one in a series of presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference in Springfield, Missouri.

Terry Thompson: It is 8:30 according to my watch, and they did say at the Welcome that we needed to get started on time. So, I'll go ahead and do that. You all here for Web Accessibility, I take it? How is Higher Education Responding to the Need--that's the question we want to explore today.�

And I'm Terry Thompson. I'm with the University of Washington, where my focus is Technology Accessibility. I work within the central IT group. And I'll talk a little bit later about how we address IT accessibility and how my position, and how my department, and how other people on campus work toward ensuring Web accessibility and IT accessibility in general.

Before we get there, though, I want to toss some numbers out for you to consider. If I were to say 600 million, what do you think I'm referring to? Any guesses?

Okay, that's a good guess. Population of the United States. Any others? [Laughter] I didn't hear that political comment, but... the better for George Bush. Both of those may be accurate. It's also the number of people with disabilities in the world. Ten percent of the world population, rough estimate according to the World Health Organization.�

What about 52.2 million? This is actually in your handout. For another session--I just added the slide this morning--the session later on Internet Evolution Through the Eyes of a Deaf User and Web Professional has this statistic. 52.2 million people with disabilities in the United States.

What about one million? That number, accessible web pages. Anybody think that's high or low? Probably. Actually, the number of college students with disabilities in the United States.

Do you all know how many college students you have on your campuses with disabilities? We at the University of Washington, I kind of lost track over the last couple of years, but in the upper hundreds, somewhere around 800 students who have registered with the Disability Services Office as having disability and that's a pretty common number at major research institutions. And I've heard a lot of numbers up in the thousands.�

So, yeah, we might not see people with disabilities everyday but they're out there and they have needs for accessing the curriculum and the administrative websites and so forth that we develop.

3,025? The number of complaints of disability-related discrimination filed with the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights. OCR is the group that sort of acts in an enforcement capacity. It has people with disabilities, you know, feel they've been discriminated against.�

These aren't all related to inaccessible Web or inaccessible technology, but a large number of them are. And so, that's something to consider. There is that threat. But I'd like to think that there are lots of other good reasons to develop accessible websites. It just makes good sense. We don't have to be concerned of litigation in order to do that.

One of the other things that I'd like to look at over the last couple of years is this statistic: millions and millions. Any idea what I'm talking about?

Inaccessible web pages? That probably is true. Any other guesses? Nobody says hamburgers sold at McDonald's? I guess that's in the billions now, right?�

iPhones sold. I actually tried to get an actual statistic and on the Web I found everything from 14 million to 45 million. Plus, there are millions unaccounted for. According to AT&T, all these iPhones that are being sold and AT&T, it has not seen all these users, so...

But this is related to accessibility in a sense that--have you all seen the iPhone developer guidelines that Apple published? They have a set of guidelines for how to develop web pages that work well on an iPhone, and a lot of the techniques that they're recommending--standards-based design and so forth--coincide with accessible design. 

So the idea is to develop websites that work for everyone regardless of whether you're using assistive technologies, whether they have unique configuration needs, regardless of what browser they're using, regardless of whether they're using a mobile device. Develop websites that work for everyone.

We want to remove barriers. This is a pretty significant barrier here. Looking at the steps to government-building, how are we going to get up those steps if we're sitting at the bottom in a wheelchair or have another mobility impairment? How are we going to get on this curb if there are no curb cuts and we're a wheelchair user? How are we going to open this, what seems to be a very heavy door that probably doesn't have an automatic door opener?

And how are we going to access a website which, like this one, this is left over from another conference presentation that I did with IRMA, the Information Resources Management Association, as a Higher Ed website, but it's created entirely with graphics, so we have a banner that's a graphic and then we have all the navigational menu items that are graphics. And if there's no alternate text there, then somebody who's using the screen reader is not going to have access to that, right?

So if we turn off the images in our browser, then we see essentially what a blind person is going to hear. So when they go to this page, they hear either nothing or the screen reader, depending on how it's configured, may read the path and file name for each one of these images, which is a very cumbersome experience.

So there's no access whatsoever for this site. That's every bit as big a barrier, even perhaps more of a barrier than all those steps leading up to the government-building.

What about video? How many of you are putting videos up on your websites? What happens if a person isn't able to hear the video? How do we make that accessible? Okay. How many of you are adding captions to your videos? It's good to see the hands up.�

This is the president of the University of Washington, President Emmert, and he actually does have closed captions on his videos. He does a monthly video address to the campus community, and from the very first of those, those were captioned, so that was good to see.

This is some text that I lifted from a JAVA tutorial. I actually found this on a higher education website. So there are three different levels to this tutorial code of byte colors. You have your green text, your yellow text and your red text. And then you read whichever color of text is most appropriate to your needs.

So, who's going to find this to be a barrier? Yeah, somebody who can't perceive the difference between green and red or any of the colors there. Somebody that's using a monochrome display. Somebody that's using inaudible output system, a screen reader. They're not going to be able to tell the difference in that text.

Here we have a page that actually is coded pretty well. This, again, is left over from another conference presentation. We've got pretty good heading structure, which is important--I'll talk about that in a minute. But one of the most important things you can do with having an accessible Web design is be sure that your headings basically form an outline. And so a person can very easily--with a screen reader you can navigate through the page through the HTML headings.

They also have a few images on the page and they all have alternate text, so that's accessible. 

The one problem, though, if you enlarge this with a Control-plus in your Window's browser, Apple-plus in Mac browsers, then it starts to fall apart, at least in Firefox. You can see over here in the menu, things are starting to overlap a little bit. If you do Control-plus another time, then it really becomes unreadable. The containers don't expand to accommodate the text. And part of this is actually Firefox's fault because of the zoom algorithm that they used up for Version 2. In Version 3 they've improved upon that. But anybody that's using Firefox 2, a lot of pages fall apart when you enlarge them. So that's yet another barrier.

This is the University of Washington homepage. Like probably a lot of the pages that you all have worked with, we have flyout menus. So, you point to one of the main four menu items and then you get another menu item that pops up. Any idea what the problem with that could be? Who could that present a barrier to?

OK, somebody that's not using a mouse. This is very mouse-dependent. So if somebody has a physical disability and they're not able to manipulate a mouse, they're navigating maybe with a mouth stick or with a head stick in using the keyboard exclusively, then they're probably hitting the tab key to move through the page--what happens when they tab to these links?�

Maybe they pop up, but in a lot of these dynamic menu systems, they don't pop up. And if you're using a handheld where you're probably navigating with a stylist, what's the stylist's equivalent to hovering? There really isn't any. And so you expect to click on these menu items, and then you expect that to take you somewhere where you can access these sub-menus.�

And that actually does happen with the U-Dub page. The work around is that the four main menu items are populated with actual links that go to actual pages where the sub-menu items can be accessed.

Here we have a CAPTCHA. Anybody know what it says? [Laughter] Who's this an accessibility problem for? Everyone! So it's equal. We're not discriminating. It's inaccessible to everybody. But particularly to somebody who's using a screen reader, there's no alternate text on the captcha., so that's going to be a problem unless perhaps you provide an audible alternative, which some of the major sites do.

But you also are going to think about somebody with a learning disability such as dyslexia, where already the letters are sort of jumping around on the page to begin with, and you throw something like this in there and expect them to be able to read it, then that really becomes pretty daunting.

Plus--you see the news just a few days ago that they've actually... Google, the captcha. was cracked, so the hackers and spammers are already finding ways to get through this.�

So the question is, given that need, the need to develop accessible websites, the title of the presentation is How are we Responding to the Need in Higher Education? And so we want to address that. How are we responding to that need?�

And there are two ways to look at that. One is to actually look at outcomes. Are there millions of accessible web pages or are there millions and millions of inaccessible web pages? So, look at some higher education web pages and measure whether or not we're doing a good job.

And then, also, it's sort of a different definition of how--how are we approaching ensuring that web pages on our campuses are accessible? What is our method for doing that? Policies, procedures and promising practices? So we're going to look at both those angles in order to answer this question.

First of all, measuring outcome. The number of research projects that have taken place, particularly over the last couple of years, that looks specifically at web page accessibility and trying to measure that in a broad sense. And before I get into those, I want to give you just a little bit of background, because each of those studies uses some measure of Web accessibility. And kind of the de facto standard for accessibility over the years has become the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 from the W3C. Are you all familiar with these? How many are not familiar with the WCAG?

Nobody's brave enough to... [Laughter] Essentially--and this has been around, they started working on this in the early '90s and finally finished it as an official W3C recommendation in 1999. And there are 14 broad guidelines. Each of those has a Priority. Each of those has several checkpoints that define it very specifically, and then each of those checkpoints has a Priority assigned to it, either 1, 2, or 3 depending on severity.�

Priority 1 are the things that if you don't do those, if you don't meet those checkpoints, then there's some group that's going to be completely unable to access your website. It's going to be impossible for them to access the content.

Section 508 is Federal Law. It requires accessibility of federal agencies, websites and electronic and information technology as a whole. And the standards that were developed as a result of 508 being passed specifically define what technology accessibility is from the legal standpoint.

And that includes then the Web. The Web is one of six categories. The Access Board, which is a federal agency that developed the Section 508 standards, already have something to work with. They have the W3C's WCAG, and so they looked at that and they were sort of charged with meeting to come up with something that was enforceable, since this was federal law, and that was realistically attainable by federal Web developers. And so what they came up with was the standards that were sort of based on Priority 1, WCAG checkpoints.�

So, Priority 2 and Priority 3 were sort of set aside, the language was modified a little bit, and as a result we have 16 standards. But they really are minimum standards, since the Priority 2 and Priority 3 issues are not dealt with at all. So it's possible to have a Section 508-compliant website, but that still excludes some people or makes usability problematic for people with disabilities because of the fact there are all these other issues not addressed.

So with that background, I just touched upon some of the studies. And actually on my website--I will give you the URL at the end--I've got actual references for all of these. So if you want to actually read the studies, then that information is available.

First of all, Kay Lewis at the University of Texas at Austin did a study on a student Web accessibility project where students asked for volunteers from the UT campus, anybody that wanted a sort of face-to-face Web accessibility evaluation. And this panel of students who'd been trained in Web accessibility were able to provide that service.

And then they documented what they found with each of these sites. They ended up working with 99 self-referring websites. Twelve of those met the Section 508 standard. So, clearly, there are a lot that did not.�

And at least 25 of the sites were developed using Flash. And those either were in the Flash pre-conference workshop yesterday. There's quite a bit of talk about accessibility of Flash. And there are techniques for developing accessible Flash, but what they found was that those accessible techniques were not being implemented. So a lot of Flash developers are unaware of how to make accessible Flash animations. Or they're just not implementing that for whatever reason.

Undergraduate student at the University of Washington, Sean Kane, did an analysis of homepages at the top 100 universities, and I forget what. His source was for determining the Top 100, but he did an assessment using three automated Web accessibility checkers.

Bobby is one that a lot of people sort of think of when they think of accessibility checkers. It actually doesn't exist anymore, but it was developed by an off-profit called CAST many years ago, was sold to a for-profit called Watchfire, and now it's in IBM's hands, I understand, but under a different name.

So there's Bobby, there's Cynthia Says, which still exists as a free website out there. Cynthia Says, which will do accessibility analysis of your website. And then there's the Functional Accessibility Evaluator, FAE, which was developed at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.�

FAE, we're going to talk about quite a bit. It has 31 rules that it measures across five different categories. 

What Sean found, based on the FAE results--he looked at each of the five categories--was that about half of the websites were accessible in terms of text equivalents. They provide alternate texts for images, for example. About half were accessible from a scripting standpoint. That is, when they provide JAVA scripts, it's equally accessible to keyboard users as it is to mouse users.

Styling, they use CSS effectively rather than deprecated font tags. There's some other things with regard to styling. Higher than half, about close to 70%, actually use HTML standards. They use heading tags, they have a doc type, those sorts of things.

The lowest was navigation and orientation. And that actually is the highest in the first of headings, not HTML standards, but most sites did not use HTML headings effectively. Like I mentioned in the beginning, providing an outline of the page.

And I want to take a little break from the Powerpoint and go over and just give you an example of why that's important. And I'll look at this site, since we're all familiar with it. Anybody know whether this has good heading structure? Or do you have any concerns about the accessibility of the HighEd website?

It actually is really well done. I've got this Web accessibility toolbar, so plug in for IE. One of the things that I can do is I can look at the heading structure. I can either look at that in-line or I can pull up a separate box, and it just shows me kind of an outline of the page. So the main heading of the page, the H1, is actually this image which has an Alta attribute that says Infinite Solutions 2008 Conference.

And then we have H2, which is quite a bit of text for a heading, but there is that appearance of an outline. And then we have several H3s and some H4s within that. So there is really a clear structure to the page.

And for somebody who's using a screen reader, I've got to pull up JAWS, which is the most popular screen reader in the US.�

Screen Reader: JAWS for Windows is ready. Top of file. File Edit View History. Delicious.

Terry Thompson: For a JAWS user, and then probably for most screen reader users, a typical way to navigate would be to use the heading tags. JAWS provides a really simple way to do that. I just hit the H key and it'll move from heading to heading to heading.�

And if you think about it, that's sort of a way that sighted users navigate the page, too. When you go to a website, you kind of scan the page, right, looking at the big headlines and then you'll probably hone in on a section that meets your needs. If you're interested particularly in sessions and tracks, you sort of eyeball the page, you find the sessions and tracks heading, and then you focus on that area. Well, a screen reader user can do the same thing if we have good heading tags.�

Screen Reader: H.

Terry Thompson: Whoops. Where am I?

Screen Reader: HighEdWeb 2008 Conference. Call to Infinite Solutions. Heading Level 1. Link graphics visited.

Terry Thompson: So that's the first heading, identified as a Heading Level 1. And now if I hit H again... 

Screen Reader: Come Discover Infinite Solutions. Join us for Infinite Solutions, the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference on October 5th at Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri. Heading Level 2.

Terry Thompson: That's a Heading Level 2 heading. And so I would argue, because of the length of that, that probably it should be short. You know, maybe a trivial detail but 'Come Discover Infinite Solutions' might be the Heading Level 2, and then, if somebody is interested in that they could arrow down and access a paragraph underneath that. If I hit H again--

Screen Reader: Keynote speakers, Heading Level 3. Jeffrey Veen. Heading Level 4. Link. Kyle Ford. Heading Level 4. Link. Sessions and Tracks. Heading Level 3.

Terry Thompson: So, I'm really able to navigate this page pretty efficiently. If you don't have headings, then the user kind of has to listen to the whole page, and it really is a major accessibility issue and a very easy one to fix.

Screen Reader: Unloading JAWS. Enter.

Terry Thompson: So, Kane also found that 36 pages out of the roughly 100 contain no Priority 1 WCAG errors since they were accessible. That's according to both Bobby and Cynthia. So the errors then were more in the Priority 2 and Priority 3 category. And when you get down into that level of detail, then there are only two pages out of a hundred that actually were fully accessible.

And so we're doing an OK job. A 36% is not great, but a lot of people who have been in inaccessibility field for a while might feel that that's pretty high, that we actually in Higher Education are starting to get the word out. And the people are at least complying with Priority 1, which is roughly equivalent to Section 508. So we'd like to see that number grow well above 36%.

I did a study that was published last year in collaboration with the folks that developed FAE at the University of Illinois. We just used FAE and did a sort of massive automated benchmark of 7,339 higher education homepages from 162 countries. And then we also did national government pages for countries. And we evaluated them all with FAE, and the results basically agreed with what Kane came up with in terms of sort of the distribution.�

The numbers were a lot lower, and that's probably because we weren't looking at the top 100 schools, we're looking at all schools. But generally, HTML standards was the highest. The other three--text equivalents, encrypting and styling--were in the middle. And navigation orientation, the use of HTML headings, was not very good. And, again, since it's such a simple thing to fix and since it has such a huge impact on accessibility, I'd really like to see folks sort of concentrate on fixing that issue.

I also did another study related to Web accessibility over time, where we did a manual assessment. We actually went in and hand-evaluated 127 higher education institutions from the Northwest. And we did assessments. One benchmark assessment, then again at three months, then again at six months.

And we randomly sampled this group and provided training to one group, sort of intensive training. We offered intensive training to them one-on-one over the phone or whatever that would meet their needs. The other group got a little bit of information and assistance through email. And the other got nothing. And we just wanted to see whether we would have any measurable impact on these web pages.

And what we found was that, overall, regardless of what sort of training people received, these three checkpoints improved over the six-month period. They were better at adding alt text for images, better at adding accessible markup on forms, so using the label element, for instance, and better at adding skip navigation links so that somebody can jump past competitive navigation on the page. So those three points all jumped up regardless of whether we provided training or not.

But there are also three checkpoints that got worse. One of those was all features being accessible using the keyboard. We started seeing more and more mouse-dependent behavior over that six-month period. And then the same thing, content being accessible without scripts. If you turn off JAVA script then you still access the content on the page. The answer increasingly over the six months became 'no'. And same thing with content being accessible without CSS. You turn off stylesheets. We had more and more content that was no longer accessible.

And interestingly, this effect was even stronger for those who received accessibility training. So we sat down with some people and provided training to them, and they very quickly embraced the easy checkpoints and implemented those and fixed their web pages.�

But they also--presumably, if they sought out our training services, if they're interested in making their Web the best it can be, they also are embracing new sort of Web 2.0 technologies that are more challenging to make accessible. They're not impossible to make accessible. There are techniques emerging and being developed for accessible, rich, dynamic content, but it's pretty tempting to implement, deploy that without necessarily addressing all the accessibility issues.

So, how do we tackle this on our campuses? How do we work to make our web pages more accessible?�

Well, we're just wrapping up the 2008 ATHEN survey on Accessible Technology on Higher Education. And ATHEN--how many of you are familiar with ATHEN? OK. Nobody. It is the Access Technology Higher Education Network, so it's all people from higher education who have an interest in accessibility, or whose job in some way has some role in accessibility on campus. And so if you're interested in that organization, athenpro.org is the URL.�

And so we've done this survey. It's kind of become, I guess a quarto-annual survey. We had hoped to do it more often, but it's like every four years we do an update. Just finished this one. The results are going to be published soon in the ATHEN e-journal. We're hoping to have that out within the next month.

Well, what we did was we surveyed 149 individuals from 106 higher education institutions, so a few surveys, there are multiple people from a given institution that answered different parts of it. This was worldwide, mostly from the United States. About half of the United States, quite a few from UK and Canada. Ireland. Also had some participation from South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

The US participants, 44% were from doctor-granting universities. We also had high participation from associates colleges and masters colleges and universities. A disproportionate amount of people from the West, particularly people--anybody from California?

The California State University system has an IT accessibility initiative. So each campus within that system is very focused right now on IT accessibility. And so they are all interested in participating in this survey.

But some of the questions that we asked--and sort of like to do an informal survey here and just kind of compare where you guys are and give you a chance to compare where you are versus where the survey said we are. And you sort of have to keep in mind that, like any survey, the people that chose to respond have some interest in this and therefore it's probably skewed toward institutions that are actually doing something related to accessibility.

So, first question, do you have a Web accessibility policy? How many of your institutions actually have a policy that requires Web accessibility?

OK, so about 20, 25? So that was about half, both US and worldwide. Pretty consistent. Half the participants said yes, they have accessibility policy. We didn't further ask for many detail about that, how high a level of policy is it.�

I used to work in North Carolina State University where, after I left, they implemented a top level Web accessibility policy that is issued by the chancellor and has an enforcement mechanism where they can actually remove websites off of the centrally supported servers if they don't comply with the Web accessibility policy. But then we've got a wide range beyond that where a lot of institutions just have sort of informal guidelines or recommendations for people developing web pages.�

Is there a person or an office specifically responsible for Web accessibility consultation? So, how many of you have such a position or such a group on your campuses? 

OK, that number is pretty low. Maybe five or six. How many of you in your roles have some responsibility for ensuring the Web is accessible? Then, all the hands. And that's obviously why you're here at this session today.

So 70% of participants in the US said that they do have a person or an office specifically responsible for Web accessibility consultation. Which is higher in the US than elsewhere.�

Do you have policies or procedures that require consideration of accessibility when acquiring IT? And if you think about the Web specifically, Web-based IT, and as you're making a purchase that's kind of, the effect, your enterprise, do you consider accessibility? Or is there some policy that requires that accessibility be addressed? You have to ask the vender about the accessibility of their product. Anybody have a policy like that on their campuses? 

OK, a few. Right. So that's another issue. How do you then measure that? Is it just dependent on venders?

And that's truly an issue that everybody's facing. We at the University of Washington are sort of struggling with that. There is a standard measure of accessibility that Section 508 brought about called the VPAT. It stands for the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. Venders complete that. It's a form. They complete that to talk about the accessibility of their product. But a lot of times it sort of seems like the marketing team is the one that fills out the form, and so it's got a spin on it where it almost makes their inaccessibility sound like a good thing.

So it's kind of tough to know what to do that unless you're able to evaluate the product yourself and sort of check some of the things that they've claimed.

44% of the participants in the US do have some sort of policy that requires that accessibility be considered. So, question then, was this then put into place when they went to purchase a learning management system? Did they actually evaluate the accessibility of their product when they did so?

And so then, this question for you guys: did you consider accessibility when you acquired an LMS? How many of you did? OK. So there are three hands went up. Were you satisfied--those of you who raised your hands, were you satisfied that the product that you ended up going with met your accessibility criteria?

Somewhat? It probably wasn't a showstopper, right? If it wasn't accessible, yet it did all these other things, then, that is pretty high. That's good.

Again, going back to California State--I wish there were somebody here that could speak to this more than I can, but, in California State University system, they were about to sign the contract for iTunes U and that was a showstopper that it came to their attention that this was not accessible. The interface was not accessible, particularly in the Windows environment.�

And so they said, "Sorry, Apple, we're not able to proceed with this because you've got an inaccessible product." And that actually has had a huge impact that Apple immediately, like within the week, released a press release saying that "We're working on the accessibility of iTunes U. We're going to have something to announce coming up soon."�

And not long after that, they released an update that included the accessibility hooks that allowed somebody to access the iTunes interface with keyboard, with a screen reader.

But it took CSU taking that strong stance and all of those campuses and the economic power that they have, and they've taken that stance in order to make this product accessible. Question? Yes.�

Audience Member 1: OK, one of the CSU schools did get sued though, which is kind of like a kick in the ass that they needed to be with accessibility like, people that are going up that are doing it? I mean--

Terry Thompson: Right.�

Audience Member 1: One of the big things that they didn't--that's the reason...

Terry Thompson: Right. And so we can question their motivation, and maybe it doesn't really matter, but there's always like 3,025 --or whatever the number was-- OCR cases in higher education, discrimination against people with disabilities, and that leads to positive results.�

My position in North Carolina State was created because of a lawsuit. Three blind students filed a formal OCR, complaining against the University for lack of access, particularly to IT. So they created an IT-accessibility position in order to address the problems on campus. And it's also why we had buy-in at such a high level, looking at the chancellor's office. She wanted to be sure that technology was accessible. Yes?

Audience Member 2: Somewhere in campus, we had an accessibility conference and we had a demo of our email with Zimbra and out web CT and she talked about the challenges that she had doing it and that was the biggest eye opener. And so we sat down with IT people right after the session. And we we're like 'this is the problem, and this is a problem' and we work on it right after it was kind of fresh when she calls upon it. That's something we can do.

Terry Thompson: Yeah. Yeah, it's really a great opportunity, and if any of you have this opportunity, it's great to actually maybe try and recruit some students with disabilities to talk about and demonstrate how they access your Web content, because it can be a real eye-opener. Things that you might have not realized in terms of how the site structures, some barriers that might be there that you're not aware of. Is there another question? Yes.

Audience Member 3: This was something we've been studying. Can you tell me why there is a barrier in some of the institutions? Why don't we have the leverage to force these companies? Why can't we recommend it to companies and CMS? Why can't they make the products accessible as well?

Terry Thompson: Yeah. I think we do have the leverage we need to be stronger, though. And we need to actually take a stand, and until--yeah, this is really a monumental thing, the CSU-iTunes thing, because it really hadn't happened before. Yeah, we as individuals have raised our voice now and again talking to venders and saying, "Hey, this isn't accessible. Can you do something about this?"�

But until now nobody has really come up and said, "We're not going to purchase your product unless you address this problem." That's one of the things that ATHEN is trying to do, too. Getting people together who have like interests and who are the clients of all these venders. Really making that presence a lot stronger. Yes?

Audience Member 4: I think part of the thing is like you have to have an evangelist in the campus. I know at the University of Texas, I know a person there who literally, every product that they look at, she like holds the vendor to their word, saying, "Yes, we're accessible." It's only back there the said, "Yeah, we're all accessible," But they are not actually, the University of Texas went in there and she actually, like, holds them to their word and sees if they are accessible and if they are not. You actually need someone like that in campus.

Terry Thompson: Right. Right. So if you don't have somebody like that on your campuses, then maybe do some soul-searching. Think about whether you can play that role. And all you've got to do is tell one other person, and they can tell one other person. Get the word out.

So the '5' sign just went up in the back. So I'm going to try and quickly run through... What we do at the University of Washington--not that we have it all figured out, but I think we're sort of moving in in a positive direction.�

We've been addressing accessibility for quite a while. In 1984, when the Micro Support Group was established, assisted technology was built into that. It was kind of new back then but there were some people that were interested in it in sort of pioneering development deployment in that field.�

We came up with an adaptive technology lab that's specifically focused on that and was integrated into our main lab on campus in 1990. There was a lab manager position created in '92. And the DO-IT program, Disabilities Opportunities Inter-networking and Technology, which is where most of my funding comes from. It's funded by the National Science Foundation originally in 1992. We've continued to get grants since then.

A couple of other grants, 2001 was the US Department of Education grant, National Center on Accessible Information Technology and Education, and Access Computing, which is in partnership between DO-IT and the Computer Science Department. All of these sort of activities on campus have kind of fueled an interest. There's a lot of faculty interest, there's a lot of central IT interest in accessibility.�

But one of the biggest things that I can point to that have made a difference on our campus was in 2003, when we started just the discussion list that we called Accessible Web and invited people to join. And it's now up somewhere between 100 and 200 users, I'm not sure what the exact figure is. But a lot of people from all over campus who are interested in technology accessibility, and particularly Web accessibility, do communicate via this discussion list.

It's kind of become the go-to list for all things related to standards-based design. Very smart CSS people there. Some people have stylesheet questions, they go to the accessibility group for answers. And also it's grown to the point where we get together once a month for luncheons. You have speakers come in and so forth. It's really a bottoms-up, sort of grassroots kind of effort.

I think that led to what we saw in the earlier slide, the president's video being captioned from the get-go, that the word just sort of spread across the campus to the point where even the President's Office was aware of accessibility issues.

Last year, they created a halftime position within the central IT group--that was my position--that provided IT accessibility support on campus. And we launched two new websites. One of those is the Central Accessibility website, which has a lot of great resources related to Web accessibility and IT accessibility.�

And we also created a sig which was basically the same accessible Web group that a hundred or so people that are interested in accessibility on campus, but as a sig we had access to more sort of collaborative resources, like the wiki and some other tools where we can collaborate and do community-building.�

It's really this sense that the whole campus owns the accessibility problem. It's not a disability services issue. It's something that all of us who are deploying technologies and building websites need to take on as our problem and come up with our solutions.

So this all sort of culminated in March this year. We had an event called the UW Accessible IT Capacity Building Institute. We had people from all walks of life from all three of the UW campuses, administrators, Web developers, librarians, faculty members. Adobe and Microsoft were there as well.�

And we just got together and brainstormed. What are we going to do about accessibility on campus? How can we move this forward? And that has continued to move forward. We identified in that meetings, an all-day meeting, we walked away with some action items, and we're continuing to work on those action items.�

And next month we're actually giving a presentation to the UW Web Council to sort of see where from a very high level, how we can move this forward. And the Time's Up sign. And the questions slide is up, but I don't know if we have much time for questions. But... So, yeah. Yes.

Yes. Yeah, Jeff Bigham is an undergraduate student. He developed Web Anywhere, which is a product that allows you--it's a screen reader that's server-base, and so you don't actually have to have a client software package. You just log in and then it sort of use this as a proxy to access the Web from any terminal. Very cool product. Happened in the Computer Science Department at UW. Yes?

Audience Member 5: I wonder if you have suggestions for us less fortunate to get a lawsuit yet?

Terry Thompson: Yeah. It depends a lot on your campus environment. There are a lot of models that--the grassroots sort of bottoms-up effort has worked for us. We actually haven't had a lawsuit and we don't have a Web accessibility policy. Mine would not be one of the hands that was raised. But just creating a discussion list really has elevated discussion tremendously over a five-year period, so...

Yeah. Well, it really depends again on your campus culture and how to sell that. There are lots of different sort of methods that can work. In some cases, not in others. Talking about the universal design benefits, designing pages that'll work on all browsers, and showing pages that fall part in one browser and another that don't work on iPhones, captioning video makes video searchable. There are all sorts of universal design arguments that can be strong arguments, but it depends, again, on how receptive the administration might be to something like that, so...

Audience Member 6: We find that in students they want to patronize their campus and stuff. I like the idea of getting the students together on issues.

Terry Thompson: Yeah. Yeah. Yes, students with disabilities, faculties with disabilities can be strong as well. If you have--in Western Washington University where I have an office, we've got a faculty member in the Geography Department who's blind. Or Geology, actually. He's become a real strong voice for accessibility issues. And because he's a colleague, people pay attention to him. Yes?

Audience Member 7: I have a question. You talked about iTunes, an example of a university that said, "No, you're not accessible. We're not using you." But don't you really have to draw a line somewhere where you say, "If it's between having an accessible tool or having no tool at all." Doesn't there need to be more balance there at sometime?

Terry Thompson: Possibly. It helps with this competition, so like in a learning management market, for example, you've got several products and some are going to be more accessible than others and maybe you can use that to your benefit. But if you have a product--it's particularly true in niche academic markets where you've got some statistics tool or some physics tool and there's nothing else that has the same functionality and it's inaccessible, then there actually are sort of caveats in the law that lets you use that, but then you have to find some sort of work around for the person with disability who needs to access that, so...

So, yeah. It's kind of a balancing act. Clearly you can't stop higher education. You can't stop innovation, you can't stop teaching because you don't have accessible tools available. But hopefully we'll reach a point where enough venders are aware of accessibility that they'll develop accessible products so we don't have to make those choices.

Thanks for coming, everybody. I appreciate it.

[Applause]

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