In Their Own Words (Part 3): Key Takeaways From Presenters at the University of Guelph’s 2021 Virtual Accessibility Conference
Back in June, when I began collaborating on this four-part blog series with another member of the Sakai community, Shawn, our goal was to provide a re-cap of the University of Guelph’s 2021 accessibility conference, a virtual event that the two of us had attended together. The plan was to highlight some of those sessions that we were able to experience first-hand, and subsequently wanted to share with other members of the Sakai community by including a few of the key points, quotes, and other excerpts from the presenters/sessions that really stood out to us.
Shawn and I knew this would be a monumental task, as the 2021 Annual Accessibility Conference featured 30 concurrent sessions, bonus workshops, plenary panel discussions, and a keynote presentation over three information-packed days.
We got off to a great start and introduced part 1 of our blog on June 27. A couple of months later, we followed up with part 2 on August 30. But that’s when things kind of went off the rails…
Shawn got busy, I got busy, and unfortunately, as tends to happen with ambitious projects like this, parts 3 and 4 got placed on the proverbial backburner.
Then on December 16 I received an email regarding the “U of G – Open Ed – 2022 Virtual Accessibility Conference Call for Presentations” and I was suddenly motivated to pick back up where we had left off.
Scheduled for May 24 – 26, 2022, this year’s accessibility conference will once again be delivered virtually via live Zoom sessions with this year’s theme being “IDEA11Y – Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility” which, by the way, I absolutely love!
So, since it’s been roughly five months since our last installment of the 2021 conference re-cap, which just so happens to be about the same amount of time until the 2022 accessibility conference is set to kick off, hopefully the timing of parts 3 and 4 can help to both celebrate the success of the University of Guelph’s 2021 Virtual Accessibility Conference, while doing some advanced promotion of this year’s edition, which by all appearances, will be another great event.
With that, we bring you part 3 of our conference re-cap…
Like before, the following is a compilation of key takeaways from each of those sessions we attended, based on our combined notes. We’ve resisted trying to editorialize or paraphrase the presenters’ comments, and are instead presenting the information “as is”, as a series of transcribed sound bites so you too can experience some of the knowledge and expertise conveyed by the various subject-matter experts, in their own words. Enjoy!
If you missed the first two installments in this 4-part blog series, you can view part 1 here & view part 2 here…
Integrating an Accessibility Framework to Improve the WCAG Compliance Process
In this session, Juan Olarte, CEO & Co-founder of Digita11y Accessible described the basic features of the Accessibility Framework, a versatile tool that can be used when working with multiple stakeholders to implement an accessibility project. Juan provided lots of great examples from his own experiences, including how the tool can be used to clearly delineate and communicate key roles and responsibilities for ensuring that accessibility remains a priority throughout each stage of the project’s development life cycle.
Juan: “An accessibility framework is a phased project approach to integrate accessibility into information technology projects by using processes to improve the satisfaction and quality of the interaction between users and all facets of a system. Why is it important to have or use an accessibility framework? Having an accessibility framework helps organizations to better integrate, manage, and maintain a project's accessibility requirements across multiple stakeholders and teams. Accessibility frameworks will encourage continuity, as it allows stakeholders to have a shared understanding of what that requires in each phase to make a project accessible. Communication, as it documents and defines activities to help stakeholders understand at what stage the project is and what we need to do after. Improved governance, as it identifies accessibility rules within the project. And then clarity, as it defines the project's roles and responsibilities among different stakeholders within the project.”
Juan: “So, in the toolkit, really, we want to start identifying our system technologies. As mentioned, we have our screen readers, also our browsers. Usually, you want to go with Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. What is important to see here is that you would like to see the interoperability between different assistive technologies and browsers. Sometimes, what may happen is that you may have a discrepancy between different assistive technology. Some browsers, for instance, a few versions are blocked. There were issues with Firefox and NVDA, where NVDA was not able to recognize the header of a table. But it wasn't anything to do with the actual accessibility implementation. It was more the interoperability. So it's always good for you to doublecheck in two different browsers. Also, we're going to be looking at the different accessibility tools within the mobile operating systems. Obviously, we have iOS and Android. You have Voice over, and you have Talk Back. But at the same time, those two operating systems offer different assistive technologies for different types of disabilities. So testing with them is going to be invaluable.”
Juan: “Really, really important early on is to try to identify all the different stakeholders. The usual suspects are going to be the project sponsors, project managers, project owners or business analysts, UX designers, developers, the QA testers, accessibility specialists, and the project audience. Now, the reason why is because you want to be able to align all of them in terms of the different expectations. And if you're working on an accessibility project, you want to be able to include multiple people at different times within the project itself.”
Juan: “What you want to be able to do is really understand the application, if you're going to have a specific library, or a lot of the times, early on within the development life cycle, the UI team is going to create different assets, whether it's going to be buttons, expand/collapse type accordions. So, at that point, we like to try to document accessibility within there, then that's going to carry throughout the development life cycle. What that's going to allow you to do is actually simplify your role. Because then, you're going to be just checking for accessibility, and you're going to make other team members more accountable. So for instance, if a developer created a specific element, and it wasn't to specification, you know you're going to be like, ‘Listen, we were supposed to be developing under these specific rules. You didn't do it.’ So, yes. You have to do the test, but also, you are sharing accountability among different team members.”
Key Takeaways:
#TestAssistiveInteroperability
#Document4Accountability
Introducing ARRM: A Framework to Fight Accessibility Apathy
During her presentation, Jennifer Chadwick, Lead Accessibility Strategist for SiteImprove and member of the W3C’s Education & Outreach Working Group (EOWG) introduced conference attendees to the Accessibility Roles & Responsibilities Mapping (ARRM) framework, a methodology that can be used to interpret and breakdown WCAG accessibility requirements by role, so that different team members can understand what specific WCAG success criteria they are responsible for, and can access the specialized information and guidance they will need to work out their solutions for meeting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Jennifer: “accessibility in your organization is everyone's responsibility. We all kind of do our part, we're moving towards those targets of removing barriers.”
Jennifer: “the whole purpose of the ARRM exercise framework…is to assign ownership to roles, to really help people understand their role and accessibility, whether they're a developer, user experience designer, visual designer, content writer, content author, project manager, business analyst, what have you.”
Jennifer: “So how's the ARRM been described? It's assigning ownership to get things done, to fight that apathy, ‘I have no idea how to start with accessibility, I don't know what I'm responsible for.’ It's a clear set of responsibilities. It's a framework to fight that apathy, as I mentioned, and I call it a gift to digital teams, quite frankly.”
Jennifer: “So, (ARRM’s) an adaptive framework to guide stakeholders, i.e. you and me, to integrate web accessibility best practice ownership, and all relevant aspects of a project, or a project lifecycle, all the time, or one particular product or project at a time. It's an exercise to help team members take ownership of all the decisions that need to be made when accessibility barriers present themselves. For instance, if an image doesn't have a text alternative, who might be responsible for making sure that happens, or preventing that in the future?”
Jennifer: “Because we do it all at the same time, together, remotely or collaboratively, you get educated on what needs to be done for accessibility and how to remove that barrier. People feel empowered because they have ownership over, ‘Okay, I know what I need to do. I don't have to do everything, I just have to do what I know I need to do.’ And then it gives you clarity on what needs to be done as well. And then the other sort of, the more significant outcome, perhaps, apart from the live exercise, you've got this shared plan and you document it.”
Jennifer: “We're going to take assigned ownership, who's going to own the fix or who's going to collaborate on the fix, and then you can share that back to your team and then share it amongst other departments so you're sharing that knowledge.”
Jennifer: “what we have created is this role-based decision tree, and this is the basis for the exercise itself. The question is, who owns accessibility? So which role should own an accessibility consideration in your life cycle, not just for one project, but to me, this is your new skill set as a UX designer, as a visual designer, that you will take on.”
Jennifer: “You go through these considerations, think about the owners, possible owners, and then you say, ‘Okay. At the end of the list, did anyone not own that piece of that task? Do we have gaps in our process where no one's owning PDF accessibility or videos, who's not considering writing transcripts for video?’ So this was someone else. Is there someone else in the lifecycle? If so, who? And you've kind of teased out those gaps, which is exciting. And then to me, it becomes a management concern where you send it back to the product owner or project manager to say, ‘Hey, no one's really owning this piece, we need to sort of clarify the process here.’”
Key Takeaways:
#AccessibilityIsEveryonesResponsibility
#FightTheApathy
#OwnershipEqualsEmpowerment
Meet Sa11y: The Accessibility Quality Assurance Assistant
In this session, Adam Chaboryk, IT Accessibility Specialist at Ryerson University demoed Sa11y, an open-source accessibility checker and quality assurance tool that was developed to plug into the University’s Content Management System. Similar to how the Spellcheck feature in MS Word works, Sa11y alerts content authors to potential errors by visually highlighting common accessibility and usability issues, while proposing possible fixes through a series of pop-up tool tips.
Adam: “As you can imagine, for any technical people in the room here, just the fact that we're able to prevent our content authors from adding external code makes our life a little bit easier from a management and support perspective. But from an accessibility perspective, we can make sure that no one's adding or introducing inaccessible code. And we also have a limited color palette. And we try to facilitate accessibility wherever possible.”
Adam: “Our content editors don't need to memorize the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines on our own web support site, which is the website that basically manages our Content Management System. Our accessibility page, it tells our content editors to focus on three main things whenever they're authoring content in our Content Management System…alternative text, semantic structure, and link text and writing. We also have other requirements that are not necessarily able to be detected by automated tools, for example, ensuring that all of our videos have accurate closed captions, just as an example. But in terms of things that can be programmatically detected, we tell them to focus on those three main things.”
Adam: “So, the problem with automated tools is that, specifically for cloud-based tools, they can often be very expensive… they're limited to the number of pages you can actually crawl. If I had to give you an estimate, I think there is over 60,000 web pages in our Content Management System alone, so it can add up. And it doesn't make sense, or it would be very expensive if we crawled all 60,000 pages, but I'm also thankful that we have a single accessible theme, so it makes managing and monitoring a lot easier.”
Adam: “Another aspect or problem with some cloud-based tools is that they have an overwhelming amount of information. Most of these tools will allow you to filter the relevant guidelines, but they're prone to false positives. So often times, our content editors might be viewing a report from one of these cloud-based tools, and they are trying to figure out the cryptic messaging behind what the error is, but it takes an accessibility specialist or a web developer, for example, to distinguish false positives from actual issues. And many of these errors that these automated tools detect can only be fixed by a developer.”
Adam: “This is what exists in our Content Management System today. I have a screenshot of one of our pages from our Content Management System. And I have a more clean, sleek-looking accessibility checker or Sa11y. So visually speaking, it's a small little checker that exists in the right-hand corner or bottom right-hand corner. It has a little tab panel, kind of like a floating action button. If you've used Gmail or various apps, when you click on it, it expands a small little panel. And right now there's another little button within the panel called ‘Show Outline’ and it gives you the overall page hierarchy. And right now, I have it flagging a warning. So right now there's a yellow little button with a question mark symbol on top of the YouTube video that says ‘Warning. Please ensure all videos have closed captioning. Providing captions for all audio and video content is mandatory. Captions are meant to support people who are deaf or hard of hearing on how to caption videos.’ So I have a link that also takes the content author to the relevant Ryerson page on how to caption videos specific to our audience.”
Adam: “On this page, there aren’t any accessibility errors, so the panel says, ‘no accessibility errors found.’ Right now, I'm highlighting over the first image. So Sa11y is a quality assurance tool, it not only highlights errors, but it will also give tool tips or little pass messages for when you do something good, like adding alt text to an image. So if I just go back here. My first tool tip is a green checkmark and it says, ‘The alt text for this image is: Group of students working together.’"
Adam: “We have a lot of component specific rule sets. So right now I have a screenshot of our slideshow component, and it's customized to display right above the slide, so when someone is navigating through the slide panel, it will actually display whether it has alt text or not. So, we have different rule sets, whenever you use an image alone or without a slideshow component, if you mark it as decorative, it will technically say it's a pass because it was purposefully marked as decorative, although when you use it in the context of a slideshow component, the context of that image changes, because all slideshows are supposed to be very visual in nature. So chances are if you are using a slideshow, it probably should have alternative text, or the image is being used as eye candy. So, our custom rule set ensures anytime there's a decorative image within the slideshow, it should always have alt text. So my warning or my error tool tip here says, ‘All images within a slideshow must have alternative text. Find this image in the Decorative folder within the Accessibility Dashboard and read the alternative text guide.’ So, these are very specific, these link you to a specific Ryerson page on how to fix the issue and you won't see any automated tool out there that will give this context-specific tool tip, such as identifying that it's a slideshow.”
Adam: “Another custom rule set we have is using components strategically. So this is, I guess, where you can see the overlap of usability and accessibility come into play. So I have a screenshot of a Ryerson website that has an announcement component. So this is just a custom component that visually has a white background with dark blue border around it with the Font Awesome icon, or visual icon on the exclamation mark icon or warning icon, and we made a custom rule set. When there are two or more announcement components on a page, we have a warning that says, ‘More than one announcement component found. The announcement component should be used strategically and sparingly. It should be used to get attention or warn users about something important. Misuse of this component makes it less effective. This component is semantically labeled as an announcement for people who use screen readers.’ And what I mean by that is that our announcement component, as a region, it's included in the landmarks, and it says, for example, ‘announcement group’ and so what I've witnessed, I've worked with over several hundred content authors in the past five years of working at Ryerson, and I have seen pretty much very, very creative ways about how people use web components. For example, what I was starting to see with this announcement component, people were using it as headings because of how visually distinct it is, but because of the semantic implications of it, as well as the purpose or use of the announcement component, it wasn't being used effectively. So this warning was helping to address not only an accessibility issue, but also a usability issue, so we want to ensure our content authors are using this component strategically.”
Adam: “When it comes to managing accessibility in a large organization or team, it requires distributing responsibilities. Divide and conquer. I have an animated GIF here of Gandalf bringing reinforcements to Helm's Deep. And the purpose of this GIF is just to show what that... Bringing reinforcements…in the sense that I am effectively putting the responsibility on all several hundred of our content authors. It's not my role, or the developer's role to add alt text to images that our content authors uploaded, so it's really important to distribute those responsibilities. And quality assurance, creating an inclusive experience requires intention. Content authors should have the ability to easily review their work. So I have a screenshot here of an image with a warning that says, ‘Please review! Image link contains alt text, although please ensure alt text describes the destination page. We recommend using the Overlay Text option for images that link. Does the alt text describe where the link takes you?’ and then the alt text here says, ‘Three people plotting a food fight’ but realistically, it's just an image of three people that are at a food market, and they're just talking. But it's a silly example here, the purpose is that this alt text or this literal description doesn't actually describe what the link does, because when you use image as a link, you're changing the function of it. So again, the focus on QA is supposed to encourage people to think strategically, or make sure that they are using proper alternative text.”
Adam: “Accessibility checkers should provide actionable information and should not leave content authors in doubt. A passing state provides content authors with positive reinforcement or a small way of acknowledging their efforts.”
Adam: “Sa11y isn't a comprehensive code analysis tool, it's not meant to replace accessibility suites, it's supposed to be used in addition to, or alongside other accessibility tools. But Sa11y addresses very specific content accessibility issues, like headings, link text, heading structure, videos that don't have captions, and many more.”
Key Takeaways:
#RealTimeAccessibilityCheckerForContentAuthors
#HeadOffMinorIssuesBeforeTheyBecomeMajorOnes
#CreatingAnInclusiveExperienceRequiresIntention
The Transition Online: The Impact of COVID-19 on Students with Disabilities in Higher Education
In this session, Laura Mullins (assistant professor in the Department of Applied Disability Studies) and Jennifer Mitchell (who recently completed a Masters of Applied Disability Studies with a specialization in Applied Behavior Analysis) detailed a research project conducted with their partners from Student Accessibility Services at Brock University which aimed to understand some of the unique challenges that students with disabilities faced when transitioning to an exclusively online learning environment during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Laura: “Following the World Health Organization's announcement of the global pandemic due to the Coronavirus, most universities announced that they would be quickly transitioning to offering their courses exclusively online. Enhanced by the uncertainty and fear associated with the pandemic, this process was really challenging for everyone involved. Instructors had to quickly review and revise and adapt their curriculum to the online format. As a faculty with a disability, I found this process very difficult for myself, which made me continue to question how students with disabilities must also be feeling. Previous research in this area has demonstrated that the university experience for students with disabilities is different than those of their non-disabled peers, they face additional challenges and barriers that impact their education, yet their unique needs are often not taken into consideration. The outcomes of the rapid transition online and the impact of the COVID pandemic has yet to be fully appreciated for this population, therefore, in partnership with our Student Accessibility Services at Brock, this research sought to reveal the impact of the transition online due to the pandemic for university students with disabilities. The students' experiences should be valuable to instructors, support services, and academic administration to gain a better appreciation for the barriers they face and identify areas of support.”
Jennifer: “The number one concern was online environment…this has to do with difficulty with online platforms and having technical issues. Next is online education. This is the lack of face-to-face communication, increased workload, keeping track of expectations, difficulty accessing information. This is meant to say that time management is a concern, which was particularly already challenging for these students, and kind of increased the difficulty in this area. Online environment exacerbated the impairment-related effects, apparently, with the students studying from home.”
Jennifer: “Although students weren't directly asked about their mental health in the survey, almost 600 comments were made reflecting the adverse effects with the transition due to online learning with the impact of the pandemic on their mental health.”
Laura: “students are less likely to disclose their needs for accommodations personally to instructors, less than before. Still, they have the same, if not more, accommodation needs. It's really important to try to provide students with an opportunity to meet with instructors to discuss their accommodation needs early in the semester, for example, by scheduling specific office hours. One thing that I did in the fall was schedule individual 10-minute meetings with everyone in my two graduate courses. Although that was 40 students and it was a few evenings of meeting with multiple students, it also provided them an opportunity to talk about the course, get to know one another, and kind of a soft way to broach the concept of accommodations, and several students disclosed that way. I know this feature is not strictly reasonable for some of those larger classes, but coming up with some way to allow them to have this authentic engagement would be helpful.”
Laura: “I don't know that we really tapped into the course load that (the students) were taking. I know that several of them were struggling with the increased amount of responsibilities that were embedded in the courses. For some reason, when it moved online, several instructors increased the amount of smaller expectations for the students, and I know that that was really difficult, and there was a few students that actually ended up dropping their courses or not being able to complete them because of the transition online.”
Laura: “It's important to be flexible. Be flexible with those deadlines and extensions to due dates when setting the course schedule. Offer students extensions on assignments when requested. We found in several interviews, students reported that there was kind of like this power engagement where students would ask for an extra week and an instructor would say they'd give them three days, and this was really difficult. It's really important to think about just giving the extension…the students…we don't know what's really going on. Overall, in this study, we were able to capture the lived experience of students with disabilities from various different levels of the study, and identified some of the issues that they were facing. Predominantly, we saw a lot of failures in communication and gaps in knowledge, which were evident of these ableist assumptions from some of the faculty. Further, faculty’s negative attitudes and a lack of access to accommodations were also barriers to learning. Universal Design for Learning, as we saw from several other presentations, should really be endorsed to promote learning for students with disabilities, and can (make learning) accessible for everybody and more beneficial.”
Key Takeaways:
#OnlineLearningMayRequireNewAccommodations
#LookForCreativeWaysToConnect
#UDL4Everyone
#BeFlexibleAndEmpathetic
Stay tuned for the fourth, and final part of the conference recap…