In Their Own Words Part 4 - Key Takeaways From Presenters at the University of Guelph’s 2021 Virtual Accessibility Conference

Last but not least, we are pleased to bring you this fourth and final installment in our special blog series to recap the University of Guelph’s 2021 Virtual Accessibility Conference.

If you missed any of the previous installments, you can click these links to read part 1, part 2, and/or part 3…

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 and 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, but I don’t think either of us would have ever imagined it would take us quite this long to complete our conference recap.

But when the University of Guelph emailed out its “U of G – Open Ed – 2022 Virtual Accessibility Conference Call for Presentations” on December 16, it motivated us to pick up where we had left off with our multi-part blog series, eventually leading us to this fourth and final installment which wraps up the work that we had started some nine months ago.

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, as we present this final installment, we hope that the conclusion of our 2021 conference recap 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.

Like with the previous blog posts in this series, 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!

Creative Accessible Design – It Can Be Done

During this session, Cheryl Bauman, QA & Accessibility Specialist for the Online Learning Center at Conestoga College, used several examples from post-secondary e-learning courses to demonstrate how the WCAG principles can be incorporated into the design of accessible online courses for creating engaging and interactive content.

 Cheryl: “I truly believe that meeting WCAG guidelines does not mean needing to compromise design. By the end of our time together, I intend to show you how attractively designed online content can be visually pleasing and still meet WCAG 2.0 guidelines. Implementing the best practices discussed in this presentation will help make online content more inclusive to individuals who use different methods and tools to connect with digital information. While the focus will be on post-secondary course development, these best practices can easily be transferred to web design or other online content.”

Cheryl: “WCAG uses four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.”

Cheryl: “Text descriptions can also be helpful to individuals who don't use screen readers, as it may be easier to read and understand the text description rather than trying to follow a bunch of colored boxes and arrows. And for students, studying a text description may be easier than trying to remember a complex diagram, so in this way accessibility makes life better for everyone.”

Cheryl: “The first example shows a tabbed interaction which uses colored icons as buttons for users to select to read more information about the corresponding topic. This interactive allows users to navigate to the information in three ways: selecting the text alternative link and reading information free from graphics or actions; using the mouse to select each icon and scroll through the content and note that, a gray box surrounds the active icon, bringing a visual focus to the icon; and third, using a keyboard, users can use the tab, enter, and arrow keys to work through the interactive.”

Cheryl: “Descriptive labels help users identify specific components within the content.”

Cheryl: “The use of different styling for each text type makes it easy for users to orient themselves on the page and understand how the content relates to each section. As long as the text is properly tagged, and follows other WCAG guidelines pertaining to color contrast, resizing the text, and font readability, developers have a lot of creative freedom to build engaging content pages.”

Cheryl: “Another way that functionality is repeated throughout courses is the use of icons. The first example shows a ‘click to open a new window’ icon that follows every link in a course to provide a visual indication of how our link will function. In the second example, a ‘click to enlarge’ icon is included beside each image, letting users know that when selected, the image will get larger. The final screenshot shows a common interactive use throughout the college’s courses. Once again, while the design may differ across courses, the function for this ‘continue’ interactive which includes two chevrons pointing downwards beside the word ‘continue’ remains the same. Every time a user encounters this activity, it will behave in the same way, creating familiarity with the interaction.)”

Cheryl: “Using back-end technology, developers can build complex interactive actions that are also accessible. And all of these knowledge checks are built using HTML, CSS, and then of course, JavaScript for the interactive, so screen readers are able to read the content as well.”

Cheryl: “WCAG conversations tend to focus on accessible documentation for HTML pages, but developers also need to keep in mind that Word, PDF and the other document types that tend to be added as reference tools or resources need to be made accessible when they're included within a course or a web site.”

Cheryl: “To me, accessibility, and how especially the more complex interactives are designed, it's about providing choice. So in the one example that I showed you, the one activity could have been done three ways, depending on what tools or what route the user wanted to use.”

Cheryl: “A lot of the focus tends to be on individuals who are hard of hearing, who have visual impairments or mobility issues, but there's a whole other gamut of individuals with disabilities that might need to take a little bit longer to read through content, or really depend on those icons, or the white space, or those guide posts to help them not get lost through the pages.”

Key Takeaways:

#AccessibilityMakesLifeBetterForEveryone

#AccessibleDoesntMeanSacrificingCreativeDesign

#ProvideOptions

From Average to Inclusive: Why You Should Design for the ‘Edge Case’

During this presentation, Lee Dale from Say Yeah sets out to debunk a common accessibility myth, suggesting that the typical approach of designing for the average doesn’t go far enough, arguing that you shouldn’t avoid edge cases if you want to design truly inclusive products and services.

Lee: “Today I’m going to talk to you about why it’s critical to design with intersectionality in mind. At the heart of this, is the importance of understanding that there is no average person. More importantly, markets themselves are becoming increasingly diverse. That's where intersectional approaches come in. And inclusive design offers a tool set for delivering products and services that better serve diverse markets.”

Lee: “Underlying these pillars of digital excellence, are three core values. The first is usability, which is ensuring a frictionless, engaging and delightful experience. The second is accessibility which ensures no one is excluded from being served by an organization, or prevented from engaging with the content that that organization is trying to share. And the third is inclusivity which means developing practices that authentically welcome key market segments who may have traditionally been ignored, to engage meaningfully with an organization.”

Lee: “…accessibility does take work. It takes more time upfront. However, it's our belief through the projects we've worked on, through the data we've looked at, that it is far easier and more effective to bake accessibility into processes from the beginning, rather than attempt to retrofit a product or service that was developed without accessibility in mind.”

Lee: “As an industry, we are failing to deliver on this basic mandate, we are failing to deliver accessible products. In an automated review of the top one million web sites, WebAIM found that 98.1% of home pages had accessibility failures. In my day-to-day work, I have only seen web sites that approach accessibility, they all have gaps. About 10% of the sites are workable, there's a sense and a confidence that they could be retrofitted to meet objectives around accessibility. They're close, there were efforts made, but maybe they weren't tested or delivered in a way that supports people with different needs. But those other 90% of web sites, they're not workable. Typically, the code is so poorly constructed that it impacts much more than accessibility. The lack of accessibility is just a symptom of an underlying failure. So, we've seen that 90% of web sites are so poorly implemented that they hinder access, usability and performance in collectively unfixable ways. The only way to meet these objectives is to really throw out the code, and maybe even many aspects of the design and content and take a new approach toward effectively delivering a web site that can reach and engage with the full scope of a market. Again, this lack of accessibility is just a symptom. It's a symptom of underlying issues that are impacting the effectiveness of web sites, issues that impact everyone, from slow loading, to hard-to-understand language, to difficult workflows, through to broken interaction models. This is where starting with a process of delivering products and services that serve the full diversity of a market improves access for all. And that's because inclusive and intersectional approaches allow you to better reach and serve the entirety of the market.”

Lee: “So, if you follow these core values, usability, accessibility, and inclusivity, a series of benefits unfold, you open up access to market, you reduce ongoing costs, you avoid alienating potential aspects of the market, and you grow engagement and conversions.”

Lee: “There's so much nuance to who we are and how we engage with the world, and even with ourselves. When you consider all of this nuance and possibility, how can we even define you, an archetype with fixed characteristics that explains who we are. We certainly can't define archetypes that cover a wide range of each of us. With all this change within ourselves, archetypes are really not a standard and reasonable way of trying to understand the people that we serve. So, let's not even focus on who you feel you are, but how you engage with the world.”

Lee: “So this idea that we are accommodating for very particular niche groups of people, is false. Everybody has different needs at different times based on the context of use.”

Lee: “There's an impermanence to who we are on any given basis, on any given day, at any given moment, because we might have a permanent, temporary, or situational change in our life. Understanding and designing with these variables in mind, helps us deliver products and services for everyone.”

Lee: “Embracing fluidity, intersectionality, and a diversity of market, is the only way we can effectively serve the whole market. And that's because the people who use our products and services are all unique individuals with different goals and needs. Essentially, everyone is an edge case.”

Lee: “It's better to think about your market, and the factors that influence your market, as complex and fluid, changing day-to-day, moment-to-moment. Thinking about the people that use your products and services in an intersectional way can be a guide for understanding how all of these factors link together and influence each other.”

Key Takeaways:

#EveryoneIsAnEdgeCase

#DiverseMarketsRequireDifferentApproaches

#InclusivityPromotesMeaningfulEngagement

Inclusive Media Course Series Process: Six Months In

In this session, conference attendees learned about a new Inclusive Media Course Series that focuses on developing effective captioning and audio description skills/strategies. Facilitated by Margot Whitfield, Research Associate and Instructor with the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University, and one of the program’s current students, Nathan Burke, the presentation used samples of student projects to demonstrate how evidence-based methods and research about improving the multi-media experience of blind/low vision and deaf/hard-of-hearing audiences was used to guide the development of this unique curriculum for equipping graduates of this program with the technical writing/speaking skills and practical hands-on experience they will need to pursue employment opportunities as professional captioners and/or audio describers.

Margot: “Previously, work in accessible media required specialized software and proprietary knowledge, both captioning and audio description that was difficult to access unless you actually worked in the broadcasting industry. But nowadays video editors and platforms have become a lot more accessible, and it's becoming easier because content creators have the tools and audio describers to do the descriptions themselves. This course series is a way just to expand access to that education, for people outside of the broadcast industry, as well as within the broadcast industry.”

Margot: “But just a quick overview, there's a required course, which is eight hours long. It's a prerequisite for all other courses, and it's Inclusive Media and Regulations, that just goes over the fundamentals and some of the legislative implications for audio describers and captioners. Then there's two introductory courses into captioning for speaking and audio description. Then we move on to advanced courses in both those subjects, and they're all 21 hours each. We're also hoping in Winter of 2022 to offer a rollout of a practicum course, which will allow students to employ their learning and inclusive design captioning and audio description, and the technologies they've learned within industry settings, such as a broadcaster, not-for-profit, or production/post production company.”

Nathan: “Moving into the advanced course, this is where things get much deeper, and a bit trickier, because we handle subjects such as looking at sensitive description. How do we properly describe violence? How do we describe sex? Race? Religion? How can we be respectful to it, but also make sure that the content is properly conveyed to the audience, both boldly and correctly?”

Nathan: “So, first-person, third-person narration, they are deliberate choices that you make when you start writing your scripts and start planning out your description, and you're not always wanting to use one or the other. It's very dependent on the story that you're telling the audience that you're trying to reach, and also the characters that you're dealing with on screen… First-person is usually from a character's perspective. It digs deep into the character and their emotions. It gives you a lot more freedom to flesh out character motivations and just delve deeper into the lore of their world and the lore of that character. An example which we can use to differentiate from third-person is, ‘All I can feel is anger, and my skin burns like fire.’ So in that narration, in that script, you're using ‘I,’ you're using ‘my,’ it's very personal pronouns. Whereas third-person is from our narrator's point of view. It digs deeper into actions and the appearance of what's on screen. The appearance of the characters, the appearance of the worlds, the setting, and differentiates from the first-person script, ‘His eyes burned with anger, and his skin grows hot.’ So you're watching this happen, you're not feeling it but you're watching it. It's a lot easier to insert, and in some cases, it is a lot easier to follow than the first-person. But again, it's a deliberate choice that you make when you start from the very beginning.”

Nathan: “I am a Video Editor/Assistant Video Editor. I went to Loyalist College for Film and Television and my niche was post-production. I really liked how editing is like putting together a puzzle, you have so many different shots and footage when filming for a movie or TV show. Then the editor, along with the director, helps shape that to form it into the final product. So I also dabbled a bit in voice acting. I've been trying to learn a bit more about that in the last few years and test the waters, and see where that can lead me. So that led me to the Ryerson courses, and it just opened me up to a completely new sector of the industry that I wasn't exposed to in my film courses, a very important sector that can be easily overlooked, and it should not be because it's very important for being able to reach out to an inclusive audience. And audio description, it's a really interesting tool, and a technique to expand and build upon.”

Key Takeaways:

#CaptioningAndAudioDescriptionMakeMediaMoreInclusive

#GoodAudioDescriptionRequiresMakingDeliberateChoices

#ConsiderationsNeededWhenDescribing

Closing CAPSTONE Presentation: The Battle for Digital Accessibility in Learning – What’s Coming Up Next? 

During his closing CAPSTONE presentation, attorney, law professor, and disability rights advocate David Lepofsky discussed the importance of the public’s ability to comment on the Ontario Government’s draft recommendations for what should be included in the Promised Education Accessibility Standard for K12 and Post-secondary Education, and how this opportunity to influence the recommendations before they are finalized could serve as an important next step toward ensuring universal digital accessibility for students with disabilities.

David: “The information technology sector should be the sector in which we achieve accessibility the quickest, and the most fully, with the least difficulty. That has been the case for years, and continues to be the case right now. Why is that? Well, first because the digital technology sector is capable of achieving total accessibility. We know that through the amazing innovations that are constantly emerging in accessible technology. Technology that allows a blind person like me to read new printed material in real-time, that makes audio information available to deaf people, that enables people with a wide spectrum of disabilities to be able to effectively interact with computers, and with remote services and so on. It's something we've been able to do, and we're increasingly able to do very effectively. It's also something that we should be able to achieve with comparative speed, because the IT sector is constantly innovating and evolving.”

David: “The fact is that the digital technology we're going to use in five years hasn't been bought yet, hasn't been installed yet. It hasn't been contracted for yet. It hasn't even been designed yet. By planning in advance, we can ensure its accessibility. This is a sector where we should…with innovation being the core, with the capacity to do accessibility being so great and expanding all the time, with the old barriers becoming irrelevant, because they're going to get simply relegated to old archives…the capacity to make progress is the best. But are we on that path? The sad answer is no. We're not for multiple reasons.”

David: “There's a need for government, and for major public sector organizations like colleges and universities, to commit that they will not use public money to create or perpetuate any new barriers. For example, they need to ensure that all new IT that they acquire, all new applications, whether or not they're covered by the decade old Integrated Accessibility Standards regulation, will be fully accessible and usable by people with disabilities.” 

David: “We need to ensure that anyone trained in the use of IT, whether it's computer science courses, universities or colleges, software writing or hardware writing, or engineering in relation to it, these should all have a required component of teaching accessible product and software design. Look at it this way, it would seem to you absurd if we trained an architect in Ontario, who did not know how to design a building to be accessible. I mean, really accessible, not complying with out-of-date building codes. But I mean a really accessible building. That would be absurd. To give somebody a license to go out and do that, that would be creating a whole new barrier creator. Using public money to train that person, that would make even less sense. If you think about it, we have government grants to fund university programs and so on. Well, guess what? That's exactly what we do. Because our architects are not required, and our landscape engineers, and our municipal planners are not required to get training in accessible design as part of their design training. We do not require it. Now, the AODA Alliance has been advocating for this since around 2007, I think. But we haven't been able to succeed. Well, let's pick one area. I mean, I don't want to forego the need for that in architecture and other areas, but for purposes of this conference, let's focus on universities and colleges who have courses in programs and computer science, in writing software, in designing hardware, in engineering, in human computer interface, every single one of those should have a mandatory requirement that if you're going to be trained to write, create technology and digital technology that human beings will use, you've got to know how to do it so that all human beings can use it. Not just those who can see and hear, use both hands, and so on. That would be an appropriate use of public money, it would be a sensible policy.”

David: “I'm a Star Trek fan. I love the future. I love being an optimist. I've given you lots of reasons for being frustrated over the past decade, that we haven't seen the progress that we should, but I am an optimist, I believe in the future that Star Trek believes in. I believe in the capacity of humanity to progress forward. As I said to this conference a decade ago, I will see you again. Now, the digital environment five years from now could be fully accessible if we set out to do that now, not at some great increased cost, but at a savings of money by doing that. We just need to decide to do it. The kind of creative energy and wonderful ideas for how to do it have been covered at this conference, let's roll up our sleeves and do it.”

Key Takeaways:

#TechSectorKeyToAchievingAccessibilityInEducation

#EducationProgramsShouldTeachAccessibleDesign

#AchievingDigitalAccessibilityIsNotStarTrekScienceFiction

That concludes our summary of the University of Guelph’s 2021 Virtual Accessibility Conference. Shawn and I have enjoyed revisiting and reflecting on the presentations offered and the topics discussed at last year’s sessions. We hope you’ve enjoyed the conference being summarized in this way and were able to get a sense, through the soundbites we’ve shared here, of the variety of topics and perspectives covered over the two-day event. They have given us a lot to consider and to use in our daily accessibility work, and we look forward to attending this year’s conference. We expect it to be just as information-packed as last year’s!