Web Accessibility for Students with Disabilities

Janet Peters

Welcome everyone. I think we''ll get started. We might have a few people coming on as we start, but thank you for joining us today for the second of our presentations in the Accessible Technology Webinar Series. And this is Janet, I''m the project, Janet Peters, I''m the Project Coordinator with the Great Lakes ADA Center. This is a new webinar series that we are, have developed. And we are doing five presentations this year, working on raising awareness about accessible technology. Today''s session is Web Accessibility for Community College Students. And our presenters are William Erickson and Camille Lee. And we''re gonna hold questions until the end of the presentation. There''s a couple of ways that you can ask questions. You can either type it in the public chat area and I will repeat the question for the Captioner, because we do have this session captioned today. As well as you can use your microphone if you have one by pressing the Control key and asking your question. Just remember to release the Control key when you''re done speaking, because only one person can speak at a time. And as I said, we''re gonna hold questions until the end. I want to introduce our speakers; William Erickson has a Masters Degree from Cornell University. He is currently a Research Specialist with the Employment and Disability Institute at Cornell. He is the Co-Principle Investigator and Project Manager of the Field Initiated Program Development Project on web based student processes at community colleges working on accessibility. He has worked on previous projects, including the evaluation of web based e-recruiting sites, as well as surveys of private sectors employees regarding the use of world wide web and human resource process and awareness of web accessibility. We are very glad to have him with us today. The second speaker is Camille Lee, and I do want to note on the evaluation form she is not listed. So we can, you can put some extra comments where there''s an area for comments under William, Bill''s section as well. Camille is a Web Developer, Graphic Designer, and Illustrator. Camille designs user friendly, accessible, attractive web sites, web applications, as well as identity packages for print and web. She is currently the Director of Web Production at the Employment and Disability Institute at Cornell and a freelance designer. She has taught web and graphic design at Cornell University, and has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Interior Design from Cornell as well. And I think with that we are going to, I, I''m gonna turn it over to them. And thank you for your attention and participation today.

William Erickson

Thank you Janet. I appreciate you giving us an opportunity to talk about our projects. As Janet mentions, this sort of beginning this project was stimulated by, by some work we did back in around 2000 examining the accessibility of online recruitment web sites, such as Monster.com and over a dozen private companies. And we found that was nearly all the sites had serious accessibility issues. And so we sort of went a step beyond that and figured well, you know, if education is vital to, for people to a, of anyone to, to get good jobs, and barriers to education to result in, in problem, difficulties and being, being able to access these, the, the higher quality jobs that people would like to be able to participate in. Beyond that it''s community colleges server about 70% of, of persons with disabilities who are, who are in higher education. And we also felt that community colleges might be open to improving access as that they, as they serve a large proportion of that, that population. This project, I just want to mention, is, it was funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, NIDRR under the U.S. Department of Education. And we also partnered with the Institute for Community College Development at Cornell University. I also want to mention that another one of our colleagues who couldn''t make it here today is Sharon Trice who was formerly working for the, the DBTAC - Northeast here at Cornell University, and is now currently a Student Services Support person at the, at Community College. Okay, is my, is the volume better here. Sorry I just noticed that I wasn''t speaking loud enough. Hope you people can hear me. So just to briefly go that the purpose of this project, it''s what we''re interested in, this is a three-year project. And one of the focuses we wanted to know what, what web based student services were actually available at community colleges, and how heavily was it used. Also, we were interested in understanding what was the college''s level of awareness regarding web accessibility. Exactly where, what, what was their sort of knowledge, and how much were they aware of the issues that could be caused by their web sites. We were also interested in finding out if online student services were actually accessible and usable to students with disabilities. And the concept was that once we collect this information we could develop a, a tool kit based on the research to help assist community colleges and make them, help, help them become more accessible and usable for people with disabilities. So what I plan to do today is I''ll talk first about some of the, some of the important findings that we had from our research. And then Camille Lee will take you on a brief tour of the, the tool kit that we''ve designed specifically to assist community colleges that were developed based on the, the research. So basically there are two research components as part of this project. The first two years were focused on, one was the, the, a survey of student services professionals to get a better understanding of, of exactly where they stood in terms of their knowledge about accessibility and their use of, of their, of their web sites for providing student services. And we also performed evaluations on a sample of community college web sites to better understand the accessibility and usability of them, and where the problems might lie. Most of the accessibility research that we''ve looked at has just been based, been based on sort of page-by-page accessibility standard evaluations. But this doesn''t really reflect the reality of actually bruising, bruising, browsing or using a web site. Your, of course you''re, you''re moving through, through pages, you''re not just looking at one page like the most of the accessibility testers do. And just say, okay is this accessible? Was the next one accessible? You''re actually going through a series of pages and a, I''m sure that many people have experienced when they tried to go on a web site, and they know the information''s in there somewhere in that web site or that product, but they just can''t find it, or they can''t figure out how to pay for it. And so that''s what the focus of, of usability is. Can, can people actually perform the, the, the task that, that, that web site is designed to allow them to perform. And so what we did was we focused on, on certain activities that a potential student are likely to need or want to do when examining a college or applying to one. Looking at a, you know, searching through a college web site for specific information. Actually completing an admissions applications form. You know, getting course information, figuring how to register for a course, that, that sort of thing. Okay, so what we did in terms of, we did a survey of community college student''s service professionals. We surveyed over, over, we, we talked to over 800, almost 900 colleges, 701 participated. So it was a 1, a really great response rate of nearly 80%. Of whom about 92% were public colleges, and about 8% were private colleges. So fairly diverse group there, being fairly representative of, of the, total there about, about 1,200 community colleges in the United States. So we, we basically actually surveyed over half of all community colleges in the United States. So that''s a great sample. One of the survey questions we asked was, what student services are actually available online at your college? And we gave them a list of several services that, that they might offer that were calling from our previous research. Hold on a second. It does not seem to be showing the image. Hold on, I''ll just go to the next slide and see if. Okay, well I guess I''ll just talk us through what this slide should be showing. It appears that it''s not actually showing our graphs. We, the, the most commonly offered online service by the community colleges was the online class schedule, which was offered by nearly 95% of all of the 701 colleges we, we surveyed. About 94% offered online classes. 87%, about 87.4% offered financial aid applications through, on, on their web site. 80%, about 87% offered admissions applications on their web site. 81% offered course registrations. 68.9% offered billing services. And about half offered their course catalogues online. In despite, you know, so overall about 99% of all colleges that we surveyed actually offered at least one or more of these services online. So it gets, that they''re obviously using, taking advantage of the, the technology to a, to a great extent. Of the, of many of the, of the folks who said they did not offer many of these services online, nearly all plan to do so within the next two years. For example, of the 13% who didn''t offer online admissions, nearly all 88% plan to do so within the next two years. So that would have brought it up to close to 96%, 97% of all the colleges. One of the things that was interesting, we also asked them if they, if the online services they offered were actually created internally by their college or if they utilized outside vendors. And in terms of, of the online admissions, only 18% utilized outside vendors. So 82% actually did their out, online applications actually within, they developed them within their own college. That had implications in terms of what, what we could impact. That''s very much internally based, rather than having to go to another vendor. Another important point that we, that we discovered is that 4% of all the colleges that we, that we surveyed offered online admissions only. The only way you could actually submit an application was by going through their online admissions process. And 11%, a much higher percent, 11% offered only online course registration. Of course, that''s maybe the wave of the future, but this has serious implications if these services are not accessible or usable to persons with disabilities. Sorry. Excuse me. I''ll just go back to the. Okay, one of the other, other questions we asked about was if you''re, if their college had any requirements regarding web accessibility for persons with disabilities? We also asked them if they had any guidelines for governing web design, so perhaps the step before actually re, having a requirement regarding web accessibility. I''m afraid we''re, no, excuse me. Sorry about moving around here. Okay. We''re back to some blanks here. I apologize for this, is we hadn''t tested to see if the, if the graphs would actually come through. I hadn''t expected this. In terms of guidelines for governing, governing web design, about almost three quarters said that they actually had some sort of guidelines governing web design as, as, at the college. So that save, sort of gave us a, a sense of, you know, 71% are actually have some sort of guidelines. It''s encouraging that you might be able to have some impact to already having some rules built into their, if their college, that, yeah, adding something about accessibility would be simpler rather than, rather than dealing with colleges who have no guidelines whatsoever. About 14% said that they did not have any guidelines, and 14% of the respondents said they didn''t know if there were guidelines or not. In terms of requirements regarding web accessibility half of them, 50% actually said that they did have requirements regarding web accessibility. And almost half of those people that they were, I''m sorry; there were about 29% who said that they did not have any requirements regarding web accessibility. But of those 29%, about half of them said that they planned to implement some sort of requirements regarding web accessibility within the next year, so that, that''s encouraging. At least half of the colleges actually did have some sort of requirement regarding web accessibility. And of, about an, a substantial portion, another 15% or so said they were planning to implement. So that would bring it up to about 65% of all the community colleges. And then a remaining 19% they weren''t sure whether they, whether their college actually had requirements regarding web accessibility or not. Okay, so that was just some of the basic results from our, our survey. The survey was much more in, in depth than that, but just wanted to sort of cover the, some of the, the more interesting main points there. We, we also performed a bunch of web site evaluations. We used four different methods to evaluate accessibility and usability. And we focused on about four tasks that we figured would be, you know, fairly typical of the respective or potential new students. One was searching for contact information for the disabilities services, for, for the, to serve the students. Another was looking of, looking at class schedules and trying to find a specific class within their class, online class scheduling system, completing an admissions application, which often required actually developing, going through and creating passwords, developing logins. Many of them had a variety of requirements before you could even get into the admission application, and then actually completing the admissions application. And also finding the financial aid, a link to the financial aid, the federal financial aid services application. Okay, so this is sort of, this is sort of a basic diagram of what we, what we did in terms of our accessibility, usability evaluations. As you can see in the, the, the first, so that the, on the top is we''ve, we perform, we used an automated tool to do some automated 508 evaluation. We, all, all of the web sites and all the pages that we evaluated were, we utilized the, the 508 criteria, just because that was the sort of the, the most basic criteria that was, that''s utilized here in the United States. I figured it was at least a, a basic, a very basic start to what might be accessible. And we also performed a manual 508 evaluation, where we had one of our web designers actually go through and manually check all of the web pages that we were looking at to see if they had, if they fulfilled the 508 criteria or not. And both of those methods were, sort of, a page-by-page analysis. So we called them page-based analysis. Again, not walk, looking at the flow, but just looking at one page, then the next, then the next individually. We also performed what we call a process based analysis, which I feel is much more realistic. You, you don''t just go to web sites to look at a single page, you go to one page and move onto, you know, follow a link or, you know, say, oh that looks interesting and follow it to the, to the next portion of the, another web page that''s of interest to you. And such as if, if you''re going to a community college page you wouldn''t just sit and look at, at the web, at their home page, but would move beyond that point to look at their, the courses they''re offering or the, the, the areas of study that they offer. And so both the, the target group testing and the simulated target group testing were both process-based analysis. Trying to see can you actually, starting it from the homepage can you actually successfully navigate through, through the, through the task and actually complete a specific task, rather than just looking at a single web page. So this next slide talks about the, the section 508 evaluation results. They, we looked at 30 community colleges here. And it''s basically randomly selected across the United States. There were some large, some small, a variety of different areas and locations. As you can see none, none of their homepages actually passed. None of their financial aid pages, academic programs, or disability services pages passed. So they didn''t do very well in this area. In terms of the online application there was a huge variety of complexity on the online application. About half of the online applications were about one to two pages long. A quarter of them were about three to seven pages. A quarter were over eight pages or more long. Actually one application that we, we examined was actually, required you to go navigate through twenty pages all together, which included three login pages, and then seventeen individual pages for the application itself. So pretty, pretty extreme. None of the application processes passed from start to finish. About 13% of all of the over 150 individual pages actually passed all of the Section 508 standards that could be tested by the automated procedures. But that did not mean that they were fully compliant, because they still required further manual checks. And once you went through those none of them had passed, or very few had passed. For the, in terms of the login registration process, it was required on a quarter of the sites before an application could, could be completed, and none of these passed the automated testing. When just looking at the application only, only 2 of the 29 application processes passed the automated testing. And on top, in addition to that, actually one had an inaccessible login. So basically only 1, 1 out of 30 applications could actually have been, actually passed the 508 requirements or criteria. So again, not, not very encouraging. So overall for the section 508 evaluation results only, less than 1% of all pages met all Section 508 standards that were applicable to that page. Okay, one, one of the things that we found, ones really most interesting in, in this whole project was looking at the, working with the actual users and seeing how they actually worked through two community college web sites that we selected for them to try out and test out and see what the results were. We basically selected two, these two sites as fairly typical for community colleges. They weren''t unusually complicated. They''re again fairly, well had a lot of, of features that were seen in many different, many a different web sites. What we did is we included several individuals who were blind, who were using screen readers. Some individuals who had low vision who were using some kind of method of screen magnification, like such as Zoom Text or other magnification software, or utilizing the Windows XP display options. And we also worked with some students actually at a community college, at Landmark College, who have reading related learning disabilities. And then we also had a group, a control group of non-disabled persons so we could see how, how they did relative to individuals with, you know, with reading related LD or individuals with a visual impairments. And we actually asked them to perform a certain specific, specific task, such as, okay you''re, you''re on this home, this college homepage, would now like you to, you know, find the student disabilities service office, or we''d like you to now find their online application form and start completing the form. And so our next slide, whoops, well, okay a nice blank slide here. I''ll see if I can talk you through this. This is much more interesting with a visual. We, what we did is we, as I mentioned, is we looked at two different colleges. We just called them College One and College Two, very original. And this, this particular slide was supposed to show a graph showing how well, how effective people were, or how able people were to complete the online application form. And for the first college, and we, what we did is we had sort of three levels, individuals who were who were able to complete the task without any assistance, those who, to required some assistance to actually complete it successfully. And then the individuals who were unable to complete it even, even with the assistance that, that we provided. We wouldn''t actually guide their hands to show them exactly where, we''d give some sort of hints if they started running into difficulties and were sort of stalled for five minutes or, or more on a, on a specific task. So for this, for College One that we had five, five people, who were, who we called control individuals who were not, did not have any disability. And 80% of those were able to complete College One’s online application form with, without assistance. But 20%, one, one of them was unable to complete it even with assistance because of some, or sorry, one of them was able to complete it, but they required assistance to complete it. With the screen reader users we had, had four of, four individuals actually testing those. And of the four, three of them required were able to complete it, but only with assistance. And one was able to complete it without assistance. Screen magnifier users, it was interesting, actually we had four individuals testing that particular web site as well. And one of them actually was unable to complete it even with assistance. And the remainder, remainder were able to complete it, but required at least some level of assistance to be able to work through the, the web site. With the users with the reading, learning disabilities, there were seven of those. And about, about 30% of those, I guess about two of them were unable to complete the task at all. About half of them were able to, to complete it with assistance, and then two additional were, were able to complete it without assistance. The second college was far, far more difficult. Now everyone found it difficult, including four out of the five controls were unable to complete it without having some additional assistance to, to lead them through, and you know, suggest, make suggestions as to how they might want to enter the information or get to the information they needed into the application. Half, half of the screen reader users and a third of the screen magnifier users were unable to complete it even with assistance. And the remainder of both the visual impaired groups required a significant amount of assistance to complete the task. And those with reading based, learning disabilities, about two-thirds of those individuals had difficulty and required assistance to complete the task. So it was interesting. And, and here basically is that not only were people with, who had to use, you know, the screen readers or screen magnifiers, and to those individuals who were, had reading based LD had difficulty. But many of the controls, many of the people without any disabilities had usability issues with these two college web sites. And many of college, many of the problems they ran into were very similar or identical to those that the individuals with, with disabilities ran into. So suggesting that perhaps if the colleges were to just improve the usability of their web sites it would improve the experience for everyone, and vastly improve the experience for potential students with disabilities. Unfortunately again this next one, you know, just quickly run through it. We asked while the people were, after they had work through the application process we asked them how many, if they felt that they were, found portions when they were working through the web site they found confusing. And again we looked at, we have this chart that showed it both for College One and College Two. And College Two, which was the one where people required more assistance, not surprisingly, there was a great deal more confusion. In fact, everyone, 100% all of the users with reading, learning disabilities, all the screen magnifier users, three-quarters of the screen reader users, and about two-thirds of the, of the control testers said that that colleges online application process and working through it on the web was, was confusing. And between 20% and almost 90% of the users in college, at the other college web site that we tested, found that they were, report that they found the process confusing. So there''s, there''s a lot, lot if issues, lot of problems here. Okay. Another blank screen. Here I go. One of, when we were talking to the, the students at Landmark College they gave us some really interesting comments about, you know, how they felt about the web site and their experience when they were trying to navigate through it. Some of the quotes, “It is like they don''t care. They put disabilities on the bottom of the page like they were ashamed of it” , “We need to know that we have a chance to succeed”. Now, so this is sort of the, the feeling that some of these individuals are getting from trying to navigate on this web site, and the result of the frustration. And also several of these comments were related to the fact that it was very difficult to actually find the contact information for the student, the disabilities student services offices, which they would have hoped would have been, you know, fairly prominent somewhere on, on, like perhaps on the home page. In fact, in many cases they were buried deep below into the, in the fine print on the home page, or not even on the home page at all. So this is something that I think is important to probably point out to the community colleges if they''re trying to provide services to these individuals with disabilities, that they need to make sure this is a bit more obvious to where to find the services to be able to get more information. One of the other tasks that we did, since we only were able to, had, the usability testing is very, very time intensive. It takes hours to, well, we spent about two hours per individual to actually do the testing. But there''s a great deal of time to actually work through the information collected, and evaluate it, and get a better understanding of what was happening. And so what we did is to broaden our finding we basically utilized the information we collected from our usability tests, and created criteria to follow to test 10, 10 additional sites on our own to sort of see, okay, these are the issues that the individuals, our testers had. Let''s see, let''s look at 10 other community college web sites to broaden the, the sample and see if those had similar issues. So we looked, these are the sort of the, the, these are evaluation criteria''s, some of the basic ones that we looked at, like the functional accessibility and usability with the keyboard only access. Tested them to see if they could be read through with a screen reader and actually perform the tasks, and rate the criteria included, can the task be accomplished? There''s a link test, text and all text meaningful? Is color alone used to convey meaning? Is there sufficient contrast? Is the home page link prominent, etc.? The results, the majority of task actually were, we were able to complete, but with, with difficultly. About 80% of them were able to be completed. There were situations where it was not possible to navigate using a keyboard only. We found extensive use of graphical, graphical text. There''s lack of meaningful alt text, lack of clear form labels and application forms, a lack of prominently placed home page links, lack of consistent styling and layout of the third party product where they actually had another party actually provide the online application. And shifting between the college web site and the provider of this application was very, was quite inconsistent sort of a shock. In terms of screen reader evaluation, 2 of the 10 sites were unable to be, unable to be completed. In terms of disability services, 2 could not be found using a keyboard only, generally due to main navigation, which was not accessible. So a 2 out of a 10 colleges that we tested and individual with a screen reader, or one who had to use a keyboard to navigate, could not actually get to their disabilities services page. In terms of screen reader evaluation over all, 2 could not be, 2 applications could not be completed, 2 were completed with relative ease, but 6 posed significant challenges with, to, to being able to complete it with a screen reader. So it''s sounds sort of an interesting discrepancy. Going back to our survey results where 50% of the institutions we surveyed said they had web accessibility requirements. However, less than 1% of the web pages met Section 508 Web Accessibility Standards. And this is looking at over 150 web pages across 30 community college web sites. So, so why, so what are some of the barriers to this implementing these, these policies? You know, what might be, what might be causing the issue? We asked several, 3 questions in the survey. About half of them, there, there was no single barrier that stood out. About half of them said the last, as, as a barrier to implementation about half said the lack of awareness about the need for web accessibility. About half said concerns about cost and time involved. And slightly more than half said it was an issue, part of one of the barrier, main barrier on their campus was a lack of knowledge about what''s required to make web sites accessible. So what we, we clearly that, you know, different colleges are at different stages regarding accessibly. But what was encouraging that nearly all showed interest. Main web accessibility they were willing to participate in this survey. Many of them claim to be, have some knowledge about web accessibility. Some were actually testing their web sites for accessibility. Although we went back to actually examine some of the web sites that they said they had tested, generally found that they really weren''t doing much better than those who weren''t testing. Which brings in a question about, okay well maybe they''re at, maybe some of these college actually are, you know, do have these polices in place, they are testing, but perhaps there just the implementation is, of their, maybe problems in actually implementing their policy, in addition to perhaps many of them not, not really being aware of the issues. So we design, what we designed is, our web site called TheWebAccessToolKit.org. And it''s designed for a non-technical audience, for administrators, IT administrators, and project managers, instructional designers, faculty, and librarians. And we''re still working on developing this. And we''d be interested in if you had any comments regarding it. We wanted to sort of try to make the standards reels there interpreted more accurately and applied to design more intuitively and successively to their, to the web sites. We didn''t, one of the things we didn''t want to do was to reinvent the wheel given the many good resources available. And so much about the web site does is try to point them to the excellent existing resources, best practices, and extemporary policy implementations. Now I''m gonna hand it over to Camille Lee to take you on a quick tour of our web site so you can see what we, what we''ve developed.

Camille Lee

Hello everyone, this is Camille. I am now going to navigate to the www.WebAccessToolKit.org. So here we are at the site. And again, we are still developing it, and we would love any, any feedback that you would, wouldn''t mind sending us, whether this would be helpful information for anybody looking at web accessibility. Because we feel that it''s, we are targeting it to specifically community college administrators, but the information is certainly, generally now for any web developer or manager. And so the site is divided into three sections. And the home page lists essentially every single page on the, on the web site. It is a site map, so to speak, right on the home page. We will be incorporating a little tutorial right on the homepage that will probably be in some sort of podcasted format that will be accessible once the site settles down into a more mature format. But getting started is our section to help administrators understand the basic issues involved of why they should be interested in web accessibility for their web site. And so the first three sections include what is web accessibility and usability? Because that is really the main thrust of our research is to find out the relationship, the correlation between accessibility issues and usability issues in developing and using a web site. And that a lot of developers, and I''m a web developer, the question would be, well, you know, I, how is this relevant when the vast majority of my users do not have a disability? And you really need to look at it a larger scope than just compliance. This is really a universal design issue for helping people, in general, use your site. And what, as a developer was an eye opening experience is to watch people using technology, assistive technology like magnifiers, like screen readers, we used specifically Jaws or, or our participants did. Students who have reading related learning disabilities, and our control group, and to see all members of all four of these groups have the same issues. And it is those issues that often made their experience, the usability issue that made their experience frustrating, or frankly impossible, was great to see. And so as a developer it was nice to see that when you focus on usability and making, make a web site easier to use, easier to understand, easier to comprehend and navigate, understand why a user is at your site, and then help them accomplish that goal easier and faster and that helps everyone. So that, what we want, and I don''t know if it''s happening on our web site yet, is to really get that message across. That this is not just an accessibility issue, this is a larger usability issue with a particular subset of users that has specific needs. So under getting started, we have the what is web accessibility and usability? Is it, is it going? So the rest of the pages are set up in three sections, we have the navigation on the left, we have a brief synopsis of the page in the little white box here, and then immediately in this little blurb you have the ability to go to the next section without actually going into the meat of the context, content. And at the bottom of every page we have a list of related resources, which go to really useful web products that are already in existence. I mean people who''ve done a fantastic job explaining, well what is web accessibility? And making the business case for web accessible design. So again, like Bill mentioned earlier, the point of this site is not to recreate the wonderful resources that are already on the web, but it''s to gather them together in what we''re hoping is a, a little bit easier and more thought out process than just gluing. So if we go to the next section there''s a section called, How Does this Affect Our College? Which is the start of a business case. And the next section, What are Our Legal Obligations? These resources are, are great to explain to community colleges exactly, you know, by law what are they required or not required to do? And then we move to this next section of the web site called, Steps to Accessibility. This is a six step process that we have developed to help administrators understand the lay of the land. These are the types of issues and here are some introductory steps to accomplishing those tasks. And that if you go to your technical team, or your, your web team, however, whatever, however it''s configured in your college and you''re able to use this terminology, and also then to provide your web team a resource to find other resources. Then it helps the administrator understand, you know, what exactly are the various steps that they need to take, not individually, but that they need to take to manage the process. So the first step is the testing the accessibility of your web site. Now we had to then instead to test the usability of the web site, we split it into two steps, where in actuality they can be happening in tandem. If you''re bringing people together, or you''re bringing people in to test your web site, then you can be testing accessibility and usability at the same time if you''re bringing in students, you know, that use assisted technology. But for the sake of the length of the page we split it into two steps. And then we move into step three, it''s really important to understand that web accessibility doesn''t just happen from one part of an organization. Just like usability and doesn''t happen in just the IT Department, there needs to be a, a group of people, of administrators, disability student services administrators, as well as the technology department administrators to understand and get on board that beyond compliance what we''re really looking at is helping people use our web site. It''s as simple as that. And so forming a committee of the different stakeholders, students involved helps people understand the full scope of the importance of this issue. That it''s not just a, oh, my page needs to be 508 compliant. No. It''s bigger than that. You need, your, your web sites need to be actually usable by people who use this technology. And what we''ve, we have a link here to organizing a web accessibility committee. So again, this is a, a quick review of the type of things that you need to do, and then there''s more information that you can find on the web. After you''ve established the committee, we give, we provide you tools to establish your goals. And what we''ve provided are 1, 2, 3, about 8 different areas of the accessibility, you know, landscape that you can take a look at to see where you''d like to actually start the process. And so, we had this, let''s see here, we called them quality indicators. This will give you, or not you, but the college administrators and their staff an ability to pick an area that they want to work on. So do we need to increase awareness of web accessibility? Here are the types of things that we need to look at to improve accessibility. Do we want to identify who the stakeholders are? Do we need to evaluate web accessibility and usability? Do we need to develop an accessibly policy? Do we need to improve our training and support for our staff? Do we need to create online access, or creating, sorry, do we need help in, do we need to help our faculty create accessible online instruction? And also, do we need to help our technical staff actually develop the accessible web pages? So, we''ve provided a list of indicators just as a place to start. And so these links will take you to the actually HTML version, and this link will give you a downloadable document. We have then step six, we help you develop a work plan around the indicators that you deemed important. And then finally we have a tool to help administrators, you know, x, what is the word? Evaluate. Yes, evaluate your progress. And so these are the six steps to accessibility. And we have a great resources section. And here are the different topics under resources, there''s video and audio files, there''s web articles, as well as just general textural information on awareness, stakeholders, evaluation, and policy. And Sharon Trice spent hours scouring the web. Also providing the resources that she used in her training for accessible IT when she was with our DBTAC at Cornell. Okay, if you would like a copy of the Cornell University reports that we wrote, the research brief is available on our homepage via the download research brief link. And so now we can open up the session for some questions. I believe so, but this is not something that we test, that we tested. And Bill is looking at a report right now.

William Erickson

About 90%, 94% of the colleges that we. Okay, I will repeat the question again. Did any of the, this is from, did any of the community colleges have a distance learning program? If so was accessibility considered? About 94%, virtually all of the community colleges actually had online, offered online classes. And I need, need to go back through to try and remember if we actually found out if, I''ll have to go back through and check our reports and see if we actually considered accessibility. I think in some cases, let, hold, let me just look it up. Hold on a minute. Of the colleges that actually had distance learning, or faculty, we asked about faculty courses and distance learning course pages, of the colleges that actually had web accessibility requirement, which is a total of 352 colleges that we entered, that we surveyed, three-quarters of them said that their web accessibility requirements did include these faculty course and distance learning course pages. Whether they actually, whether they were actually accessible is another question. But their policy did, at least in those cases, did, about three-quarters of the cases did include there, that, that, those types of courses.

Participant

But it was, I mean, right. I should have probably just changed that to speech reader or something like that. And then the top part, the only reason why I put those questions down is because those are things that I kind of think about when I''m walking through the door in case that client says something to me. Oh yeah, I had surgery. And then that tell me, Oh, I better email the counselor, and have the counselor talk to them again. Because, you know, something will change in their vision, and you know, it''s always issues and things to consider. So even though I don''t ask those questions, I still have to think about it. And so that was a really. I don''t know, I was kind of getting a generic type template going for the counselors, some of the things that I look for, you know, when. It''s just. Yes. Right. Yeah.

Janet Peters

Okay, just a reminder, you can speak your question, but release the control key, because if you''re speaking and you don''t release it we can''t, Bill can''t answer it, Bill or Camille can''t answer it. Or you may type the question and we''ll repeat it for the Captioner or for those who are listening. Okay. So, any other questions?

William Erickson

Response on the, on the public chat area. It seems that, like even this, the community colleges that had accessibility guidelines were also, were also not adequate to meet the 508 criteria. Any recommendations to the community colleges?

Camille Lee

Well, from the developers’ standpoint, I absolutely understand why these pages don''t end up being 508 Compliant. Because as a developer you''re thrown all of these different requirements, there''s changes that you need to make on the fly. So for me, what I would say that it has to become a part of the culture of the IT Department in conjunction with the culture of the school saying that the administration has to say that this is important, this is a mandate. And then the IT groups need to get onboard and say, yes this is really important. And then, they need to incorporate it into their day-to-day development structure. So whatever software development process they use it needs to be incorporated. Testing needs to be incorporate. Not only user testings, but just generic usability testing, but specifically the accessibility portion of that as well. So, to answer your question, any recommendations, my recommendation would be that, this is not something that happens over night, but you need to start. And to take a look at what is your ID development process. And incorporate user and accessibility testing as a part of that process. And in time this improves. So does that meant that, yes, every month we bring in users? And then all the, or does that mean that before we publish any page we run it through a checker to make sure that the I''s are dotted and the T''s are crossed. Do we have an even understanding of what does, what are the contrast issues? What are the color issues? Because a lot of the 508 Standards are based on manual checks. And the only way you will know whether your decisions are accurate or not is, is through the testing. So I, I hope that helps. That would be my recommendation.

William Erickson

I guess another thing too, we, we didn''t ask any specific questions about what exactly what''s their policies were. So it, it, it''s quite possible they might have, it''s possible they might have said that they used 508, but they didn''t know how to actually follow it. They may have just had some sort of a sentence about, about web accessibility is important to the college, and that''s what they considered their policy. We don''t really know the details. On our web site we provide some information about how to, how to go establish goals and, you know, what, what makes a good, and links to what makes a good policy, and things to consider when developing a policy. So hopefully they''ll be able to look at, you know, some of the information we have on our web site, and hopefully be able to determine what, what they really need to address.

Janet Peters

Are there any last questions in the final few minutes here? I''ll leave it all request. Okay. You can also email questions, if Bill you want to put your, your contact information up there. Or actually I''ll email it out to everyone with the PowerPoint and the evaluation. I''m gonna put the evaluation link in the chat, and as well as you''ll receive an email on it. Please fill out the evaluation. I apologize for the technical difficulties today. We appreciate your time, and we have three more of these sessions on accessible technology happening. I''d like to thank our speakers for their participation and their willingness to speak for us. And thanks for joining us.