Web accessibility coordination

[Matt Herzberger]

I am trying to work on some oversight for web accessbility and in particular how to be sure people are in compliance. I know Univ of Texas had a great model but they use a central piece of software that was quite pricy to monitor and I am not able to purchase. So I want to make a low cost sustainable way to be sure our sites are compliant.

 

One method I was thinking of was make top level sites complete their own review and sign off they are compliant and create a report on a lets say a twice a year cycle.

 

Let me know your thoughts or experience and how you oversee this?

[Suzanne Klaus]

Matt - one of the ways we succeeded in getting buy-in for web accessibility was to first get it from our top-level management team. Once they understood it and supported it, that helped to get others on board. We had created a site about 10 years ago or so outlining the ways to make the site accessible. That, also, was helpful to my department content managers. Also, I guess many here would call me a "nagging wife" when it comes to making the site accessible, but it is extremely important in an educational institution especially. I don't use any special software, but there are some "checks" built into our CMS that help. I have basically done it through educating my content managers.

[Michael Fienen]

Just hire a blind person to call and question departments regularly.

[Suzanne Klaus]

Michael - you made me laugh this morning - even though that is not a bad suggestion, it is funny. I would caution people that a couple of universities are dealing with law suits regarding accessibility issues on their web sites. Hopefully, everyone at Matt's institution understands the importance of it.

[Holly LaRose-Roenicke]

Matt, thank you for your post. I'm also wondering if anyone has been informed about a new policy issued by the Department of Education/ Department of Justice about use of video, electronic book readers, and online classroom management forums. In talking with our Disability Services Director, schools are still trying to discern what this means. She is suggesting that all academic and promotional/ marketing videos on the Universities' official YouTube channel need to be closed captioned to be in compliance, and was referred to the FAQ document, specifically questions 5,6 and 7. Anyone else working with this?

 

Here are important links:

Here is the link to the Frequently Asked Questions (for how this affects online videos, etc., I was referred to 5,6, 7)
http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/dcl-ebook-faq-201105...

Here is the link to the original Dear Colleague Letter which came out last summer:
http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-2010062...

[Suzanne Klaus]

Holly - we are working with it. I was told that someone in our media services area was looking for a program that would "caption" or develop transcripts for videos and audio files. To my knowledge, though, she has not found anything. So I would be interested in knowing if anyone else has seen such a program (that doesn't cost a fortune, of course). Regarding YouTube, since it has captioning - even though it isn't perfect - my understanding is that it is an acceptable short-term solution.

[Matt Herzberger]

Suaznne - When you say "

program that would "caption" or develop transcripts for videos and audio file" did you mean automatically or manually? There are plenty of ways to do it manually.

[Holly LaRose-Roenicke]

Automatically... without having a student listen to it and type a transcript.

[Suzanne Klaus]

Yes, Holly, that is what I meant.