Speaker: Jim Luke

Many schools are seeing the light about accessibility of web and digital resources in higher education but it’s creating a monster on campus. Accessibility is a complex thing. It’s not easy. It’s both legally mandated and it’s the right thing to do. But the sudden urgency to “be accessible” often results in a dreaded monster: THE ACCESSIBILITY INITIATIVE! The Accessibility Initiative has the potential to eat faculty time, disrupt all other initiatives, and discourage or frustrate everyone in its path.

Taming the accessibility challenge and making accessible the norm requires a lot of faculty and staff development. Unfortunately, much of the professional development offered is either high-level “accessibility is good thing” messaging or detailed, technical training (“click here to add alt-text in MS Word, but do something else in Adobe…”). While some of this technical training might be necessary, it doesn’t solve the real problems. It fixes old documents and sites. It doesn’t make the future accessible.

Fortunately, for domains schools there’s a superhero that can tame the accessibility monster: Digital Literacy Woman! (or man, but I thought it was time woman got top billing). The real problem behind accessibility is a lack of digital literacy among faculty, staff, and students. Most faculty are still using and thinking of the computer and even the Web implicitly as some kind of fancy typewriter where you don’t need the whiteout. Once they understand the basic, modern concepts behind the Web (and Word) accessibility becomes natural in the construction/authoring stage rather than a after-the-fact fix. Among these basic concepts are well-structured digital documents, semantic markup, and separation of content from style from delivery. What they need is less technical training and more professional education on digital literacy.

Digital literacy is a critical part of any domains or similar open learning program. Digital Literacy Woman is right there hiding in the WordPress dashboard, cPanel, and even MS Word if only we explain it and help them see it.

In this discussion, I’ll begin by sharing the experiences we’ve had at LCC. The Accessibility Initiative monster has reared its head in the past year or so, threatening to disrupt all other teaching initiatives. As our Center for Teaching Excellence (responsible for the faculty development) and our Open Learn Lab (DoOO) have struggled to tame the monster, we’ve learned a lot. In particular, we’ve learned the importance of framing accessibility as a digital literacy issue. I doubt that I’ve got it all figured out and that’s why we’ll follow this brief presentation with an open discussion. I hope you’ll come and share your experiences with accessibility. Together I hope we can summarize a list of lessons learned, tips, and things to avoid that can be shared with all the Domains schools (openly licensed and available, of course!). Together we can tame the monster and build digital literacy at the same time.

(BTW: I am not Digital Literacy Woman, I’m only her sidekick, Open Learn Boy).