We're on a worldwide search to see what inclusive education looks
like. So Blackboard Ally is going on tour for 2019, visiting campuses
around the globe to learn how they're tackling their toughest
accessibility challenges and improving the learning experience for all
their students. All right, it's great to be back with another
installment of the BB Ally podcast series. During our last episode, I
had the chance to check in with the team at Lesley University in
Cambridge Massachusetts where social justice was the theme of the day.
It's a campus that's been committed to social justice since its
founding and that's a theme that's going to continue in today's
episode. I'm here in the Bay Area California at the birthplace of the
Free Speech Movement, the University of California at Berkeley. We're
both at the campus and in the surrounding cities. The advocacy for
people with disabilities and for historically marginalized communities
is really at the core of the campus, the core of the community
culture. So I'm very fortunate to have the opportunity first to have a
conversation with accessibility evangelist Lucy Greco a.k.a. "The
Punisher", she earned that nickname both for her fierce and relentless
commitment to accessibility advocacy as well as for her achievements
on the global court. Lucy represented candidate in the Paralympics,
helped bring home a bronze medal with her rocket arm. So I'm very
fortunate to have a chance to sit down with a true accessibility
champion, somebody who's been bulldozing barriers both in her personal
life as well as for the students she works with here on campus. Lucy
also serves as a special advisor to the Blackboard Ally team. She's
brought her unique knowledge and expertise about accessibility to help
inform some of the early designs and features of Blackboard Ally. So
we'll get a chance to hear from her about how Blackboard Ally is
impacting accessibility at the campus here at UC Berkeley. So I'm very
excited to have the opportunity to sit down with two inclusive
learning champions; Lucy Greco and Dr. Joseph Feria-Galicia. I am Lucy
Greco, I am an Assistive Technology Specialist for UC Berkeley. My
title is assistant to access technology evangelist and I lead the
accessibility initiative for UC. How did you get involved in the
accessibility game? So I have been in the accessibility game for many
many years. I am totally blind and I, of course, was interested in
access technology and assistive technology for myself when I was a
student going through school and I became an expert in the field by
just using and accessing and working with products myself. What were
some of the barriers that you experienced growing up as a student? So
the biggest barrier was access to information, being able to go to the
library like every other student and access articles. In the days
where I was going to school, we still had periodical reference guides
and everything was on paper. Being able to go through and get that
kind of information without assistance from somebody else, that was
restricted to the 9-5 when the reference librarian was available. As
computers became more used and technology became more digital those
barriers slowly dwindled. Things like STEM were very very difficult to
access, there was no digitizing of STEM content early on. I think
today we have a lot better access to those topics and areas. Tell me a
little bit about the history here at Berkeley around supporting just
people with disability. This is like the home of where some of that
stuff started, right? Yes. So early on in the late 60s, there was a
group of about four or five different students who had various
disabilities. The most famous of which was a gentleman called Ed
Roberts and Ed Roberts was a polio victim who used an iron lung for, I
think, about two thirds to three quarters of every day and was a young
man who came here to Berkeley to go to school and Berkeley was
challenged to work with him and accommodate him and his peers. I think
there was a gentleman who was blind in the group, a couple of other
chair users who weren't, various levels of disability and this group
of people became known as the rolling disabled. They came to Berkeley
and they challenged our image of people with disability, they
challenged our understanding of the capabilities of people with
disabilities and they won a lot of victories, they won the right to be
able to go to what classes they wanted when they wanted, they won the
right to demand that the classrooms be made accessible and started the
whole disability rights movement. Berkeley soon became known as kind
of a Mecca for people with disabilities, we actually had a really good
program for many many years where students with disabilities would
come here specifically because we were more welcoming and more open
and had more surfaces for people with disabilities. This was our
disabled students residents program where students who may have had
physical disabilities of various degrees who had been taken care of by
mom and dad their entire lives or their entire realm of their
disability, say they were injured at age 10 something like that, they
would come here not only to go to school but they would come here to
learn how to become independent disabled adults and learn how to work
through the system of disability, learn how to get the appropriate
supports, everything from how to hire a personal care attendant to
getting a master's of business or a PhD in economics, all the rest of
those, all those things were a big package at Berkeley and those
students with disabilities were always welcomed and very friendly. So
because of that, we had a very rich disabled community. There's a
certain condition of causing disabilities where we actually have the
highest percentage of people living with that disability in Berkeley
because they all came here to school because we could support them.
How long have you been here at Berkeley? I've been here for almost 15
years now. What was it like when you first got here? How digital were
things? Things were just on the verge of becoming digital. I was hired
to be an access technology consultant for the students, my role was
working with the students specifically and helping evaluate their
needs and then helping them match them to assistive technologies. So a
student would come in who didn't have the use of their hands and I
could help them determine, did we give them on-screen keyboard, did we
give them a use of eye gaze, did we pair them with speech dictation
software, so it was my role to look at their ability, pair them with
assistive technology to make their journey through Berkeley go better
and go more effectively. To jump to the next part of that question.
How is it different? Today I'm actually working at a more systemic
level instead of working with students firefighting individual
problems and individual cases, I'm now working to improve the
environment overall for these students. So that when they come here
they have less of a challenge with each and individual program or
every course that the courses are designed excessively and everything
works on an accessible basis. So then when they know how to use their
own technology they don't have to be challenged by every single phase
of process. What has been one of the most challenging parts of your
job as things have gone digital? Getting the news and getting the
information into the hands that need it the most. Getting people like
faculty to know about the tools that they could use to become more
accessible, getting them to even realize that they were accessible or
were not accessible. That's always been a big barrier. People in my
industry have always worked at a firefighting type of role where we
were basically drinking from the fire hose and trying to catch up and
we had a student who had this problem and they were on this course and
we had to fix that for them. The biggest problem has always been
getting ahead of the problem, getting to faculty and trying to fix the
problems before they happen. Being able to help people realize what
accessibility means is actually really the key point. Having people
actually recognize inaccessible and accessible before the problem
occurs has been a primary problem. Maybe just going back broadly, so
are you seeing now accessibility becoming more a part of the
conversation with faculty and or with the course experience? I always
of course would like it to be more, but definitely faculty are
interested, faculty are engaged. Faculty aren't aware of where the
inaccessible barriers lay at this point and time. But when they are,
they jump on, and they grab it, and they embrace that whole thing.
Faculty really care about accessibility. Something I've been known to
say before is, faculty teach to teach everyone and give everyone the
information they can. When they realize that a person with a
disability might not get that information and might not have access to
the information, they want to have that be accessible. They just don't
know. They're not aware that what they're doing is blocking somebody
from being engaged in their course. As soon as we introduce something
to them, they love it. They embrace that whole idea of teaching and
reaching more at the same time. What's been the biggest challenge for
faculty in making accessible content? I think the tools that they've
been provided are limited and I think as we provide tools and
resources for faculty, it will become easier for them. We had a study
here just done just last year on the authoring tools themselves that
people are using to create content. The big problem is authoring tools
themselves may have accessibility features built into them to make
accessible content but they're not the default setting. If you go into
Microsoft Word to create accessible documents and all the
accessibility checks are not on by default. Actually, labeling the
graphics which Microsoft Word does really well now is not on by
default. So the big barrier is knowing where to go to change the
problem and faculty didn't even know that there was a problem that
they needed to change. So getting the information to them about where
the barriers are and then helping them find the path, the easy path,
that's going to be the challenge is the easy path because even though
accessibility is a very easy thing, sometimes that pathway can be
blocked. Do you see that a lot with publisher content? Yes. Some
publishers create content that's inaccessible by default, and you have
to go through all kinds of hoops and loops to get to that content in
an accessible way. More and more publishers are actually thinking
about accessibility and working on their accessibility. So we are
getting improvements. We're not there yet. I think the longer we work
at this and the longer we talk about the default experience being
accessible, we will actually achieve this. In a few years, I think
we're going to have the scales tip in the other direction. But right
now, we're still very balanced with some publishers are making good
content, some publishers are making bad content, some publishers are
making great choices for accessibility, others are making bad choices.
What about, let's shift gears a little bit more on the theory stuff.
The relationship between accessibility and universal design, universal
design for learning. So universal design for learning is an excellent
concept because it talks about the fact that everyone should be able
to learn in their own way. However, people get fixated on it sometimes
as a way to get content accessible and I want to remind people that
for content to be universally accessible, it actually has to start
with accessible content because you can't talk about ways to teach
content and expect that those ways will be the way you make it content
accessible. If you were presenting a file as a picture and you're
presenting a file as a video and you're presenting the content in four
different ways, if every single one of those ways is inaccessible,
you've got universal design, you've got something that works for
multiple different people. You have to start with accessible content
and then move to the universal design or the universal design for
education. I dread when people start talking about UDL because they
think that UDL is the answer for accessibility, and I think UDL
requires accessibility before it can work. Tell me a little bit about
your involvement with Ally? So I've been involved with allies since
very early on. In that, the founders came to me early on and said,
"We've got this tool and we would like you to help us see how it's
working." They gave me early access to some of the content that they
were remediating and I looked at it. They first came to me and I was
very skeptical and they said, "We remediate documents to make them
much more accessible." I'm like, "yes. Everybody says they do that,
nobody does it." Then I actually looked at the full product and
understood how they were working. First of all, they were doing a very
reasonable job of remediating the content. But the really exciting
thing for me was looking at the whole product as a package. They were
doing one thing that nobody had thought about doing before, which was
going in and catching faculty early on in their process. Maybe not at
the beginning, but early enough that as they were uploading content
into their courses, catching those faculty and saying,"Hey, let's take
a look at this. This is accessible. This is inaccessible." So I worked
with them very closely from the very beginning to say, this is the
things we need to emphasize, these are the things we need to look at
and I've always monitored it and respected the product because it's
given me as a professional in academia a tool I've never had before.
I've never had access to go up to faculty and say, "Let's look at your
content and see if your content is accessible." First of all, at a
university like Berkeley, the scale is just too large. Maybe if there
was 100 faculty at this university, I could do that. I can't do that
at Berkeley. We have a lot more than 100 faculty members, and most of
them aren't willing to talk to a staff member because they've got busy
lives and all the rest of that. So ally gets the faculty right where
they are and gives them the information in small digestible bites,
which is what's really really important. Right now, they're getting
messaging about big concepts, the big idea of accessibility. How do we
even begin to talk about that? Do we talk about learning disability?
Do we talk about physical disability? Do we talk about access to
cognitive barrier? No. We have to talk about small minuscule little
things. Do your images have labels? Get them to work on things and
give them bite sized digestible information, and that's what Ally I
saw as the value right early on at the beginning. It's like, "Oh my
God, you mean I can actually get a faculty member to know that a PDF
they created is a scanned image?" forget about remediating that PDF
for them, which ally did do. But just letting them know that
inherently what you're uploading blocks a percentage of the population
from actually accessing the content. How have you seen the product
evolve over the years? It has evolved through leaps and bounds. First
of all, the algorithms they're using are getting better and better.
We're looking at different products, we're looking at different
campuses, different universities around the world now and seeing
similarities in education. It's giving us great insight into where
academia is. It's telling us what people are doing right and people
are doing wrong for accessibility. The product is evolving by working
more with universities and helping us, first of all see where our
problems are, going through and seeing that campus I work on has X
number of files that are PDFs. So maybe we need to work on PDFs. It's
giving us ways to approach the problem that we've never had access to
before. Tell me a little bit about the data review today and the first
three months of roll-out. It was really exciting to go through our
data review and see that faculty were engaging with content and
changing content. That was really quite rewarding for me. I mean, it
was nice to see that we had a lot of content but that the content
wasn't also all bad. There was some content that was in there that
actually had some promise, but it also gave us some really good
guidance as to where we need to go next. We still have a lot of images
being uploaded, not as many as we would have thought. So that was
actually interesting to see that faculty are moving away from
uploading images. But we still have people putting in scanned PDFs and
getting those fixed it's going to be critical and key. I mean it was
great though because we now have a snapshot of where we are, what
we're doing and what kind of content we're creating. We know that PDFs
are the number one thing that we're doing on our campus, so we have to
find a better way of creating those PDFs. What do you see as maybe the
next steps in the process? So the next steps in the process is of
course to continue using Ally. That's going to be really important to
keep engaging and to start communicating ways and means for people to
do the things they're doing more effectively. So, we need to start
providing our faculty with the tools and easy access to the tools and
provide them with easy to understand guidance on how to use the tools.
So we need to encourage people. "Hey, use Microsoft Word and maybe
upgrade your copy of Microsoft Word so that you're using the most
advanced version of it". These are the quick steps on how to check
your product. Literally, get the messaging through to them and I think
starting to provide places and ways for them to understand how to do
what they're doing better. That it focus specifically on what the
reports are telling us. So, the number one problem is scanned PDFs. So
what kind of things can we do to stop those scanned PDFs. Do we have
to go around and find out where those photocopiers are that are only
scanning images and providing images and maybe install OCR functions
on them. That's maybe one solution but there's got to be others as
well. We've got to start coming up with fast easy fixes. What's most
exciting do you see in the horizon for accessibility technologies? The
fact that STEM is becoming more accessible is really important to me.
The fact that we can now do math, or chemistry, or biology or physics
online and that it's actually becoming more accessible, I think it's
going to make it not only accessible to people with disabilities but
it's going to make it accessible to third world countries. People can
learn more, people can engage with content and understand it.
Education can benefit from technology if it's done right. One thing we
didn't talk about yet is like the alternative formats. So just from a
person with a visual impairment, what's the value of being able to get
an alternative format? I'm going to throw that back at you and say
that the value for everyone is that you get to learn in the way you
want to learn. Maybe you're a commuter and you want to listen to an
MP3 file because you're driving and you can't take your eyes off the
road to read the book. Maybe you're a person who is a tactile learner
and you want to be able to engage with an HTML file and move your way
through that HTML file and see the links and connections within it.
Maybe you are a person who needs to see and hear to understand. So
you're going to listen to it then you're going to read it. If you're a
blind and visually impaired person and somebody does give you that
scanned image, being able to download it as an HTML file or a PDF,
gives you the benefit that you currently have to wait up to seven
weeks to get that converted by your disabled students program. You can
download that alternative format and have a file within instances,
seconds that you didn't have access to before. You had to go to
somebody else and say, "Can you remediate this". Now you have access
to it yourself. Because people can engage with those formats and pick
whichever format they want, that means that they can absorb it
whatever way they want, when they want, how they want, where they
want. How has it been for the disability services office in terms of
providing equitable access at scale? How challenging is that? It's
incredibly challenging. We have well over, I think it's close to 2,000
students right now with disabilities, many of which require
alternative formats and we have to hire a lot of staff to do that. I
think there is currently 68 staff right now, doing alternative media
conversion. That's a lot of people. That's huge and we're just
serving, I think the number I heard was 125 students specifically with
that. It's taking up to seven weeks to get them their content. Some
students are getting material on what we call it just in time basis,
so you're covering topic X next week in the course, you're getting the
material this week. You're not getting it before the semester. A lot
of students like to go through their textbook ahead of time and get
the ideas and concepts. Students will sometimes read the book before
the semester even starts. Yes, very few of them but there are students
who will do that. If you're disabled students and you're in a very
complex area like chemistry or science of some sort, we may not be
able to get that material to you in an accessible format ahead of
time. Any closing thoughts? I think. There are school's out there just
getting started with Ally. The closing thought is this, to see where
you're at. Thinking about the Ally tool, use this tool as a way to
engage and gather information about where you need to train, where you
need to reach out to people, and figure out what the support
mechanisms you can afford to give people are. Educational institutions
are desperately in need of funding to do things. Using something like
Ally to target what's most important in your institution, maybe you
don't have as many PDF as we do. Maybe you have images, that's your a
problem. Come up with really effective ways of communicating about how
to make those things more accessible to your campus by using the Ally
tool. Make sure that your faculty find the tool as a help not as a
threat or a hindrance to their getting you from point A to point B,
point out that this tool is there to make them better people. That's
the number one thing to focus on. If you say to them, "You may
actually face penalties if you're not actually correcting your files
nobody's going to want to use the tool." But hey,"We're providing you
this so you can reach out to more students and be more effective,
engage with it, let us know where it's failing you, let us know where
it's assisting you." You will form a partnership between your faculty
and your audience and be able to engage more effectively and be able
to get to a point where accessibility is part of the culture. Which is
where you want to be, you don't want accessibility to be a mandate,
you don't want accessibility to be something that's tacked on at the
end, you want people to think about accessibility as a cultural
important thing in the organization and have everyone be a part of
that community. Really inspiring to hear from Lucy. I think the thing
that stands out to me is just how important it is to reach faculty in
their workflow. For so many years Lucy's been trying to connect with
faculty about the importance of accessibility and how to author
accessible content and now with a tool like Blackboard Ally, she's
able to spark that conversation inside the LMS, that point of contact
still important for moving the conversation forward and giving the
faculty the tools and skills they need to create more equitable
learning experiences. Now we'll have the chance to hear from the
accessibility team lead, Dr. Joseph Feria-Galicia, who has been
leading the Blackboard Ally roll out at UC Berkeley. Joseph has a
background in instructional design and was working with faculty in
designing accessible online courses, working with Lucy Greco to build
in those accessibility best practices. Now as the Ally team lead, he's
actually working with the existing courses, helping put in the
strategies and the communications and the trainings in place to help
those faculty take their existing content and start to make it
accessible using Blackboard Ally. I'm Joseph Feria-Galicia, I'm the
accessibility team lead with UC Berkeley and I'm also the LA service
lead on campus. Just tell me a little bit about your background in
working with accessibility issues with disability? Sure, I've been
here on campus for five years and started off with the Berkeley
resource center for online education, became an accessibility team
lead right after and making sure that our online content is accessible
both the course content and the download files, providing a number of
workshops to instructional designers and helping with policy as well.
Your background is in instructional design? My background is
educational policies studies and educational technology. But yes, I
was an instructional designer for a number of years as well. The
instructional design work was one of the reasons why I was hired
originally. The team was amazing and I learned a great deal, they were
doing a lot of work in terms of providing content in smaller modules,
making sure there's alternative forms of assessment and making sure
the online courses are navigable. So they had a lot of good universal
design concepts implemented but in terms of the course content like
using headings, things like that, in the download files I was able to
help out with that back in 2012 I believe. Nice. So you kind of got
involved in with Ally, becoming the service lead with Ally. So maybe
just kind of thinking back before Ally for supporting students with
diverse needs and not just those disclose, what kind of practices and
strategies have been put in place to support those students? Yes, so
in terms of online content, UC Berkeley has been slow to adopt online
courses but the UC Extension was the model on campus and again, like I
mentioned earlier the course content that the Berkeley resource center
for online education was creating involved breaking the content down
into smaller chunks, using the modules, using good navigation, a
consistent navigation, consistent layout. For the most part color
contrast was really good, yes. Just trying to reach diverse learners
that way but the content itself in terms of headings and the download
files weren't necessarily looked upon originally back in 2012. But,
you know, as soon as we brought it up it was embraced and then we
created a number of course templates, Word templates, PowerPoint
templates and just really embraced the training model right away
within the Berkeley resource center for online education. That was
recently broken up so that we could bring the expertise on campus and
the new organization that is leading the push is Digital Learning
Services or DLS. They also implement a digital learning initiative
campus-wide and we're accepting grant opportunities for faculty to
learn how to create their course content using inclusive design.
That's happening this spring and into the summer and next fall. That's
cool. What does that consist of? Like the grant, what kind of
strategies are they incorporating using inclusive design? Yes. Well,
just the use of an accessible canvas template is really key. We've
tested the template itself using Lucy Greco's web access team and so
we created proper navigation with the skip tools for a screen reader
users, again breaking things down into smaller modules, chunking the
videos into smaller eight-minute videos instead of 13 or 20-minute
videos, making sure everything's captioned, also just trying to focus
on accessible content, the download files as well. So we do a lot of
workshops as well around Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat
to get folks up to speed. Nice. Have you started those yet? They're
starting this spring. This spring they are starting those? Yes.
Faculty board have already been selected for that? Yes, there's been a
few that have been offered and yes, they're getting started. The other
initiative is helped by the Digital Learning Service team is Adobe
Fellows Program and that is a program that takes advantage of the UC
Berkeley's license for Adobe products. So we have well faculty from
American cultures that are embracing students using things like Adobe
Spark or Premier or Rush or Photoshop into their curriculum. So
instead of traditional multiple-choice tests or essays, they are able
to produce podcasts or videos or infographics to share their learning
within the classroom. For those we're encouraging students to produce
content that has the proper use of captioning, described the video,
color contrast, things of that sort so that they're producing
accessible content as well. That's happening right now. Yes, so you
guys are doing audio description on the videos? We're encouraging to
describe it before the need for AV at the end so that they're
describing it as the recording is taking place. Got you. So then you
are not use any special software to do that? We have tested out 3Play
audio description and it's actually really good. Yes. When you pause
that's extended audio description so then instead of a five-minute
video that's originally short you could turn it into a seven or
eight-minute video because of the added description but their service
is really good. How did you learn all this accessibility stuff signed
in your background? Yes, when my brother went blind back in 96 at the
age of 39 and I helped install JAWS on his computer and just saw how
his access to the online community gave him hope for life in a lot of
ways, it lifted his morale. I've been involved in different social
justice endeavors and didn't make the connection until much later that
this type of access to historically marginalized communities, it
embraces people with disabilities as well. So my brother's experience
is one and then I was at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign and they were using a native American mascot that was
impacting a student retention for native people, people of color.
Someone at the University let us know that the website that we were
using and our PDF files weren't accessible. Again, making that
connection to social justice and I just quickly learned how to code
websites with CSS and headings and then slowly producing PDFs in an
accessible way. Yes. Was it easier to learn the websites and PDFs?
Well, at the time it was just more pertinent for the website but yes,
PDFs are a big quagmire and nobody likes doing them. I wish there was
a different way, hopefully, things like EPUB will help replace those
or just straight HTML. But yes, PDFs are everyone's burden. Let's
switch a little bit to Ally first. When did you first get introduced
Ally? So while we were at the Berkeley Resource Center for Online
Education, Nicholas actually, he came to a workshop that we had on
tables, accessible tables and that's when we first met him and then he
needed pilot participants back. This was probably one of the first
ones I piloted at the UC Extension. I didn't really pay attention to
it much because all of our indicators were green at the time because
we were pretty remediating all our content. It wasn't until some of
the instructional designers might add a PDF file or a Word file that
wasn't remediated, and then we would see the indicators. It was just a
really good way of triangulating our work. I think we actually
presented with Nicholas at season on Ally and shared with the
community our best practices and producing online content. So that was
our initial endeavor with Ally and then now that we're on campus, it's
a different model. We don't have a lot of instructional designers,
creating content for the rest of the campus, so we're able to see the
beauty of Ally in terms of informing the community of the course
content in the download files. So tell me a little bit about the
process just now in preparing to roll out Ally to the campus. Sure.
Last semester, thing about last semester, what the process was. Yes.
So we reached out to our Center for Teaching and Learning to recruit
15, actually it was 11 faculty that had 15 courses. This took place in
the fall of 2018 and we had an array of different users. Some of them
were very enthusiastic about Ally, some of them just were
participating as a favor didn't really pay attention to the indicators
and then others were willing to select the indicators and try to make
some fixes themselves. But for the most part, we found it a positive
experience because it worked and there weren't very many service
calls, there weren't any service calls, so we were able to launch it
without much support. We had support in place but our fears were that
we would be overwhelmed with service calls. Because it seamlessly
integrates with canvas, I think a lot of people just went along with
it, didn't notice it too much. I did go to a couple of classes and
showed the students the alternative formats and they were very
enthusiastic and that was another reason why we wanted to launch a
little earlier because of student enthusiasm for the alternative
formats. So part of what we had to build was our service page with
resources, frequently asked questions, training our helpdesk on how to
respond to urgent questions and our teaching and learning service team
had a long history of launching new services and so they had templates
for launch and that's just really helpful to work with a group of
experienced individuals that were very enthusiastic about the hopes of
Ally and getting it implemented. So we launched on January 11th, 2019.
We were a little worried about the amount of service calls that we
would get but we've since launch and it's today's the 21st we've only
received two service calls and both of them had to do with helping
their course materials more accessible. We've also had some
instructors come into office hours, they just want to know how to make
their course more accessible because they don't want the read
indicators. So it's been really positive overall, it's galvanized us
to work across other units, other departments. We're working with
Lucy's team, the web access team, with disability students program,
with the library, with alternative media and with equity and inclusion
now and it's the first time in my recollection that this has happened.
So the momentum that Ally is providing on campus is I think leading
toward a culture change around accessibility issues, which is
something that's really needed and that's going to help deepen our
understanding of what accessibility is on campus. Can you elaborate
maybe just why you didn't see a faculty reaction, like there wasn't
that many service calls and that there wasn't the push-back as it's
obviously, it was a fear here, is if you're in a lot of places that
they turn it on they're going to get a lot of push back. What in your
mind was the reason that they didn't have that? Well, no matter what,
if faculty gets a letter of accommodation, then they're going to get
support from disability students program and alternative media, to
produce that alternative content more excessively. There is no mandate
for faculty to produce accessible content right now, they're not
reprimanded, they're just provided with the indicators and that's it.
So they could choose to ignore them and I think that's what a lot of
them are doing. Based on the data yesterday, there are a number of
faculty that are clicking through the red indicators and making
content more accessible. But again, there's no mandate, there's no
penalty, and then we have our disability students program to take care
of our legal mandates overall. So it's a safe place right now. We do
have support in terms of the disability students program. I'm just
assuming that's what's happening right now. yes. Now, it makes them
makes a lot of sense. What about when you presented the alternative
formats to students, how did they respond to it? They applauded. They
were like, "Wow, this is really helpful." They were very enthusiastic
about the HTML or the mobile devices and in the audio as well. I would
get ovations when at my workshops were done. Not because of my
content, but because of the alternative formats. It's just really
needed I think within the student life right now. Yes. Do you think
it's like the nature of the campus where you've got a lot of students
relying on mobile and English language learners or you just think as a
general need in education to have that kind of access? Yes. We do have
a lot of second language learners on campus, lot of international
students. They were particular the ones that were asking questions and
we're better testing the translation tool and I think that was another
functionality that was well received. We're not really a commuter
school, but student life is really busy and they're just so used to
mobile devices. I think that anything that they could consume on their
mobile devices is going to be helpful for them in terms of their
academic performance. Yes. Had you be creating a ton of training
resources and things like that? Yes. So that's another thing. Just
because we're not receiving service requests or service calls, doesn't
mean that the need isn't there. I do workshops around Adobe Acrobat
and Microsoft Word, so we just created content around that so that
it's more of a self-service model and it's been well received as well.
Again, it's open for everyone. It's available for anyone outside of
our campus as well to use. Thanks. Before we get to that what's next,
what about working with the consulting team, Kristi Greer and that
team. Was that helpful for you in getting the strategy and
communications in place? Yes. So Kristi Greer is really amazing. John
Scott as well been really helpful. I mean whenever we have questions
we get responses within 24 hours. The fact that they're able to put us
in contact with other institutions similar institutions, is really
helpful as well. I think one of the most helpful was getting in
contact with Chico State, Jeremy Elgin who shared his experience of
when they turn on the Ally tool. He went to his office and just waited
for the service calls and nothing really came and that was really
helpful as well, it helped alleviate some of our apprehensions about
turning on the tool in the first place. But overall, whenever we would
have meetings and in our meetings with the Blackboard support team it
involved our librarian, our alternative media specialists and our web
access representative as well. So we were communicating across units
and that communication was more rich because of that and it wouldn't
have happened without Kristi's leadership and your leadership as well.
So we've continued on those relationships and strengthen them. Just
not feeling alone and anticipating possible pain points, and then just
a reminders all of that has been really helpful has been invaluable.
Nice. So what's next? You're rolled out to the whole campus. What are
you thinking about for your next steps? Yes. So we're going to
continue our workshops and building online content for self-service.
We're reaching out to our graduate student, instructors as well to see
if we get them on board with some of the content remediation efforts.
We've looked at Penn State and Washington Universities lays on
programs and where they trained. It's a trained the trainer model for
around accessibility across our different units so that we could
spread our expertise and continue to impact the culture that looks at
accessibility from new ways is involved with pre remediation as much
as possible. Is that the biggest challenge right now as you go into
the data review yesterday if you're going to think about your content
challenge? Yes. So I mean one of the issues is where a research one
institution and it might not be fair to expect instructors to
remediate themselves. So trying to figure out some alternative models
that instructors could be supported and that's can definitely involve
a support staff across campus looking at content creation right from
the beginning. If folks are aware of what is needed in order to
produce accessible documents, then they're more likely to do so and
it's not that difficult it's actually very efficient once you learn
how to use styles in word or learn how to tag PDF files. It's not that
difficult if you're working from the source files. Nice Jo. I think
that's it man. Anything else you want to touch on? Oh just your world
tour is really intrigued a lot of us and we're really excited that
you've been presenting today. We have over 33 people that are
registered for the event. It's helped us continue in our accessibility
endeavors and your support has been really helpful for us reach new
staff, new faculty and I really appreciate it. Has it been fun for you
like you did like some presentations and stuff on Ally, is it fun to
represent a product like this given your passions for this subject?
Well, Ally has gotten so much better since we first previewed it when
I was part of the Berkeley Resource Center for Online Education. So
part of that is my belief in the product itself. It's very strong.
There's a lot of depth to it and the road map just seems really
promising. So yes, I'm really happy to associate myself with the
product itself and the influence that it's having on campus. But yes
it has been fun. That concludes another episode of the Blackboard Ally
Podcast Series. It's really great to hear from Jo and Lucy about how
they've been implementing Blackboard Ally at the UC Berkeley campus. I
think it's another example where we see that faculty, they really do
want to do the right thing by their students. They want to provide
those equitable learning experiences for all their students and it's
just a matter of working with them to find the time, find the
strategies and the best practices to help them make accessibility part
of their course design experiences. Be sure to keep an eye out for the
next episode of the Blackboard Ally Podcast Series where we'll be
traveling back across the country to Gaston College in North Carolina
where we'll be talking with Kim Geller Sengor and Karen Duncan about
how they are using data rich insights from Blackboard Ally to
systematically improve the accessibility of their courses. Until next
time, see you on the road to IncluCity. Join the tour along with the
rest of the Ally communities at tour.ally.ac. You can catch the latest
updates on Instagram and Twitter at hashtag Ally tour 2019 and listen
to stories of inclusion from our community champions on the Ally tour
2019 podcast series available on SoundCloud or in your favorite
podcast app. We'll look forward to seeing you at the next stop on the
road to IncluCity.