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CASE All Districts Online 2023
Increasing Accessibility in Advancement
Increasing Accessibility in Advancement
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Hello and welcome to today's Session Increasing Accessibility in Alumni Communications, presented by Amy Whitesall and Kioshana Lacount Burrell. We encourage you to use the chat box on the right hand side of your screen to connect throughout the session, and please use the Q&A box system. Any questions remain on the recording from today's session will be posted in this platform at the end of the conference. Thank you for your participation today and I am pleased to welcome our speakers. Amy Whitesall from University of Michigan and Kioshana Lacount Burrell from the Ohio State University. Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's session. Thank you for joining us. I am Kioshana Lacount Burrell and I'm excited to be here with my colleague Amy Whitesall to talk with you all about increasing accessibility and alumni communications. Today, we will be talking about disabilities in higher education and how they manifest different types of disabilities. We'll talk about creating access and consideration for inclusive design. And as previously stated, please feel free to ask questions throughout the conversation using the Q&A box. What does disability look like in higher education? Well, what we know, according to the CDC, is that one in five undergraduate students and one in nine graduate students currently identify as living with a disability. About 24% of adults throughout the United States have a disability, and some of them even have more than one. So they have coexisting disabilities. And this is really important for us to think about with how disability manifests in higher education, because that also means that as individuals who continue communicating with and working with alumni once they have graduated from our respective institutions, those numbers don't really change all that much. Those are the same numbers that we see throughout the general population and throughout our alumni bases. We also know that many disabled students and alumni tend to not disclose their disability, and that can be for a number of reasons. So it could be that their disability does not affect their academic or job performance. It could be that there is a fear, discrimination or stigma that really outweighs the benefits or the perceived benefit of gaining accommodations for their disabilities. They may struggle with their own internalized stigma around their condition, or they may even lack awareness of qualifying conditions available resources or procedures that may support them in their educational journeys. Another important statistic that we want to bring to you from the CDC is that about 17.4 million adults or 32.9% of adults in the United States with disabilities also identify as having a mental health related diagnosis. And that's really important when we think about how we are interacting with and treating or not treating, but making accommodations for these disabilities that people have, we're not simply just looking at a specific type of condition, so maybe they are wheelchair bound or they need some other sort of assistive technology. But we're really thinking about how to how to support and champion them through their mental health and wellness as well. We okay. So for context, I think it helps to have a little bit of background in disability and the way that people have thought about disability and then how it's kind of become embedded in our culture. And on one hand you have the medical model of disability, which tends to show up in our big system like health care and education. In the medical model, disability is seen as a diagnosis and related to as a deficiency. If a person faces a barrier under the medical model, it's because they're missing something. In the social model of disability. The disability is seen disability as a mismatch between the person and their environment. So the disability is a difference, but not necessarily a problem. The it's the environment that's creating the barrier within the social model. He'll go ahead and move us forward looking at disability through a social model lens, then we see a lot more facets to it. So if you if you look at this, a disability may be permanent. Those would tend to be the ones with a medical model diagnosis, but they might also be temporary. I have a coworker who smashed her index finger in a pool filter last summer and couldn't use a mouse for a month. It could also be situational disability where you you're a new parent and you're literally have your hands full or or any of any of the other things that keep your hands full on a daily basis. Go ahead and move along. You. So this permanent temporary situational spectrum applies across to all kinds of disabilities, including the less visible ones such as language related ones. Next slide. Another example The tools and technology that help deaf people take in information can also help people with temporary deaf, temporary hearing loss and people in noisy environments. You can throw some examples in the chat of ways that other situations, hearing disabilities, other situations where someone's hearing might be, might be disabled, go ahead and move along. You all right? How about visual impairment? What other temporary visual impairments can we come up with? We can pop those in the chat too, and also situational ones. Obviously we've got here the permanent disability is it is a diagnosed blindness, but temporarily you might have cataracts or might have been to the eye doctor and just had your eyes dilated, can't see for a while and then situational. We have the distracted driver and and a lot of other situations. Next slide. OC cognitive disabilities are sometimes overlooked, but they work the same way. Interruption and distraction are kind of a way of life for a lot of us. And none of this is to diminish the challenges of people who have permanent disabilities. The point here is that when you make things accessible, everybody benefits. So next slide. So when a person's abilities and their environment don't work together, there are all kinds of tools to help lower barriers to what they want to do. These are just a few examples, and it's it's a really small sample. The list is long and diverse, and there's some really innovative stuff out there, really great tools. But it's important to remember when you design content or design experiences, people with disabilities experience them through these tools. So you need to make sure you're you're creating things that you can work with. The tools that are being used. Next slide. Okay. I don't know how many of you have ever heard a screen reader read a web page, but if you haven't, buckle up. We're going to do that today. A screen reader is the tool that people who are blind used to interact with, with the web. And it's a good example of how any assistive technology works because it's just reading the underlying code of the website. So it's going to be reading source code of this page and passing along more than just what what words are there. So I'm going to have you close your eyes. And I, of course, can't see if you're all closing your eyes. So I'll just trust you and listen to the screen reader and imagine that this is how you read websites. So go ahead and run the video. Screen reader test page Google Chrome person one screen reader test page article adding level one screen reader test page visited link home underscore outline slashed visited link accessibility first aid slashed visited link website accessibility underscore help lines match accessibility first match website accessibility next screen reader test page home understandable lines match accessibility. Use this page to test how a screen reader moves through web content Accessibility Navigation Menu Group list one item visited Link Accessibility First Aid List five items Level two Visited Link Website List one Item Level three Current page visited Link Screen Reader Test page Link Documents Link Social Media visited Link multimedia visited link events adding level two accessible example adding Level three All text. This is one of the most common accessibility issues on the web and text is short for text alternative. It's an attribute that needs to be added when you place an image on a web page so a screen reader can announce what the images without text. A person using a screen reader has no way of knowing what the image contains. And if that information is important to their understanding of the page or not. Woman entering data into a Computer Image. Images that have been uploaded to the media library may already have full text, but you'll almost always want to rewrite the old text to add context about how you viewed the image on your page. For example, if this image came with your text PR, but knowing her name doesn't really do much for our understanding of why it's on this page. So I'm going to change it for demonstration purposes. Let's say the company's a story about computer models is creating so woman entering data into a computer puts the image in the context of the story where something like woman in a black sweater sitting at a desk would not. Okay. So welcome back. Just take a second and think about how that felt. And we we don't have time to to sample everybody's feelings on this. But some of the things I've heard from people after they've heard a screen reader for the first time are that was overwhelming. It was so fast. It was so robotic. Oh my God, this would be really hard. This would be really difficult way to consume content. And I would just want to temper that with the understanding that this for a blind person is a wonderful tool. It's not it's not a terrible thing, but we can do things to make the experience better. So there are some things as as you can tell, it takes a while to get through quite a bit of content. And there are some shortcuts that blind people use to make sure that they don't have to sit there. And it's tedious more than anything to listen through every single bit of it. So one of the shortcuts is to have the screen reader read only the headings on the page. That's going to give them sort of an outline like idea of what's on that page. And another shortcut is to have the have it read only the links so that just the link text gets notes. And so I just wanted you to be aware of those things there. We're going to come back to those, but but we'll get back to them in a little bit and I'll kick it over to Keough for a while. So as Amy said, that is very, very tedious, but it is important that we create different avenues of access for our constituents who have disabilities. And they're typically two different schools of thought that we utilize in order to create this access. The accommodations model, which I'm sure that most of us are used to. And then there is the inclusive design model. So in the accommodations model, the goal is to level the playing field. It is typically per the individual's request. This is a model that is very reactive. It is required by law. So of course, you know, we all have heard about the ADA. It is very much guided by what is required of us from the ADA, and it requires an individual to disclose to us that they have a disability in order to receive those accommodations. The other way of looking at her or the other school of thought is the inclusive design model. And the inclusive design model is simply a goal of benefiting the most people by the most people possible by default. So it is a proactive method of looking at accommodations. It is it has an optional framework in there, so there's a lot more flexibility included there and it's really guided by universal design principles rather than being guided by a much more stringent legal alien and often one of the biggest benefits is that it doesn't require an individual to disclose to us that they have a disability because that accessibility is just already built in. So when we talk about what is inclusive design, inclusive design is again, just very simply the design of programs, services or facilities usable by all people to the greatest extent without the need for adapting or retrofitting. And there are many different examples that we'll talk about on the next slide of inclusive design. Different things like having curb cuts made into when we're building sidewalks or door openers or elevators when we're designing buildings, having automatic captioning for virtual events so that people don't have to say, Hey, I can't hear this, can you make captions for us utilizing inclusive language checker tools that may be in some of our word processing or other software? All of these are great examples of inclusive design. Feel free to drop in the chat. Some other examples that you can think of of inclusive design. Another thing that's really important to think about with inclusive design is that it goes beyond accommodations and it goes beyond accessibility. Inclusive design is a process based approach that really begins at the very beginning. So when you were in the ideation phase and we're thinking about how to design something, that's where the inclusiveness comes in. It requires the designers to ask, How can this be used easily by the most amount of people? It's not asking, Well, how can people with wheelchairs use this? How can people who are deaf or who are blind use this? How can people with cognitive impairments use this? It's not that. It's literally just to say, I want this to be the most accessible to the most amount people without having to go through retrofitting to figure out, okay, how can we go back and make this accessible? Accessibility is a byproduct of inclusive design. It's not necessarily the goal, but it's a really great outcome that we get as a benefit. So when we're talking about that ideation phase, when we're thinking about engagement and event planning, you want to ask yourself, how is this activity? How is this event that I'm planning accessible to people who may have mobility impairments or sensory needs, people who have hearing and visual impairments, maybe people who have mental health conditions or who have simply different communication modalities then then when we look at content creation, so planning websites, email, social campaigns, etc., you again want to ask yourself how information that we're communicating accessible to people who have these mobility impairments, sensory needs, hearing or visual impairments, mental health conditions, different communication modalities. How can we make sure that the information is still accessible to them? Okay, it's activity time. So what can you do to to make a difference when you're creating things? So just as there are a lot of different kinds of disabilities, there are a lot of ways that you can make small changes and make a big difference by getting kind of in the habit of doing a handful of things to make things accessible. So go ahead to the next slide. Okay. Take a look at this slide and you can throw in the chat what you think the issue might be and we'll go on to the next slide and talk about it. Yes, it's color contrast. There's not enough contrast here between the foreground and the background text. And when you when you don't have that, then it can be a problem for people with colorblindness, but also with lots of visual disabilities or just aging eyes. So there is a standard for color contrast. It's a it's a ratio of luminance of 4.5 to 1. You don't have to know a whole lot about what that means. You just need to know how to use a color contrast checker. And there are a lot of them on the web and you can Google it and find one or I think we have some in recommended in our resources here. We go on to the next one. Okay, this one's a little trickier. So I and it's a good practice to describe what's going on in slides anyway. So this is a Google doc. The second line is highlighted as selected. It's a little bigger and a little bolder and what you might notice about it or might not notice is that up in the in the editing toolbar, this appears to just be normal text. So go on to the next. The issue is that it's important to use the headings, the headings styles within your documents to create that outline like hierarchy. If you remember the screen reader exercise and imagine a blind person tells that screen reader to read only the headings on a page. If you haven't designated anything as a heading, it will not read anything. And then they've missed the entire content of the page. Having hierarchy is also important for people with cognitive disabilities. It helps to really convey structure so it's most easily illustrated with the with the screen reader example, but it helps in a lot of different ways. Okay, We have an image here. Go ahead and throw in the chat, which you think might be something you need to think about when putting an image into a digital document or a website or social media for that matter. And we'll go on and talk about it, right? It is all text, alternative text. Remember, assistive technology is just reading the source code, so it can't interpret that picture. It doesn't know anything about it other than that it's an image. So if it's important information and alt text that describes the image in a way that makes sense for why it's on the page. And I will add that if this image, like, for example, were part of the social post and it had text embedded in it, you would want to include that text in your old text because again, screen reader can't read that text. It's just a picture when you go on to the next one. And this is one of my favorites, if you know what the what the issue with the giant click here is go ahead and pop it in the chat and we'll move on and talk about it. The issue is that the screen reader, again, if you tell it to read only the only the link text on a page and let's say you have five instances of click here on your page, it will just read link, click here, link click here, link, click here. Which is not going to give the person using that tool any sense of where the link is going to take them. So it's it's a best practice and important accessibility practice also to use the information about the destination of that link. So find out where that link is going to take you and make that the link text. Okay. So some things that you should consider when you are building and designing programing or events or different types of communication. So within the infrastructure you want to think about marketing and communications, you want to think about the speeches that you're giving. Make sure that someone is giving that you're planning for. Make sure that those are accessible. You want to think about the availability of interpretations or captioning services anyone to think about, especially for in-person events. We, many of us have transitioned back to at least partially doing in-person events in our organization. So you want to think about the facility design and setup not only is it conducive to a functional meeting, but also that it is accessible to everybody, regardless of what their mobility is within the curriculum of the grounds that you may be putting on? Want to think about the speakers content? Is this inclusive? Is it relatable? Is it something that people will be able to understand regardless of if they are from our region or if they are from somewhere else? Because again, inclusive design thinks about the holistic, the holistic product and having it be accessible to the most amount of people. So it's not necessarily always about this ability. Maybe somebody is not from here, and so they don't necessarily understand some of the idiosyncrasies of English the way that a native speaker would want to think about different learning communities and cohorts and making sure that you're in the information that you're presenting is really makes sense in those contexts. You want to look for different collaborations within the community and with academic resources to bolster whatever it is that you're trying to do. You want to make sure that you are considering how people who learn in different ways, different learning modalities, are able to connect with and interact with the information that's being presented to them. And then finally, of course, you want to make sure that you are using inclusive language that is going to be not only not offensive, but that makes everybody feel like they are considered and that they belong. And then what they consider communications in general, you want to think about things like, again, inclusive language usage. You want to avoid as much as possible any types of ableism that may come up in our language. And sometimes that's a little bit insidious. I mean, sometimes there are things that we think about that are not even necessarily or that we don't think about, unfortunately, that we say that we don't realize is being able to list. You want to use those universal design theory and principles wherever possible. You want to make sure that you are coming at different communications from an empowered learning perspective so that our learners feel that they are being empowered and that they are growing, not that they are confused and being talked down to. And then last but not least, at a minimum, we want to make sure that we are utilizing those mandated messaging practices, whether those are from our organizations or those are guided by the ADA. So that is our presentation today. We are happy to take questions now, but thank you all for coming in. If you would like to connect with Amy or myself, you may do so here are our email addresses as well as our names so that you can search for us on LinkedIn. You get so much on an Emmy for the wonderful session and great content. We do have a quick one question that's come through so far, but I encourage you all to submit any questions you have via the Q&A box. And we have about 15 minutes, so can have a great conversation. And the first question is can you share how screen readers read emails? Is that different than a website? It is actually the same as as a website. It's it's pretty much the same experience. And I, I would love to give everyone a quick tutorial on screen readers in that you, you have one on the device you're on right now. Every all of our hardware has this technology built into it and you I happen to be on a mac and so I know command F five is my shortcut to turn voiceover on and off. It's worth it's worth learning how to just toggle those tools on and off and test something that you're that you've created. You might be surprised at how it reads back to you. And thank you. For those of you who are sending in your questions, we'll be able to get to lots of these today. The next is does anyone know if there are particular fonts that are easier for people at the deck, fluffier to process or other ways to help people process? Text key? Or do you have anything on dyslexia? I mean, I know that there are specific fonts, but you are have it. Okay. So there are some fonts that are developed specifically for dyslexia. And the the evidence is, is that there hasn't been like a solid peer reviewed, you know, super serious study that that definitively says like dyslexia font is better. But there is a font called dyslexia that was developed for dyslexia. A lot of I put me on the spot here. I want to say it's tends to be a lot of sans serif fonts. So simpler like Arial and Open Sans I believe is is another good one. Open Sans is actually the one we've chosen for our web web properties because of dyslexia friendliness. The important thing is when you look at a font, look at the the BS, the DS, the PS, the ends, the use. So if you think of those letters and the shapes that they have, if they are pivoted or flipped in space, if those look the same when they're turned in those directions, that's harder for someone with dyslexia. And the next question is, for those of us unfamiliar with learning modalities beyond the surface definition, what's a good resource at the start to start with to start learning more about them? We actually have a couple of resources pages that are attached to our presentation here. When we go back and reshare here, the here are some of the resources that we utilized in order to create this presentation today. Some of them are specifically from our organizations. Both of our organizations have really, really great resources that are available. And I'm sure that your actual actually, I'm sure that your organization probably does as well. Most AA offices have a great amount of resources, but of course the CBC is really great. Microsoft Office has an amazing inclusive design toolkit that is is really good on helping people really understand what inclusive design is and how the different how those different principles can help with creating different, different resources that assist with different learning modalities. Anything that you want to add to that and. I would just put in a plug for the World Wide Web consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative. That link is also in there, and those folks do a lot of good work to kind of frame up how to approach digital. Accessibility goes way, way, way deeper than than the stuff that we covered. Yeah. So those are good things. And as you said, hit up your your institution's accessibility. You know, they're going to have all kinds of different, different titles. But there's someone at your institution involved in this work and it's important to let them know that you're out there and you need help and to turn to them and just just make sure they know you're paying attention. And for those of you who have asked about the link to the slides, they will be posted at the end of the day. Day. We were having a little technical difficulty earlier, but you will have them and they'll be available for the next month so you can reference them as many times as you'd like. The next question is how can you make events, particularly particularly speaking panels, more inclusive. While inclusive in what way? I would come back and ask. So there are lots of different ways that you can do that. First and foremost, think about the makeup of your panel, who's being included in the panel? Make sure that you have a diverse group of people. And by diverse, I don't just mean like the way that people look. So of course we want to have people that represent different backgrounds, but also we think about the age makeup, we think about the perspective makeup. So are these people who who are coming out, whatever topic is that, whatever topic that we're talking about, do they have the same background that they're coming from? We also want to make sure that at a minimum, we have different types of procedures or mechanisms put in place so that different things like like hearing it won't be a problem if if it is a big enough, if it's a big enough space, maybe we have someone who is an asylum interpreter who's speaking with us, or at a minimum, again, maybe we have microphones for everyone so that we can make sure that people can hear no matter where they are. We make sure that that the lighting is done in such a way and that the staging is done in such a way so that people, everyone in the room can see the stage in the speakers or that there are screens or other other assistive technologies available to help. If maybe this is a really big facility and we don't have everybody won't be able to if people in the back can't see all the way down to the front, there's lots and lots of different things that you can do. But really the the goal is just to think about if I am coming in like at the very back or at the very the bottom tier of what we're what we think about with any sort of different event, we want to make sure that everybody walks away with a good experience. And and you know what, that's a really great example because I just said something right there that was one of those internal list types of embolism walks away that that's an able is a term that that we don't even think about because it's part of our common vernacular, right? We want to make sure that everybody leaves our event, having had the best the best experience that we can possibly provide and we can do that and all of those different ways. If it's a panel that is online like this one, that we want to make sure that we're automatically providing captioning, we want to make sure that the backgrounds that people are using for their provide enough contrast and the screens. We want to make sure that people's presentations are, you know, have the appropriate amount of contrast that the font sizes are large enough that everyone can read and that where possible to Amy's point that we are using, you know screen reader friendly tools and also dyslexic friendly tools so that everybody can read what it is. That's the information that's being communicated. We have a follow up to the event. Question Are there any special accessibility considerations to make for hybrid events in particular? You want to go with that one first thing? Well, I was just going to say all of what Kiyo just said, because the hybrid event, you know, you need to cover all the bases. So you're doing the things that support people in a in person environment and in a digital environment. Just one kind of quick tip thing. Any time larger events, it's a little harder. Any time you can provide the information ahead of time for people to provide transcripts ahead of time or like a speech transcript or a slide deck or any background materials you can provide for people ahead of time is always helpful, but providing them after the fact is also great. You know, it just it's going to enhance someone's experience a bit if they kind of know what to expect, a little bit. To the next question. Microsoft and Adobe have tool built into their platforms to help check for accessibility. Are there any other tools or resources that we should be aware of to help check content? I can go on that one. Sort of thing. Amy has a great toolkit for this that I'm going to let me answer today. Okay. Well, first, I'm going to give a shout out to Microsoft because their checkers are very good. The the accessibility checker built into word and into PowerPoint in particular are really good tools. And use them, Use them, use them, Use them. Whenever you create documents that is going to then if you turn those documents into PDFs, it's going to help you make an accessible PDF much, much more easily than if you just took a raw PDF and run Adobe's stuff on it. Adobe's tools are good, but garbage in, garbage out use Microsoft's tools. They're great. I have a tool kit that I've put together in the College of Engineering, so let's see. Natalie How would I get that? That link is not in our resources. I can tell you that it's accessibility dot engine e-n-g-i-n-e dot umich dot edu. https://accessibility.umich.edu/ So it's the Michigan Engineering Accessibility Toolkit that's got a section I call Accessibility First Aid, and it's it's sort of situational. What's the issue? What who's affected, what do you need to do and some resources. So it's just sort of a a quick tool. There are again, I the the link that is our resources. They have wonderful tools. I would highly recommend those also just know that any automated accessibility checker, even the best ones, only pick up maybe optimistically 40%. That's really optimistically 40% of issues. So don't ever let someone tell you that. Put our overlay on your website and it will automatically be 100% accessible. That's not the case. The rest of it, I think, is really just learning and figuring it out because to this point, you know, even the best accessibility checker don't get everything and it requires quite a bit of that human element to be able to really determine whether or not something is accessible. You know, So again, lean on those resources that you have within your organization. Ask somebody from your office to take a look at things. Ask someone else who you know, someone from your team to take a look at this. How does this read to you? What is this? What does this sound like? Do does this make sense? Because, you know, I think a lot of us tend to have these blind spots that we're not necessarily aware of, that we don't necessarily, you know, utilize and even realize that we're doing. And it's a learning experience. It's a growing experience. Don't be super, super hard on yourself if you're not perfect about it, because as we have as we have shown in this presentation, we're not perfect about it either. We're learning, we're growing, we're making the effort, and that counts for a lot. And the more that you do that, the more you make that concerted effort, the better you will become and the better outcomes that you will be able to achieve for not just your constituents with disabilities, but your constituents overall. Nicole Hamilton For the last two questions. The next is many immunocompromised people in our constituencies still need to mask at events. Have you approached being inclusive and welcoming to those in regards to this? You know, the masking thing is such an interesting issue. I am an immunocompromised person and so I very much appreciate. That. That masking is still encouraged in a lot of places. We really approach it just by reminding others, especially for in-person events and any sort of invitations that go out or different things that may be happening beforehand, confirmation emails, that sort of. Stand out, you just need to pick yourself off pretty quick. Sorry, I don't know how that happened, but sorry, we we do that by sending out confirmation emails, different things like that. And we communicate that masks are optional, but that we just go ahead and address it head on, that you will probably see other people who are who have masks and we're not saying that everybody has to wear a mask. It's to your comfort level. But we go ahead and let people know that those masks are optional, but that that other people will likely be wearing them that way. Nobody, you know, nobody shows up and says, why are you wearing a mask? What are you you know what? Why does this person have a mask on? Copeland's over that sort of thing. And I mean, you know, and and we just we remind people to assume positive intent, intent and to really go into different scenarios from a positive space. And most of the time, we don't have an issue with that. I mean, because if you want to wear a mask, you can if you don't want to wear a mask, then you don't have to anymore. And as long as they, you know, keep that as a personal choice, it's not it hasn't been too much of an issue so far. I hope it continues not be. But the short answer to that is you mentioned that ahead of time, so that they're at least aware that there may be some people who are wearing masks and then it's typically not that big of a deal. And the last question that we have a few minutes left for, what are appropriate ways to recognize or apologize when mistakes are made that other events or within publications. And when you want to take that one? Oh, geez, I come from a I'm sorry and a sincere I'm sorry is is a great place to start and a, you know, what can I do to make it right. It's not something that I have run into a lot. And I will say, you know, as you mentioned, yeah, we make these mistakes all the time. I think the the more you're willing to write up front when it's still a small thing, say, I'm sorry, how can I make it right? The the less likely it is to become a big thing so then it doesn't become, you know, crafting an institutional apology or anything like that. You know, unfortunately, I think that people who live with disabilities are kind of used to things not being created for them. And so you will find that most of the time pretty go with the flow. If you to Amy's point, just say I'm so I apologize. I'm sorry that we made this mistake. How can we remedy this most of the time making the effort and, you know, sincerely trying to remedy something will will, you know, take care of things as long as you actually do that. But, you know, again, we're all we're all making mistakes. We're all learning, We're all growing. Usually there's not a need for an institutional response. It's just but to be reactive, to listen and to actually do things in a way that works to remedy the problem is extremely helpful. And in figuring out, okay, what our next steps, how do we how do we make this right going forward and keeping that going so that that lesson learned remains a lesson that we learned. And we're not making the same mistake at the next event, rather in the next communication, because if you do that, then it seems like, well, maybe you weren't really sorry and maybe this is a bigger institutional problem that we need to, you know, elevate. Thank you. Thank you so much, Kioshana and Amy, we're out of time, but this is a very insightful conversation and I really appreciate you taking the time. And for those of you who are calling in live, we're going to take a 15 minute break and join our less reflective sessions at the top of the hour. Thank you. Thank you.
Video Summary
The video is a presentation on increasing accessibility in alumni communications. The presenters are Amy Whitesall from the University of Michigan and Kioshana Lacount Burrell from the Ohio State University. They discuss disabilities in higher education, the prevalence of disabilities among undergraduate and graduate students, and the challenges faced by disabled students and alumni. They emphasize the importance of inclusive design and the need to consider various disabilities, including physical, sensory, and cognitive impairments. The presenters also highlight the importance of creating accessible content, such as using appropriate color contrast, providing alt text for images, and using clear and descriptive link text. They provide examples of tools and technologies that can help improve accessibility, such as screen readers and captioning services. The presenters also discuss the difference between the accommodations model and the inclusive design model in providing accessibility. They emphasize the need for proactive and inclusive design that benefits the most people by default. The presentation provides insights and suggestions for making events, panels, and other communications inclusive and accessible to all.
Asset Caption
CASE Career Level: 3
CASE Competencies: Industry/Sector Expertise, Integrity and Professionalism
Keywords
increasing accessibility
alumni communications
disabilities in higher education
inclusive design
accessible content
tools and technologies for accessibility
proactive design
inclusive events
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