Presentations

I have presented at international and local conferences on many accessibility topics, from implementing organization-wide accessibility plans to demonstrating new accessibility testing tools I have created. The following is a selection of these presentations, organized by topic.

Organizational Accessibility

  • IT Accessibility for CIOs and Campus Leaders: Strategies and Solutions (with Sue Cullen, California State University-Northridge; Marc Hoit, CIO of NC State University; Bruce Maas, CIO of University of Wisconsin-Madison; Cheryl Pruitt, California State University, Accessible Technology Initiative), EDUCAUSE Live!, 2013
    • Synopsis: Implementing a campus-wide accessibility plan is a very daunting task. Key takeaways: No one is doing it perfectly, it takes time, and everyone has different success stories and strategies (there is no one way to do this). CIOs must remember it is about culture and change management. There are some easy wins with relatively little investment. But also recognize the complexity so dedicate resources and set expectations accordingly.
  • IT Accessibility and Project Management, EDUCAUSE Project Management Constituent Group, 2014
    • Synopsis: Accessibility is often only considered in the final stages of a project, just before its completion, but the later accessibility is considered in a project, the greater the cost is to meet compliance. Accessibility needs to be considered in all phases of the project, and time and resources must be allocated to meeting these requirements.
  • The Realities of Creating an Accessible IT Environment, University of North Carolina System Attorneys from all 16 Campuses, 2012
    • Synopsis: Achieving 100% accessibility on a campus is an aspirational goal. There are numerous problems, including the ever-changing technology landscape, the sheer volume of content created on a campus, and dealing with technology fiefdoms on campuses. University attorneys need to understand the complexities when providing accessible educational environments.
  • Making IT Accessibility Accessible (with Terrill Thompson, University of Washington; Cheryl Pruitt, CSU Accessible Technology Initiative; Sue Cullen, California State University, Northridge), EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, 2013
    • Synopsis: IT accessibility requirements can be difficult to understand and overwhelming when approaching them for the first time. There are several easy resources you can deploy on your campus to demystify accessibility requirements and give people easy to understand, step-by-step guides to accomplish their most common tasks when creating accessible content.
  • Paying for and Implementing Captioning, Both Proactively and Reactively, Accessing Higher Ground (with Dawn Hunziker, University of Arizona; Korey Singleton, George Mason University ), 2014
    • Synopsis: Campuses create large amounts of instructional video, especially as more classes move online. Captioning everything is often cost-prohibitive. Strategies can be used to prioritize which courses make sense to caption to both minimize risk and maximize effectiveness. By captioning for reasons beyond simple compliance, you also build upon universal design for learning principles by aiding non-native language speakers, and allowing students to search transcripts of lectures.
  • Product Accessibility Assessment: Prioritizing and Making Recommendations in an Imperfect World (with Mark Turner, CSU Accessible Technology Initiative), Accessing Higher Ground, 2012
    • Synopsis: Campuses purchase so much technology it is difficult to impossible for compliance offices to know everything that is being procured. Even for the purchases the compliance office is aware of, every product has some level of inaccessibility. In order to manage the flow of purchases and to aim for compliance, certain responsibilities will need to be given to procurement officials to help prioritize which purchases should be more scrutinized by the compliance office. For example, purchases which will be used by every student are a high priority, while a purchase for a small research group is a low priority. Additionally, when purchases are examined for accessibility, plans need to be made for how to deal with known accessibility problems and remediation timelines need to be established with vendors to correct known problems.

Partnerships in Accessibility

  • Moodle: Towards an Accessible and Open Design (with Hadi Rangin, University of Illinois; Jason Hardin, Moodlerooms, Inc.; Marlene Zentz, University of Montana), CSUN, 2014
    • Synopsis: Moodle is a widely used learning management system that all students at our institutions use, however, the latest version of Moodle had significant accessibility problems. A consortium of campuses worked with Moodlerooms to identify problems and provide guidance on how to solve the problems. We established regular meetings where all sides could work collaboratively to improve the accessibility of Moodle over time.
  • How Accessible Are Google Apps? (with Terrill Thompson, University of Washington), EDUCAUSE National Conference, 2012
    • Synopsis: Many campuses are adopting Google apps as their official email and productivity software solution. A consortium of higher education institutions evaluated actual workflows students would need to perform in the software and attempted to do those tasks using common assistive technologies. It was found that students with certain disabilities were not able to perform many of the basic functions needed. If campuses are going to adopt the Google Apps suite, the risks need to be known and certain altered workflows will need to be used to ensure accessibility compliance requirements are met. (Note, after this consortium’s evaluation, Google greatly improved the accessibility of the Google Apps suite.)

Accessibility Technologies

  • The Incredible, Accessible Report: Creating PDF Reports that Meet Compliance Standards in SAS® 9.4M6, SAS Global Forum, 2019
    • Synopsis: After a significant investment of work in the latest version of SAS, it is now possible to create accessible PDF reports from SAS that require zero post-processing remediation. Using the ODS system, you can create completely customized reports that meet accessibility requirements. We have also included accessibility checking wizards that will warn you if your code is producing a known accessibility violation.
  • The Accessibility Playground: Web Accessibility Training by Experimentation, CSUN, 2017
    • Synopsis: Sometimes we learn best by playing or experimenting with new things and concepts. Accessibility concepts can be taught using these principles. Using JS Bin, an online code editor, I built a system that allows you to create exercises that present an accessibility problem and allow developers to try to change the code to fix the problem. As the developer submits new code, feedback is given to indicate if the problem has been fixed, or tips can be given to point the developer in the right direction.
  • Implementing ARIA: What Works and Filling Support Gaps (with Joe Humbert), CSUN, 2017
    • Synopsis: ARIA and the Authoring Practices provide a very valuable resource for describing complex UI controls in accessible ways. However, sometimes real world UX designs do not fit neatly into these categories, or the existing categories do not go far enough to support all of the functionality needed.
  • The Future of Video Player Accessibility (with Matthew Schweitz, Google; Vladimir Vuskovic, Google; Eric Boyd, JW Player; Steve Heffernan, Video.js; Terrill Thompson, University of Washington), 3Play Webinar, 2015
    • Synopsis: Video player accessibility is critical because of the ubiquity of video on the Web. If people with disabilities are to be able to fully interact with video content, the players need to be designed to support accessibility requirements. The major video player vendors discuss their current level of support and what their future plans hold.
  • Better Color Contrast Analysis Through Browser-Based Image Analysis, CSUN, 2014
    • Synopsis: There are many tools to evaluate color contrast issues, but some issues are still hard to analyze, such as text over non-uniform backgrounds. I created a Chrome-based tool that allows you to analyze images in these contexts to see where there is sufficient and insufficient contrast across non-uniform backgrounds.
  • The Gamification of Accessibility, CSUN, 2014
    • Synopsis: At NC State University, I created a game that utilized an accessibility scanner to analyze hundreds of thousands of Web pages. Each Web site was given an “accessibility compliance score” and posted online. Over a two week time period we invited teams to a contest to fix as many accessibility problems as they could, but this was voluntary – no mandate was given. The end result was that almost 30,000 violations were fixed voluntarily and teams wanted to learn more about how to fix accessibility problems and how the problems impacted users. Over the lifetime of the service, over 1.2 million accessibility violations were corrected, all on a voluntary basis.
  • Blind Instructors Controlling Classroom Tech (with Ron Jailall and Sina Bahram), CSUN, 2013
    • Synopsis: Most of the classrooms at NC State are controlled with a touch panel that allows you to configure how the instructor’s computer is displayed in the room. The touch panel only contains virtual buttons to do things like turn on the projector or select the input source. Instructors with visual impairments could not operate this equipment. We added custom programming to the touch panel to enable swipe gestures to allow instructors with visual impairments to fully operate all of the functions of the room.