IIE PACE Podcast: Episode 10
IIE PACE Podcast: Episode 10
Beyond Compliance: Cultivating a Digital Accessibility at U of R
Guest Speakers: Ewa Zennermann & Rachel Cherry
Recording Date: March 20th, 2025
[Announcer]
We acknowledge with respect the Seneca Nation known as the Great Hill People and keepers of the western door of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. We take this opportunity to thank the people on whose ancestral lands The University of Rochester currently resides in Rochester, New York. To learn more about ancestral lands. Upon which we live and work. Please check out native-land.ca.
[Kelsey Sherman]
My name is Kelsey Sherman, and I am the Director of Simulation Education for the Center for Experiential Learning, which is in the medical school. I am also an associate or assistant research professor for the Department of Medicine. And during my doctoral program, I did a lot of research on universal design. So, this idea of accessibility in education and universal design for learning has really impacted me and has shaped who I am as an educator. So, I'm really excited to be hosting this podcast episode today. I want to turn it over to our guests. So, Rachel, if you want to introduce yourself first.
[Rachel Cherry]
Hi, yes, my name is Rachel Cherry. I am the university's Senior Digital Accessibility Developer And I've been at the university for a little over a year now, but I've spent most of my career working in higher education building websites. And it is pretty much where I got my start in digital accessibility and getting to kind of learn and getting to understand the real impact it has on our users and work in environments that invest in accessibility and make sure that our products are accessible for everyone, especially with the education components. And even here at Rochester, our healthcare components. And I get to work with Ewa Zimmerman. Take it away.
[Ewa Zennermann]
Hi, everyone. My name is Ewa Zimmerman and I'm Director of Digital Accessibility with University Marketing and Communications Department. And my role is to support the university in creating accessible digital experiences. And I have been in higher education for around 20 years. Maybe 15 of those is where I focus on representing interest of people with disabilities when digital content is created to ensure it works.
[Kelsey Sherman]
Thank you both again so much for joining me today. So, I want to start off by asking, what exactly does digital accessibility mean, and why is it so important in today's digital landscape.
[Ewa Zennermann]
So let me start with a little bit of explanation about the scope of digital accessibility. It's all about making sure that websites, documents, videos, or web applications are built in a way that people with disabilities can use them. So, most of us have noticed accessibility in action in the physical world. Like ramps, curb cuts, restrooms that are easy to get into with a wheelchair, but accessibility is not only about physical spaces. It also matters in digital world too and we spend so much time today in the digital world on the internet. It's where we communicate. It’s where we work, where we learn, where we socialize. So as more of our lives move to digital space, it gets more and more important that this space works for everyone because it really impacts the real people. For someone who cannot see, for example, having an accessible website, grocery website means that they can order food independently without planning any complicated trip and over 1 billion people around the world have some kind of disability. In US, it's one in four adults. So, it's not a small issue. It's a very big deal. What's more, digital accessibility is not only for people with disabilities. We are all aging, having stressful situations, injured wrist, slow internet connection or a very noisy commute can impact how we engage with digital content. So digital accessibility really benefits everyone. For example, if you're creating a caption for a video, you're doing it not only for a person with hearing impairment, you may be doing as well for a person who's listening to the video in noisy environment or for somebody who's learning a new language. So accessibility is really about making the digital world better for all of us.
[Kelsey Sherman]
Excellent. Well, thank you so much. So, I know you touched on this a little bit, but why is accessibility so crucial in educational and healthcare settings?
[Ewa Zennermann]
So, when we talk about accessibility in education, we mean making learning available to everyone. Schools and universities have responsibility to create an inclusive environment where all students and all faculty can succeed. And this is not just the right thing to do. It's also required by law like the Americans with Disabilities Act or ADA, but it's not just following the rules. It helps students stay engaged and succeed. It is connected very closely to universal design for learning. So, if you are a student who learns better by reading. When you have a transcript available, you're engaging better with this content and it's easier for you to learn it. So, accessibility really improves communications. It also protects privacy. It protects security individual because if systems are accessible, you don't have your you don't have to share your private information with everyone else. You don't have to ask anybody else for help. For us, it aligns with our Meliora values and shows how we are striving to do ever better for our community. Now, let's talk about healthcare. So, when medical services aren't accessible, people struggle to get the care that they need. And a perfect example of this happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many people with visual impairments couldn't schedule vaccine appointments because the websites and forms weren't designed to work with screen readers. Some forms didn't have proper labels. Many of them didn't work with keyboards. So, they weren't just accessible for them. That meant that some couldn't book their appointments on their own. They had to rely on someone else for help. Or worse, they didn't schedule it at all or schedule it later. This is not only unfair, but also against the law. So more importantly, this shows how accessibility creates real barriers for people. So, whether it's education or healthcare making our digital spaces accessible is about making sure that everyone has equal access and opportunity.
[Kelsey Sherman]
So, do you think our university is doing enough to comply with accessibility laws or are there still some of these significant gaps?
[Ewa Zennermann]
So, our university has made great strides in digital accessibility in recent years, but accessibility is not a one-time fix. It's an ongoing commitment, something that we have to do all the time. So, it's about building our long-term capacity through awareness, through training, through governance, through using right tools. So, for many institutions, this transformation takes years. It requires baking accessibility into so many different processes and especially into decision making. It requires sort of thinking how technology is designed, developed, bought, procured, and maintained. So, we are fully committed to the journey as university, and we did made a significant progress. We implemented our first digital accessibility policy. Our team was created. We established some governance structures to ensure we are accountable for this work. We have a report barrier form that allows users to report any barriers across most of the university websites. We also have advisory committee that is in place to guide the strategy and foster collaboration between different units. We also have comprehensive training programs, and we have a new website, accessibility website. We have a lot of resources. So, Rachel also improved our main website template, which affects almost, which made almost 100 sites more accessible to everyone. So, we have made a significant progress towards accessibility. There is still a lot of work to do. It is a transformation. So, we are fully committed to this. It is something that we're trying to accomplish to change our culture. So, you don't think about accessibility as an extra step, as a burden, but something that we initially missed, when we were creating a digital product. So that cultural change requires time. We are on the journey to get there, but there's still a lot of work to do.
[Kelsey Sherman]
Are there any concerns like for noncompliance?
[Ewa Zennermann]
Absolutely. So, we have audits in place and we measure compliance of different sites. And then we reach out to our stakeholders who are accountable for the sites, and they have a roadmap how to address those issues. It does take time. However, as long as we can show the progress and have planned, how can we provide alternative equally effective access, we are able to address needs of our digital users. So, we are able to meet those needs and we are able to, and we are working toward making accessibility happen for us. However, accessibility is not something that is 100% achievable. It's a mountain that you always climb. You never get to that peak because there's always a need of a one user that may be completely different than accessibility standards expect. So, it is a journey, it is a progress, but we are definitely making great strides there. And faculty or staff member thinks that there is an accessibility issue.
[Kelsey Sherman]
And if a faculty or staff member thinks that there is an accessibility issue, who would they reach out to?
[Ewa Zennermann]
So, if they believed if it's something that they're unsure when they create their own digital products, they can reach out to our team to get training, to help with evaluation. We do provide consulting services so they can email us at digitalaccessibility@rochester.edu and get that help anytime. We are there to support them.
[Kelsey Sherman]
So, in what ways can we make digital accessibility part of the culture within our organization and ensure we are prioritizing this in our digital content?
[Rachel Cherry]
Yeah, so Ewa has talked a lot about the culture and a lot of the work that we do is not just the technology but embedding accessibility into all our workflows and into our community and to our just culture of how we work and how we build digital content. Really the first big step towards a lot of our work is awareness, which is kind of what we're doing now, right? Where you're helping us with awareness and talking about accessibility as much as possible so that we can spread and socialize this across the university and our teams and explain what accessibility is, but most importantly, draw attention to the real-world impact that's caused by inaccessible products and systems and so a lot of that is culture building. A part of our strategy is community building. And we have work for that as well, to not just train and educate, but to have shared resources and have shared collaboration and support for one another as we build this culture and as we, as Ewa said, climb the mountain together. So, it's a team effort across the board. But once you've built awareness, people do want to prioritize the work. We have evidence of that everywhere and in every job I've ever had. Once people know about accessibility, they want to do the work, but generally, the first question is how, and I need help. I mean, people want to know where to start. And so, and in my experience, you know, they don't build inaccessible systems on purpose, you know, there's reasons why inaccessible websites are created, or inaccessible documents are created. And in my experience, they build them for one reason, they build them because they don't understand the technology. It's really complicated. Building PDFs is not a simple process. Building websites is not a simple process. Websites are written using a language called HTML and developers and web users and designers often don't fully understand the language. So, websites don't function as they're intended. Another reason for inaccessible systems is that people don't understand how others use technology. Everyone uses technology differently and Ewa's touched on that a little and a lot of folks, they don't understand how assistive technology works. They don't understand that not everyone can use a mouse or a keyboard. I had a great presentation, I attended a great presentation recently that talked about, it was more about physical spaces, but it was very much digital accessibility and kiosks. And there's this kind of growing movement in restaurants to use kiosks for ordering food and sometimes it's the only option to order food. And if the kiosk is not accessible, the barrier that creates for people just trying to order food. So, understanding these barriers, understanding the impact that inaccessibility has on users is very important. And the other reason that we have inaccessible systems, especially in enterprise environments like ours, is that people don't have enough resources. Like I said earlier, it's not a simple process. It takes education, it takes tooling, it takes training and a lot of a lot of teams are possibly, you know, don't have enough team members or resources. They might be a little over a little too busy. They don't have time to do things, you know, the quote unquote right way or they don't have time to perform checks, or they don't have time to perform user testing. And so, they have to rush to get stuff out the door. And the correct amount of time is not given to invest in the process and make sure that the end product is usable for the user. And so, our people, we need space to learn and modernize our workflows. People need ongoing training. They need a focus and an investment on the users and the user testing and more support and resources for the work. They need processes for governing accessibility embedded into their workflows to help with accountability and oversight because no one's perfect. Even if you've got all this working, you've got the training, you understand. You still might rush out the door and forget something like it happens to the best of us. So, for example, developers, we can set up deployment processes that run accessibility tests and before anything goes to production, but that takes time. Setting up new processes takes time. It takes new tooling. It takes an investment. So how do you get all this? One of the most essential ways to integrate accessibility is to have support from leadership. So, we have to have leadership that commits to accessibility, make sure it's important and that gives their team the time and resources to upgrade their workflows, to add testing, to take time for professional development to require accessibility processes before launch. Another big supporting element is governance and governance is a big word. Governance largely means setting expectations and requirements making rules for how things work and function. And sometimes your teams need the power to say no. You know we're not going to launch an inaccessible website or no, we're not going to share an inaccessible PDF. We're going to take the time to make sure this is accessible. And like Ewa touched on, when you find the time to do all this work the work required to improve digital accessibility matures your processes. And it helps you create a higher quality digital product that's better for everyone. But again, that work requires investment and accountability from leadership to prioritize what's essential So that team members don't get overwhelmed in the day-to-day management of these complex systems and all the checks and all the to-dos that are involved in our work.
[Kelsey Sherman]
Thank you so much for sharing all of that. I feel like my brain is just like soaking all of this in and I want to share and spread all of this good news and all this good work that you all are doing with everybody because it’s very, very important. This is very important stuff. What advice would you give to someone just starting to learn about digital accessibility? And what might be some like basic items that get overlooked?
[Rachel Cherry]
Yeah, I'll take that one again. So, I am a developer. So, a lot of my advice is sometimes a little more development focused, but I will try to, you know, there's a lot more than just development in a digital accessibility. You know, I when I say development, I mean writing HTML code and there's content accessibility, there is design accessibility and so there's a lot going on. So, to touch a little bit more on the work that I do, and I've already mentioned this a little bit, but one of the most common beginner mistakes that for web developers and even content editors, anyone who's making web content is that they don't really fully understand the HTML language. And HTML is how the web works. And we're not just talking about the web and our digital products. We are talking about digital documents like PDFs and videos, but websites are a huge component of what we do, and HTML is the foundation. And so, it is a big pain point in digital accessibility. When you write HTML, you’re not talking to a person. And I think that some people don't quite understand that. When you write HTML, you're talking to a computer. You're talking to what we call a user agent. And the most common user agents are web browsers. So that's a term like Chrome or Firefox, but there are lots of user agents. And a user agent is pretty much any kind of software that talks to the internet, really. So, web browsers talk to the internet, and they serve up web files. So, user agents read HTML, they translate the HTML into text and interactions in your web browser when you're clicking things and you're typing things and navigating around the web. But a lot of accessibility issues are created when the web browser doesn't understand what the HTML is trying to say. Because the HTML was either written incorrectly or just not given enough information. And so, the best advice really to give to a lot of people who are wanting to work on the web, whether you're a developer or you're a content writer, or really anyone working on the web is to fully understand HTML. And there's lots of courses, training online. Reading the HTML spec is very helpful. It's very complex and it's a lot, but I highly recommend reading it and I highly recommend just continuously coming back to it. I never stop reading it. I'm always going back to it and referring to it. And so, there's lots of content online to learn about HTML. If you're a visual user like myself, you can gather a lot of contacts from a website. By the way, it's visually laid out and that's largely using another language we call CSS or Cascading Style Sheets, and they govern the visual design of websites so, if you have important information you want to make sure catches someone's eye, web designers will make fonts bigger or they might move content to the side of the page or put a border around it, you know, something visual. But if you don't consume content visually or if you have low or no vision, you know, that context, how does that design context get conveyed to you? How does that importance get conveyed to you? It's through HTML, which is why that is so important. HTML is designed to help us convey semantics and meaning and provide context to our users and so understanding how to do that with HTML, because not everyone consumes visually and maybe not everyone even consumes it through a web browser. It's very important to understand how your content is being consumed. The other big thing to understand that's a challenge is a language called ARIA and it stands for Accessibly Rich Internet Applications. And it's sort of an HTML add-on. That was created to fill gaps in HTML language. HTML couldn't always and it can't always provide enough information. In and of itself, HTML could use some modernizing because it can't always provide enough context for screen readers. So that's why ARIA was invented. Largely when, if you're familiar with things like JavaScript and was invented and got really popular and ARIA stepped into kind of help screen readers understand what was when things on your web page move around a lot while you're viewing it, explaining all that to screen readers, this is where ARIA steps in and helps explain all that. So, if you're a web developer focus on learning HTML and ARIA. If you're a web content creator, also understanding HTML and ARIA, study it early, study it often. You always learn something new. So, the other piece of advice that I kind of live in is there are a lot of testing tools and this isn't just for developers. There are a lot of testing tools that you can use in the browser. Research those tools and use them, test them out. I usually recommend starting out with like one to three tools and kind of design your own process. Improve that process as you go. There’re new tools all the time. You know, there's tools that will test basic things like your heading structure or color contrast. There's more complex tools like the Axe in browser testing tool that you can use. So, there's lots of stuff out there that can really help you. There are tools that can be integrated into your CICD workflows if you're a developer. CICD stands for Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment. And so there are tools that you can use as part of all kinds of steps of your process. There are tools you can use inside Figma if you're a designer to test for visual design. There are tools you can use inside your code editors. And then if you more live in the world of document creation, there are tools that can check for PDF accessibility and so forth and so on. There are a lot of options and so having testing tools in your belt are very helpful. With that said, automated testing tools can only catch so much, so you have to understand there's a lot of nuances. Testing a lot of accessibility really comes back to context and understanding what your web page is really trying to say and explain to people. And testing tools can't quite understand that. They can check for really obvious issues, but they can't truly 100% check if your content is accessible. So, that requires manual testing by someone with expertise like myself or someone with more education and training and experience on what to look for. And so, testing tools are very helpful but I do want to make a point of sharing that accessibility is not about being perfect and our goal is not, you know, it's not about making sure that every single aspect of everything is perfect. Our goal is to make the products accessible. And so, compliance, when I bring that up to bring up, compliance is involved in a lot of what we do. And working to follow guidelines, as I mentioned, ADA, the work that we do is not just because it's the right thing to do, but there are actual laws. And guidelines that help guidelines help give us some governance as well and help give us some authority and so working to follow guidelines is a significant part of our process and most of the testing tools actually test against those guidelines, which is really helpful. But the end goal is not to be compliant, really. The end goal is to make accessible products. So sometimes guidelines might even say that you meet all the guidelines. But you might discover that it's not actually accessible for some of your users and so that's why the user testing is so important in working with users, because that's really the end goal. The end goal was making it accessible for the users, not following every single guideline, but thankfully, most of the time our compliance and being accessible align. So, most of the time working towards the guidelines is really beneficial, but sometimes they don't align. So, there is an art and a science to digital accessibility. We set guidelines. A lot of them can be tested against but the science doesn't always work out because like I said, it's really about context. It's about the complete picture and the experience. It's a lot of pieces working together. And the tools are not smart enough to understand that full picture so I can't rely a hundred percent on guidelines and automated testing but If you do the work to understand HTML, ARIA, the guidelines. If you do the work to understand how users interact with your website, to know what sort of issues to look for, then you can be in a great place to create really accessible products that are also just high quality and fun to use, right? Like you want, I mean, that's what you want. Like, why are you making websites if you're not trying to make websites that are user-friendly? That people actually enjoy using that they're not frustrating and people walk away, you know, with a positive experience. So, I've spent most of my career doing a lot of this work and fully understanding HTML and ARIA and CSS and all the guidelines and so that's what puts me in a good experience to be a manual tester. Our digital accessibility developer. I perform our audits. When we do our consulting, you know, I can work with folks on our web teams to help them understand, not just understand that there are issues, but understand why there are issues understand how to fix them but also try to understand you know like why it happened in the first place, work on education, you know, fix, you know, kind of fix the bigger picture problem instead of going around and fixing small issues here and there. And that's a lot of the work that we try to do. And then once again, my other big piece of advice is really just trying to get people to understand that everyone uses technology differently and technology is always changing. So, we work in a pretty complex ecosystem of technology and of technology and users and user experience and it's like Ewa said, it's always a mountain we're climbing because it's not really like we can solve this problem tomorrow and we're done. It's an ongoing dedication to creating accessible products and creating accessible user experiences for everyone. And also focusing on our web teams as well like the people that are doing this work. They also really want to create use user-friendly, accessible websites and it's a lot of work like it's very complex and intensive that what we do and all the pieces that move together. And so also just supporting them as well and helping people understand that you know the why we're doing all this is focusing on the user. So, I will give one more piece of advice which is if you're faced with kind of remediating digital accessibility this all sounds like a lot because it is, I don't want to sugarcoat how this can be quite complex sometimes. And so, I do try to encourage people to focus on fixing or improving one or two things at a time. Sometimes I'll perform an audit and you'll just get like a long sheet of things that need to be solved. And it can be a little bit much. So, I always encourage people just to pick one issue, focus on not just fixing the problem, but doing the work to understand why it's a problem and this is what kind of helps us learn and understand and how we keep it from happening again. And then move on to the next and don't feel like you have to sit down and fix it all day one and right out the gate and because like we said earlier, the goal is not to just be compliant and fix every single little problem. The goal is to make usable experiences. The goal is to support our web teams to improve and mature our systems. And we don't want…and a lot of what we want to be supportive and not the people that are coming in and telling you you've got 20 things to fix you know we want we're here for you and we're here to be kind of part of the process and support all the great work that people are doing here at the university to make all of the digital products that we have, including websites and documents and videos.
[Kelsey Sherman]
I think that that's really great. I am curious. So, you talked a little bit about like technology and like advances in technology so, I’m wondering how or what you think the impact of like AI and all of this advancing technology will be on this field.
[Rachel Cherry]
You want to answer that, Ewa?
[Ewa Zennermann]
I can. Absolutely. So, we actually have been to a conference recently where AI was a great topic and absolutely AI will have a huge impact on accessibility as in many cases it can be very usable. It can start interpreting the visuals, but it's not perfect. And the big message we receive at the conference is that We are not there yet. We are hoping that AI will be able to find more and more accessibility issues in our digital products that it will help us remediate and kind of fix those technical issues, but AI cannot speak to a human experience, cannot understand it wholly. It's very imperfect right now. So, although it can help us be more efficient in making improvements, it cannot address all of them and it cannot completely resolve them so it will have a huge impact in how fast We can address accessibility but It's not there yet. It's still kind of evolving. But today there's a lot of tools available on the market that will promise you accessibility, but we say be vigilant. They may over promise. So always, you know, always make sure that the human is involved in this process and that you're receiving feedback from a human because really everything we do we do for people, for people with disabilities. And without them, whatever we do might not be effective. We have to have that feedback and a human in the process so it's a big impact but we're not there yet.
[Rachel Cherry]
That's a good description. Yeah. Kind of going back to like what I was saying earlier like these tools are very helpful, but they can't fully understand the full picture. Even as we start to integrate or even as our kind of ecosystem or the testing tools start to integrate AI, it will be helpful, but it won't be a like a cure-all or it won't be, you know, you still need a human element you still need the digital experts to review their work, but maybe it can help automate some processes of it. And so, there's definitely ways that it will help but also, as Ewa said, it's not quite there yet. So, I think it needs more time.
[Kelsey Sherman]
All right. So, you both have talked a lot about like the resources and the tools and the services that you all offer and that are out there. And I just wanted to lead or end, I guess, end our call today. Do you have anything else you would like to promote or add or any other last couple pieces of advice? I know, Rachel, you gave us a whole bunch to think about. Anything else before we wrap up today?
[Ewa Zennermann]
So, I want to encourage everyone to visit our website at rochester.edu/digital-accessibility You will find there are a lot of resources. This is where any educator can go and learn how to make their documents, their slides accessible. We posted our trainings. So right now, we have two trainings in MyPath. There's a training, Digital Accessibility for Content Creators that is relevant for anyone creating any kind of digital content. And you can find a link to that training on our website. It will take you to MyPath, our learning management system, and you can take this course there whenever it's convenient for you. We also have a training, Creating Accessible Digital Documents, that is great if any faculty is creating any handouts, any PowerPoints, documents, Google Docs as a part of their course. We are also teaching a lot of live classes. So, one of the classes that I'm introducing this month is about giving out accessible presentations. More inclusive presentations. So how to connect with your audience. So that's a great class for anyone who's teaching, anybody who gives presentations out, anybody who create some events. I also have a class around media accessibility. So, for those who create videos and or record videos like our lecture recording. So just understanding requirements around captions, around transcripts and audio descriptions. So, there's a lot of resources on our website. I encourage everyone to visit and check it out. There's more that we are adding almost every week as we are building it out. So, it's a great resource to understand accessibility better. But one more thing about it, just like Rachel said, it's not about perfection, it’s about making progress. Don't think that you have to do and learn everything straight away today. Make one thing, fix one thing, and then build your capacity and make a progress. So, one step at a time.
[Rachel Cherry]
Yeah, I'll just add, we have some great resources on our website, and we have more to come so I'll just kind of do another pitch for all those great classes that Ewa's put together. And then I'll just add on one more thing that I just want people to know that they're not alone in this work and that Ewa and I are here for support and there's a lot happening in our industry. All industries mentioned, you know, really and there's a lot of work to do but it's about, again, progress, not perfection. It's easy to get kind of bogged down in all the details, but you have support and there's a community at our university doing this work, doing web work, and doing accessibility work and we're all facing the same problems. We are ready and willing to share solutions and support and, you know, there are ways to improve processes and streamline our work and if you feel you need help with that, we're here and there's people here that want to help with that. And then, but I mostly want people to remember why we are creating digital content and because the why can be hard when we're all in the weeds, like doing the work. That we're creating this for other people. We're creating content You know, for other people. And in our world, that means a lot of providing access to education or healthcare. And as we've said, digital accessibility, it means providing content that everyone can access and also in my experience, as I mentioned, people want to create accessible content. They want to provide a good experience. So, if that's what you want, but you're creating inaccessible content, you know, then you can refocus, you can make improvements, you can make changes, you can get your leadership involved. And get the support you need to create space for change so that you can change your work and change your processes and make those higher quality user experiences that you do want to have out there for your content. And so, a lot of it can be about perspective. But we're here if you need help. We're really excited to do this work and I love working with Ewa and we get to do a lot of great work together.
[Kelsey Sherman]
Thank you both so much for taking the time to talk to us today. Let us into your world and inform us and I'm just really grateful that you were able to take the time to chat. So, thank you very much.
[Ewa Zennermann]
Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for having us.
[Rachel Cherry]
Thank you. Yes, thank you.