Accessibility Efforts
at ALG

Context

When ALG was first getting started, we created a repository of new resources being developed by faculty as a result of our grants, and soon realized that we needed to address accessibility. For a time, we addressed accessibility by partnering with the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation (CIDI) to present at our grants kick-off meetings on accessibility under an assumption that new materials would be made accessible before they came to us. However, there were mixed results. ALG often had to fix accessibility issues after materials were submitted, and even then, materials weren't coming out truly accessible.

In 2016, UC Berkeley was told by the Department of Justice to make all 20,000 of their openly available video and audio files accessible to Section 508 standards, which prompted them to simply delete the resources because it was too expensive to make them accessible. ALG realized that our materials were not meeting Section 508 standards either, but denying access would go against the overall strategy of ALG.

From 2016-2020, we focused on our partnership with CIDI, which provided basic post-publication screen readable conversions for all files considered "textbooks." Unfortunately, those conversions typically resulted in files with tiny text, no heading structure, and remnant web elements. These new versions were screen readable, but not really accessible to Section 508 standards. They were more accessible than not, but we could do better.

The dominant accessibility narrative in academia and most institutions here was reactive, in that it was more about reacting to the presence of a student with a disability, and it was negative, in that the level of expertise expected of faculty was significantly higher than the amount of support was allowing. More recently, however, the accessibility narrative is shifting. Academia is shifting from the reactive approach to a more proactive approach that emphasizes access for all students, regardless of ability, in engaging and accessible ways.

How Are We Doing?

The content on this page is remixed from "Into the Digi-Verse: Bringing Everyone into Accessibility and Inclusive Design," presented by Tiffani Reardon and Jeff Gallant at the GALILEO 2020 Virtual Conference.