The UITS Digital Experience team, in collaboration with the department Digital Accessibility Liaisons, held our first annual digital accessibility celebration to recognize all the work departments have accomplished over the past two years to make their content accessible to the disability community.

On Wednesday, May 27, Michael Milligan kicked off the event with welcome message that emphasized the importance of this effort and all the individual contributions that brought us to where we are today.  

The event included several presentations by President’s Office employees discussing a range of digital accessibility topics. Stephanie Lines and Andrew Buroni from the Communications Office along with Ron Agrella from the UITS Digital Experience team kicked off the event with a detailed walk through of the overall initiative to make marketing videos accessible. They discussed the different types of effective communication needed to make a video accessible to everyone, including closed captions and audio descriptions. Stephanie also gave folks an overview of accessible presentation tips that are covered in the Delivering Accessible Presentations training.

Then Tracy Axelson presented on converting over one hundred Board policies from inaccessible PDFs to accessible html pages. Tracy went into detail around the benefits of using html instead of PDFs and noted several other PDF to html initiatives that were worked on with departments, including the switch from a PDF to html for the Payroll Calendar.

The celebration took a brief break from PowerPoint presentations for a Digital Accessibility Liaison panel. Kristina England facilitated a discussion with two of our department liaisons, Ana Ligia Rezende and Kate Carroll. Ana Ligia and Kate shared their experiences as liaisons for the past two years and how that role has changed how they develop content.  

Ana Ligia also shared her experience as the Digital Accessibility project manager, stating,

“I've seen firsthand the importance of testing, and training, and having clear processes in creating sustainable accessibility practices. And being in this world allows me to scale accessibility by thinking about it first, not just later.”

Both Kate and Ana Ligia emphasized the importance of progress over perfection. As Kate noted,

“When I started this journey, it was daunting… and I was pretty hard on myself, to be honest, because I felt the more I learned, the more I realized how many things I've been doing wrong for so long. And I think that's a pretty normal reaction. But just keep reminding yourself, when you know better, you can do better. And it does, in fact, get easier as time goes on.”

The overall message at the end of the panel was to give yourself grace and as Ana Ligia said,

“To start small and start now.”

After the panel, we returned to presentations with a recorded demo from Megan Momtaheni, who discussed social media best practices she learned as a digital accessibility liaison. Megan spent time walking through how anyone can apply those best practices to LinkedIn posts and why those best practices matter. As Megan noted in her presentation,

“Accessible posts help more people engage with your content, improve readability for everyone, support screen readers and assistive technology, [and] create a more inclusive, professional community.”

Finally, Ruth O’Keefe and Rebecca Bonczyk gave an overview of a project they worked on to make a UPST comic strip accessible. They ended up discovering that the best accessible solution was creating a transcript that was designed like a screenplay – a solution that Ruth noted was both simple and creative.  

The celebration went on with a fun trivia game where three of the digital accessibility liaisons showed the importance of digital accessibility training as they took first (Kate Carroll), second (Nick Sardonini), and third place (Hope Singas).  

Before wrapping up with a documentary film screening, Rob Baker recognized the work of the Digital Accessibility Celebration project team and Kristina England thanked the department Digital Accessibility Liaisons for all their digital accessibility advocacy over the past two years.  

All presentations were recorded and are posted to the Digital Accessibility Celebration page.  

Thank you to our event planning committee for all the hard work in developing this half-day celebration: Ron Agrella (UITS), Kasey Barrett (Internal Audit), Chelsey Burke (Board of Trustees), Kristina England (UITS), and Ana Ligia Rezende (UITS).