To get a handle on what she needed to do, she decided to boost her knowledge of the topic during the early days of the term. She met with staff at the teaching center at IU Southeast to get some basic coaching on digital accessibility. She also joined the Digital Accessibility Liaison Program, where faculty learn new accessibility skills and act as mentors for colleagues in their school or department.
As liaisons, faculty receive special accessibility training, but they also attend monthly Accessibility Series webinars which are open to faculty on all IU campuses (registration, details, and recordings are available for these webinars). She credits a webinar on the Seven Simple Steps to Accessibility as being a key resource. (Information from that webinar is also conveyed in a free, self-paced online professional development course on IU Expand.)
How does she stay ahead of the work?
Her process is to budget some time each week to work on all the classes she is currently teaching. For each class, she goes module by module and page by page to make the visible content accessible using Ally and what she learned from the Seven Simple Steps webinar. She has been able to stay a few modules ahead of the pace of the class.
She then applies a key lesson from Seven Simple Steps: how to use built-in accessibility checkers in Microsoft Office to highlight and fix issues in her PowerPoint slides and Word documents.
"I am very checklist oriented, and I can look at the course right now and see things that I need to fix, and I can just move through the modules and check them off," she said. "And honestly, I needed to do it sooner than later because I had students this term that needed to be able to access my content. So that has pushed me as well."
This process has helped her tackle the workload, and she feels that her work with making the course digitally accessible will pay off both now as well as down the road.
"I've been able to keep up with it. It's been a lot of extra work each week. But next semester some of my classes repeat. So, the good thing is that while I may have to double-check or fine tune some things in those classes, I'll have the bulk of the work done. I'll only have two new classes to dig into for next term."
Her advice to faculty faced with digital accessibility work is to get some training, dive in, and keep moving forward methodically.
