Brent Warner 0:00
You just found out you have to make your all of your content 100% accessible in about a month. What do you do? This is the higher ed tech podcast, season seven, Episode 16.

Tim Van Norman 0:20
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Interim Assistant Director Technology Services at Irvine Valley College and Adjunct Professor of Business at Cypress College.

Brent Warner 0:35
And I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman 0:44
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. Yes, this topic is a huge topic. I literally, on my slow days, I only have three meetings about it.

Brent Warner 0:55
This is true, integrating technology into the classroom, like we talk about that. It’s like the definition of actually integrating so so title to ADA compliance. Whoo, so, Tim, you’ve been in this world, actually, for quite a long time. Some of the early stuff you were doing when you were instructional technologist was tons of stuff around accessibility, making sure that all those things are going can you just give us a brief overview of what’s expected of us here. Well, we’re

Tim Van Norman 1:24
all of us. I would say, I would say that this whole recording is going to be a brief overview. It might not seem brief, but we’ve got a lot of different things going on, and wanted to part of this episode. What we want to do is define a little bit for people, so that people can understand how things fit together, rather than it just be a blast of, oh, you have to do all of this stuff. And what does it really mean? What does it mean in context? So, for instance, understanding that there’s lots of laws involved in accessibility. One of the main things about it is back from 1973 and we’re talking federal laws. California’s got its own laws. We’re not even worried about California right now, but California, there’s a couple of sections of the Americans with Disabilities Act that are really key to public entities and especially to California community colleges. So for instance, there’s section 504 we often look at that as our DSPs department or disabled student services, however you phrase it. That is 504 and it but that applies to every entity that receives federal funds, okay, okay. Then there’s section 508, which is digital. It’s about websites, documents, technology, specifically. So, okay, what does that mean in today, in my world, everything’s digital, right? Well, kind of all right. So I love this example that I found on a website about the difference between 504 and 508 it’s organizations may be able to meet its section 504 obligation to provide equitable access to programs and services to persons with disabilities by making electronic information accessible under 508 so 504 is about all access ramps into buildings instead of making people go upstairs. That all fits under 504 but 508 is the specific part that’s electronic. Got it? Okay, okay, so some things fit in both, but it’s kind it’s there’s a separation there too. Then we have another part to that, and that is this title too. And so that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about April 24 April 24 2026 is a date, you know, that may live forever in infamy or something like that, at least right now it’s looking looking ahead. That’s what it looks like. It’ll be, you know, kind of like, Why 2k if you remember that. Hopefully it’s about as dud, a big dud as that, too. But there’s a lot of people really afraid of it. And so basically, for April 24 the federal government has specified that, hey, we need to. There’s some rules that are applied under Title two that are for state and local government programs and services specifically. And there’s all kinds of rules about the size of the organization and stuff like that. Well, California community colleges, we’ve found out that all California community colleges are being lumped together as one entity, one giant So, one giant entity. And so one of the things about the rules are that for entities that are less than 50,000 constituents in. It has one date, and for over 50,000 it has this April, 24 2026 in February, we found out that we’re all lumped together, and therefore it is 2026

Brent Warner 5:12
so 24th 2026 all California Community Colleges have to be on board. But pretty much the majority of people listening where you are, you know, if you’re in the states across the country, because it also applies to like, depending, I was looking this up, and it’s like, oh, it’s not just your school. For example, if it’s like, if you’re if you’re a part of a district, then it’s actually your constituency is like, the county of the people who live there, right? And so it’s like, so it gets complicated, but regardless, go look into it, make sure you know your date, right? But at the same time, essentially, we’re talking a big chunk of us are going to be April, 24 2026, right?

Tim Van Norman 5:50
And so what that particular requirement is that we must meet WCAG, 2.1 AA standards. Okay, so it’s a web accessibility standard that is not a federal government standard. It’s a standard that has been put together by by a panel of about web accessibility. And so it’s not a federal government, it’s not a state government, it’s not something like that. It is. It’s a general, which actually is good, because I don’t trust our politicians to come up and tell me exactly how technology should work.

Brent Warner 6:29
Well, WCAG has been kind of trusted in this area, and this is where all of our previous conversations around accessibility still came from, right? So it’s like none of these rules are brand new. They’re just, you know, it’s just turning from guidelines to law, I guess is what the intention is here, right?

Tim Van Norman 6:46
And it specifically, W, C, A, G, web content, accessibility group, you know? And so it is. It’s about that. So by the way, if we think back to the other part where we were talking about it, it’s not, while it sounds like oh hey, this sounds like 508 it’s actually a 504 policy. So it’s, it’s one of those technicalities and all that stuff, but that’s part of why I went over the 504 versus 508 before it’s about providing equitable access to all programs and services. So it does not mean that we have to be 100% compliant. What it says is that we have to have a road map in place, and we have to be working towards that 100% compliance. Yes, okay, so that’s

Brent Warner 7:31
important part to remember, right? That is very important, because everyone’s like, I have to have my everything I’ve ever done compliant within a month, right? And it’s like, no, no, you have to have your institution, has to have a plan in place, right? And you have to be participating in that plan, I would say, right, but you don’t have to be done with it necessarily. Or it’s not even realistic to say that you would ever really get to 100% compliance. I think that’s kind of a bit of a misnomer and a weird part of the law that’s going to get some pushback on it. But regardless, there’s a lot more that all of us can do, and a lot of a lot of us don’t really, you know, do the due diligence of these things. So it’s about building a habit of making sure every time you’re creating content, how are you, how are you doing your best to make sure that it is accessible for more So Tim, I know you’ve got a list of, you know, how, where, where it impacts people. Well, the the big impacts, and this is not just teachers, right? We’re talking you as managers, right? We’re talking about, you know, classified staffs. We’re talking about, like, really, for everybody here who’s, who’s using and sharing documents digitally in any level. So can you break that down a little

Tim Van Norman 8:42
bit Absolutely? So you mentioned the first one, documents, documents need to be accessible. Whenever you’re going to have a document, your website needs to be accessible. Well, everybody kind of knew about that one that that’s not surprising, but this is specifically spelled out. And as much as it’s not surprising, you’d be surprised at how many people don’t have accessible websites, all right software. So we’ve talked in the past about vpats and about how we check accessibility that all it impacts everybody buying software and making sure that it actually people can use it. If they struggle, if they can’t use a keyboard, if they can’t. They are having trouble seeing all of those different things. That’s all part of that as well. Emails. When you this is one that’s catching a lot of people, they’re kind of surprised that their emails, you can’t just bold something in an email. It needs to have headers if you’re going to be doing stuff like that. So building your emails like a document and a properly formatted document. Now here’s a couple of things to really keep in mind. You can create a document for your own use, and it can be anything you want. Okay, it’s when you share it with somebody else or somebody else. Also has access to it that it needs to be accessible. Okay, okay, so if you’re just taking your own notes and you’re not sharing it with anybody, don’t worry about it. Okay, you make it so that it’s useful for you. I was at a conference last week. All of my handwritten notes, I guarantee you’re not accessible. Okay, I’ll have trouble reading my own handwriting, but barely accessible to you. Okay, exactly, exactly. So, so I’m not in trouble because I doing that. Nobody’s going to be in trouble for having their own notes. That’s not the issue. But just just understand that the moment I start sharing those notes with other people, it needs to be accessible to do that. Yeah. Now also archived information, archived documents, do not need to be remediated, do not need to be match the accessibility standards. Okay, so what does that mean? Archive means that nobody has access to it.

Brent Warner 10:58
Okay, you’re no longer using it, right?

Tim Van Norman 11:01
You’re no longer using it now. You might use it just for yourself, but the moment I’m using it for me, that’s great. The moment I you, I give it to you. Brent, yeah. Now it needs to be accessible, and that’s no longer archived. Got it? Okay? So think about that. Think about that. For instance, in Canvas, is there any reason to go back to last semester’s class and try to make it accessible if nobody’s going to see it? Right?

Brent Warner 11:29
There’s two parts to this, right? Because one, if you transfer that, so, for example, if you have a fall level course and you’re transferring that to your fall of 27 right, then you’re going to have to go through and make that accessible. But you might a lot of teachers I know do this, right? Oh, all of my folders and all of my files are in here just in case we need them, or just in case my student needs access to them for something. And you’ve got this long list of PDFs inside of there that maybe you could go into Canvas and see, has it ever been accessed, right? And then you’re going to make some changes around that to make sure that you’re like, Hey, I’m going to, I’m going to unpublish some of these things and start just checking them off, right? Oh, we don’t actually use this right? Instead of using your public facing sources like your Canvas shell as a repository for all of your digital goods. Right? Section. Those out. Archive them separately. Think about what you actually need, and then you’re going to start adding those back in as new, ideally accessible documents, you know, one at a time as you’re actually needing to put them into the work

Tim Van Norman 12:37
Absolutely. And this is, this is something that I would consider myself often a digital hoarder, and so this is something that I’m trying to use to actually help me with that. Yeah, is if I don’t need it, archive it, get it, I can go back in and I can do something about it. But if you’ve got documents that you haven’t seen in 10 years, chances are pretty good that most of those you don’t actually need. Yeah. And so cleaning people, spring cleaning would is really key, and if you do that, that alone will clean up a lot of your stuff. And frankly, it’s it’s good for you,

Brent Warner 13:21
Yeah, yeah. So there’s a lot, I mean, and again, this does go very deep. And so hope, if you’re on our campus, we’re got some trainings things going on, you know, if you’re, if you’re at other campuses, look around, there’s professional trainings going on, whether it’s either on your campus or, you know, through some of the services that are online, like one he or some of these other online services that offer things through your state or through the government, or whatever else it is. So take a look at these. But Tim, we want to kind of end today with some kind of quick wins, because it’s a long right, like, it’s not going to be quick. It’s not going to be, you know, April 24 right? But we should start working on these things, right? And you should start getting them so, so we kind of put together a little list. This is actually I watched a webinar that was from one he, I think it was Tom Tobin, who ran it, and he gave a few ideas, and I kind of took some of those, and we kind of talked about a few of these things. But he’s, he gave this idea of the basic four, which was developed by a, I think, a professor over at Kennesaw State University, the major things that you can just start doing, one at a time on each document, as you’re going with right now, so that you’re moving towards compliance with the needs here, right So, Tim, I’ll start Talking about them, and I know that you’ve got experience with each of these at different levels. So let’s start with we did talk about documents a little bit. So let’s start with documents. First. What are some of the main things we need to be careful about with just general documents?

Tim Van Norman 14:55
So some of the easier ones are headings. So put a title on your document. Document, put headings. Use Heading One, Heading Two, Heading Three, etc. Now, understanding in Canvas, heading one is actually the title, so you’re going to start with heading two and heading three, but use them in order, and it just it doesn’t just benefit the person who has a disability. Also, if you’re doing this with these documents in Word, in Google Docs, it creates on the left hand side, then it creates a table of content. Or you can put a table of contents in and that’s what it uses for that. So it can be really, really useful. So keep that in mind.

Brent Warner 15:38
Oh, can I add something to the headings too? I think a lot of people don’t realize, because, like, when you change the headings, a lot of times it changes the size of it, and, like, font, or, you know, different parts, and they’re like, it’s like, Oh, it doesn’t fit with how it’s supposed to look. I’m sure you can do this in Word. I know you can do it in Google, which is when you click on those headings down at the bottom, there is an OP, a thing called options, and you can actually save the headings set up to the style that you prefer if it does not match with, like, how Google does it by default, for example. So hey, because sometimes I found it’s like, hey, heading two is the same size as heading one, and it doesn’t look, you know, like whatever else it is. So you can play with it so that it looks the way that you’re expecting it to look on your documents. You still need to be careful with like accessibility fonts and choices like that and sizes, but you can customize that to a degree,

Tim Van Norman 16:31
and keep in keep in mind that word PowerPoint, Google Docs, Google Sheets, all of those have the ability to create themes. So you can create a theme that breaks those down in the way you want them to be, and just use that theme every time, and so you don’t have to. You can have that kind of be your default theme and just use that same thing all the time. It’s a great way to do it easily. You do work one time, and then you’re done.

Brent Warner 17:00
And I’ll also add in one more thing too here, Tim, because fonts, fonts themselves can be a little tricky. There is a really excellent font out there, totally free. It’s called Atkinson, hyper legible. And I actually suggested this to the fine people at libretex says, like, hey, what if you use this, and I think they’re making that, moving that towards their default font, because it is very specifically designed for legibility, for, you know, different reading issues, or whatever else it is. And so if you wanted to kind of go one step further and know that your font choice is probably the best possible one that you can get for readability, for all the different things you can you can add that right into your Google Docs or upload it to your computer and have it as a choice as well. We’ll put that in the show notes. Absolutely. Okay. So that’s headings alone. Then we’ve got other bits in the documents.

Tim Van Norman 17:53
Yeah. So list styles. Don’t create the list yourself. What I mean by that is, don’t do one period space or space. I’d start typing and then put bullet points in with dots or whatever. Use the list functions that are built into your your word processor, or canvas, or Canva, what Canvas? Canva, whatever you’re using, there’s if you use their list creator, first of all, it will be very consistent, which is, which is important. But secondly, it actually creates it as a list. And when you do that, if ever somebody needs to look at it with the screen reader stuff. It just makes sense, okay? And it’s kind of like headings. It just really happens to structure things a lot better, and you don’t get weird. I’ve seen when you cross pages that sometimes, like the list, numbering will shift and stuff like that. It doesn’t do that if you’re using the list properly.

Brent Warner 19:03
So default list choices, just click that little button up on the top, the ribbon up at the top, instead of trying to make your own exactly now this next one is probably the biggest headache, right? All right, let’s see what we got.

Tim Van Norman 19:16
So tables. Use tables for data, and that’s basically it. What do I mean by that? If you have data where you got a header row and it tells you all of the things, what everything underneath it is, that’s a good thing. If you’re using table to organize how your how your buttons look in Canvas. That’s a bad thing, alright? And there’s several reasons. One, if you go to mobile all of a sudden, it really does weird things on your button list, okay, and stuff like that. So it it really it’s a good thing to do anyway, but make. Shirt and your tables, you have header rows, your columns. The first row explains what’s going on the rest of the columns, which is what we’re used to when we see data, right? It’s not what we’re used to when you use it for navigation,

Brent Warner 20:14
Yes, and so it’s worth if you haven’t ever seen a video of a blind person navigating through some of these tools online. We’ll give a link to that too. I think that that same link, I think, has a cool video where you’re like, Okay, I start to see what the what the conversation actually sounds like, or what the, what the what the screen readers actually seem to to actually deliver. And so when you have a little sense of that, you start to get a little feeling more what’s going on do. What’s going on. Now, I will say, Tim, this is worth mentioning. I’m just just slightly devil’s advocate in this is like, tables do really help with good layout and usability in in these other like, when we’re not worried about accessibility and back end access, right? And so we have a struggle here, because it’s like, hold on. Usability conversations are one thing. Accessibility conversations are a separate one. We might have to dig into that a lot later, deeper, because it’s pretty it gets controversial, and people get, you know, upset about certain sides of the conversation. But just be aware that, like you know, you should be building, the expectation is that you are building for accessibility, and hopefully as AI gets a little stronger, and the AI made accessibility tools that are kind of doing the screen reading get better, then it will be less of an issue that you maybe, hey, you could use tables or ways to organize things, but right now, it doesn’t really work very well, and it’s problematic

Tim Van Norman 21:41
Well, but also consider the fact that your students are looking at your class, if we’re talking if we talk about Canvas, for instance, many of the students are looking at your class. 50% of IVC students are using a cell phone to look at your class. And the moment, if you use a table, a table is structured in these columns, and it tries to go across. So now either they have to scroll right or left, or everything is squished down, instead of it being, you know, one column wide, which it would be if you just put a space between, between cards, or something like that, between buttons be one column wide. Now, all of a sudden, it’s still trying to fit four columns in this really narrow space. So just it’s something to be aware of anyway, but you’re right. Sometimes usability and other functionality, you got to be really creative, or you got to talk to somebody that knows exactly All right, so

Brent Warner 22:46
We’ve got a couple more just in documents, and then we got to, we got to move quickly through the rest of these. So what else we got?

Tim Van Norman 22:51
So contrast. Make sure that you’re not doing, you know, yellow on white and stuff like that. Make sure that it’s really readable that you’re not using really tiny fonts for any reason make it readable. And think about it like I keep bringing up the cell phone because I think that’s a really good way for you to just see. Does it work is open it on your cell phone? Does it work on that? If it doesn’t work when you’re looking at it on the cell phone, it’s not going to work for other people. So descriptive links. So instead of saying, Say IVC website, instead of saying, go to www.ivc.edu, okay, give it descriptive and frankly, then you don’t get this long, drawn out URL that we often see. I understand if it’s being printed, you’ve got to give that. It’s not like somebody can tap a page, yeah, and but if it’s not going to be printed, use a descriptive link instead of the whole long URL,

Brent Warner 23:59
And then a couple of quick little ads on there. One, if you’re like, so for example, if you’re pasting a link to a Google Doc, right? It’s like, that’s a really long link that has huge, crazy string of numbers. And imagine that being read out to someone, right? Docs, dot google slash, document, slash, 1c, 8l, f7, 954711, it’s like, wait. No, no, we can. Like, what is that? How is that going to just going? To just confuse someone, right? So be careful about that. It’s, I am always tempted just to, you know, just because it’s so fast, it’s just paste the link, give it available. And we even have this little problem last week when I was like, Oh, I was, I was pasting some links to Google Docs inside of zoom. And zoom doesn’t actually have a way to make descriptive links, right? Like it just lets you post in the whole thing. So I’m like, Well, I cannot be accessible right here in this document, in this location, because there’s no option to do it. So anyways, just be aware of it. There are some tools that give you, like contrast checkers, right? That you can run it on your browser, for example, and make sure that you’re okay. So. But we got other things to talk about Tim because text, alt text is one.

Tim Van Norman 25:04
Alt text is a great example of something that that you can do easily. Right click on any image in any environment, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, all the Google Canvas, you name it right, click on the image, go to alt text, and you can type in the description of that picture. Now understand you may have a spreadsheet. Okay, you may have different alt text depending on the context of what you want somebody to understand from that. It may be an example of a spreadsheet, then it may be an example of a graph from a spreadsheet. It might be a table from a spreadsheet. It might be so depending on your context, you’ll put different things in there. So be fairly descriptive. But also don’t put in image of because they already know it’s an image. So basically, if it’s red, it’s image of image of a spreadsheet. Okay, wait, no, it’s an image of a spreadsheet so, but it’s a good one. There’s a lot of resources if you want to know how to do alt text, by the way, there’s a lot of AI that’s coming in and doing a really decent job. Do not trust it, meaning, don’t just assume that it’s right. Go in and you verify it yourself. Yeah.

Brent Warner 26:24
And I think one of the conversations we had on here, I think the language helped me conceptualize this too, because it’s like, Are you telling the reader to understand it in the context of what you’re talking about? So someone says something like an ice cube, right? And they’re like, Well, okay, an ice cube could have a totally different purpose for a picture of it in a, you know, in a chemistry class, than it might in a geology class, right? And so it’s like, okay, well, let’s talk about this, right? So, so you’re not just saying an ice cube, you’re saying, Well, okay, what are you talking about in this section that needs a picture of this ice cube, and what is, what is it there for? Right? So, a little, just a little bit, right? You don’t need to go crazy. You don’t need to go tons and tons and tons of things. But like, if it’s there to help out, if it’s related to the content, then put it. But if it’s just a decorative image, there’s a button that you can usually click that says decorative, right? And it’s just for, you know? It’s just to be make your document prettier.

Tim Van Norman 27:18
I guess, absolutely, absolutely. The next one is media accessibility transcripts. So transcripts are what, where you have maybe a document of whatever was said in a video, and you have captions. There’s live captions which are played you hit play on the video and it plays, it shows them. And then there’s closed captions, which you hit a CC button, and then it displays them so it’s options. All three are good, but the key is you want them to be accurate. You can use otter, you can use what comes in zoom. You can use all of these other things. They do a great job, but then just go through and verify that they’re accurate. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen that Brent Warner said something, and I’m like, Yeah, that’s not what he meant. Okay, that happens with AI stuff all the time as well, and so just watch that to you reviewing it kind of like we were talking about alt text. If you use AI for alt text. It’s that same thing. Just make sure that is right, yeah.

Brent Warner 28:23
And we’ve talked about this, you know, just like humans, it mishears things, or it doesn’t understand it the right way. Tim used to give the example of, like, talking about Canvas, and it would bring up cannabis, right? Or, you know, even like IVC, it could be Ivy y se, right? Like IVC, something, you know? And so it’s like, okay, it might, it’s like, fair to say that they would not understand the context every single time, right? And so just to be aware of those types of things. And then we’ve got our very last one here, Tim, which is going to be hard for a lot of people, but just to be aware of, I think.

Tim Van Norman 28:56
Yeah. So the fun part on that one is choosing accessible third party resources. We talked about that a little bit, V pads. It’s a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. And having your product, having the stuff you buy, the what you choose to use, any software, any websites have them fill one of those out so that you can see what they have said. It’s good. It’s good to know what that is. But that’s also where somebody like me comes in a lot of times and actually reviews those because people I’ve had sales people fill it out and have no idea what they were talking about, yeah? And so it’s important, because it does in the purchasing process, it does become a legal document too. Yeah, it’s voluntary, but it’s also kind of required, yeah?

Brent Warner 29:56
So if you’re using, so for example, if you’re using, like, a non school. Tool, approved tool, right? Like, the school’s not paying for the school doesn’t have access to it necessarily, right? But you’re like, Hey, I just want to use it. You could, in theory, reach out to the company and say, Hey, do you have a V pad, or do you have an accessibility statement, or something like that? But, like Tim said, they may or may not really know what that means and what’s expected inside of there. And so they can say, Yeah, I’ll just give you something, and then they might just throw it into it into AI and just say, just fill this out, right? And sounds like, so you actually have to spend the time to make sure you really understand what’s going on with it. But we are working ideally on at least a collection of the common tools that we use. And I think, I imagine that’s going to be pretty common across most schools at this point, which is like, Hey, these are the, you know, these are the ones we the ones we pay for at the school. Those are fine, right? The ones we’re working to make sure it’s them. It should be clear on that. That’s the ideal statement. Then there’s also probably going to be, like, common ones that people use, that we don’t pay for, right? But like, Hey, here’s kind of the deal with them, right? And then there will be, of course, so many that people just like, I’m the only person who uses this thing. Does it fit into the needs? And that’s its own question, too.

Tim Van Norman 31:09
Exactly, exactly.

Brent Warner 31:10
Whoo, okay, lots of lots to cover here. I hope this is a good starter for people as they’re kind of starting go, Wait a second, what I got to get into? But Tim, thanks for breaking down a lot of these there. It’s just a starting point, right? So, Oh, absolutely. And you’re going to need support from your institution. You’re going to need support from other people. Do not expect to, and you should not be expected to do all of this on your own. It is. It is some real heavy lifts in many parts. And so like we said, work on what you’re doing next and like the next thing you’re putting forward, and just check that and kind of work on them. And try to make yourself a little checklist on how can I add bits here and make sure that I’m getting closer towards the ideal as we move forward Exactly?

Tim Van Norman 31:58
Thank you for listening today. For more information about this show, please visit our website, at the HigherEdTechPodcast.com

Brent Warner 32:04
as always, we want your feedback, so please go to the higher ed tech podcast.com and let us know your thoughts

Tim Van Norman 32:10
for everyone at IVC that’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please stop by Library 213 or contact me. Tim Van Norman AT tvannorman@ivc.edu

Brent Warner 32:24
and if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at @BrentGWarner.

Tim Van Norman 32:30
I’m Tim Van Norman

Brent Warner 32:32
and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody.