Creating an Accessible Learning Environment with Laura Jervis

In this new episode of the Teaching Beyond the Podium Podcast series, Laura Jervis of CITT sits down with Ryan Rushing our Textbook Affordability Coordinator to discuss easy ways of how to get started adding accessibility to your courses. 

Transcript

Ryan Rushing:   

Hello. My name is Ryan rushing and welcome to the Teaching Beyond the Podium podcast series. This podcast is hosted by the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Florida. Our guests share their best tips, strategies, innovations and stories about teaching. Our guest today is Laura Jervis from CITT. Laura Jervis has a Bachelor of Science in journalism and a master's in bilingual, bicultural education from the University of Florida. Before finding instructional design, she taught academic English to post-secondary language learners. Now she applies her teaching experience and her passion for student engagement to the work she does to support UF faculty. In addition to course design, she educates instructors about what they can do to make their course more accessible and how it positively impacts students. 

Ryan Rushing:  01:43 

Laura's specialty is accessibility. We have her here today to talk about perceptions around accessibility. Kind of where to get started. We also want to address that some faculty are really happy to make their materials accessible, but a lot of faculty find a task of actually doing this to be a bit overwhelming, and they're a bit scared sometimes if they're getting it right or not. What would you say to those faculty? 

Laura Jervis:  02:13 

Having a good faith effort and having the willingness to fix things as you realize that you haven't done them in an ideal way, really does count for a lot for your students. I think that students notice that they appreciate that, and if you've cultivated a relationship where they can come to you and say, you know, I noticed an issue with this captioning file, or I know that you tried to make this document accessible, but I still had trouble with, you know, this aspect of it, and that you'll receive that well and like do your best to fix it. I think that that makes a big difference. And I also think that there's an element where even making a start does have a noticeable impact to your students, even if you never see it. So it can feel a little bit thankless because you're just doing this task, but if you remember that it does have a human impact, and that your students do really appreciate it, and it makes things easier for them, even if you never know about it, I think that that can help sustain that motivation.  

Ryan Rushing:  03:21 

Yeah, so what I'm hearing is perfectionism isn't necessarily the goal.  

Laura Jervis:  03:24 

It's always better to focus on progress over perfection. You know, perfection is getting as close to perfection as it is possible in the real world. Is a goal, but don't let that stop you from doing things you know. Don't let that stop you out of fear. 

Ryan Rushing:  03:43 

I think students could be a good partner too, if they bring things to you that you might not have noticed or been aware of, that's a good opportunity for learning there, right?  

Laura Jervis:  03:50 

Yeah, absolutely. I did a consultation with an instructor once who had a student who needed alternative text, and the consultation went so well because they had already asked the student what type of alternative text is helpful for this type of graphic. And so then when we met, they were practicing, and we were kind of giving examples back and forth, but they already knew what their goal was. 

Ryan Rushing:  04:17 

Fantastic. Speaking of students, one rumor I've heard from faculty that if students create work as part of a class, like post it to be shared or maybe peer reviewed by other students, that this must also meet accessibility standards. Is this true? 

Laura Jervis  04:35 

It might depend on the context, but if there's an element of peer review, then it does kind of become course content. For example, if you have a discussion post, you know, most of those are text based, and there's not a whole lot you have to do to make them accessible, but just kind of having a reminder to students of you know, if you post a link. Please hyperlink it to text instead of just pasting the URL and, you know, like little reminders like that. It's a really, really low, you know, ask of students, but it makes a big difference to some students for something a little more complicated than a presentation, maybe utilizing auto captioning and asking students to just kind of check it and see if there are major errors with it would be a good practice for that. 

Laura Jervis  05:28 

But if it's something a student is just submitting to an instructor, then obviously that's based on the instructor's needs only.  

Ryan Rushing  05:35 

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I've had cases where students have submitted video files to me because I've been trying to integrate more multimedia, and there's no closed captioning, and sometimes that was very difficult, but one student actually submitted her video using YouTube, and I was able to turn on the automatic captioning, which, while not perfect, made it so much easier for me to hear and understand what she was saying. Would you endorse the use of tools like that, or, you know, forming CSA, putting it YouTube, making it private. But what do you think about that?  

Laura Jervis  06:10 

I like anything that provides the end user with some options. In fact, as I've been advising people to, you know, if they post PowerPoint slides, leave them as PowerPoints instead of converting them to PDF. I have heard feedback from one or two instructors that their students want a PDF version to annotate, but they can use the alternative formats, through ally and Canvas to download the PDF themselves, so that way you're not like blocking access for a student that would struggle with that PDF if it's like untagged, for example, but the students who want it can still get it. And I think that that principle of universal design, where the baseline is this is accessible, but we make as many options for people on top of that as possible is a really good goal.  

Ryan Rushing  07:01 

What other rumors or myths that you've heard that are either true or not true?  

Laura Jervis  07:06 

There are so many. It's a big shift for a lot of people in academia, and that's scary. I think that PDF myth busting is a big thing that I've been doing these days, you know, PDFs are obviously kind of a portable file format in the sense that you don't need special software, and they might be a smaller file size, but there's a lot of metadata required to make them accessible to people who use assistive technology, And that can be, you know, a really big time commitment for the instructor. I advise them, you know, if you have your syllabus, that could be a Word document or an HTML document, and I think in the future it will be an HTML document, or if you have, you know, those PowerPoint slides, leave them as PowerPoints. And sometimes I hear the concern that students are going to be able to edit those documents, but that is based off of a myth itself, that PDFs are not editable. They are now. You know that used to be true, but it's not anymore. Any student can edit a PDF. The crucial thing to remember is that a student can edit their own version of any document, but they cannot edit the version that you've posted on Canvas. So it's really kind of, I think, a habitual fear that we have more than one that's grounded in the actual technology.  

Ryan Rushing  08:37 

Yeah. So what I'm hearing is a lot of other formats besides PDF might be more accessible than PDF itself. Is that correct?  

Laura Jervis  08:45 

Yeah, it's easier to make a Word document, a PowerPoint webpage, accessible than a PDF.  

Ryan Rushing  08:52 

Okay, 

Ryan Rushing  08:54 

Okay, I have a question about library resources when it comes to this. So a lot of faculty rely on course reserves to scan book chapters or to provide PDFs of articles. I'll give you an example. I'm actually taking class right now, and the instructor provided a PDF, and this PDF is not great. The text is really, really small. It's blurry if you zoom in on it, and while my AI could read it, I was having difficulty in reading the text myself. So what advice would you have for faculty who need to rely on book scans or other things in order to bring those materials into their class?  

Laura Jervis  09:33 

Yeah, my first choice is always to save yourself time by seeing if you can find another format of it. You know, with a journal article, you might be able to find the DOI, you might be able to find it in the Course Reserves, where there's an HTML version or a more accessible PDF. I know that sometimes that's not possible, though, and so then we are relying on technology to. So, you know, run optical character recognition, and then we have to go in and do tagging that, like, level of metadata. So it's something that is doable, but it's something that does take a little bit of time. So I think that the biggest challenge for instructors is to really prioritize, like, what can I have in a more accessible format, and what do I need to remediate, to fix?  

Ryan Rushing  10:27 

Yeah, so what I'm hearing there, and I really like this. I had not considered this myself, but providing the HTML version of a journal article, maybe you also provide the PDF. For those who prefer that, prefer that format. Is that acceptable to have two different options?  

Laura Jervis  10:42 

So alternative formats are not allowed under the law if one of them is inaccessible and then you have an accessible version, because you either, you know, didn't want to make the original accessible, or their esthetic differences, or things like that. But if it's an accessible PDF and an accessible HTML page, then students will have preferences, and providing both of those accessible versions is a great option.  

Ryan Rushing  11:10 

So let's say I am an instructor and I want to post a journal article. I know that posting both the PDF and the HTML is not good.  

Laura Jervis  11:18 

Unless the PDF, unless the PDF accessible. 

Ryan Rushing  11:25 

Let's say that the PDF is not in this particular, would it be okay for me to post the HTML and tell students if they want a PDF, there's on there, but we're going to be using the HTML version for the class?  

Laura Jervis  11:31 

Yeah, I think that's totally fine. The course version is accessible, but you're letting students know what their options are if there's something that works better for them and meets the same needs.  

Laura Jervis  11:42 

Another myth I hear a lot is this work worth it? I don't have students with disabilities in my class like I would know I know my students, but the fact is, that's not always the case. There are a lot of students with disabilities who don't disclose for whatever reason, sometimes the fear of stigma, sometimes something else, though, and many of them do benefit from digital accessibility best practices. I think it's important to remember that you don't know who this is helping, but it's definitely helping someone, whether or not you know it. You've had students with disabilities in your classes. 

Laura Jervis  12:21 

I always like to brag about my best friend. She's a molecular biologist, and she also has dyslexia, and she didn't disclose that during her doctorate program, so when she got PDFs that didn't work with her assistive technology, she just kind of struggled through reading them like three times as slowly as the other students, which is not fair. It was a huge waste of her time that she didn't feel comfortable asking for an accessible version of it, and she could obviously complete the work. Her dissertation. Won an award. She has a very successful career now, so she made it work for her, but it wasn't a fair experience compared with her colleagues.  

Ryan Rushing  13:12 

I can definitely relate to that as a student with hidden disabilities myself, especially with hearing I oftentimes feel kind of ashamed to go to the professor to pull up. I actually had to go to the professor the other day say I can't hear students in the back. You just tell them to speak up a little bit, and it felt really embarrassing. Or, you know, another in my case, I'm not, like, completely deaf or anything. I'm functional in most context. So maybe I don't think the DRC is that I'm going to meet the DRC process itself is pretty intimidating, so there's lots of reasons why you might have students who are in your class with disabilities but don't disclose the DRC or to the instructor.  

Laura Jervis  13:52 

Yeah, it's hard sometimes to like, ask for help or acknowledge vulnerability, and if you're aware that a lot of people misunderstand disability. You might be afraid of like, well, sometimes I can do this and sometimes I can't, so they've seen me do it before. They won't believe me if I tell them it's hard for me. Now, there are just so many reasons why making things preemptively accessible is a much better experience for everybody.  

Ryan Rushing  14:19 

Yeah, it benefits everybody, just like the universal design for learning framework can benefit everybody. 

Laura Jervis  14:24 

Absolutely. 

Ryan Rushing  14:26 

So this is a topic that's near and dear to my heart that we both kind of agree strongly on, but I would love to hear you articulate it in the way that is much better than me. Can you talk about the usefulness but also issues associated with automated accessibility checkers.  

Laura Jervis  14:42 

Yeah, automated accessibility checkers, I kind of have a love hate relationship with them. They're a really valuable tool, but they are not perfect, and it's hard, because if you're new to digital accessibility. You just want something you can rely on to tell you what's right and what to do. But there are just inherent limitations. It's not any individual tool. It's a limitation of the technology itself that make that strategy not very viable. So there are accessibility checkers built into different programs, like Word, PowerPoint, Adobe, Acrobat, Pro. There is Ally that we have installed in our instance of Canvas, and all of them are useful. I am not telling people not to use them, but I do think it's worth remembering that they are flawed. So if you see something that doesn't make sense, don't ignore it right away. Try to figure it out. But if you know that you fixed it and it's still flagging it, it's probably an issue with the tool, not you. And similarly, there are things that might be a problem that they can't catch. 

Laura Jervis  16:01 

For example, I've seen PDFs that pass the accessibility checker. Like, if you run the accessibility checker in Acrobat, they look fine. There aren't issues. But if you actually look at the structure, you know, this should be a heading, and it's not. Or you know, this is marked as a list, but it's a table of contents and things like that. It's challenging, because digital accessibility, when you get really into some of the weeds on it, can start to require a lot of knowledge, so you want to be able to hand some of that off to a tool, because you're busy and you have other things that you need to be an expert in, but your subject matter expertise does matter, and the tools can't provide that. They can't replicate a human experience. They can't always make decisions on, you know, document hierarchy or whether alternative text is appropriate for the context or not.  

Ryan Rushing  17:05 

Yeah, something I've heard, I would love to get your opinion on this. I've heard faculty say, Well, I'm aiming for 80% or I'm aiming for 85% in my opinion, that's probably not so useful, right? What is your take?  

Laura Jervis  17:19 

When you work in academia and you see a percentage, you want it to be a grade, right? But that's not what these are. So if I'm teaching a class and there are only three files in the class, and you're teaching a class with 300 files, and both of us have an inaccessible syllabus document, my accessibility score is going to be much lower than yours because of the number of documents, but either way, our students can't access our syllabus. That's just as big a problem in both courses. And then there's also the issue of like, well, how are we waiting one barrier over another barrier? The percentage, I think of as a marker of progress, more than an objective score. Now the 85% number comes from the UF quality review rubric, so that, in general, says if you're meeting this standard 85% of the time or more than it's met, and if not, it is not met. So I think that people have been using that as like a handy starting point, because it's familiar and it's related to something else, but a course with an 85% ally score could still have some serious barriers that students will encounter. So it's really important not to just stop there. But again, you might not get it to 100% because you might disagree with Ally. Sometimes you might have a situation where you're like, I know that there's a title on that document, even if you don't see it. Or, you know, just like I disagree with what you think of that tagging structure or something like that. So using it as a marker of progress, but then thinking of like, what our students experiencing is going to be a more effective way of measuring the accessibility of your course?  

Ryan Rushing  19:18 

Yeah, and I want to talk a little bit about standards. I don't want to go too much into the weeds on that, because that's scary. And this is we don't want to go we don't get scary here. I've heard a lot about this, WCAG double A standards, and you know, when you look at those standards, they're quite technical, they're hard to parse out and hard to interpret. So let's say I'm doing my best. I'm using the accessibility checker as a tool. I have a hunch or a sense that maybe I'm not quite there yet, but I don't know what I'm missing. You know, what can I do at that point?  

Laura Jervis  19:47 

So the WCAG standards are often going to be less relevant for, course, creation, some of the things in there. Are digital accessibility best practices that will be really familiar to instructors, alternative, text, heading, structure, color, contrast, things like that. But a lot of them are not the instructor's responsibility. It's the responsibility of you know Canvas, in this case, like Canvas, has put work into making sure that you can use their product with only a keyboard. That's not something the instructor has control over, though. So with that in mind, I think that using the accessibility checkers, even though there are limitations, is a good way, though, to notice, you know, standards that you haven't met. And if you're using a web based one, they're usually pretty good at catching color contrast, for example, but that's something that as a human you might not notice if you aren't used to looking for it. So I always think that a combination of your own judgment and these tools is the best option, because they will sometimes catch things that you missed, but you will also catch things that they've missed.  

Ryan Rushing  21:05 

Yeah, I'd love to give an example of that. So I learned early in my career that people have color blindness, you know, and I was working in an apartment with a lot of men in it, so there was a higher proportion of men with color blindness, and I was realizing that my color coding red and green was causing problems for folks, and so I it took some time I had to get myself out of that habit. I either stopped using color coding all together, or put little patterns, you know, in the in the code to make it easier for people without color coding, I would even, you know, sometimes have a pre course survey, do you have any color blindness? So that way I could just double check, right? So with a lot of these changes, right, I think that as you continue to work on looking for these things, you'll build that skill up, right? And we're not looking for perfection now, but over time, you should build your confidence. 

Laura Jervis  21:59 

Yeah, and anytime you're acquiring a skill where there's a lot to learn, that's just how learning will work. It's funny, because I will look at something and if there is insufficient color contrast, it's so noticeable to me now, but it wasn't always that way. And if something is borderline. I still use the contrast checker. It just takes practice to incorporate that thought process into your workflow, and that's why some instructors right now might be really relying on tools and checklists and reminders, and also they're, you know, remediating a backlog. They're remediating existing material. But I think that it's going to feel a lot easier for them in the future, because the bulk of the work will have been done. They're going to be thinking about accessibility in terms of new things they create, and they will have spent enough time thinking about it that it will be second nature to add alternative text to that image. It's not something you have to remember later. 

Ryan Rushing  23:09 

I want to flip the script a little bit here and think about things from the student perspective. I think maybe faculty who don't experience these disabilities might have trouble understanding how students with disabilities navigate course materials. So to the best of your ability, could you describe the experience of a student who maybe uses a screen reader? Maybe he doesn't use a screen reader, it's hard of hearing, low vision. You know, other disabilities that you might think of, what is, what is navigating a course feel like to them?  

Laura Jervis  23:41 

Yeah, 

Laura Jervis  23:42 

There are so many varieties of experiences, so obviously we won't be able to talk about all of them, but I think starting with a screen reader user is a good place. So somebody who's blind or has very low vision, might be using screen reading software reads the screen to them, does what it says on the box, and they will likely also be using the keyboard instead of the mouse. So it's helpful because it targets a lot of like metadata requirements and keyboard accessibility. So if I were blind, and I was accessing a Canvas course, I would log on to the page, and my screen reader would announce all of the courses on my dashboard, for example. And I would, you know, select the correct one by pressing Tab until I got to it and pressing enter. And you know, the screen reader is telling me which one I've selected the whole time. Then I get to the course it reads me the title of the home page. I would probably press tab on my keyboard a few times, and then I would hear skip to main content, and I would absolutely hit enter immediately, because otherwise I'm going to listen to the entire navigation menu, which I've probably heard before. 

Laura Jervis  25:00 

So once you get to a page, a screen reader can find it can read the whole thing as one chunk, but it can also just read the headings, or just read the links out, or just, you know, like an image. So that can be really helpful, because as a sighted user, if I look at a document, I can glance at the larger text and know that that's the heading structure. I can get a feel for the organization of the page really quickly. So going through all of the headings provides a similar experience for somebody who's using a screen reader or like, for a link, if you have a link on an HTML page, like in your canvas course, maybe I've gone to the page before, so I know that there's a link, and I'm just going through all of the links.  

Laura Jervis  25:52 

If that is just a URL and it's not hyperlinked to normal text, the screen reader will read the whole thing, like starting with HTTPS, and you can imagine how boring and unhelpful that can be, but if you have it linked to text, then it will read out link, and then that text. And so that's also why it's helpful for the hyperlinked text to not say, you know, learn more click here, because they might be hearing that out of context. They might be looking for a link that they know they've heard before. So you want it to give some idea of where it's going.  

Ryan Rushing  26:29 

For example, I might be saying, you know, homework assignment one, and then click here to learn more. Like, what does that mean, right? And then click here to learn me might be way down on the page not related to homework assignment one.  

Laura Jervis  26:41 

Yeah. But if you've linked to the words homework assignment one, and they go to that module page because they know that they have a homework assignment coming up, they can find it really quickly.  

Ryan Rushing  26:51 

Yeah, so it sounds to me, if you don't take the time to make your content accessible when it comes to screen readers, it could really eat up a lot of the students time to make it a very frustrating experience.  

Laura Jervis  27:02 

Yeah, it really can be. And there are a lot of, you know, potential pitfalls that a content creator can accidentally introduce, like, if there's an image without alternative text, and you get to it and you hear image, and then the file name that could be, you know, just a pretty picture that's there to break up the text, or it could be really important course, content and you don't know what you're missing. So that's very stressful. If the page structure is confusing in a document, you might not be able to understand what you're listening to.  

Laura Jervis  27:37 

For example, if you have, like, a PDF with columns of text, but it hasn't been tagged appropriately, it might read all across the page as if it's one column. So you're basically getting gibberish. You know, it's not just a screen reader user who can encounter these barriers. You might have people who are using Read Aloud software due to other print disabilities or immersive readers and things like that. And then, of course, you have a whole plethora of other access needs. You have, you know, somebody who can't hear your videos, and so they need those captions to be accurate, and that means that they have punctuation in the correct places too. Because, as a former copy editor, let me tell you, punctuation can matter to the meaning of your words. 

Laura Jervis  28:27 

If somebody is using a keyboard only, and they might be using a screen reader as well, or they might just have mobility issues that make it hard for them to use a mouse, they need to make sure that their keyboard isn't getting trapped somewhere, like, oh, there was this box, and now I can't get out of it, so I have to just close the page and I can't use it. So that's something where, if you're assigning something in another website or another tool other than canvas, I always tell people, like, put your mouse in a drawer so you're not tempted to use it and see if you can still use that page. 

Ryan Rushing  29:04 

Let's say I want to play a video in my class, and maybe it's on YouTube, but it has the closed captioning turned off. Maybe the uploader turned it off, or it's not working or something. Would it be appropriate for me to play the video anyway or try to find something that does have captions or to describe, you know, the video as it goes along. I mean, there's how do you remediate that kind of situation? 

Laura Jervis  29:27 

That is a really good question, and it doesn't have a clear-cut answer. So if it's in class and it's not posted to your online course, then it doesn't fall under the regs. You're just kind of thinking about it from an access standpoint, like, what's best for the students? How can I make sure I'm not discriminating against them? Some students need captions, but some people actually find captions very distracting. So you might also have students who have dyslexia or ADHD, and those captions are. To actually be a deterrent for them. But then you might also have students who need them, so it can be hard to figure out those competing needs in some cases, and that's an area where sometimes accommodations will be really handy, like you might just know, I have a student who absolutely needs captions. I have to find another video, or they won't be able to get, you know, the content in this or you might have a student with a sign interpreter, and then you know, you can confirm with them, like because you have the interpreter, will you be okay without captions in this video during class? 

Laura Jervis  30:40 

And sometimes it's a matter of doing your best, but when you do your best, explaining your choices to your students and making sure they know that they can come to you if that didn't work for them, and you know, if you've been able to provide a transcript in advance, that might be enough for some people, but not others. So we live in an imperfect world, and we're always just doing our best for our students and for the people around us. So sometimes they know better than we do what's best for them, and it's helpful to ask and make sure that we're putting our effort into things that they actually need.  

Ryan Rushing  31:21 

A class wide survey. You know might be a good way to do that, not with people raising their hands in the classroom, but like on Canvas or something else, right? 

Laura Jervis  31:31 

One example of that that I've heard is I know a lot of students, they really like feedback on assignments to be like recorded audio of the instructor's voice, it feels more personal to them, but if you have someone who's hard of hearing or has an auditory processing disorder or who just likes to be able to refer back to it quickly, they might prefer a text comment. An easy way of accommodating that is asking students you know like this is my default mode of providing comments. If you prefer me to do this other way, please add that to the submission comments for your assignments so that I remember.  

Ryan Rushing  32:06 

Fantastic. I really love that idea. My next question is, do third party resources, whether they're required or recommended that you utilize in your course, also have to follow accessibility standards? So let's say I'm teaching a course on something related to psychology, and I want people to cite using the APA format, and I link to the APA site, and I don't know whether the APA site is accessible or not. I would hope it is, but, you know, I don't know. So what would you say in that case?  

Laura Jervis  32:36 

Yeah, those resources do need to be accessible, especially if they're required. But even if they're optional, they really do need to be. I also don't know if the APA website is accessible. I kind of want to go back to my office and check after this. I would also hope that it is so for some external resources like you know, if it's a document or a journal article, you can figure out if that's accessible, if it's a whole website, it might be a little bit harder, because, you know, that's just a new skill that some of us are still learning. There are, you know, browser plugins that you can use, but again, automated checkers will never be perfect, and those definitely do leave a lot of issues caught just due to inherent limitations. So I think that trying to see if you can use it with only the keyboard is a really, really good start. And then you know, if you look at an image, if you like, can right click and inspect it, or, depending on your browser, like, hover over it and see if it has alternative text. And, like, doing a couple of little things to get a feel for whether they have considered accessibility can be very revealing. 

Ryan Rushing  33:56 

To do your best.  

Laura Jervis  33:57 

Yeah.  

Ryan Rushing  33:57 

Do a little bit of it's like you would, you know, check the sources of anything that you would use for your course?  

Laura Jervis  34:00 

Yeah, in a way, digital accessibility is just a different form of digital literacy that you know we have to remember to incorporate into our processes.  

Ryan Rushing  34:11 

Yeah, I think you might like this next question.  

Laura Jervis  34:14 

Oh, it's exciting (laughs)  

Ryan Rushing  34:15 

Generally speaking, how might faculty continue to be creative and innovative while also being accessible.  

Laura Jervis  34:22 

If anything, I think that accessibility can really spur creativity, because it forces you to consider different needs and different ways of doing things. I remember a while ago those videos of like kind of cartoons, and there would be like, text on the screen were really popular, and there was often, like, no audio, or it would just be, like a musical track, and they all started to feel very samey and very repetitive. They also weren't accessible, because if you can't see what's on the screen then you're out of luck. You're just hearing mediocre music, right? I think that that's a good example of like, if you stop and think, Well, who am I excluding from this video, people who can't see it, what can I do to fix that issue? Then you're forced to think of like, okay, but I don't want it to just be nothing but dialog. How can I use my creativity to make this an interesting and engaging video for my entire audience? I think that really spurs a lot of good ideas.  

Ryan Rushing  35:33 

I was thinking earlier when you talked about student feedback and giving them a choice of maybe audio or text. I mean, that's such a creative thing that you could do. You could say, do you want video, audio or text? You know, pick your option that works best for you, and then you're personalizing the course more. So again, even for students without disabilities, it's just benefiting everybody, and you're being kind of creative. I can't remember a course where an instructor had asked me and what modality do you want to receive feedback, right?  

Laura Jervis  36:04 

Yeah, and I think it can also help you encourage creativity in your students, if you're giving them similar choices. You know? I know that I used to run a training where a couple of the reflections you could either type or you could do a video for and most people did just write them, but the people who did them as videos would say in the video things like, it's really fun just being able to talk this out like it, it was helpful to them to be able to process their thoughts about what they were learning in that way, instead of typing it. So it worked well for them without forcing the people who preferred to just write a reflection to do it that way.  

Ryan Rushing  36:47 

Yeah. And from the teacher’s perspective, I did this in the last course that I taught. I actually felt more connected to my students as a result of watching their video. I've engraved them so much like on the quality of their video, but if I saw that they were struggling with, like, the production, you know, maybe recording in a cafeteria or something. I would note it in the feedback and just say, hey, just, you know, it was hard for me to hear because you're in a cafeteria. But I wouldn't necessarily like grade them off for it, because the students who were submitting text didn't have that same..  

Laura Jervis  37:15 

Yeah.  

Ryan Rushing  37:15 

So I think there has to be attention to equity between the modalities as well.  

Laura Jervis  37:19 

I think that it can be meaningful for students to have that choice and also be reminded of the impact of that choice, and then we're kind of teaching them to consider accessibility in their daily lives, and that's a great skill. You know? It's helpful when you get into the workplace to be able to remember that there's a lot of background noise, so somebody might not be able to hear me, because that impacts the efficacy of your communication.  

Ryan Rushing  37:51 

Absolutely. You might have mentioned some of these from this next question already, but I want to give you a chance to explicitly answer what are the biggest yet easiest to fix accessibility oopsies that people tend to make? 

Laura Jervis  38:08 

I like this question because I think that if you're feeling really intimidated, having high impact, low hanging fruit to get you started can be so motivating. Color contrast is a big one. There are, I think it's about like nine or 10% of men who have color blindness. That's a lot of people. It's a smaller percentage in women. But still, you're, you're impacting a lot of people. If you remember color and color contrast, because that also, if the color is too light, will impact somebody who maybe has low vision and just like, can't see that against a white background. It's also kind of a fun one to mess with, because you get to think about your color choices, and it spurs that creativity of like, oh, this is only color, but the color is meaningful. How can I add that meaning in an additional way as well?  

Laura Jervis  39:08 

Alternative Text is another high impact one, and I personally think it's kind of fun to write alternative text. So if you get into a groove with it like that can be a really satisfying thing to tackle. 

Laura Jervis  39:25 

Also, I don't know why, but I find PowerPoint accessibility to be a blast. Like something about remediating a PowerPoint just really puts me in a good mood. Going through the accessibility checker and seeing the issues disappear is very satisfying, and I don't know why, but PowerPoint is my favorite format to do that with.  

Ryan Rushing  39:48 

Yeah, that actually reminds me, you know, talking about remediation, maybe you could touch on maybe two or three things for PDFs, or two or three things for PowerPoint that that would be easy for faculty to remediate those documents.  

Laura Jervis  40:02 

For PowerPoint, you know, you have the basics like, is the font big enough? Is the font, you know, not Wingdings? And is there alternative text and good color contrast? But the things that are a little more specific to a PowerPoint are slide titles in reading order, so every slide needs a unique title. That way you don't have somebody who's like, using a screen reader going, Wait, I thought I was just on that slide at the same title. There is a way in PowerPoint, if you don't want the title to be visible, it can be pulled up over the slide so that you can hear it, but you can't see it, but every slide needs a title, and it needs to be labeled as a title, and you can make sure it is with the accessibility checker. And then the read order is just, will assistive technology like a screen reader and immersive reader read the title, then the text, then the alt text, then the caption, or will it read the caption, then the text, then the title, then the alt text, which would be confusing. And again, the accessibility checker in PowerPoint shows you what the read order is and lets you change it. 

Laura Jervis  41:16 

For a PDF, it's kind of similar, because all PDFs need a title in the metadata, and they need to have a language set so that the screen reader knows what language to pronounce things in or to voice things in. But it handles it handles things through a system called tagging, so every piece of content, like a heading, an image, a block of paragraphs, has a tag that tells the screen reader, this is a heading level one. This is heading level two. This is normal text. This is a math formula and so on. It needs to be the correct tag, and the tags need to be in the correct order.  

Ryan Rushing  42:03 

I think one of the biggest problems with PDF that I've experienced personally is the content looks like text, but it's actually images, for example. And I think that's a really hard one to fix, right?  

Laura Jervis  42:16 

Yeah, a screen reader will get to that document and just say blank.  

Ryan Rushing  42:21 

Oh gosh. 

Laura Jervis  42:22 

Yeah, (followed by laughter from both speakers). 

Laura Jervis  42:24 

It's really tough to be given a reading assignment and you have homework due in a couple of days, and all you hear is nothing. The first step to fixing a PDF like that is to run optical character recognition, which will turn it from an image into actual text, but it can also introduce typos, so then that has to be edited, then it has to be tagged. And some people might do that all by hand, manually. Some people would have Adobe Acrobat Pro run auto tagging and then check the auto tagging and fix it where it has issues.  

Ryan Rushing  43:03 

So you could do those things, but you need to double check and make sure, right?  

Laura Jervis  43:08 

Yes, exactly.  

Ryan Rushing  43:09 

I've had the same experience with OCR when sometimes it doesn't really recognize some text correctly. So there's still a lot of manual labor involved in that process. 

Laura Jervis  43:18 

That's why using fewer PDFs is so helpful. It's just a time saver. You know, you might not be able to get rid of them completely, but if you can replace some of them, you're saving yourself time in that in that tagging structure. 

Ryan Rushing  43:33 

Absolutely. What tools and resources exist for accessibility and how can faculty access them?  

Laura Jervis  43:41 

UF has a lot of resources out there. My office does offer accessibility consultations. So if you go to our website and request help, that's one of the options. We also have some static resources. We have a video series called Accessibility in five you know, we sometimes do events that are related to accessibility. If you check our calendar, you'll see things similarly, there's a training team in my office that will sometimes do trainings on things like site improve, to help evaluate the accessibility of websites and fix them up. And then the ADA Coordinator at UF is also a helpful resource.  

Ryan Rushing  44:25 

Fantastic. I also think you have materials like eight steps to course accessibility, right? 

Laura Jervis  44:32 

Yeah, I'm a little embarrassed that you had to remind me of that, but we do. (both laugh) It can be hard to, you know, like chunk and prioritize, and sometimes, if you have a big task in front of you, you just kind of freeze a little bit. Our eight steps to course accessibility resource just breaks it down into those steps so that you can follow the steps and take deep breaths and not just feel like you need to do everything at once so you don't know what to do. 

Ryan Rushing  45:00 

Yeah, I think it's a great first start. In addition to the other resources that you've provided, is there anything that we have not talked about that you want to mention?  

Laura Jervis  45:10 

I don't think there's anything that we haven't covered, but I think my big takeaways are that the most important thing is to keep making progress and to keep thinking about the various and unknown needs of your students, if you're thinking about all of the potential barriers they might face in a course, and recognizing that you may or may not be able to anticipate and predict those, and you're doing your best, and you're continuing to learn and continuing to refine, then you're probably doing pretty well.  

Ryan Rushing  45:49 

That would be my biggest takeaway as well. Thank you so much, Laura for joining me on the podcast today.  

Laura Jervis  45:56 

Thank you for having me.