- So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Laura.
- So when I see this, I think we have a lot of work to do,
and I know for a lot of folks that I can see,
it makes...
(microphone static)
And I think I wanna start by saying
that this is the result of, again, many years of students
experiencing a lot of discrimination in classrooms,
being left sitting there without books, without information,
and that in many cases, students with visual impairments
and learning disability, basically they don't have
(distant mumbling)
(audio gap)
(microphone static)
Try again.
So that's been really a critical issue.
And there was also a dear colleague letter about this,
just to, you know, underscore the seriousness of it
a few years ago that went to all college presidents,
and there's been a number of settlement agreements
over the years, over the last few years.
But the Montana Agreement, I think, is the best attempt
at kind of laying out, like what do you actually
mean by this?
What does this involve?
And what are the principles at stake here,
as well as the educational implications.
And so I think that we present about the Montana decision
because it does give us some guidance about
what do we mean by accessible?
What does timely mean?
You know, those kind of things are just beginning
to be defined in ways that I think
will be meaningful going forward.
And so we've done some,
beginning to do some training around this,
and I think actually the school's social work
is in the best position to take this on and do it well,
because we have a lot of lead time
coming up to the summer.
And I did some presentation with some undergrad faculty
who said things like, "Well I'm just,
"sometimes I don't get my syllabus together
"until the day before class."
And I said, well, you know what,
that's just not going to work.
You can't do that.
(chuckles)
You just can't do that.
You can't do that and meet these goals.
You can't do that and be sure that every student
is going to be able to read on day one.
And so you really have to begin to be thinking far ahead.
And as an instructor myself, it's forced me
to look over my syllabus to make sure that everything on it
is really essential, that I'm not just carrying things over
from year to year, that I've thought carefully
about the things that I'm requiring students to read
versus things that I'm recommending or that I think
are useful but aren't really a required party or curriculum,
because we really need to make sure
that anything we absolutely believe students must read
or must view are accessible.
And there are gonna be instances where some of those things
are not accessible, and maybe have to be made accessible.
There are times when they're not gonna,
there are things that aren't going to be able
to be accessible.
And in those cases, we need to think about
what the alternatives would be.
And so Beth, asked me to give you an example.
A professor asked me about
purchasing a software called Matlab,
which is a math software.
And Matlab, they went ahead and asked the company
to give information about the accessibility of this product.
And apparently, it's not very accessible.
And by that I mean, it's not easily navigable,
there aren't features to navigate well if you're using
a screen reading software.
There were no, like, audio missing,
there might be text but not audio, or audio and not text.
And so there were a renumber of problems with this product.
There's an alternative called Mathematica,
which apparently has all those features built into it,
but the argument was, "But Matlab is better."
And so we want to keep using Matlab.
So what's going to happen there is a question mark.
And in some ways, I think academic interest
is very important, and I don't think the intention of this
is to say you know, don't use the best tools.
But at the same time, we need to be driven by
the pedagogical goals.
What is the curriculum that's being taught,
and are there other ways to teach it?
And as technology evolves, it's very exciting.
I mean, I think in many ways, technology opens so many doors
for people with disabilities, but it can so easily end up
leaving people behind if we are not making sure
that the content is actually accessible.
So it may be that in that case, that we need to
have both products available, Matlab and Mathematica,
or we're going to have to have an alternative
to the problems that exist in Matlab.
And I think what's really happened in these decisions
is that in the past, no one was even thinking
about these things.
They were after-the-fact considerations,
especially now when it is so difficult
to create an after-the-fact solution.
So I think a big part of this is just asking people,
like, when you create your curriculum,
please remember that there will be people in the class
who can't use these things in typical ways
and that you have mindfully considered
what an alternative be, that you've actually looked into it.
I spoke yesterday too about curiosity,
about whether these conversations are happening
within various disciplines.
So I mean, even if you came to me, I don't know anything
about chemistry, so I wouldn't know very much
about the products that would be chosen in that department.
And so I think some of those discussions
have to happen discipline by discipline
about what is the best way to teach chemistry
to students who have vision problems
or who have attention issues, or who can't use
keyboard strokes.
I mean, there's a lot of different ways that,
that might come up.
And I think the Disability Services Office
is very important.
Also the ETS is very important.
The libraries, we're all gonna have to really work together
to get to this place, like that said,
of we need to be doing this in an anticipatory way
as opposed to a reactive way.
And what has happened is we just have not been able
to keep up reactively, because you can't alter
a software program on the fly.
It's got to be integrated.
And it also has required a lot of national advocacy
and support with these companies
to try to...
Things like Google, getting Google to make itself
accessible has been a huge national advocacy effort,
and there's been a lot of progress and we don't have
all the answers yet.
So a couple of things I just wanted to share with you today
are I think the low-hanging fruit of things that you can do,
and that we'll continue to provide more guidance
and more information.
And in some ways, I love this summer to hear from you,
and I'll be talking to students what worked,
what was hard, what couldn't you find, you know?
What did you bump up against so that we can keep
moving forward over the next couple of years
and feel like we have accessible,
I think what we're saying, what we're hoping is that
in a couple of years, you'll be able to say,
Josh will be able to say, "My class is accessible."
Not, "This individual got accommodated in my class."
And so that's a different orientation.
But I think we can definitely do that.
And in some ways, it does make you central to the process
as opposed to having been,
having me be central to the process.
And I think that's good because it's your class,
it's your materials, you know what you want students
to learn, I don't know that.
So I think we have to work together to make sure
that we can meet your goals for all the students
in your class.
So one of the most
challenging and yet, I think, fairly easy things to solve
has been the materials that are posted on Moodle.
Over the years, a lot of the, you know,
more and more people are using Moodle to post
journal articles and post things that you've scanned,
charts, images, handouts, all the ways that we use Moodle,
that the material there overall has not been too good.
It's not clear, it's not clean.
Some of it's really messy to read.
And what happens is
perhaps a sighted person can get through
some of that material, but when it's not clear,
the screen reading software will not read it.
So the screen reading software that people are using
are phenomenal, there are just so many new products
on the market and a college showed me one yesterday
that I think is, to me, going to be everybody's solution,
but it won't work unless the material is clean.
And so if you look at a document and you can see
even just, that the naked eye,
that there are underlinings, highlighting,
notes written on the side of the page,
a black mark down the middle from copying it 20 times,
well, you can see that the text or the font is degrading,
that the letters are kind of splitting up
or it's some really oddball font.
It's probably not going to be able to be read
by these softwares.
So there are a couple of things,
there are several things we can do.
The number one thing would be try to find a good copy.
And I know it's really tempting if you've had that copy
on your desk.
And here's my favorite one.
I had one where you know, faculty will
have an article they used when you were writing
your dissertation, and you made your notes on it,
and those notes made sense to you,
and those underlinings and highlighting made sense for you
and what you were looking at,
but they don't mean anything to your students,
as far as what you want them to find,
and that's just obscuring the readability of a page.
Yup?
(distant audience member mumbling)
Sure, okay.
Screen reading, screen reading software
is basically software that is going to read the documents
out loud to people.
So it sees the images on the screen, the letters,
and it reads, it reads the words that are on the screen.
An example of that, like we have in labs here,
is called Kurzweil.
Kurzweil a very, like, high-end product
and it's been around for a long time.
Kurzweil is an awesome tool because it also includes
a whole bunch of learning tools.
Like students can read from it and it will highlight
the words, word for word.
It will highlight sentence by sentence
or highlight whole paragraphs.
It connects to thesaurus and dictionary and all of that.
It also allows students to pop open note boxes
and take notes as they go.
There's a bunch of different tools in it.
The product that I saw last night was an app for iPad, 9.99.
I mean, let me tell you, Kurzweil is about $2000.
9.99 app on iPad called Dream Voice Reader.
Everybody go home and try it out tonight.
Really, really amazing.
It does everything I can see that Kurzweil does,
and it also allows you to do all kinds of things
like change the size of the font on the screen,
flip the background from black to white,
which you know, all of these things have,
are nuanced things that make a difference for people
with various kinds of eye conditions or dyslexia,
or even just the strain of reading.
I don't know, it's probably not as relevant to all of you,
but we have a ton of students who have concussions,
and reading the screen all the time has been a big problem.
So just flipping from black background to white
or vice versa has helped a lot of folks.
So these things are all incorporated
in that you can highlight in 10 different colors,
you put your finger on a word, a little box pops open.
You can make bookmarks and notes.
They are wonderful for learning.
There are just amazing ways that you might want to use them
in your teaching and helping people learn how to
make the most of their documents.
So Dream Voice Reader is the one that I found last night.
And there are others, but this is a great one.
So the point is you've got to have a nice,
clean document in there,
and it has to a digitized document,
which means that some PDFs, as you know, are just images.
It's a picture of the words, it's not actual words.
It's like a Word file is words.
It's actually a readable document.
But some PDFs are just images.
And you can tell that it's an image file
if you tried to highlight and cut-and-paste from it.
If you cannot do that, it is just an image and it is useless
in that format.
It has to be converted.
And so there are things like optical,
you can run it through an optical character recognition,
an OCR process.
And there's software to do that, there's Adobe,
there's Omni Pro, there's a whole bunch of different
things to do that.
If you're very savvy and you know how to do that, yay!
(audience laughter)
And it's not hugely difficult, it's just,
I'm not a technology person, so this of all things
has been a challenge for me in my career, let me tell you,
but it's not that difficult.
On the other hand, we have a nice simple and easy way
for you to do this.
This college subscribes, the five colleges subscribe
to a service called RoboBraille, of all strange terms,
and it's an online document conversion service.
And so what we've been recommending,
and you have some materials in your packet here,
so if you can pull out this one called
Converting Documents from Moodle into Accessible PDFs,
and we could take a look at that.
There's one other little thing that I forgot
to bring here today.
We're gonna have to share some more materials with you,
and we're going to be upgrading, updating
and editing these more and we'll make sure that you have
the best information we have.
And we'll have more feedback from you,
and we'll keep updating them and upgrading them
so that we have really good and clear information.
So the way that we will, the we suggest that you make sure
that anything you post on Moodle is accessible
is that first of all, again, go through, weed,
make sure you have what you really want,
make sure you know what you want to require,
and anything that you're gonna post there,
you could also work with the library
and bring your materials to them and have them,
and they'll do it as an E-Reserves,
and they are following these guidelines.
The second document you have is photocopying
and scanning guidelines, and the library has agreed
to use those as well.
So if you have a document, first of all,
if you have an article that's from something like
jstorm use or an online journal, chances are,
it's already going to be fine
because they have their own standards
and they're creating them accordingly.
So those documents should be able to be posted.
And again, those come through the library anyway.
If you are copying and scanning something,
then you should follow the copy and scanning guidelines
that are here.
And once you have that document,
or you picking up a document from somewhere
and you don't know whether it's accessible,
you can email it to Robo Braille.
This is the screen capture from their website.
So you would go to Robo Braille,
you would go to step one, you choose file,
and you retrieve the file that you want to convert.
And you send it to them basically.
You upload it and you send it to them.
Choose file.
And once you send it to them, you request it,
let me see what you say here,
specify the document conversion option
from the drop-down menu.
And choose Microsoft Word.
Now we're suggesting that you choose Microsoft Word
and receive the document back as a Word file.
And the reason for that is because
that will allow you to see the quality of the conversion.
If you get it in Word, you can also edit it.
If you get it back in a PDF, which you could also do,
you'll never know whether it's readable or not,
whether it's actually a mess.
It will look great to you,
but you won't know what the screen readers are seeing.
If you get it back in Word, you'll be able to see that
every time the word the occurs, it's misspelled.
And in that case, you can do a very quick search and replace
and fix the document pretty quickly.
And then you can save it as a PDF
and feel confident posting it on the Moodle site,
that it will be accessible.
If you get the Word file back and it's a mess,
pretty good chance that the original document
was really a mess to begin with.
And then I would really recommend trying to find
another copy of it and go through the process again.
If you're having that problem over and over again,
then you need to talk to us or we're gonna have
to figure out how to help.
Yup?
(distant audience member mumbling)
Yup.
(distant audience member mumbling)
Yup.
(distant audience member mumbling)
Right.
(distant audience member mumbling)
Right.
(distant audience member mumbling)
Microsoft Word is great, yes,
because it's just a text file, right?
So as long as you have a Word document,
you can see that you could post Word documents
if you wanted to.
But some people are concerned about preserving
the formatting, which is the only reason to me
to put it into PDF.
If you don't care about that, I mean,
then you can post it just as a Word file.
Sometimes Word will retain some of that structure,
but it doesn't always do that.
Okay?
So once you've done that, you will see that...
And this comes back as quickly as, you know,
five to 10, 15 minutes, so it doesn't take very long.
You could upload a whole bunch of them,
and they should come back to you in a very short
period of time.
We also have,
we've done training at the undergrads
with all of the departmental assistance,
and so we're going to have to think about what support
can be provided to all of you in getting this done.
But you know, again, there are going to be times
when the document, we just can't find a good copy.
We, in disability services, have another software
that we use call ABBYY Fine,
and ABBYY lets us go in and do more extensive editing,
where we can see both versions at the same time,
and there's lots of tools in ABBYY to upgrade
the quality of the document.
We could do that if there's something
that's really important to you and needs
and we can't find a good copy anywhere else.
So I feel like this is kind of like a tiered process.
We're just asking that you try to take care
of the easy stuff.
If you can find a better copy, please do it,
just don't pick up the same copy of the old document
over and over again.
Look through your staff, make sure that it's readable.
I asked some students who just work in my office,
who were not students with disabilities,
what's the quality of stuff that you're reading,
and what do you do when you can't read an article?
"Well, I just don't read it."
(laughter)
I said, oh, really, does your faculty know
that you just say, "We just don't read it?"
So I said, all right, it's important, I guess, you know?
So anyway, this is gonna be processed,
and we're gonna hear from all of you how it goes.
And so that's the main.
Yup?
(distant audience member mumbling)
Yeah.
Are people okay with trying this out?
All right.
Some of you probably have done it,
and if you know how to open a document in Adobe,
you can do the editing or you can do that there.
But I don't know how to do that, so I use
the Robo Braille service,
and it's been really, really helpful.
I think it also is important to have really good
labeling when you put something on Moodle,
that the clear titles are there so people are trying
to navigate Moodle, they can tell where they're going
in the process.
So then the other thing that we want to talk about
are video and audio files
that you might be using.
Again, we want to make sure that anything
that's posted to Moodle is accessible
and things that you're gonna use in the class.
Videos, again, it's really a matter of beginning
to make sure that you've checked that the videos
you're selecting our captioned,
that you've made an effort to get a captioned version.
So if you've been using something for a long time,
go back and check, make sure it's there, they're there.
If it's not a captioned video, there are some resources
through ETS to try to get these videos brought up to speed
and captioned.
Some years ago, we sort of hesitate to do that
because it would be like, $600 for a video.
Now, in some of the services that we can use,
it's a dollar a minute.
So it's really worthwhile to start making
these materials accessible.
And again, ETS will be able to help us with some of those.
But again, it takes this proactive effort on your part
to let me sit and review what I'm using
and let me identify which videos are going to be okay,
which ones I'm worried about.
Am I really gonna use that one this year?
I only use that once in a great while, it's not required.
It is required kind of do that assessment for yourselves
so you know.
And then we can figure out how to make sure
you can connect with someone who could help,
upgrade those videos for you.
The biggest question mark to me,
and I don't have the perfect solution to this yet either,
is using stuff from online,
like videos that are posted online,
because we don't control them,
especially stuff on YouTube
and any number of other sites with groovy graphics
and videos.
And the bottom line is we've got to figure out something
because the student can't be expected to sit there
while everybody else is listening to a video.
So I think we have to try to create...
In YouTube, if you created something,
there is a captioning function in YouTube
so you can have something captioned.
And there's ways to do that.
And what I don't know is if you don't know the content,
how you can influence the captions.
I have to find out more.
Does anybody know that?
(distant audience member mumbling)
You think you can edit it yourself?
(distant audience member mumbling)
- [Voiceover] I know there's something
that you can do in YouTube, but I don't know
how to do it myself.
So we'll research that for you and get back to you on that.
- Right, right.
And I do know there are things you can do about it,
but I don't know either how to do it.
So that's one option.
I think the other most relevant thing
are probably things like President Obama
gave a speech last night, it was on TV,
and it was captioned when it was on TV.
But when it gets posted to the website,
the captions go away.
And this is another area of national advocacy
to push the television stations to keep those captions,
but that hasn't quite happened yet.
So be mindful of using something like that.
Is that your only way of communicating the information?
Is there's something else you could use?
If not, then we really need to make sure
that the student has a transcript of it.
And honestly, the easiest way that I could think of
to do that, and I have done it for my class,
is use my, I use my iPhone.
And I literally just repeated what was being said
on the video into the voice thing on my iPhone.
And it types it right there, I reviewed it,
make sure it was accurate, and I gave that,
I printed it out for the student.
You son?
(distant audience member mumbling)
Yup.
(distant audience member mumbling)
Mm-hmm
Right, and you have those options to save it
on certain copiers, right?
(distant audience member mumbling)
Right.
Yup.
(distant audience member mumbling)
Not allowed to what?
(distant audience member mumbling)
Oh.
Okay, well we'll have to figure that out, right?
(distant audience member mumbling)
Yeah, the other thing to understand too,
that we're not just, we're looking for something
that will read things out loud,
but that's not the only access feature
of an "accessible document."
The highlighting is really important for some people,
the note-taking capacity.
The other features that are in some of these screen readers
are things that people are also wanting to utilize
and are important for their learning disabilities.
So a good example of where that was problematic
is another whole category, which are e-books
or electronic books.
So sometimes, e-books come even with their own reader
built in, and we had a lot of difficulty with SSW books
last year in the library.
We had to work with them and actually buy hard copies
and rescan them because even though they seemed accessible,
they even had their own little reader button in them,
they didn't allow you to use them
with screen reading software
so people couldn't use any of the other learning tools
that they wanted.
So we really, you know, e-books are not
a great solution right now.
It's really unfortunate.
And part of how the whole, thing whole thing
kind of of came about was an original lawsuit
that had to do with Kindle that a college had required
students to have the Kindle and use Kindle,
and the Kindle itself wasn't accessible.
And that was sort of the original decision that said,
you can't require students to use a technology
that's not accessible and have no alternative
to that in place.
And that's a presentation about, it came up,
you can do other things, but they have to be,
"equally effective," they have to provide the same
ease-of-use, they have to be available
in the same time frame.
And so that's all well and good,
but the answer is really try to make the original thing
accessible as much as you can because coming up
with an alternative is not an easy thing to do either.
Yup?
(distant audience member mumbling)
There you go, yeah, me too.
(distant audience member mumbling)
Yes, it's fine.
PowerPoints are fine.
(audience members mumbling)
But...
Yup, yup.
But if you put a bunch of images in there,
if you just put charts in there or you put images
and the images could convey information,
then you would wanna have tags underneath, you know,
explaining what that is, you know?
So explanations that are in there.
The other thing about that is that if you have a PowerPoint,
it would be very useful for you to post them
at least the day before it, so that, you know,
some students rereading, that helps with vocabulary,
and that's not the first time they're seeing it
when it's in class.
I know sometimes we like that idea,
but it's not really good for them.
And then also, they can read it over and over again
once you post the PowerPoints.
They can have read it before they come to class.
Because if a student is visually impaired,
they're not gonna be able to read that PowerPoint anyway.
But if they've read it with their screen reader,
they'll have more familiarity with it
while they're hearing it.
It also means that you probably need to say it out loud
as you're pointing to it on the screen.
There's more things, a lot more things to talk about
in terms of making best practices around instruction
and teaching in a sort of universal design way,
where we think instead, you know,
not what's "wrong" with the student,
but how we can teach in ways that are more,
are going to reach a broader group of people
and different kinds of learners.
And there's lots to learn about that,
and there's some wonderful, wonderful work
that's being done on it.
And just the simplest thing.
I mean, I know even within our wonderful group,
at times, when students come and say,
"You know, I asked a faculty member
"could they just write that up on the board,
"and people are like, 'Why?
"'Why would we have to write on the board?
"'I just said it.'
"And I was like, well, because it would help me
"if you could just write those three things
"up on the board."
And get a big sigh, and then feel like well,
I guess I should'nt have asked for that.
Sometimes it's just the little things
that make a difference.
And they don't make sense to you because you don't need it,
but if someone's asking for that, it's a simple thing
that you can do.
So there's a lot of simple techniques that just make things
more accessible.
We had a group come from Landmark College last year,
and they did a workshop, you know.
Does everybody know what Landmark is?
It's a school specifically for students
with learning disabilities.
Their population has also expanded,
they're seeing lots of students with ADD
and students with autism,
and so they really are thinking broadly, again,
about not just diagnosis,
but what are the learning,
what are the things that make learning challenging,
and then thinking broadly about solutions.
And as that comes up, they're also relating to
students whose first language isn't English,
you know, lots of ways that people are using these.
So the tool I saw last night, I can tap on a word
and it also pronounced the word for me.
So there's so many ways that even tools like that
could be used in much more general ways
for language learners.
So anyway, we had Landmark come,
and we do have the video of that presentation
that we could post, if people are interested in hearing.
The topic of that was Neurodiversity in the Classroom.
And so everything from mental health, brain injury,
ADD, dyslexia and autism were all discussed
and differentiated in some ways.
They were very helpful, even to me.
So we can post that.
Yup?
(distant audience member mumbling)
Sure.
Oh, I can't see you.
(distant audience member mumbling)
How to present the material for students who have ADD?
Is that what you're saying?
(distant audience member mumbling)
Yup.
(distant audience member mumbling)
I would say that actually, a lot of students with ADD
are using these tools as well.
They may be using them in slightly different ways
or in different combination.
Like, they rely on the highlighting features a lot,
they rely a lot on the note insertions
because they can, like, especially people with memory,
short-term memory.
So students might do something like read a paragraph,
stop, take the notes, reread and then go on;
as opposed to like, I'm gonna read the whole article
and get to the end and I don't know what it was about.
But the tool, the note boxes, let you sort of stop, pause,
allow that time for processing.
And again, probably helpful for everybody,
but really critical for those students.
One of the things they did talk about in the workshop
was this idea of cognitive load
and the way that everything that
we as instructors don't attend to,
puts the cognitive load on the student.
And if a student is in any way compromised,
even if that's by stress or pressures,
then it's tough for them to take that burden on.
So you know, again, just thinking about
the clearer your syllabus is, A, B, C,
I mean, it feels sometimes like...
Maybe that seems "childish" or doing it for them
or all those things, but think about everything
that's on that student's mind and what a difference it makes
to have very clear instructions,
or to have these supportive tools that let them,
that augment their reading and augment their understanding.
It takes that load off.
And I think it's funny to me about,
not funny, but I think about the school for social work
and how much pressure everybody is under,
the compactness of these five weeks.
So nobody has much room for any additional cognitive load.
I mean, I tell students like,
if you're gonna come to school social work,
find someone to do your laundry all summer for you.
(laughter)
I mean, that's how much.
You want to get every extraneous thing off of your plate
so that you can focus on this.
And if you add the mental health issue or if you add ADD
or you know, anything else to that,
there's not a lot of room to be successful.
So I just feel like we can think more about how to
take that load off of them, and that's a big part
of what the workshop talked about
and how to think about that.
Anything else?
Question?
(distant audience member mumbling)
I know you do.
(laughter)
Okay, one more, yup.
(distant audience member mumbling)
Yes, I think we can do that.
We're just gonna get it captioned and then we'll put it up.
Okay?
- [Voiceover] Huge thank you to both Laura and Beth.
(applause)
Really informative,
and I hope people are really sensing the relevance of this.
To Laura's point that, you know,
she talks about this being this is gonna shift
how we think about teaching and how we apply
our pedagogical methods and so on.
So we were talking about possibly having some
brown bag discussions this summer,
thinking about what this means in the classroom
and how we think about how to teach and who we're teaching.
So this is to be continued, okay?
So we have a 10 minute break.