Subject: Compliance with Accessibility laws – Faculty Notices
Date: March 11, 2019
To: Jack Kahn
cc: Deans
Hi All,
I am the Distance Education Coordinator at Palomar College and am directing a promotional campaign to inform all faculty of the legal necessity of compiling with Accessibility laws for all electronic documents that they distribute to students.
Jack has asked me to copy all of the Deans on the upcoming emails I will be sending out to faculty during this promotion.
Additionally, I am working with the ATRC to develop the training that will be necessary to support faculty as they create new accessible documents and to help them remediate any documents that they are currently distributing to students.
The Accessibility laws and regulations that must be followed apply to all electronic documents the faculty distribute to students, both for documents that are faculty-created and documents that are from external sources. As a result, we are planning a phased rollout, the first phase being concerned with faculty-created documents and the second phase with external documents and software.
In April, the ATRC will be conducting six separate all-day “boot camps” of workshops on how faculty can create/remediate the various document types that are used (e.g. Canvas, MS Word, PDFs, Videos, etc.) Faculty would be encouraged to sign up for one of those days. Additionally, there will be versions of these workshops that can be taken online for those who cannot take the on-campus workshops. The ATRC staff will be on-hand to meet individually with faculty as needed.
The Faculty Senate has adopted the current OEI Course Design Rubric to be used to help self-evaluate their online courses. It is comprised of four sections and the last section deals exclusively with Accessibility requirements. In this first phase, we will be focused on teaching faculty how to bring their courses into alignment with this Accessibility section of the OEI Course Design Rubric, concerning all their self-created documents. Fortunately, the criteria that must be met is fairly straightforward and should be relatively simple for the ATRC teach and for the faculty to learn to apply.
Accessibility is a vast topic whose legal requirements derive from laws like the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. The information available can be overwhelming to someone just beginning to become familiar with it. It is my goal to bring faculty along in a way that they understand the urgency but are given a reasonable amount of time to assimilate the material and to do the work necessary.
Concentrating on faculty self-created documents initially has the additional advantage of getting them familiar with what makes a document be accessible so that, when they need to evaluate their externally created documents in Phase 2, they will better know what to look for.
In his June 19, 2018 letter entitled, “Information and Communication Technology and Instructional Material Accessibility Standard”, Chancellor Eloy Oakley encouraged all districts “to improve accessibility on campus, in order to provide equitable higher education for all students”. The Chancellor spoke with more urgency on Accessibility compliance at an Online Teaching Conference I attended last summer and I got the distinct impression that it would be wise to act on his “encouragement” sooner than later.
Fortunately, Palomar College is one of only two community colleges in the San Diego and Imperial College area that is making a significant effort to be compliant with the Accessibility requirements.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks,
Steve