Managing Digital Accessibility at Universities During the COVID 19

A Google TechTalk, presented by Jonathan Lazar, 2021/02/09 ABSTRACT: Students, faculty and staff with disabilities at universities have faced many digital accessibility barriers during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the legal requirements for digital accessibility at universities are clear, the mechanisms for managing digital accessibility are not yet well-established. This presentation describes a series of interviews carried out with directors of digital accessibility in 2020 at a small-sized, a medium-sized, and a large-sized university in the USA, respectively, and for comparison purposes, a manager of digital accessibility at a state government agency. The interviews started before the COVID-19 pandemic was officially declared by the World Health Organization in March 2020 and lasted through December 2020. Some patterns that appeared across the interviews: the use of “emergency purchasing” authority during the pandemic to bypass accessibility controls in procurement, the drastic increase in requests for live captioning for classes and online events, challenges with PDF accessibility due to the number of forms that were converted from paper forms to electronic forms, and challenges related to inaccessible COVID-specific tracking software. In this presentation, common challenges, emerging best practices, and implications for managing digital accessibility during non-pandemic times are all discussed. About the Speaker: Jonathan Lazar Dr. Jonathan Lazar is a professor in the College of Information Studies (iSchool) at the University of Maryland. Dr. Lazar has authored or edited 13 books, including Research Methods in Human-Computer Interaction (2nd edition, co-authored with Heidi Feng and Harry Hochheiser), Ensuring Digital Accessibility Through Process and Policy (co-authored with Dan Goldstein and Anne Taylor), Disability, Human Rights, and Information Technology (co-edited with Michael Stein), Universal Usability: Designing Computer Interfaces for Diverse User Populations, and Web Usability: A User-Centered Design Approach. His newest book, Accessible Technology and the Developing World, will be published by Oxford University Press in mid-2021. He has published over 140 refereed articles in journals, conference proceedings, and edited books, and has received research funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research, (NIDILRR), Adobe, and Google. He frequently serves as an adviser to U.S. government agencies and regularly provides testimony at the federal and state levels, and multiple US federal regulations cite his research. He is the recipient of the 2020 ACM SIGACCESS Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility, the 2017 University System of Maryland Board of Regents Faculty Award for Excellence in Research, and the 2016 ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award. At the University of Maryland, Dr. Lazar is a core faculty member in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL), and is the incoming director of the Trace Research and Development Center. Dr. Lazar is the general chair of the ASSETS 2021 conference.