We're excited to share a few digital accessibility highlights to round out 2024.

ADA Title II ruling response

The UCSF's ADA Title II response for websites and web apps was a big focus in 2024 since the new ruling was announced that April. Here are the efforts of the team to help participants understand and comply with the new ADA Title II guidelines, demonstrating an effort to ensure that all attendees are well-informed and prepared to implement these changes.

• Created the UCSF ADA Title II Ruling webpage with a link to the resource 10 Action Steps to comply with the rule.
• Facilitated the training session Making Your Websites Accessible: An overview of the new federal ADA guidelines recording, in cooperation with Kanopi Studios on July 31.
• Presented to the UC-wide Health Apps Team meeting and the Cabinet
• Discussed frequently at monthly Office Hours. It was featured four times (April, June, October, and November) in the Brief Message portion at the beginning of the session. It also appeared on the attendee-driven agenda by request five times during the year.
• Work is underway to increase staffing and create enterprise-wide communications for site owners to better understand their roles and responsibilities.

Onboarded new Digital Accessibility Program team member

The digital Accessibility Program team grew by one this year when our apprentice, Christina Ovalle, joined the team as an official full-time UCSF employee on August 26, 2024. Christina's kindness and knowledge of digital accessibility are acknowledged by clients and coworkers! 

Continued training and outreach

Digital Accessibility Office Hours sessions 

We hosted 10 Digital Accessibility Office Hours sessions. The attendee-driven agenda topics for 2024 indicate a range of skill levels in digital accessibility, from beginner to advanced. Here’s a breakdown of the skill levels observed:

1. Beginner:
   • Onboarding Siteimprove new users: Introducing new users to accessibility tools like Siteimprove and providing tours of free accessibility courses.
   • Introduction-level guidance: Basic introductory sessions covering fundamental accessibility concepts and tools.
   • Accessibility tips for Drupal Site builder beginners: Basic tips for beginners using Drupal Site Builder's WYSIWYG as a content editor to ensure their sites are accessible.
   • New ADA Title II guidelines and compliance: Understanding and implementing new legal guidelines and compliance requirements, which involves advanced knowledge of accessibility laws and organizational policy implementation.
2. Intermediate:
   • PDF and PowerPoint accessibility: Addressing common issues and providing training on creating accessible documents, which requires some foundational understanding of accessibility principles.
   • Preparation for Drupal 10 "Lift and Shift" migration: Discussing specific technical issues related to accessibility in the context of a CMS migration, which requires a moderate level of technical knowledge and basic content audit skills.
3. Advanced:
   • Detailed PDF testing and remediation: Handling complex PDF accessibility issues. These may be flagged by tools like Acrobat Checker or found with basic manual testing. More complex files require advanced knowledge, such as tagging, of PDF creation and remediation techniques.
   • Complex accessibility issues (molecule drawing tools, describing  images): Addressing specialized and advanced accessibility challenges, such as making complex files with form fields, tables, or high interactivity features accessible. 

Testing Websites with Users with Disabilities sessions

The goals of this monthly session are the feature a user study for one UCSF site and demonstrate the experience of a native Assistive Technology user using a screen reader.

Sites tested include those on Web Services' Drupal 7 and 10 Site Builder template to customized sites on their own Drupal versions, WordPress and Salesforce integrations.

Barriers found ranged from redundant image descriptions to insufficient color contrast choices. With the team's fixes in place, they raised their Siteimprove accessibility score and the nice side-effect was it also raised their site's Siteimprove user experience score.

"Seeing users interact with our websites via screen readers and keyboard navigation has uniquely highlighted a variety of improvements we can make to our websites that allow for better design of our websites for all." -Daniel Tjandra, IT DevOps

New Live Training with SMEs

Accessible PowerPoint Lunch & Learn

The first in-person/hybrid event since the pandemic was presented in May for Global Accessibility Awareness Day. The “Accessible PowerPoint Lunch & Learn,” presented by Tanya Jansen and Jill Wolters, was customized for staff who create and present training and business communications using slide decks. 141 online attendees joined the small group of folks who attended in person and were treated to a taco bar.

Two sessions on data viz

Joanne Yim and Rhiannon Crochi, developers from the Health Informatics team, took a deep dive into accessibility for data visualization. They evangelize and incorporate accessibility in the development life cycle of Tableau dashboards, graphs and charts.

The two recordings and slide decks are posted on the IT Images Accessibility page.

Considerations for Accessible Data Visualizations 

The topic was considerations when planning the content strategy for using data visualization, why accessibility is important, and how to bake in accessibility for data visualizations when creating them.

Building Accessible Data Visualizations in Tableau

Rhiannon and Joanne presented Tableau dashboard and data visualization examples with a screen reader and keyboard navigation to identify accessibility challenges and limitations in Tableau. They demonstrated what steps you can take to improve the accessibility of data visualizations and dashboards created in Tableau.

Response from participants was highly favorable as they enjoyed learning from colleagues.

PDF Live Training

To cater to the many requests for live training on PDFs, Shawn Jordison, The Accessibility Guy, presented last fall on how to Create Accessible PDF Organizational Charts Using Visio and Adobe Acrobat Pro (Stream video). The recording and accompanying Presentation Slide Deck (PPT) are available on the UCSF PDF Accessibility webpage for reference.

Participants enjoyed his interactive and energetic presentation style.

Updated Siteimprove User Training

The Siteimprove reps hosted a live webinar on web accessibility in December 2024. Here is the link to the recorded session, please share it widely. 

For getting access to Siteimprove and reviewing your site, please refer to UC Siteimprove documentation. 

For help working through the Siteimprove platform, be sure to visit the Siteimprove Help Center with on-demand articles, courses, and webinars. 

UC Tech at Davis/Sacramento

Let’s Taco ‘Bout IT at UC Tech

The 2024 UC Tech Annual Conference, which happened October 27-29 at UC Davis and UC Davis Health was an unforgettable event, gathering more than 800 attendees across ten UC campuses to celebrate collaboration for transformation.

Tanya Jansen, Communications Specialist, OCIO-Communications, and Jill Wolters, Digital Accessibility Program Manager, IT, presented “Let’s Taco ‘Bout IT” at UC Tech. Their session used the analogy of how building a thriving accessibility community is like crafting a delicious taco bar. Just like assembling the perfect taco, it requires the right blend of ingredients, a supportive network of helping hands, and a welcoming space for people to gather.

If you didn’t make it to UC Tech this year, the materials from this session are available including the slide deck and resources page.

UCSF IT’s Digital Accessibility Program Manager Receives Silver Award for Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) Leadership

Jill Wolters was recognized for leading the UCSF/UCSF Health Web Accessibility Team in building website accessibility protocol from the ground up. Jill introduced digital accessibility to the flagship patient-facing sites – UCSF Health and UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals – that, combined, receive approximately 2.5 million page views every month. Learn more about the awards in the UCOP announcement.

Jill is inspired by the UCSF Health Marketing accessibility champions David Novak and Shelby Pope who do the hard work to make UCSF health websites accessible to users with disabilities. Their team both creates content and works with content from the dozens of department stakeholders averaging 150 new requests a month!

Their commitment spans from reducing videos and PDFs with accessibility issues to creating their own alt text style guide to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for the images specific to the UCSF patient-facing websites. Read more in the UC Tech News story.

Thank you allies!

Thanks for making time for accessibility and usability in 2024. It’s the right thing to do. Stay in touch and request a Digital Accessibility Consultation request whenever you need guidance.