Transcripts of audio clips for “Creating a Web Accessibility Policy: Voices from the field.”

Boulder Conference, November, 2003

Trey Duffy quote #1

The first thing that happened was that - the committee had representation from information technologies, but either the information about the policy didn’t get communicated to the highest level, or it got communicated to the highest level and the realization of what it meant didn’t hit until after the policy was published, advertised and disseminated throughout the campus. Then some people, primarily faculty, looked at this and went, “I can’t do this. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know what you want me to do.” Then they went directly to the Chief Information Officer with questions and/or complaints. Then it came to their attention, and it was at that point the Information Technology Administrators felt as if they had not participated in the development of the policy.

Trey Duffy – quote #2

So, in the long run it worked really well because, as I said, once DOIT - the Division of Information Technology - played a role in the development of it, they had to live with it. And now they’ve become enforcers and endorsers of this policy which, just months before that, they were the ones that wanted to dismantle it. So I think the main thing is to get a policy, and get something out there that the University says ‘we have a commitment and obligation to try and make this information accessible to people’ and then go from there.

Trey Duffy – quote #3

... Exactly, exactly. I think that’s probably the power of this whole process is that, at the point there is resistance to it, you engage the resisters and bring them in and say, “O.K.,” acknowledge their complaints and concerns are legitimate, and they’re not just a bunch of nay-sayers who want to discriminate, but they are people who have jobs to do who are very worried about being imposed upon where they cannot meet their job obligations. So, “what are your concerns? What can we do to modify this so that it works for you too?” And then you’ve got them. It doesn’t become adversarial anymore it becomes more collaborative

Trey Duffy quote #4

Making WEB pages accessible falls on a continuum, and there are some things that we can do that are easily accomplished with a minimal amount of time, or effort, or resources. There are some things, depending on how the information is presented, that are far more complicated, for which we will require greater resources - say, captioning, for example - to be able to do or some things such as streaming video, you know, with multiple components to it that we’re not even sure yet whether it can be made accessible.

Bob Regan quote #1

Many people were left feeling like they could not possibly ever meet the requirements of the policy. They tried, they gave up, and you don’t often have a second crack at that kind of enthusiasm and momentum.

Bob Regan quote #2

You’ve got people who don’t know HTML – that, many are using DreamWeaver so they don’t have to use HTML. But the only way for them to meet the requirements of the policy was to learn to use Cascading Style Sheets - which meant they had to learn a little bit of HTML. So it was not unusual, when I was working with faculty there at the University, to have people yelling and… just showing a level of frustration that one would normally associate with, you know, home repair or golf or something else. And, at the same time… I even had one person break down in tears. Because she was convinced that she was going to lose her job, because she couldn’t tell me, when I asked her, what an Em was in terms of CSS units. And, you know, that’s very, very real frustration. And I think that successful implementation of accessibility policy has to start from that point - has to start from a point that acknowledges that, you know, that people have very limited familiarity with accessibility. And what level of expertise they’ve achieved in their field is going to be reduced for a while until they get up to speed on that.

Bob Regan quote #3

Given the political landscape at the University of Wisconsin, we didn’t have a lot of trouble convincing people this is the right thing to do. Everybody said, “Sure!” It wasn’t until they started really getting into the details that people started to go, “Oh no! Wait a minute. What do I have to do?”

Bob Regan quote #4

If you are going to go after a department - let’s say you are going to go after the Chemistry Department: then invite the entire Chemistry Department. Don’t go after individual sites. You know, say, “I’d like to have a training for people who are doing Web... We’ll provide the training, we’ll come in, we’ll talk about the issues, we’ll show you how to do this using traditional tools.” And there you can say, kind of a, “You know… I took a look at your site. Let’s just take a look at a...” Boop. You know, even better than doing that.. You can just hint at it. I think the best way to approach it would be to take a look at another Chemistry Department at another campus. Point out something that is kind of safe. They’re all going to know that they’re doing it. No one’s going to want to be embarrassed by showing their site. But for every problem you see on any given campus, I can… you know, call me – I’ll tell you five other campuses that have the exact problem. And point to those, because the anonymity associated with that is a bit safer. And there you have people going like, “Oh God! I hope nobody finds out, you know, that I’m doing the exact same thing.” And you’re much less likely to have somebody angry and hurt and frustrated.

David Sweeney quote #1

How did you hit on the idea of doing… doing this, a, sort of electronic survey of the websites on the campus? How did that come to happen?

Well, frankly, it came about because my administration was not willing to do what I really wanted to do, which was to start the initiative from really what we now consider to be phase two, which is training and rules and implementation and those types of things. My administration, I think rightly looking back on it now, was hesitant to throw a bunch of money and personnel at that issue without really knowing what we were getting into. And so as a first step, David, we need to know what the situation is, and so we want to pay you to do an assessment of our institutional web spaces. That assessment was designed over the course of about six to eight months, and we used a variety of tools, both production and in-house, to do it. We did an assessment of approximately 29,000 pages in the Texas A&M University system. It cut across all departments and divisions, so it gave a good snapshot of what was going on. It also started from all of the key public entry points, which would be all the departmental, college, and program pages, and went three pages deep. So it assessed those pages 3 deep from all of those key public entry points. And the results of that survey were surprising. We got a lot of good information from it. I guess the biggest number there was, or the most useful number, would be the mean number of error per page for the entire assessment – which turned out to be 4.7. And because the sample size was so large, you know, I consider that number to be a very good number, because we can then use that as a benchmark in order to run future assessments and then see how we’re doing.

Bob Regan quote on Texas

The thing that scares me the most are projects that do exactly what you described at Texas A & M. Something that goes out and systematically hunts down inaccessible pages and brings it to people’s attention. I think that, you know, when that’s done at an enterprise level, there’s a lot of dangers there of creating kind of a “shame on you” kind of attitude.

David Sweeney quote #2

There was a variety of responses that really ran the gamut, all the way from anger to gratitude and satisfaction that somebody was doing this and was helping the departments address the issues. I would say overall the main feeling was one of caution, because of the response. And if I had to do it again I would have changed this - we gave them some notice that this was going to happen, but there was no dialogue between the people that were doing the assessment and the departments. That may have been a mistake, looking back. I think that maybe what we should have done was give the departments more notice that we wanted to run the assessment, and then maybe have some open forums where they could come and ask questions about how the assessment was going to be run.

David Sweeney quote #3

You know, and so people are cautious, and the people that are looking at accessibility are cautious. I think they also, to a large part, see the magnitude of the problem. You know, we've been developing our websites in higher education for curriculum and informational purposes now for years. You know, maybe 10, 15 - I would say even back into, you know, when the web was a force in education into the 80s - maybe 20 years. And just now we're beginning to look at the accessibility of those web pages seriously. And so I think people are to a certain extent afraid of what they're going to find out. You know, my take home message would be do an assessment and get a handle on what the situation is - what the problem is. And, you know, it's just like eating an elephant - you just have to take it one bite at a time. People call me and say, "How can we ever begin to address this issue on our campus?" And you just do it one bite at a time.

Kathy Cahill quote #1

You know, one of the biggest arguments you can have is The Law (laughs). And having an attorney who can explain what the federal laws are that govern access to material for students was probably one of the biggest argument.

Kathy Cahill quote #2

There’s no way to have any centralized knowledge all the time about what’s going on. I mean, we know about larger projects that may go on to develop new websites, you know, for a department or something like that. But there’s very often changes and updates that go on that we’re never aware of. So we have to try to just get the word out, because legislating this would be pretty impossible, because there just aren’t enough of us staff who could be checking on websites and so forth.

Sara Clark quote #1

The review process is a fairly manual process where the students actually look at every page. But they have tools that help it go faster - they can review about 100 pages an hour on their review process. And we generate a web report that we then send to the department. And we will help the department learn how to make the changes, but we expect the department to make the changes themselves.

Sara Clark quote #2

The word really got out, though, once we started doing the reviews because then we started contacting department heads individually. And we would explain 'This policy has been passed and we're getting ready to review your site and...' We kind of went through the departments alphabetically, so it was all over the place as we were going through the different units. So... everybody got contacted in one way or another as we went through the process.

Michele Elder quote #1

We had templates available that started out as templates that were compliant for people with disabilities, and templates that met our web style guidelines and so on. And yet, as soon as the templates were turned over to an end user, they no longer remained... accessible (laughs) or met the guidelines that we had created.

Michele Elder quote #2

So I have to be the one who's concerned with all the accessibility issues. And the other people on campus, all they have to worry about is their content. I think that makes a big difference. Because there was no way I was going to be able to explain to all the people who were updating the web pages all the things they needed to consider. Because that's not their full-time job. Their full-time job is usually much different - updating the website is just a small portion of it. And, with the time that sometimes goes between when they update pages, it wasn't really going to help them to learn it and then, let's say a few weeks later they have to update the... they're not going to remember everything again.

Michele Elder quote #3

I mean, everybody wants to know how their content fits into the structure we're using. And when we explain it and we... you know - I meet with them and I talk about the options they have with their content and the way we're approaching it from an informative kind of way for the end user - then they kind of come around and they understand that this is actually a better opportunity for them: they can get their content seen at a higher level than it ever was before. I think it just takes patience on everyone's part, I guess, to really think about how we can make things better and the impact we can have. But definitely it takes patience and a lot of explanation. And I think the explanations help when there's a visual, "This is how the Red Dot system's going to work. This is how you'll update it." They feel a lot better after they see it.