Meet UND’s Faculty Accessibility Champions
Faculty peer mentor group seeks to ‘champion’ new standards for digital accessibility by sharing tips and tools
Editor’s note: In the UND LEADS Strategic Plan, the Service core value calls on the University to “strengthen services and cultivate programs for recruiting, mentoring and advancing historically underserved and marginalized students and employees.” The story below highlights a campuswide commitment that UND has made to strengthening services and cultivating programs in exactly the way LEADS describes.
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To support UND’s instructors in improving digital accessibility, six members of the faculty have undergone training as Faculty Accessibility Champions.
Comprised of a cross-discipline cohort from several UND Colleges, the Faculty Accessibility Champions were recently established to aid UND instructors in meeting Title II regulations in the Americans with Disabilities Act taking effect this spring.
As one such champion, Jon Maskály, associate professor of Criminal Justice, summarized, his task as a champion is to connect colleagues to information, resources and techniques to improve course materials.
For fellow champion Michelle Buehlmann, clinical assistant professor of Political Science & Public Administration, her new role is like becoming a “billboard” for accessibility practices.
“Being people in each College, we end up serving as a reminder just by existing,” she remarked.
Joining Maskály and Buehlmann as champions are:
- Rebecca Simmons, professor of Biology
- Mary Rivard, clincial assistant professor of Nursing
- Jared Schlenker, clincial associate professor of Teaching, Leadership & Professional Practice
- Dustin McNally, senior lecturer of Mechanical Engineering
The group went through training over the past year through UND’s Teaching Transformation & Development Academy to learn more about ADA Title II, Universal Design for Learning and assistive technologies.
Lee Ann Williams, clinical assistant professor in Education, Health & Behavior Studies, who helped bring the idea of “champions” to UND, characterized peer mentorship as essential to making accessibility efforts stick.
“They bridge the gap between policy, technology and everyday practice,” Williams said. “Instead of accessibility feeling like a set of rules or extra work, peer support makes it practical, normal and doable.
“When faculty and staff see peers modeling small changes and able to offer quick help or support, accessibility becomes part of everyday learning, not something imposed from the top down.”
To learn more about the Faculty Accessibility Champions and how they’re approaching peer mentorship, UND Today hosted a Q&A with Maskály and Buehlmann.
The following has been edited for length, style and clarity.
To introduce the idea of Faculty Accessibility Champions, what’s your elevator pitch on what this group is?
Michelle Buehlmann: We have a mandate from the federal government to make things more accessible, and we, as accessibility champions, are here to help our fellow faculty in achieving that objective.
Jon Maskály: I agree with Michelle, and I also try to sell it as an opportunity. This comes from my experience at my prior institution, when I had a student who had low vision. I never realized how difficult it was to teach stats and how much I relied on visually explaining things. It basically excluded this student from the course, unintentionally.
It took something that was already difficult for many of my students and made it instrumentally more difficult than it had to be, because of the lack of assistive technologies.
I’ve been trying to remind my colleagues that not only do we have an obligation to do this, but we have an opportunity in the event we teach students who may or may not fully acknowledge or ask for the services available to them.
MB: The other thing I like to pitch is that if we do this from the get-go — make things more accessible — that’s much less crunch you have to go through down the line. As soon as you get hit with that paperwork from the disability office, you are required to comply with it. If you’ve already done the work by building these habits of making your materials accessible, that’s less you’re going to have to do in that moment when the semester is already underway.
I’m curious about your perspectives and backgrounds on accessibility, particularly digital accessibility. What brought you to the point of being part of this group?
JM: For me, it was that prior experience I mentioned, trying to figure things out with teaching stats. Once this new requirement came around, I knew the challenge that we were all going to face in trying to get there.
So, I was trying to at least help folks out in doing that. I think that it’s a part of making campus more inclusive to all of the folks who are here — trying to break down the barriers that exist to make education more accessible to people.
For example, one thing I never knew until I started doing some of this work with accessibility was how many folks are colorblind. Again, I was teaching subjects that have graphical interfaces. And it disproportionately affects men.
My brother-in-law, who’s an electrical engineer, remarked that he wished accessibility was more of a thing when he was in college, because you have no idea how hard it is trying to tell a light gray wire from a dark gray wire. People assume that red and green have an inherent value.
MB: My personal motivation for this is actually my husband, who in 1993 had a brain hemorrhage while in his last year of law school. He had to have a part of his brain removed, and he lived at the National Rehabilitation Hospital for four months, learning how to walk all over again and read all over again, etc.
But the school where he was studying accommodated him and helped him, giving him all sorts of assistance. He was able to graduate a year late and passed the bar exam on his first try.
I saw, firsthand, the benefits of when an institution steps up and assists the student who has a major obstacle put in their way and accommodates their disabilities. He now works for the National Disability Rights Network, helping people nationwide.
We have previously quoted the provost as saying that digital accessibility is everyone’s responsibility. Can you talk about some of the work you’ve done, in your capacity as a faculty member, to help meet this bigger goal for UND?
MB: For fellow faculty inside the Nistler building, I made “10 steps to making your Word documents accessible” and “10 steps to making your PowerPoints accessible.” And for each of those steps I made a one- to five-minute video for quick reference. That has been well-received among those who’ve used it.
For my own materials, I reset my font on Word and made that permanent, so my documents are in Arial font. And I’ve made it more of a habit to use the automatic accessibility checkers in those applications. That’s become built into my practice.
JM: The College of Arts & Sciences is a very diverse college in terms of subjects. My colleague, Becky Simmons, and I are the accessibility champions for the College, and one of the things that we’ve done is started a community of practice. We’re bringing together folks who are interested in this or have particular problems — kind of like a recurring “office hours” drop-in session.
We have two subject matter librarians who are part of this, as well as the instructional designer for the College.
Becky and I are consistently pushing the same message that Michelle mentioned earlier: after you learn to create your documents in an accessible format, your life is infinitely easier.
Our community of practice is trying to show that people don’t have to suffer in silence or suffer alone through this, because everyone is facing the same thing — just some of us have managed to suffer earlier than others.
Is there anything that’s been particularly helpful to you in better understanding and practicing digital accessibility?
JM: I think TTaDA’s resources are a starting place for it, because they cover the basics of it. After that, you get into specific questions, having to identify one-off issues that you’ve likely never thought of before.
Our community of practice in the College is finding these things that are causing issues beyond the nuts and bolts of digital accessibility. For example, through that peer support, we’re connecting subjects such as math and music to find ways to make equations and musical scores accessible. We’re developing tools as people give them to us over time, because there isn’t a silver bullet solution.
How do you see the Faculty Accessibility Champions helping in this effort?
JM: In my view, we as accessibility champions become a node in the network that can connect people with ideas and information, as well as encourage people to keep moving forward.
One of the things I’ve noticed is that this year, as folks have started to invest the effort in doing this stuff, the amount of time that they’re investing is significantly more than what it would have been in the past. Oftentimes they feel discouraged, because it’s like, “I just invested 25 additional hours in doing this, and my accessibility score is not what’s supposed to be. How do I have time to do any of the other things that I’m supposed to do?” And I empathize with that and try to make sure people don’t feel alone doing this work.
It’s been said before that accessibility practices are a benefit to all, regardless of ability. I’m curious for your take on why these additional efforts are worth the time and effort.
JM: One of the classes I teach is a crime prevention class, and we talk about environmental design and design features. These include such things as the curb cuts that we now build into sidewalks for wheelchair users. And it all started with a bunch of architects in the UK who decided they were going to get together and lobby to make this a standard. The changes they inspired have made an amazing difference for everyone in our society.
I don’t think that there will be any negatives that are coming out of this. It’s just a lot of work right now, in the short term, to get out of it. And I think that once you get over that hump, once you fix your remediation issues in the past and you keep working on it slowly, it’s going to be one of those things that will pay benefits for yourself and students for a long time.
MB: I would add that one of the benefits I had last semester was that I had a grad student go through and transcribe and provide captions for all of my videos. And it turned out that, in the second week of class, I had a student with an auditory processing disorder who needed all of that stuff. And I was like, great, here!
It was super smooth, and it was great because the work had already been done. It could have been a situation of spending a lot of time fixing something during a time that is already crazy, being the start of the semester. But because we’d already done it, it was super easy for all involved, and that student did really well.
What would you recommend to your peers who are interested in learning more about the Faculty Accessibility Champions, or who want to reach out?
MB: I think most of us in the group have some story like mine, where there’s something in their life that’s motivated them to step forward and take on this responsibility of being an accessibility champion. Because of that, we’re all doing it because it’s what we believe in as people, not for whatever credit we might receive. We’ll help anybody who asks.
JM: To Michelle’s point, that personal connection to it completely centers you in the fact that somebody is struggling in a way that you cannot even begin to fathom. You’re watching people overcome all of the challenges that are beyond just the simple subject matter of trying to learn. When you see people that are going through that, you’re naturally going to try to reach out and see what you can do to help them, meet them where they are, and try to get them access to information accessibly.
The bottom line is that if anybody ever wants to be involved in doing it or has a question, they can always reach out to us. At the end of the day, I would be absolutely tickled pink if somebody reached out and said, “Hey, I want to learn more about this. I want to learn how I can go about doing this and supporting the endeavors for it.”
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