Accessibility, Tech Support, & the Academic Tech Life Cycle

Who Is Most Likely Involved Directly:

TLS Academic Technology and Media Services Group

Goal

Technologies We Support: In addition to the direct links provided to VPAT documentation of our supported resources via the Online Accessibility TE, we expand on this to also provide concrete, best practices for faculty on how to ensure they are using these tools accessibility. I think we need to glean the essential accessibility features of our technologies and offer best practices in such a way that's more user-friendly and easier to follow. This type of information could be added to the existing TLS-supported Technologies resources and would probably entail that each of these technologies has its own landing page. Currently some of the tools link directly to wiki documentation but by creating a more transparent 'entry point' that offers a high level overview, links to corresponding TE's (if any), accessibility info, best practices and where to find how-to's.

Academic Tech Life Cycle: As we continue to investigate new technology, we could devise a decision tree or checklist that ensures we are considering unique accessibility concerns and issues that may relate to a particular tool. For instance, determining whether the hardware or software (in question) can be accessed via assistive technologies or facilitate accessible experiences (i.e., closed captioning live stream captioning etc.).

The following steps and process documentation details are for TLS-internal use only.

Path Moving Forward

1. Examining and Revising our Current Academic Technology Life Cycle

2. Augmenting Existing Technology Resources with Relevant UDL and Accessibility Best Practices That Apply (some will certainly overlap)

3.

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