UDAL Initiative and pdf pilot at UW Bothell Ana Thompson and ashley magdall

Presentation link tinyurl.com/bothellPDF

What is UDAL? UDAL = Universal Design + Active Learning Comprises principles, research and best practices of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) with added emphasis on student engagement and physical spaces More information can be found at the UW Bothell Learning Technologies website UDAL@UW Bothell Learning Technologies website: http://www.uwb.edu/learningtech/faculty-resources/universal-design-for-active-learning

UDAL Core team Formed June 2016 Mission Current members Bring UDAL methodologies to our campus Provide support services Integrate practices Current members Disability Services for Students (1) Web Communications (1) IT Enterprise Applications (1) Learning Technologies (2)

UDAL Journey What’s in the Name? UDAL Origins UDAL Core Team PHASE 1 PHASE 2 PHASE 3 The UDAL acronym comes from combining Universal Design for Learning and Active Learning. Andreas Brockhaus, Director of Learning Technologies coined the term April 2016. UDAL Origins Universal Design for Active Learning (UDAL) began in UW Bothell Learning Technologies as a way to combine best UDL best practices and other pedagogies that maximize student learning and engagement. UDAL Core Team Initially started informally within IT, Jeane Marty (Web Developer) and Ana Thompson (Learning Technologist) began conversations that reflected their passion for accessible design.

Phase 1(2016) PHASE 1 The beginning… 2/23– Campus UD Strategy Group Meeting 3/11 – LT staff meeting UDAL initiative is born April – Creation of UDAL web page 4/28 – UDI presentation and UDAL panel

Phase 2 (2016) PHASE 2 UDAL Core Team 4/29 – CBI in Seattle conversations 5/25 Met with UW Bothell stakeholders to plan UDAL Forum 6/3 – Pizza & UDAL Forum 6/13 – UDAL Core Team and a11y listserv creation 7/8 – Campus Access Guide Workgroup Meeting 7/19 – UDAL Mission and website

Phase 3 (2016) PHASE 3 Other Events 9/14 – First UDAL Core Team (UCG) meeting 9/27 – Sheryl sent Policy #188 announcement and is named UW IT Accessibility Coordinator 10/4 – UCG Brainstorm on Policy #188 implementation on campus & plan to talk to Student Affairs, Academic Affairs VC, Academic Council 11/4 – ARIA Bootcamp at UW Seattle campus

Phase 4 (1 of 2) PHASE 4 2017 1/15 – Outline for top-level accessibility site topics 2/19 – SiteImprove discussion and GAAD event planning 3/7 – ARIA Bootcamp UW Bothell 3/28 - UDAL new definition 4/18 – Met with Student Affairs Dean 4/19 – Start PDF Remediation Pilot 5/15 – GAAW Celebration week 5/22 – Policy #188 presentation to Student Affairs

Phase 4 (2 of 2) 6/20 – Meetings with Library Director and VC Academic Affairs 7/10 – Student Affairs student web designers training 8/18 – UW Bothell Accessibility top-level website is live Early Sept – Completed flexible classrooms 10/12 – Presentation to Academic Council 10/19 – UDAL presentation at NWeLearn 10/30 – UDAL Presentation at UDL for Higher Ed Conference PHASE 4

PDF pilot at UW bothell

Process: Getting started Met with Gaby to talk about the pilot Developers generated PDF report Organized PDFs by department/primary website contact Emailed out reports to the web contact and had them coordinate/delegate Established a hard deadline Reminder emails about deadline, suggestions on how to get through their content, and offers to help

Process: Getting Buy-In Free, limited time opportunity for the UW Bothell campus Offered a framework of how to sort through the information Offered time for consultations simplified it for them as much as possible to encourage participation Explained in email message why this work is important and reminded them that making information accessible isn’t optional Offered suggestions on next steps

PDFs by the numbers Total cost to remediate at UW Bothell: $8,593 Report pulled: 2,943 Useful PDFs pulled: 2,622 Removed hyperlinks that referenced external PDFs PDFs that I inquired about to their owners: 2,277 Removed broken or duplicate pdfs PDFs I submitted for remediation: 122 (pdfs) 930 (pages) Pilot engagement was voluntary not everyone had time to vet through their PDFs and participate Those that did were VERY grateful for the free opportunity Total cost to remediate at UW Bothell: $8,593

End of the pilot How many missed the deadline? We had approximately 17 top level directories update out of the 140+ directories due to this pilot the level of awareness for PDF accessibility is now higher What options did they have? Gave vendor’s information and price quote ($9.23/page) Lynda.com courses to train on remediation opportunity to become a liaison and get an adobe license Ana Thompson and Gaby de Jongh’s information as contacts

What was the general response? Overall people thought it was a great opportunity It was easy to get the people who worked very closely with students to see the value in taking the time to participate Harder for other groups to commit the time due to competing demands that were deemed higher priority getting leadership/administration buy-in will help avoid future problems

Impact on me Bothell IT developers generated the reports and emailed them to me Organizing the PDFs by the website contact was time-consuming and required attention to detail double-checked “approved” PDFs to see if they could be converted to html Met with groups to explain pros/cons of having a PDF “turned” into a webpage Timeframe was short; a generous timeline should be less impactful to the project organizer rather deal with the impact that this pilot had than with PDF accessibility without help Final impact: sending out the remaining PDFs to their owners

Lessons learned Vastech does great with small amount of PDFs being sent They have a program that can connect to static IP addresses in order to transfer the PDFs UW runs on dynamic IP address for security purposes so their system did not work Highly recommend using but become well versed in max email file sizes or coordinate setting up a Google Drive (or something similar) Organize the files! Makes double checking faster/easier, good risk management

conclusion Duration: April – June 2017 PDF documents to VASTEC 930 pages total cost $8,593 purchase of 10 Adobe Acrobat Pro 2017 licenses funding from the PDF Pilot provided by UW-IT Training sessions on document accessibility May (all) and September (MS Word and powerpoint) More to be offered in the near future

Questions?