This document summarizes a presentation about achieving accessibility compliance at Oakland University. It discusses identifying accessibility issues across the university's websites, applications, and other digital resources. It outlines establishing an accessibility committee to address these issues, educate stakeholders, and develop tools and processes. The committee works to automate accessibility testing, engage students, manage vendors, and learn from open source communities. The presentation provides examples of common accessibility problems and solutions implemented at Oakland University.

1. A Path to Accessibility Compliance
Open Apereo 2018
Christian Murphy, Aaron Grant, Josh Brudnak

2. Introduction
● Aaron Grant
Associate Director Emerging Technology, Oakland University
● Josh Brudnak
Student Java Developer, Oakland University
● Christian Murphy
UX Developer and uPortal Extraordinaire, Unicon

3. Today’s Discussion
● Addressing accessibility
● Tools and processes
● A culture of compliance
● Common accessibility issues
● Addressing accessibility abroad

4. What is accessibility?
From the Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C WAI):
“Web accessibility means that websites, tools, and technologies are designed
and developed so that people with disabilities can use them.
Accessibility is essential for developers and organizations that want to create
high-quality websites and web tools, and not exclude people from using their
products and services.”
“Degree to which a product, device, service, or environment is available to as many
people as possible.”

5. What is accessibility?
Accessible content and services are available to everyone.
Also it’s the law
● US Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Section 508
● Americans with Disabilities Act, 1990
● US Rehabilitation Act Amended, 1998
Community Lingo
Accessibility = “a” + 11 characters + “y” = a11y
Image: Microsoft Design Inclusive Toolkit

6. Accessibility Standards
US Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Standards &
Guidelines, 2017
WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.0
WCAG 2.1 - Live 6/5/2018!
● Mobile
● Low vision
● Cognitive disabilities

7. Oakland, we have a problem...
Our services were missing the mark
on accessibility.
● Web Site
● Applications
● PDFs
● Videos

8. Oakland, lets add to the problem...
● Decentralized IT structure
● 600+ vendor applications
● Limited staff and resources

9. Identify allies on campus to help drive effort
● Work with legal
○ Know your boundaries and limitations
● Identify stakeholders
○ e-Learning
○ Communications & Marketing
○ CETL - Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning
○ Library
○ Title IX Coordinator
○ IT
○ Disability Support Services
○ Purchasing
○ Procurement
○ Advising
○ Risk Management
Photo: Cordelia McGee-Tubb, Dropbox

10. Legal
Depending on your situation, make sure you have good
representation protecting your organization.
Some universities have lost the privilege of offering
distance learning opportunities.
Others have been forced to hire accessibility officers in
every campus department, raising operational costs.

11. What does this a11y committee do?
● Identify team roles
● Educate on WCAG / legal position
● Communicate known issues
● Communicate on how to report progress
● Discuss roadblocks
● Develop toolkit & resource guides
● Meet offen
Image: Feedback Labs

12. What does each member do on the a11y committee?
● Inventories their issues
● Finds resources to tackle issues
● Identifies global issues (i.e. video, web templates)
● Reports changes
● Reports roadblocks
● Help close the accessibility gap
and connect the dots

13. Perfect is the enemy of good
“Progress is Progress” - Andrew Petro
● Don’t get caught up on perfect design
● You need to make progress
● Document, document, document
○ You need data to report back to the
powers that be
● Tackle low hanging fruit first
● Identify systematic issues

14. Where we are at now?
We know we have a problem.
We have a committee of smart individuals who
care about a11y.
We are educated and have indexed a huge list of
issues.
Each one of us had a full-time job before, now
we have two full-time jobs of work.
Time to work smarter.
Image: Sara Turnquist

15. Automation
● Accessibility testing and inventory management
(Siteimprove)
● Accessibility testing when code is compiled
● Checking internal applications and applications
with authenticated views (Pa11y)
● Upload videos to YouTube for captioning

16. Student Employment
Students can be a really big help and add to your overall
capacity to tackle issues.
Corey was a huge help to us:
● He manually checked applications
● Indexed issues
● Patched issues & submitted to open source repos
● Researched new tools
● Educated developers
Image: Corey Rowe

17. Vendor Management
Place more of the accessibility ownership on the vendor.
● Collect VPATs
● Identify accessibility issues with product
● Submit call tickets to vendor and hold accountable

18. Collective Intelligence
Open Source communities have experts working on
a11y problems and might already have solved your
problem:
● Example: uPortal strives to be WCAG v2 level
AA. More on this later.
● Educause and other communities have
accessibility mailing lists to help brainstorm
solutions.
Image: Unanimous AI

19. Navigation accessibility issues
● Alt text
○ Presents the content and function of the image
○ Describes the image context

20. Navigation accessibility issues
● Aria label
○ Provides a description of page elements to the screen reader
○ Reading aria labels
● Headings
○ Communicate the organization of the page
● Larger buttons and clickable areas
○ Support for users with tremors, etc
● Tab support
○ Allows the user to navigate the webpage with a keyboard

21. Visual accessibility issues in uPortal
● Text
○ Font - should be readable
○ Size - correlates to the organization of the
page
● Color contrast
○ Text should contrast with the background
● Link distinctiveness
○ Links should be distinct from other text
Image: Ashish Bogawat

22. Internationalization
● Oakland University
○ Translations Api
■ Allows for static text to be translated
○ Browser language preference
○ React
■ Internationalization package
■ Properties of the react component

23. Accessibility Audit Tooling
● Siteimprove
○ Accessibility auditing tool to find
accessibility failures
○ Chrome extension
○ Auditing tool
■ Accessibility
■ Search engine optimization
■ Analytics
○ Free toolbar
○ Enterprise inventory / reporting system

24. Accessibility Audit Tooling
● aXe
○ Auditing tool that points out accessibility compliance failures in web pages
● WAVE
○ Visual tool for accessibility issues
● Color blind tests (https://www.toptal.com/designers/colorfilter)
○ Checks web pages for color accessibility issues

25. Screen Reader Tooling
● ChromeVox
○ Chrome extension screen reader
○ Used for websites
● VoiceOver - Mac OS
○ Mac OS’s screen reader
○ Can be used for offline document reading
● Narrator - Windows
○ A Windows built in screen reader which is good for checking accessibility in documents

26. Community
United States United Kingdom France Canada Canada
Ecuador Ghana Japan Netherlands

27. Standards
Référentiel Général d'Accessibilité
pour les Administrations
Americans with Disabilities Act
Section 508
Equality Act
The Accessibility for Ontarians with
Disabilities Act
?

28. Standards
Référentiel Général d'Accessibilité
pour les Administrations
Americans with Disabilities Act
Section 508
Equality Act
The Accessibility for Ontarians with
Disabilities Act

30. Translation
English
French
Spanish

31. Translation Considerations
● Length of text
● Pluralization
● Date Times
● Gender

32. https://github.com/Jasig/uPortal/blob/master/docs/VPAT-2.0.odt

33. Questions?
Aaron Grant - asgrant@oakland.edu
Josh Brudnak - joshuabrudnak@oakland.edu
Christian Murphy - christian.murphy.42@gmail.com

35. Credit: Photo by Tourisme Montréal, Stéphan Poulin
@Slack Apereo #uportal, #uportal-ux
JOIN THE CONVERSATION
And now for something completely different!
Take a deeper technical dive into accessibility
The accessibility tree, a uPortal case study (RAVEL)
SPEAKER(S):
Christian Murphy,
Unicon Inc;
Christian Cousquer,
Sorbonne University