Creating a Digital Accessibility Program in Higher Education: Jesse Loesberg

Amber: Welcome to WordPress Accessibility Meetup: Creating a Digital Accessibility Program in Higher Education with Jesse Loesberg, who’s a Web Developer, Digital Accessibility Program Manager at University of California Berkeley Library.

[00:00:17] Meetup Introduction/Announcements

Amber: If you have not been before, a few announcements to be aware of.

First, we have a Facebook group which you can use to connect between meetups.

If you go to facebook.com/groups/wordpress.accessibility, you can find that group. It’s a good place to share what you’re working on, ask questions, support one another, get plugin recommendations, testing feedback, all of that sort of stuff in one place in between meetups.

Everyone always asks, “Is this being recorded?” Yes, it is being recorded. It used to take us a couple weeks to get corrected captions and the video edited and all that, but we have adjusted our process, and we should hopefully have the recording available for you probably Monday or Tuesday of next week.

You can find upcoming event information and also past recordings in one place if you go to equalizedigital.com/meetup.

The other way to get notified when the recording is available or of upcoming events is to join our email list. You can subscribe if you go to equalizedigital.com/focus-state. We send a few emails throughout the month about events specifically, and then every Thursday we send an email newsletter, our Focus State email, that has a roundup of accessibility news from all around the web and resources, not just our own content.

And then, if you like to listen to these in audio format, we always suggest to tune into our podcast, which you can find at accessibilitycraft.com or on pretty much any podcast app that you prefer to use.

If you have any suggestions for the meetup or if you need additional accommodations to make the meetup work for you, if you’re interested in learning something and want us to try and find a topic or a speaker for a specific topic, you can contact myself and my co-organizer, Paola, if you email meetup@equalizedigital.com

Who am I? I have not yet introduced myself. My name is Amber Hinds. I’m the CEO of a company called Equalize Digital, and we are the organizer of this meetup. Equalize Digital is a mission-driven organization and a corporate member of the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, or the IAAP, focused on WordPress accessibility.

We have a WordPress plugin called Accessibility Checker that helps you find and fix problems on your website, and we offer online courses for NVDA and VoiceOver screen reader testing as well as selling accessibility. We do accessibility audits, remediation, and consulting in higher ed, government, for-profit, nonprofit, all across the gamut.You can learn more about us, of course, if you go to EqualizeDigital.com.

I do wanna thank our sponsor for today. Kinsta is very generously covering the cost of live captioning and transcription for this meetup, so you may notice that we have a human captioner here today making sure that we have captions that are as accurate as possible, and that is thanks to Kinsta.

Kinsta provides managed hosting services for WordPress. It is powering 120,000 businesses worldwide, and based on user reviews, it is the highest-rated managed WordPress host on G2. It has everything you need, including an unbeatable combination of speed, security, and expert support. Powered by Global Cloud and the fastest C3D and C2 servers, combined with CDN and Edge Caching, your sites are secured with Cloudflare Enterprise, protecting you from DDoS attacks. All plans include free migrations, and the first month of the starter plan is completely free so you can try the service risk-free. You can learn more about Kinsta if you go to Kinsta, K-I-N-S-T-A, .com.

I also ask if you are willing, on whatever social media platform you’re on, they’re probably on most of them, if you would go send them a little message or tweet at them or comment on one of their posts and say, “Thank you for sponsoring captions for WordPress Accessibility Meetup,” that helps to encourage them to want to continue sponsoring. It tells them that the sponsorship matters, and also that I did what I was supposed to do this morning in exchange for their support. So if you’re willing to do that, we would very much appreciate that.

Please mark your calendar for some upcoming events. Two that you have to look forward to is on Tuesday, August 18th at 10:00 AM US Central Time, so the same time slot but on Tuesday, August 18th, and it will only be an hour on Tuesdays. We have Tanveer Khan talking about accessibility testing, what automated tools will never catch. It’ll be a manual, what to look for when manually testing.

And then the same time slot on Thursday, September 3rd, Cam Coulter will be presenting on how to learn WCAG. If you are not sure how to even look at that and read it and memorize or to figure out how to integrate it into your work and your testing practices, this will be the meetup for you.

I’m gonna add a spotlight here and bring our speaker up. Jesse is a web developer, digital accessibility expert, and public speaker. His presentations on disability and technology address issues from fostering an accessibility-forward workplace culture to the nuts and bolts of building compliant websites and applications. He is currently the Web Developer and Digital Accessibility Program Manager for the University of California Berkeley Library.

Welcome, Jesse. We are so excited to have you here today speaking for us.

Jesse: Thank you, and I am very happy to be here. I’m gonna jump right in and share my screen, my slides.

Amber: Yep. While you’re doing that, let me just give one quick announcement, which is that there is a Q&A panel, hopefully, that everyone can see in Zoom. If you have questions, I’ll come back at the end to pass those along to Jesse. It is very helpful for us if you put them in there instead of the chat, because with this many attendees, they can get buried in the chat. I’ll let you take it away, Jesse.

Jesse: Great. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for being here.

I’m really glad you could join, and people from all over the world. That is super exciting. I don’t know what time it is everywhere, but if it’s super late in the middle of the night thank you. Thank you for thank you for coming. Thank you all.

[00:07:24] Presentation Introduction

Jesse: My name is Jesse Loseberg. Like Amber said, I am the web developer and digital accessibility program manager for the UC Berkeley Library.

I am a bald white person. I am wearing glasses. I am standing in front of a white background, and I am wearing a dark gray shirt. I would also like to say that even though I am an employee of UC Berkeley and the University of California system and work for the UC Berkeley Library I the present, the the opinions and ideas I’m presenting today are my own and do not officially represent the University of California system UC Berkeley, or the UC Berkeley Library in any way.

It’s just me talking here. I don’t know if there was official legal language for that, but I tried to approximate it. So the important thing is this is me talking here, as much as I will be talking about the University of California Berkeley and the library itself.

[00:08:19] The University of California System

Jesse: A little bit about the University of California system. If you don’t know about it, it’s always coming up in the news. You see it in news articles and stuff. But the University of California system is made up of 10 campuses, six health centers, and three national laboratories. It is the second largest employer in California. The first-largest employer is the state of California itself. The University of California has more than 300,000 students, approximately two thou- it takes me a minute to read numbers like this, 266,800 faculty and staff, and 2.5 million alumni around the world.

[00:09:00] About UC Berkeley

Jesse: Zooming in a little bit more, a little bit about UC Berkeley itself. There’s a picture here on the slide, it’s of a picture of the UC Berkeley campus taken from the hills above campus. You can see most of Berkeley and Oakland in the background. There’s some university buildings in the front, including the iconic Berkeley Campanile, which is a very famous clock tower.

UC Berkeley is one of 10 schools of the University of California system. There are, at this writing, 33,122 undergraduate students, 13,029 graduate students. It is a major research institution with 63 affiliated Nobel Prize winners.

[00:09:45] The UC Berkeley Library

Jesse: And zooming in one more time, a little bit about the UC Berkeley Library itself. The picture on this slide is of I, I won’t call it the main library, that’s a controversial thing to say at UC Berkeley, but this is the Doe Memorial Library, which is a large building with a big staircase in the front, and very ornamental pillars and large windows. To the left is the Bancroft Library, which is a little bit smaller. That iconic tower, the Campanile, is off to the left. People sometimes think of this as the main library because it is the most visually iconic of the libraries, and when there is representation of the library in media, this is usually the one that shows up ’cause it is super pretty. But the UC Berkeley Library is not just one library, it is composed of 19 libraries. There are over 15 million volumes in its collections. There are about 1,136,372 visitors to Doe Library, that is this library in the picture, during the last fun year, which was 2025 to 2026 3,371,849 page views on the website during that same period, and the library’s mission statement is, “We help people find, evaluate, use, and create knowledge to better the world.”

I am happy to say that I am very proud to work for a library that has that as its mission statement, although I know that kind of mission statement is not unique at all to the UC Berkeley Library. Now, that was a lot of proud facts there a lot of really great things to be proud of. I’m gonna take a little bit of a turn here, and I’m gonna share this quote.

This is from UC Berkeley’s website. UC Berkeley often refers to itself as “The home of the disability rights/independent living movement.” And that is not a false statement. That is true to a certain extent, but it is a complicated statement, and I’m gonna talk about a little bit of this history because this provides the context for the Digability Accessibility Program within the library.

[00:11:58] The History: Ed Roberts

Jesse: It exists in a context of what is really a very complicated history, and that complicated history starts, or the point at which I’m choosing to start it, is with this gentleman. His name is Ed Roberts. There’s a picture of Ed Roberts here from 1962. He is a white man with dark hair in this picture. He’s got some facial hair. He’s got a mustache and a goatee, and he’s got a white collared shirt. Ed Roberts was born in 1939, and he died in 1995. And this quote, which is from the Disability Rights Movement highlights page on the Berkeley website says, “Berkeley’s involvement in disability rights began with Ed Roberts, the first student enrolled to be dramatically impacted by a disability. In 1962, Roberts was the first student to attend Berkeley who relied on a wheelchair to get around. UC Berkeley did not have adequate resources to support him. The accommodations lacked beyond the classroom and also affected housing for Roberts. In order to live independently and attend classes on campus, Ed Roberts moved to a room in the Cowell Hospital, which was Berkeley’s student health center at the time. His attendance at UC Berkeley inspired other disabled students to enroll at UC Berkeley.”

That is all true. To complicate this story a little bit, and these are things you won’t necessarily find in UC Berkeley’s public telling of this story, is that when Ed Roberts showed up on campus after his application had been accepted and he showed up to begin the semester, when Berkeley administrators discovered that he used an iron lung, they attempted to rescind his acceptance, claiming that they didn’t have the equipment or space to accommodate him.

And here’s a quote. This is from one of the deans of admissions. I couldn’t find the actual attribution who actually said this, but this quote is in a lot of the historical record. The quote is, “We’ve tried cripples before, and they just don’t work out.” I don’t know what he meant by that exactly. I don’t know what trying cripples means or what not working out means, but that is what he said.

And Roberts was finally offered a room in that empty wing of Cowell Memorial Hospital. It was, in fact, the student center, but it was in downtown Berkeley. It wasn’t physically on the campus. So although Ed Roberts, after his fight, did in fact get the housing that he was requesting, it was in a hospital. It wasn’t regular student housing. He was placed in a wing separately from medical patients who were in the hospital, but it was not on campus.

The reason why I’m telling this story is UC Berkeley does have an important location in the history of the disability rights movement.

The story behind that is complex, and the story that often comes out of official UC Berkeley channels highlights the victories of the disability rights movement and doesn’t often go into the resistance that UC Berkeley as an institution put up in order for Ed Roberts himself and other disabled students to fully participate in what UC Berkeley had to offer as an educational institution.

I think it’s important to tell that whole story because the digital accessibility program that I work for and work on exists in this very complicated context.

Now, this kind of de-complicating a disability story is not unique to UC Berkeley, of course. This flattening of historical movements is something that all institutions do at…

every level. There is a particular history at UC Berkeley, though, and it extends to other parts of UC Berkeley’s history.

[00:16:04] The Free Speech Movement

Jesse: This slide is about the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, which you may have heard of. The picture on this slide is of a young man in 1964 named Mario Savio, who is regarded as one of the spokespeople of the Free Speech Movement. He was a student. This picture is Mario Savio hanging out flyers during a rally in front of Sproul Hall, which is a building on the UC Berkeley campus.

The Free Speech Movement was a protest during the 1964-65 academic year. The students were demanding the lifting of the ban against on-campus political speech.

UC Berkeley, if you can believe it, it’s not how we think of UC Berkeley these days. At the time, there was a ban on political speech on campus. And the students were banding together and demanding that they be allowed to speak freely, especially about the Vietnam War, which was ramping up at the time. UC Berkeley refused, and they responded with arrests and charges against the student organizers, including Mario Savio.

Eventually, provisional rules were established for when and where students could engage in political activity

So now, this is a picture of from very recently. It’s of the Free Speech Movement Cafe on the Berkeley campus. This is right next to the Doe Memorial Library. They have really great brownies, which I can attest to it- when I worked on campus. I live in Eugene, Oregon now, but when I worked on campus that was often my afternoon treat.

But the reason I’m highlighting here isn’t because of the brownies, it’s because this is now a very well-known location on campus. This picture shows the entrance to the Free Speech Movement Cafe, a set of doors set into a concrete structure, and out front is another small concrete structure that says, “Free Speech Movement Cafe.”

That big protest and that time is now celebrated by this cafe. And the cafe has really great photographs in it from this time. A lot of quotes on the walls. But this is also a way that the campus resistance at the time to the Free Speech Movement Cafe disappears into the story that is publicly told. And that, again, is not a feature unique to UC Berkeley. That is what I would call broad institutional behavior. The retelling of a story in a way that resituates a particular institution in a way that decomplexifies. But we can see this at all levels of society. And one of the questions I like to ask is, why do we have a Martin Luther King Jr. Day in this country and not a Malcolm X Day? And I’m just gonna leave that as a question right now. There’s a whole other talk to be done on that, and I am, as a white person, not necessarily the person to give that talk, but it is a question I like to ask.

[00:18:58] UC Berkeley, Digital Accessibility, and the Law

Jesse: Shifting from this particular context I’m gonna talk about UC Berkeley digital accessibility and the law, because the campus digital accessibility program and the library digital accessibility program didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of a very particular situation.

In 2014, the National Association of the Deaf filed a complaint with the US Department of Justice claiming, accurately, that UC Berkeley’s free online courses are not accessible, especially the audio and video content. And specifically, that was because there were auto-generated captions or no captions. And anyone who has worked with captions knows that auto-generated captions are not a fully accessible solution. They may be a good start for the editing process, but they contain too many errors to really serve the needs of people who need captions. Those videos or a lot of the audio were also missing transcripts, and many of the images were missing alternative text.

In 2016, the Department of Justice orders UC Berkeley to make this content accessible to people with disabilities. This little timeline that I’m giving has a lot of big gaps in it, a lot of space between 2014, 2016. These legal processes move very slowly.

In 2017, UC Berkeley responds to that requirement from the DOJ, the Department of Justice, by removing more than 20,000 audio files and video files from public access and putting them behind a Berkeley login. After this move, you were required to have a UC Berkeley login to access these.

And I’m gonna read from a statement from the Berkeley news website. “This move will partially address recent findings by the Department of Justice, which suggests that the YouTube and iTunesU content…” Remember iTunes U? “… demanding that it meets higher accessibility standards as a condition of remaining publicly available. Finally, moving our content behind authentication allows us to better protect instructor intellectual property from, quote, ‘pirates’ who have reused content for personal profit without consent.”

That was the official statement from UC Berkeley on why all this material, why the particular solution to the accessibility issue was to move it out of straight-up public access and behind a login.

That was declared not to be sufficient, and in 2022, UC Berkeley entered into a consent decree with the Department of Justice, and this was signed and sealed in December of 2022. There is a link here that actually goes to the consent decree itself. It is really great reading.

But I’m just gonna read out some of the broad strokes of this consent decree.

All content on Berkeley.edu domains, that’s all Berkeley.edu websites, must conform to WCAG. Those are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0, level AA within 18 months. All new audio and video content must conform within nine months. Existing audio and video content must conform within 36 months, and Berkeley must report on compliance every six months over the 42-month period covered by the consent decree.

And I should note that the period of the consent decree it expired this past June. That is a high level overview of the legal actions that brought UC Berkeley to where we are now. UC Berkeley does now have a very strong focus on digital accessibility, and this is how it came about. Every now and then someone will very jokingly say to me, “Jesse, I’m really sorry, but I’m really glad you got sued.” And the reason that they’re saying that is UC Berkeley and the UC system in general being very public. This was all very public. This was in the news. This was reported in a lot of news outlets. I don’t know if it ended up in the New York Times, but there are some pretty highly public media outlets like the San Francisco Chronicle and SFGATE, and I believe like the LA Times also, need to be fact check on that, was reporting on this pretty regularly.

So the other UC schools, which were not part of this consent decree, this consent decree was specific to UC Berkeley, all of a sudden took notice. They took notice that there was really strong legal action involving the federal government that was being taken against UC Berkeley, and that had a ripple effect that caused other UC campuses to say, “Oh, I think maybe we better start looking at digital accessibility too.”

So when people say, “I’m really sorry, Jesse, but I’m glad you got sued,” I say, “Do not apologize.” It is not a bad thing. I do wish we lived in a culture where it did not take legal action to advance the cause of digital accessibility or any accessibility in general. That is the culture that we live in, and if legal action is what it takes, then I will generally support it. And in this case, I do not think it is a bad thing that UC Berkeley got sued, because it has improved our digital accessibility considerably.

[00:24:25] Berkeley’s Digital Accessibility Program

Jesse: What did Berkeley do? Berkeley created, UC Berkeley created a campus-wide digital accessibility program.

I need to clarify, this is not the program that I work for. I work for the library. This is the campus-wide digital accessibility program.

And from their website, “The Digital Accessibility Program, or DAP, was created and designed to provide resources, guidance, and support to the Berkeley community in order to make accessibility a fundamental part of our digital experience.

We support and facilitate the implementation of the UCB/DOJ Consent Decree, UC’s IT Accessibility Policy, and the updated ADA Title II requirements.

If you edit, design, or manage a Berkeley website, it’s important to understand the legal responsibilities and how to implement accessibility features. Our website provides a variety of resources and training materials to assist you.”

And now some bullet points. Berkeley’s Digital Accessibility Program replaced the Web Access Office. So Berkeley did have an office whose job and focus was to improve digital accessibility across the campus. Their services, you could engage with them on a voluntary basis. A lot of people didn’t even really know they existed. They did excellent, fabulous work. When the UC Berkeley Library was in the process of rebuilding its website, which it did between 2019 and 2022, took longer because of COVID. When it came time for hands-on user testing, we engaged the services of the Web Access Office, and people with disabilities engaged with our site and provided us feedback. And those were the services that they provided.

The Digital Accessibility Program folded them in and provided a lot of the same services, not all entirely in the same way, but also brought in that to engage with the new legal environment in which UC Berkeley had found itself.

So pretty much as I just said, the web the Digital Accessibility Program is the Department of Justice point of contact for consent decree compliance.

The DAP also identified websites under the berkeley.edu domain, as well as the administrative contacts for those sites. That was no easy task. At the time that I wrote this slide, which was a few weeks ago, they had identified 1,881 berkeley.edu websites. It is very easy at Berkeley to create your own website. It is a little bit less easy now, but the reason this number is so big is individual departments have their own websites, individual researchers get their own websites. Student projects can have their own websites, and it was possible at the time to get a berkeley.edu domain. So it was a little bit of a Wild West situation.

The Digital Accessibility Program had to do a lot of footwork to identify all these websites and find them, and then identify the administrative context so they could reach out to those people and ask them to remediate their sites. Some sites did not have administrative contacts. People graduate, people change jobs, people move on. This was a really big job and is ongoing. And as I understand it, they are still identifying berkeley.edu sites.

The DAP also worked to implement Siteimprove as an assessment and reporting tool. Maybe some of you are familiar with Siteimprove. Siteimprove is basically a web crawler. It doesn’t just do accessibility work, it also does general QA and search engine optimization checking out.

But what UC Berkeley uses Siteimprove for is for accessibility crawling. The UC system on the whole has a contract with Siteimprove, and the Digital Accessibility Program was using, and continues to use the Siteimprove accessibility score to report out on accessibility compliance.

The DAP also provides a repository of information and guidance for understanding and maintaining digital accessibility. And like the original web access office, it provides individual site testing on a per request basis. They are very busy. They do incredible work. Their staff is not anywhere near as big as it really needs to be for the task at hand, but they are great.

This is when we get to the UC Berkeley Libraries program.

[00:28:55] Jesse’s Digital Accessibility Story

Jesse: Before we do that, I’m gonna take a little detour into my digital accessibility story, which begins at Holy Names University, where I was the website manager from July 2012 until October 2016. This is a picture of the Holy Names University library, of course a building I’m fond of.

Holy Names University no longer exists, unfortunately, like a lot of small private institutions these days. They struggled with funding, they struggled with enrollment and just a couple years ago they had to shut their doors. Very sad. But this picture is of the library from taken up on the hill. Holy Names University’s campus was on a hillside overlooking the San Francisco Bay, which you can see here. It was quite beautiful, and the sun is going down in this picture, which made it an especially beautiful time to be on campus.

[00:29:49] Belo Cipriani’s Story

Jesse: At the time that I was working at Holy Names University, the writer in residence was a gentleman named Belo Cipriani. There’s a picture of him here sitting on his couch being kissed by his guide dog. Belo is the author of a book called Blind: A Memoir. Like I said, he was the visiting writer at Holy Names University, where he also was the recipient of a Master of Arts in Culture and Spirituality. He is the founder of the publishing house Oleb Books, and the CEO of Oleb Media, which is a digital inclusion firm.

And the reason I mention him is because when I was there, he wanted to have a website built to basically be an online literary journal for his students. And he came to me and asked me to build this site, and he asked me to make sure that it was accessible by a screen reader.

Now, I was aware of the concept of digital accessibility. I was aware of what screen readers were. I understood that people using assistive technology, accessed websites differently than maybe I did as someone who is using my eyes to use a computer and is also able to use a mouse and a keyboard. But I did not know the ins and outs, and I definitely didn’t know about WCAG.

I sat down with Belo at his computer and he navigated a couple sites with his screen reader on for me, and that was my first experience of seeing how a visually impaired person navigates the internet. And he showed me websites that worked really well and websites that really didn’t work all that well. And I got my first real window into understanding what it means to interact with the web as a visually impaired person and what a screen reader does at a really basic level.

So, I went back to my office and I did a little bit of research. I don’t remember, but I probably Googled how do you write HTML for a screen reader. And I was pretty much handed the basics, which are things that I still repeat to people today, which is if you build a website with semantically correct HTML, you are already a lot of the way there. That is what I did. This literary journal was composed of static pages. It was very simple. Each piece of writing had its own page, and there was a navigation menu. There were no bells and whistles. I don’t think there was any JavaScript on this site at all, and it was built entirely with static HTML. Every element performing its semantically appropriate task. So when I handed it off to Belo, and I said, “Please go over this with your screen reader. Let me know if this works for you.”

He said, “You did it. This is great.” And that was my first really big lesson into how digital accessibility works, and what are the things I need to do as a web developer in order to make sure that the websites and applications that I build are accessible to people who do not interact with the internet in the same way that I do.

Which brings us back to the UC Berkeley Library. This is, again, the picture of the Doe Memorial Library with the Campanile out front. This is one of my favorite places in the whole world. I am really glad to be able to say that about my place of employment, even though I’m not physically located there at the moment.

[00:33:14] The Web Developer of the UC Berkeley Library

Jesse: As the web developer for the UC Berkeley Library, and I should say I was hired as the web developer. I was not hired to manage digital accessibility there. I was not hired specifically to create a digital accessibility program. The position I applied for was, at the time, web designer. My role expanded since then, but the consent decree was not in place at the time, even though the lawsuit was making its way through the system.

So when I came on board, I wasn’t necessarily on board for a digital accessibility role, even though I already had that mindset.

As the developer, I’m responsible for the public website, which is what when you go to lib.berkeley.edu. I’m responsible for the staff website, which is more an internal site.

The library has a blog. That’s on WordPress. Shout out. That blog is at update.lib.berkeley.edu.

I am responsible for various aspects of UC Berkeley’s instance of UC Library Search. UC Library Search is a platform, it’s a vendor platform, it is used by all the UCs. Every school has its own instance. There are customizable aspects. That’s what I manage.

And many other library web-based applications have their front end that I either work on exclusively or do a lot of work with other application developers in library IT.

So that is my web developer role, but I am also a certified professional in web accessibility through the IAAP. This is a picture of that badge. It says IAAP Certified CPWA. Once I realized how, once the news about the consent decree started making its way down, and once I realized that institutionalizing my digital accessibility efforts would be a worthwhile thing to do, I asked the library to fund my certification process. They very happily did, and I am very proud to have this certification.

[00:35:19] Formalizing a Digital Accessibility Program

Jesse: And after the certification, I did start talking about formalizing a digital accessibility program at the library. Which was not a very hard sell for a lot of reasons.

Getting buy-in from the library was really not difficult. One of those reasons is simply the mission statement, which was, “We help people find, evaluate, use, and create knowledge to better the world.”

The word people is in that statement, and people is all people. People is all bodies. People is all minds. That is people with disabilities too. The mission statement itself supports the goal of creating a digital accessibility program.

There’s also the fact that librarians themselves, librarians already want people to access their information. Librarians are very proud of their subject areas. They are very proud of the collections that they help create. They want people to access them. They want, again, all people to access them. So a digital accessibility program fits in very well with that goal.

It was also an easy sell ’cause there was already an in-house expert, that is me. I wasn’t recommending we hire out for it. I was just saying, “I’ll do it.” I was raising my hand and saying, “I will do this. I would be very glad to do it.”

And lastly, and this is extremely important and something that really cannot be overlooked, the library is not bound by a profit motive. In some of the digital accessibility communities that I participate in, there’s a lot of people that work for corporations, for-profit companies. Even non-profits are often looking at a very tight bottom line. It is true that, at UC Berkeley and at the library, we have budgets to consider, but there is the simple fact that when the library makes its decisions, we are not looking at profits. We’re not trying to become billionaires. We are not trying to angle for control of any particular market. Our goal is to serve people, which means that barrier that a lot of people who are doing my work in a for-profit environment, I don’t have that barrier. I don’t have to make a case for how digital accessibility is going to make us money. That is not a case that I need to make. There are strategies for making that case when you need to, and that strategy usually relates to legal risk. It also relates to the fact that serving people who are using assistive technology does expand the number of people you can make money from. But these are not arguments that I needed to make, and I consider that to be a very fortunate thing, and it’s one of the reasons why libraries and academic institutions are so awesome in general.

[00:38:12] The Four Prongs of the Digital Accessibility Program

Jesse: Our digital accessibility program, as I see it, has four prongs.

There’s the assessment prong, there’s the auditing prong, then remediation, and then education.

These are the four sort of categories that I think about when I think about how our digital accessibility works and where I would like it to go.

[00:38:36] Assessment

Jesse: Looking at that first prong busy little table on this page, the assessment prong, I need to look at with my IT colleagues what the library’s web presence is composed of. And it is composed of locally built applications like Drupal sites and WordPress sites and various custom forms and APIs. It’s also composed of open source third-party applications, and it’s also composed of vendor applications. Those are the three categories in which all of the things that library IT does and fall into.

I should say all the things that library IT does that are accessed by our students, faculty, and the public. Because those three categories are so different from each other, the way in which they are assessed and remediated are very different. When everything is locally built, like a Drupal site. Even though even though Drupal is an open source platform that we pull from, we do have 100% access to all of the code, and that’s same for WordPress, and that’s same for all of the stuff that we have built in-house, which means that if something needs to be fixed, we can do it. When it’s a website, I can do it. When it’s something built by our application developers, they can do it. This is their things that we have 100% access to.

When it’s an open source third-party application, and a couple of examples of this are Geodata, which is a site where we share our map data resources. We also have an internal short link generator that is used by various librarians in our communications department. Things like this, we do have a certain amount of access to the code, but a lot of times it is things that we cannot fix ourselves or do not have the time to fix, in which case we report these issues upstream to the developers that work on them.

And last, but most definitely not least, are the vendor applications. Vendor applications at Berkeley are things like UC Library Search that I mentioned, LibGuides which is a giant CMS where various librarians can create pages about various collections that they want to highlight or share very specific information.

And then there is our vast digital collection site where we share all of our digital collections. That platform is a vendor platform. And in those cases, accessibility issues must be communicated to the vendor, and then we cross our fingers. We don’t just cross our fingers, but I will get to that in a second.

But the organizing principle here is, how much access do we have to the source code, and how direct is the route to remediation?

More on the assessment aspect, we of course need to prioritize how we’re going to assess our sites because we only have a certain number of staff and available time. And we have to ask these questions for any particular website or application. Is the audience public or internal? How essential is it to core library services? How much traffic does it get? And what is its current level of accessibility?

The answers to these questions can move things up and down the ladder of priority. We may have something that is in the accessibility department maybe doing okay, but gets tons and tons of traffic. That will often get attention first. Sometimes there are things that have many accessibility issues, but are more internal facing and don’t get a ton of traffic. We will move those down the ladder a bit. But these are the questions that we ask. I have a colleague at another institution that has actually created a rubric and assigned questions like these scores and assessed all their applications and assigned each of them a score.

I haven’t gone that far, as much as I would like to. One, because I simply haven’t had the time, but two, because it isn’t that difficult for our sites and our applications to look at them, answer these questions, and just get a sense of where should it go in the chain of priority. The actual scoring hasn’t been entirely necessary yet, even though I think it’s, it would be a fantastic thing to do.

[00:43:08] Auditing

Jesse: Then the next prong, of course, is auditing. Auditing has to happen next. We use a number of different methods for auditing. As I mentioned before, UC Berkeley uses Siteimprove. In the library, we also use axe DevTools. These two tools provide automated testing. They will crawl a site. Siteimprove has a bot that just crawls on a regular basis, usually weekly. You can go to their site any time and see what your current state is. axe DevTools will run an automated search on any given page.

And that gives us, of course, a general sense. But as many people here today know, I’m sure, automated testing does not catch everything, and the percentages I hear, although it does gradually go up over time, is it catches anywhere from only 30 to 50% of known accessibility issues, which is why we also do manual testing.

axe DevTools also has a bunch of really great manual testing tools that I use. And then there’s, of course, plain old keyboard testing because any tool, even axe DevTools, does produce false positives, so I like to back things up with keyboard testing and then, of course, plain old screen reader testing.

As I know Amber likes to say, you have not fully audited your site until you screen reader test. So on top of axe DevTools and Siteimprove, I am also rolling through everything with a screen reader and making sure that things are understandable and usable and sensible.

But then, of course, since I am not the person who is most being served by a screen reader, and my screen reader knowledge is limited to testing and not everyday use, we do testing by users with relevant disabilities where possible. And I do say where possible because in a perfect world in a department with unlimited funding, I would regularly hire an outside service like Folio, for example, where people with the relevant disabilities do the actual testing.

I know even with all the auditing skills that I have, I cannot possibly catch everything because there are particular angles of websites that I do not have because I do not have a particular disability, but I do have very generous friends and colleagues who, if I have very specific questions about a very specific thing, I will say, “Hey, would you mind taking a look at this form? Could you use this form? I think I got everything, but can you let me know?” I reach out to these people where I have really specific questions or where I’m concerned that I’m just not getting stuff.

In a perfect world, everything would be tested by people with the disabilities who we would like to serve. But budgets are limited, time are limited, and we do not live in that perfect world.

Once auditing is done for those of you who are project managers or other web devs who use Jira, I turn individual issues into Jira tickets. They are then appropriately assigned. Either I assign directly to myself if it’s something I’m going to work on, or I hand it off to my supervisor, who then assigns them to the appropriate developer.

When it’s a vendor, our- those tickets in Jira are really just about tracking, ’cause that’s when we have to get into vendor interaction.

[00:46:44] Remediation

Jesse: The remediation approaches follow the same categories that we saw before. When things are locally built, we can do it all ourselves, even when it’s WordPress or Drupal. If it’s in WordPress Core or Drupal Core, I will report it as best I can. I will often run a patch myself, because I want things to work right away, and the developer cycle often takes time.

If I have the time, in the case of Drupal, I will fork the repo and push my solution. Hopefully it gets brought in during the next development cycle. Sometimes it doesn’t. But at the very least, I can make sure that our instance is as accessible as I can make it.

Then again, with those open source third-party applications where our own Developers can remediate things. They will take my ticket and implement that fix, and we will test it.

If it’s something that we don’t have access to, we will try to communicate these issues upstream, and then it’s very similar to Drupal and WordPress. We hope and push and ask to see if we can get it into the next development cycle.

Very occasionally, and this is happening right now, we have actually joined with one of the development teams who work on this upstream platform to actually work directly with them on remediation, and I am very excited when the UC Berkeley Library can pair on projects like that.

Vendors are a little bit different. Vendors, of course do not necessarily feel responsible to provide you with the accessibility fixes that you are asking. I’m gonna talk a little bit more about vendors in a minute, but my job becomes to annoy the vendor and to become a thorn in their side.

[00:48:33] Education

Jesse: The last part that I’m gonna talk about of these four prongs is the education that we do.

This is, because I am so involved in auditing and remediation and because campus provides so many resources, I do not provide a lot of direct education myself. There is campus-level basic training, which everyone on campus is required to renew annually. That’s a very high-level training. It really just says, “Accessibility exists. Here are the basic principles of it.” It doesn’t go much deeper than that, but it does keep people aware of accessibility, which is not a bad thing.

There is required document reading for anyone in the library who creates web content. That is documentation that I worked on myself and with other fellow project managers. I shouldn’t say fellow project manager. I’m not a project manager myself, but this was a… this documentation was a very large project of which I was only one contributor.

But with the folks who create content, we make sure that they are aware they need to create alternative text for images. We make sure they know about correct heading structure. We make sure they understand about human-understandable link text, that they’re not just using “click here,” “read more,” that links are supposed to tell you what’s gonna happen when you click on it. And this is a tough one. We push super hard to make sure that people know that tables are really only for tabular data. They are not to organize content on a page. They are for tabular data. This can be a tough one for folks, and also a tough one for people to remediate because the HTML for an accessible table is a little complicated.

Within the library, we ask our devs to take the W3C Digital Accessibility Foundations course for application developers in library IT. That is a really pretty great resource, and we also point to the multiple training resources that are available through the campus digital accessibility program.

And less formal education, a little while ago we took on the blog post remediation project for the library blog. The blog posts were not in great shape. There were all of the common errors that you generally find, we find among web content. But rather than me going through and fixing everything, which I was not going to do, we informed the authors of their accessibility issues and provided them instructions with remediation, and then asked them to inform me when remediation was done.

The purpose of that is not only to get the bloggers to just take responsibility for their own content, but by pointing them to the solution and having them hands-on remediate it. That gives a visceral understanding of how to remediate and what an accessibility issue is. It may seem very small, but I actually find these little moments to really be very powerful, where people will say, “Oh, I didn’t know that was a problem.” And I say, “Yes, it’s a problem because it affects people this way. Here is how you fix it.” And then handing it off to them allows them to understand what the problem was and how to fix it. It’s really small, but it’s very effective.

Where the Jira tickets are concerned, the Jira tickets for our accessibility issues do contain a lot of very useful information, but we just hand those tickets off to the developers and we encourage them to research solutions.

And our devs are awesome. A lot of them are highly accessibili- they’re actually all of them are accessibility-minded to begin with. They reach out to me when they have a solution and they just wanna make sure that it’s a good one which I really love. And that, again, hands the job of remediation off to them. It gives them a a hands-on experience of fixing stuff, and it expands that digital accessibility consciousness.

And then more broadly, accessibility is communicated as a value in our work, and it’s not just a process or an add-on. This is just something we do in the UC Berkeley Library. We talk about digital accessibility. We talk about accessibility in general, not just digital. It’s part of all the work we do in library IT. It’s a question that we ask as it’s a question that we ask about of all of our applications. We are shifting left as much as we can. We continue to shift left more every day, but it is known that accessibility is a very essential part of what we do.

[00:53:18] About the Vendors

Jesse: Now I’m gonna spend just a couple minutes talking about vendors.

For any of you out there who have to work with third-party vendors, this is an ongoing problem. This is a problem I deal with every single day. I don’t expect it to go away anytime soon. These are what I consider to be the roots of the problems with working with third-party vendors.

We, as the client, are on the hook for a vendor’s lack of accessibility compliance. The Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act holds the institution responsible for digital accessibility. That’s not a bad thing. That is a good thing. That means we can’t say “Oh, wait, our tool isn’t accessible, that’s the vendor’s fault.” That is a good thing. The flip side of that is the vendor has no liability at all. They have no legal motive, because the institution is on the hook. We can ask the vendor, but they are not legally motivated to make any changes. Oftentimes, this is especially true for libraries. It may be true for the environment that you work in as well.

The service that they provide is often the only game in town. So the library vendor ecosystem is populated by a number of very large players that have been around for a very long time and are providing services that are used by many libraries. So if we don’t like the way they are handling accessibility, and they are not remediating in a timely fashion or at all, we’re often stuck with them, and the vendors know that, and that works in their favor.

Their staffs are frequently small and poorly trained in accessibility practices. That’s just a fact. All of us would like to have a larger staff than we have. For a lot of these vendors, the client coming to them and saying, “We need your product to meet accessibility standards. We need it to be WCAG compliant,” sometimes that is the first they have heard any of the words that I just said. Sometimes the client coming to them is the first time they have heard that accessibility is a thing and is something that they need to do. So the fact that their staffs are poorly trained, not necessarily their fault, it’s just not something that was culturally communicated to them.

And lastly, our current contracts often do not hold the vendors to often do not hold the vendors to account. A lot of our contracts were written up before the consent decree, before the lawsuits, and that means that we did not include accessibility compliance in the contract. There are sometimes contract renegotiations that happen that do give us a window to try to get accessibility requirements in, but as anyone will tell you, in any new contract, the time to get any new provisions in, not new provisions, any provisions at all is the very first time you sign that. The time to get accessibility into a contract is the very first time you sign that contract. A lot of our contracts have been around a very long time. Our vendor relationships go back pretty far. So renegotiating a contract and saying, “Hey, we want accessibility now,” that doesn’t often work as well as we might like.

So what do we do? How do we get a vendor to remediate their product? Unfortunately, the broadest answer to this question is you can’t. You cannot force a vendor to remediate their product.

You can apply legal pressure where possible. Sometimes there are angles. I am not a lawyer, so I’m not well-experienced in where those angles are, but I do chat with lawyers, and sometimes there are angles to be taken where you can exert legal pressure.

There is also the guilt and shame angle. Generally, I would say guilt and shame are not great things, but sometimes guilt and shame are appropriate. And if a vendor is not taking any action at all after you have pointed out the fact that their vendor is excluding large swaths of society and not allowing people with disabilities to access their product, that is an appropriate time for guilting and shaming, I believe. Politely, but in this instance, I believe guilt and shame is appropriate.

There’s also public embarrassment. Now, this doesn’t mean getting out on social media and saying, “That vendor, they suck. I hate them.” The way I like to frame this kind of public embarrassment is in venues that it is, in venues that it is appropriate you can very honestly and directly speak about your experience with the vendor and share that this vendor is not meeting digital accessibility requirements, that they’re excluding disabled people from being able to access their product. And an appropriate environment like that might be a conference where you are conferring with other colleagues who also use that product or may be considering using that product. I believe there is nothing wrong with saying, “Before you sign a contract with that vendor, you should be aware that they don’t know what WCAG is,” or, “They are not responding to my requests,” or, “I’ve been working with them, they’re not really that great.” There is nothing wrong with speaking honestly about your experience with these vendors. That is a way to apply pressure.

Lastly, and this is one of my favorite ones in almost any venue, is collective action. In the UC system there have been a couple times where there are vendors that many of our libraries use across the entire UC system. Maybe we had individual contracts with them. We all individually tried to reach customer service, and it didn’t work. One of our colleagues will occasionally reach out to all of us and say, “Have you communicated with this vendor? What has your experience been? I would like to organize all of our accessibility issues into one spreadsheet, and I will write to the CEO.” That has worked. A lot of times, we are working in our own silos. We are individual actors. We communicate with customer service departments who don’t necessarily feel like the issues we are raising are worth their time or their money. That is the time to reach out to other people who use the same product and collectivize.

[00:59:54] What About Documents?

Jesse: See I jumped around here. I’m looking at the time here.

I’m just gonna say a quick thing about documents in the library. You may have noticed I didn’t say a whole lot about documents. PDFs, these are a big pain point for accessibility.

Speaking frankly, documents are not one of my strong suits. My focus is always the web. So I do not spend a lot of time thinking about document accessibility. There are folks in the library and library IT who do, and I work with them. However, when someone comes to me with an inaccessible PDF, my first question is always, “Does this need to be a PDF? Can it be HTML? Can it be a webpage?” HTML is always more accessible than PDFs.

If it needs to be a PDF, the library does have services for processing PDFs into more accessible formats, and I am always happy to assist people with that. But my focus is on moving away from documents like PDFs and into more accessible formats. But our digital accessibility program campus-wide does support document accessibility. It is not one of my personal strong suits.

[01:01:05] Future Improvements

Jesse: Future improvements for our library digital accessibility program, I would love to have more people in-house with auditing skills. That is very slowly changing. A lot of people are taking it on themselves to cultivate those skills. That always brings me a lot of great joy.

Right now, most of the auditing knowledge lies with me. I would like there to be more folks just so I’m not the only person doing it. And it would be great that to have other people to check my work, and I could check their work because one auditor, me, is likely to make mistakes.

I would also like to move accessibility knowledge from preferred to required in hiring. In our job postings, we do say, we do list accessibility knowledge under preferred requirements. That is great. A lot of places still don’t do it. I want it to be required. That’s just on my wish list.

I would also love to integrate the accessibility project. I put that in quotes because the Jira project, which is where we put accessibility tickets into other existing projects. It is good that we have a project that is devoted to accessibility. Accessibility works best when it is fully integrated into the entire development process. I would love to see that happen moving forward into the future.

I would love to see the involvement of student employees. UCLA specifically has an incredible student employee accessibility training program where students come in, they work on accessibility, they learn about accessibility, they build their knowledge, and then they move out into other accessibility roles if they are able to. I’d love a program like that. That’d be fabulous.

And lastly, it would be great to have a succession plan. The Digital Accessibility Program Manager, that is a role that I stepped into. It is a role that I helped create. I’m not gonna be around forever. Retirement is in the future sometime. I would like the Digital Accessibility Program Manager to be an official role that could be hired for. I have no doubt, and I am confident that a lot of the work that I am doing and a lot of the work that we are doing, the hands-on work will continue, but I would like to see the Digital Accessibility Program Manager role continue beyond my presence at UC Berkeley.

And then on the UC level I would like to see a system-wide consolidation of knowledge and resources. This is happening. There is a digital accessibility community of practice UC wide that is forming, and that is the beginning of this process. But right now, a lot of these knowledge repositories exist on the campus basis, and the inter-campus sharing is more on the informal level.

I would like to see it formalized. I would like to see more permanent positions devoted to digital accessibility up and down the institutional ladder. Again, that is happening. I would like to see it continue happening, and I would like to see it all the way up the ladder up to the UC Office of the President.

And lastly, I would like to see stronger resistance to the ableist and eugenicist tendencies of the current federal government. That’s of course, the US Federal Government for those of you who are not in the United States. And what I’m thinking specifically of here is many of you may be aware that up until this past April there were Title II changes that were going to happen. Title change was going to start requiring WCAG version 2.1 as its standard. It is now 2.0. At the very last second, that was pushed back a year without the appropriate review process. There is a current lawsuit from the National Federation for the Blind against the Federal Government for this, which I’m following very closely.

There’s also Section 504 of the re rehabil- I’m not gonna get this right, I always get it wrong, rehabilitation Services Act, which is under the Department of Health and Human Services. UC Berkeley was subject to that as well. That was also set to switch to WCAG 2.1. That was also pushed back a year. There is no good reason for this. A lot of the reasons that are being rolled out is it gives institutions more time to meet their remediation requirements. We have had plenty of time. The fact that deadline existed was something that made my job a lot easier. It made contract negotiations a lot easier. It made holding vendors responsible easier. That just got pushed back a year. There is no good reason for that, and we know, speaking very frankly we know that this institution, we know that the Federal Government, the current Federal Government contains racists. We know it contains people who are ableist. I have not heard any explicit eugenicist statements come out of this Federal Government, but we know they exist. It is plainly obvious. I would like to see UC resist that. And UC for a little while after these deadlines changed, UC was keeping its original policy of saying, “WCAG 2.1, we are going to keep this,” even though the federal government dropped the requirement. UC also moved it back a year. I understand that there are political considerations there. However, I would have really liked to see UC push back on that, say, “Nope, 2.1, this version’s been out for a while. It’s a better standard. We are going to hold that institution wide.” That is what I would like to see.

This is just a list of resources. If you take a look at the slide deck, this is a list of links that refers back to things that I referred to over the course of this talk. There’s a link to the digital accessibility page on the UC library site. There is a link to our Digital Accessibility Program, the campus wide one. There is a link to a friendly rundown of the 2022 consent decree, a very human readable one. There are links to the highlights of the Disability Rights Movement on the UC Berkeley site, and a link to the Disability History and Futures at UC Berkeley page.

Ah. That was a lot. Thank you very much. I know we have about 15 minutes left.

I will be very happy to take questions now.

[01:07:23] Q&A

Amber: Yes, thank you so much. That was a phenomenal presentation, Jesse. I really appreciate both the history, what you’re doing, and looking ahead and future hopes. It was great, and I’m seeing lots of little applause reactions coming through in Zoom as well. I actually thought it was interesting.

I saw a comment in the chat kind of early on when you were talking about how things started out and what happened with the initial complaint. And someone said, “I wonder if Berkeley Executive Management was talking the talk about how great accessibility was, but not walking the walk in, as in not providing funding for it until the lawsuit happened.”

Do you know was funding kind of the issue initially, or was it general lack of awareness as to why you might wanna caption all those resources that were put out there?

Jesse: I do think it comes down to funding. I don’t have direct insight. I don’t know what was going on behind the scenes there.

The Web Access Office, which was the, like I was saying, the Web Access Office, which was the precursor to the campus-wide Digital Accessibility Program, they were funded. They were there. I don’t think it was lack of awareness. People knew what digital accessibility was.

And it was explained v- some I think people knew well enough that the videos needed to be captioned , so that was there. Yeah. It was really just a matter of resources especially in this moving of those 20,000 files behind the login. That was done because I don’t know for sure, I’m speculating again here. But remediating those 20,000 files, I’m sure they were looking at it and think, “Oh my God, 20,000 videos, 20,000 audio files, that’s gonna be a lot of money. That’s gonna be a lot of time.” So- … I don’t think it’s a matter of awareness. I think my guess is that it was a financial and time resource decision.

Amber: Okay. Along those lines, I’m gonna start for folks looking at what’s in the Q&A, so if you have any questions, please add them in there. But I saw Corinda ask something that was relevant to what we’ve just been talking about captioning, and do you think that AI is improving caption creation accuracy?

And do you wanna speak to that at all?

Jesse: Sure. It is improving. I used some of the early tools that were out and kinda rolled my eyes. I’m like that produced kind of what I thought it was gonna produce. But then, even a year later I was just playing around with Whisper AI for captioning videos and I was doing it to caption some of my own talks to put up on my own website, and I was a little alarmed at how good it was in terms of in terms of editing out my ums and uhs, and punctuating and capitalizing.

Now, that said, I am an AI skeptic. I’m waiting for the AI bubble to burst. I think it’s got the economy propped up pretty hard right now. We will always need humans there and I think the rush to adopt AI is gravely misguided, and I’m very happy to say that in the library we are adopting AI tools with very slowly and with the appropriate level of skepticism and on a very specific per-project basis.

I do think it is improving. I do not believe there will ever be a time that we do not need to have human eyes on that final review. But I’m impressed at what’s, what I’ve seen so far.

Amber: Yeah, it does seem like the auto-generated is making fewer mistakes now. But I agree with you, it does seem like you still always have to check them and fix spelling of strange words or punctuation or misunderstanding.

Jesse: Yep.

Amber: Yeah. So someone asked, they said, “When you do the training for web content, does that include guidance on LibGuides?” And maybe you can define that for those of us who are less familiar-

Jesse: Sure.

Amber: …with that. This person says “This is a huge issue that they have at their library, and they have not been able to find a solution.

Also, how do you get people to attend these trainings? From what they’ve seen, most people who need it don’t go to the trainings.”

Jesse: Oh, these are fantastic questions. Okay. LibGuides for y’all who don’t re- if you work… If… So the way you know who works in a library and who doesn’t, you say LibGuides and go, “Ah, that’s how they require me.”

LibGuides is a product by a company called Springshare. LibGuides is that platform where librarians can produce one page or multi-page guides to a particular collection. It’s basically a content management system, and what our librarians will do is they’ll produce a guide on, say African American studies, and they will link to certain texts and certain materials and maybe certain professors will… they will encourage professors to direct their students to this particular guide. And there are th- we have so many LibGuides, things tend to pile up.

To answer this question, LibGuides is such an issue that I am not even the person who deals with the LibGuides content. I have a colleague whose job is not specifically accessibility, but it has become part of his job, and he does incredible work. He is the LibGuides overseer, among other things, and he is the person who reaches out to individual LibGuides owners and asks them to remediate their content.

I don’t have good answers to your questions. I really wish I did. It is an ongoing issue. We did float once the idea of unpublishing LibGuides that were sitting for too long without remediation. That was not a very popular idea, as you can imagine. It is difficult to do. And again, librarians are very busy and accessible remediation kind of gets put down at the bottom.

And then, okay getting people to show up to trainings. If your institution isn’t gonna require it, you can use some of those vendor tricks that I use. Now, you don’t, maybe you don’t want to publicly shame your colleagues. Which I think is wise. Do not publicly shame your colleagues. But it is not, And I have crafted emails that have said things like, “We do not want to exclude people from being able to access your content. And right now, your content is not accessible because this image doesn’t have alt text. Someone using a screen reader has no idea that image is there.” Or one of the problems with LibGuides is it gives you an awful lot of control over content. You can change colors of text in your LibGuide. So we say “Are you aware that nobody can read that link?” I wish I had a good answer, but this colleague of mine… It’s a constant thing, and he’s very busy trying to get all of those LibGuides up to compliance.

But I would say, don’t be afraid to push on accessibility and to communicate what failing at accessibility does and how it excludes and what kind of a history that exclusion participates in.

Amber: Yeah. I think there’s… Mary had submitted sort of a similar challenge, which was she’s had difficulty with educating people that tables are for tabular data only, which you said is a big thing that you’ve been working on.

And she asked if you had any specific strategy for getting them to understand, because that’s been a huge habit at her institution.

Jesse: Do I have strategies for getting them to understand? We’re kinda getting back to the same point there. One of the things that I have done with, I didn’t do this in a formal setting, I did this with a couple of colleagues and I said, “All right. I’m turning on my screen reader now, and we’re gonna go through this table.” And the table did not, the table did not… It was it was basically a table that could have easily been translating to bullet points. It had that kind of structure to it. It was, like, two columns, two headings. It just… it didn’t need the table structure to communicate the information that was contained. And I rolled through it with a screen reader, and you could see that the relationships that were wanting to be communicated by the content owner were not being communicated through the screen reader, and things that matched up to eyeballs did not match up to ears, that was as convincing as I could get.

I would like to be able to do that in kind of a broader setting. Again, I think you need to force people to come to accessibility trainings somehow. But yeah, forcing people to, change their preferred habits is really hard, especially since, people really like their tables, and I get why. It’s, like, all that information, it’s in this box. It’s in these little boxes. There’s cognitive pleasure in having information organized like that. But the best thing to do is to get somebody in a situation where you can demonstrate to them, “Here’s how this table fails. Here’s how it actually doesn’t work.

And if you do this as bullet points, here’s how it does work.”

I wish I had… Again, I wish I had a better answer.

Amber: You know what? I think… So Rick had a question here which kind of aligns with what I’ve seen. I used to guest lecture once a semester for a undergrad web development course at Colorado State University, and I would come in and talk about WordPress, and I was able to see his whole syllabus, and they never once talked about accessibility there.

And Rick’s question is along the same lines of training people and getting them to understand, and he notes that schools have to be accessible for students, but he has found that most colleges don’t teach accessibility in their classes. And he was wondering, do you know if Berkeley is offering accessibility courses to their IT and computer science students?

Jesse: God, that’s a fabulous question. I actually don’t know. I UC Berkeley, and I, and Berkeley is not unique in this way. It’s a fairly siloed environment. The only students I interact with are students who work in the library. And now that I’m fully remote, I actually barely interact with students at all, which is a shame. So I do not know, and now I’m going to ask, because that is a fabulous question.

Amber: Yeah. I hope that maybe Colorado State University is a little better than it was when I was doing this, which was many years ago. But I do feel like that is probably one of the biggest challenges, that the people that are learning web development aren’t being taught accessibility, both at higher ed but also in the boot camp programs and things like that.

Jesse: Yeah.

Amber: Yeah. Let’s see. There were a couple of questions related to certification. So this one’s maybe a quick one. Do you happen to know how many people at the library and at Berkeley have IAAP certification?

Jesse: Not a ton. One other person at the library just took their CPAC exam. So at the moment I think, and any of my colleagues on the call right now, if you are certified, I apologize, I think it’s just me right now.

Amber: Okay.

Jesse: Although this person, she- they’re gonna pass the CPAC. I’m sure they passed. But but yeah.

Amber: Is-

Jesse: That’s who I think so …

Amber: Is there any reason why there aren’t more?

Jesse: I don’t know how broadly… I don’t know how aware… people are aware of the certification from me. I think the fees can be a barrier.

Although Berkeley paid for mine. If you work for an institution that’s willing to put up money for stuff, that’s a great way to do it. So I would love to have more colleagues certified. I think it would be really great, especially in library to have more certified folks.

I don’t think the certification is necessary for the knowledge. I think the certification is great professionally. I’m really glad that I have it. The one of the reasons I went for it was for the process to go through to accumulate the knowledge and to fill in gaps. So I do think you can definitely acquire that knowledge without getting the certification.

But yeah, I don’t know why it’s not more broadly-

… approached.

Amber: Yeah, not required, but maybe a good pathway to learn-

Jesse: Yes.

Amber: … If that’s something you want to do.

Someone else had commented that they are pursuing the WAS certification, and they were wondering if you had faced any resistance when providing accessibility guidance after earning your certifications.

Did you have to… ‘Cause and now I’m hearing you say people don’t even know what these are. Do you feel like it adds to credibility or not necessarily? Because this person says they face- they found some colleagues aren’t always receptive to feedback or recommended changes, and they’re wondering if that would change once they have their certification.

Jesse: I think it might. I have my badge in my signature. I, even before I got certified, I already had a reputation in the library as the digital accessibility guy. I don’t know what people are saying when I’m not there you know? People may people may be… people are like, “Oh, yes,” “Thank you so much. I’ll do that.” And then maybe they’re going, “Oh, Jesse,” I don’t know what they’re doing. I think it helps. It has helped more outside the library for me. Within the library, I do feel respected for my knowledge and for what I have to share. People reach out to me proactively, which has been really great.

Where I feel like it has helped is when I’ve gone out to deal with vendors, when there is a UC-wide digital accessibility team that I chair that that works with Ex Libris, which provides our UC library search service. I think that certification really helps there. When I go to a vendor and I say, “You’re not being very accessible,” and that badge is in my signature, I do think that carries weight.

Within the library, yeah, I don’t know that it makes a difference within the library. I feel like people already know what I’m up to.

Amber: So I’m watching time and there’s a few more questions. I know we have our captioner for about 10 more minutes. Are you able to stay and maybe we can rapid-fire-

Jesse: Yeah, I can stay for 10 minutes.

Amber: A few of these and see if we can get them-

Jesse: Sure.

Right around.

Amber: Okay. This question is, “What screen reader do you use for testing?” This person says, “I’ve been having trouble using the screen reader built into my Mac and my work won’t buy JAWS.”

So they’re wondering what you’re using and maybe how you learned it.

Jesse: Yeah, so okay. I’m on a Mac, so I primarily use VoiceOver. How did I learn it? I learned it from Amber Hinds here. I learned it by taking the VoiceOver course through Equalize Digital, which is great. I highly recommend it. I was not paid to say that.

It is true that VoiceOver has a few quirks. We all know it works really best with Safari. I don’t use VoiceOver on Chrome because it behaves completely differently. I have a two-prong process.

The UC Berkeley Library also has a subscription to a service called BrowserStack, which some of you may know. BrowserStack is an environment that allows you to test on almost any combination of operating system and browser, and that includes mobile. BrowserStack, a couple years ago folded NDE into their services. So when I’m using VoiceOver and I come across something that isn’t looking right, I open up BrowserStack and I turn on NDE and I test it there. It’s not the best environment to be working on. Because it’s over the web, it’s pretty slow.

My NDE skills are not as good as my VoiceOver skills, just because I’m not a, a PC user. Hopefully that will be changing soon and I’ll be improving those skills, but I do back up my VoiceOver with NDE. And then as an auditor, I am assuming that if something is failing VoiceOver and failing NDE, that it’s likely failing JAWS too.

I know that is not true in 100% of cases, but even with NDE and and VoiceOver, we have effectively captured, like, two-thirds about of screen reader users. So even if it is succeeding on JAWS, someone’s still having a problem which needs to be fixed. And JAWS, for exactly the reason mentioned, that costs you money, is losing market share, because it costs money.

So if you are able in any way to back up VoiceOver with NDE on a PC… Oh, I keep saying NDE. NVDE, excuse me. Everything I just said-

Amber: NVDA … N-

Jesse: Yeah, NV- So I, there is a product I’m working on called Primo NDE, and it’s stuck in my brain. I’m sorry. NVDA.

Amber: That’s okay.

Jesse: Thank you. I, ’cause I I’m working with this every day right now.

Yes, if you are able to wrangle a PC somehow and test with NVDA, which is free, that will keep you pretty well covered. And then even though it’d be great to test with all three, you can safely say that if something has failed on VoiceOver and failed on NVDA, that is an accessibility failure.

Amber: Yeah.

Can you share, Jamie asked, “What’s the current status of collaborative action across the campus systems for things that you work with, like LibGuides and quote, ‘only player in town vendors?'”

Jesse: Aha, very interesting question. Speaking very plainly right now, and those of you who use LibGuides are gonna like this.

SpringShare is the company that provides LibGuides and many other services that we use. I audited our LibGuides instance and many of our other SpringShare products and identified a number of failures and bugged their customer service for a long time. And their customer service basically arrived at a point where they said to me, this is a paraphrase “We will deal with the accessibility issues that we’re already aware of, but we can’t review everything that you sent.”

One of my colleagues at I’m gonna say UC Irvine, might’ve been Davis, and I apologize to this person whether they’re here or not, reached out to all of us across the UC campus and said, “Are you having a problem with SpringShare?” And I said, “Yes, I am,” and I had my Jira tickets in my spreadsheet. And we put together a UC-wide spreadsheet. We back checked each other’s issues. We indicated on the spreadsheet which campuses were having this problem. One of the people in this group knew the SpringShare CEO and went straight to the CEO with this, who then responded to us and apologized for giving us the impression that they did not care about accessibility.

That got the ball rolling. So that is my best instance of a group of campuses formally organizing and coming to a vendor when each of us were not working on well on our own. I don’t have a lot of organizing instance where other vendors are concerned except for Ex Libris, which provides UC Library Search. But we didn’t need to make an organization effort because our contract with Ex Libris is UC wide, so we are already working in an organized fashion with them.

Amber: And I do think that’s something you don’t just have to be a higher ed institution. If you go to conferences and people in your industry, even for-profit companies, like in WordPress sometimes we’re very collaborative, right?

And I would think, with these different websites, you could say, “Hey, we’re all using the same plugin or the same piece of software. Let’s all come together and team up and go to that vendor.” Because I do think you’re right, like the group complaint is a lot more powerful sometimes-

Jesse: Much more powerful, yeah.

Amber: Than an individual. Yeah.

Let’s see. Real fast. Someone said, “I had a PM ask if we were planning to update the accessibility statement on our website to WCAG 2.2. However, our statement is very, quote, ‘aspirational in nature.’ How can I as an individual contributor move us toward a more robust digital accessibility program when it doesn’t seem to be a top-down priority in my workplace?”

Jesse: Yeah, that’s a tough one. So yeah, like I said, I had the advantage in the library of already being in a culture where digital accessibility was going to be supportive. Most of us are working in environments where there is no top-down support. Support is going to be bottom-up always. Creating institutional change is very difficult, and it takes individuals to make that change.

It starts with you. And I don’t mean that in the aspiration, to use the word aspirational “It starts with you, nah.” What I mean it starts with you is if you are asking that question, that means you are the person to actually get it started. Famous civil rights poet quote from the 1960s from June Jordan is, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” No one’s coming to save us. We have to do it.

What do you need to do? The first thing you should do is even though you are the person who needs to start this, you are not alone. Find who your allies are. Who are the people you work with who, even if they haven’t specifically expressed interest in digital accessibility or concern for it, who has your political and social outlook? Who is inclined to be a community-building type person? Who are those people? Identify them and talk to them, and start talking about digital accessibility and start identifying, who in this group of people, what do they do? What do they work on? How are they able to start implementing digital accessibility themselves?

And then those people start talking to other people. And then, again, I don’t know what kind of institutional environment you’re in, but then you can create a formal group. You can say, “We are creating a digital accessibility community to practice,” or, “We are creating a digital accessibility interest group. We would like you to join us.” And then just start talking about it. It has to start with people. It’s not gonna come from up here. The upper people, they’re not gonna do it. They’re not motivated. Not motivated. The motivation has to come from us. I don’t know if that helped, but that is… I would say identify your people. Who are your people? Whether they are digitally accessibility-minded or not, who do you have that connection with? Who has your outlook? Start talking to them, and then take that structure and formalize it.

Amber: Yeah, the grassroots approach.

Jesse: Exactly.

Amber: So maybe as our last question, someone had said they’re having difficulty holding people accountable, as in who is going to, quote, “police the site or document,” and what would consequences look like. They had a particular issue with volunteers who post social media on behalf of the department.

Ah. Maybe not writing alt text or something.

Jesse: That’s tough,

Amber: But do you have any tips on that, like the actual enforcement side of policies-

Jesse: A little bit.

Amber: … once they exist?

Jesse: Yeah. You or the company institution that you work for has to be willing to unpublish. It has to be willing to unpublish posts or content that you have identified that is not accessible.

They need to be willing to suspend accounts if it comes to that. These are really the only tools that we wield to prevent. One of the things that I was given license to do… we wanted to do something like this with LibGuides, but the pushback was really hard.

On the blog, we had many, many inaccessible posts. I was given license to unpublish those posts and then contact the post owners and say, this is, these are the po- it was a lot of, it was a lot of administrative work on my part. It’s always gonna be. You’re gonna have to do a lot of legwork here. So I had to email a lot of people. I had to email them their posts. I had to tell them what was wrong with their posts. But I was able to say, “I have unpublished your post. This is what you need to do. When you have done these things, you may republish it.” And I installed a little WordPress plugin that would notify me when something got republished, just in case someone tried to go around the back, which nobody did. Just in case.

And that worked. That really worked. Some posts never got republished. All right. I would prefer that our stuff was available, but also accessibility is the lens that I view through, so that is my priority. But most people, they fixed their posts. They let me know. I reviewed it. It was fixed. So you need to be able to have those tools. You need to be able to unpublish, you need to be able to suspend accounts if people are repeat offenders. Most of us aren’t given that kind of license. This blog instance is the only instance where I had that.

It’s it’s tough. It’s tough. But if it’s important you should push for it, especially on social media because the social media platforms aren’t helping you either.

Amber: Yeah. I think the way I see a lot of that, or the way I’ll try and communicate that with our clients is we’ll talk about, if you had misspellings or typos on a blog post or an About page, you wouldn’t leave it up without fixing it. If someone-

Jesse: That’s great way of framing it. Yes.

Amber: … a team member’s name or job title was wrong, like you would go fix that because it represents your organization in a negative light to have those typos or misspellings.

Jesse: Yeah.

Amber: And so it’s just building this mindset of we’re either gonna fix it or we’re gonna take it down because we don’t wanna see bad stuff out there making us look bad. And just connecting accessibility with that as well.

Jesse: Yeah, that’s a great framing. It’s true. Yeah. That’s exactly right.

Amber: I very much appreciate you spending so much time with us today, Jesse. This has been a fabulous presentation.

Jesse: Thank you for having me.

Amber: If anyone wants to follow up with you, where’s the best place?

Is LinkedIn or-

Jesse: LinkedIn is good. If you reach out to me on-

Amber: And you have a website too, right?

Jesse: I do, yeah. JesseLoesberg.com is my website. You can reach me at jesseloesberg@gmail.com. LinkedIn is fine. If you reach out to me on LinkedIn, if you could indicate that you heard about me from this talk or from something like this talk, because I get reached out to by a lot of vendors who then would like to sell me their product, and I just…

Yeah, so just give me an easy way to- … to filter you and to know that you actually wanna talk to me because it’s me, and not because you wanna sell me something.

Amber: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. We very much appreciate it, and thank you everyone who hung in here until the end. We should have this recording up for people who wanna reference it in next week.

Jesse: Yep. Thanks, everybody. Thank you for coming.

Amber: Bye.

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