A campus-wide review of digital accessibility at Syracuse University will take place in the upcoming weeks, six months after SU announced its plans to review disability services on campus.

The Information and Communication Technology Accessibility Policy, published on Jan. 1, aims to reduce digital barriers on platforms like MySlice, Blackboard and university webpages.

Chancellor Kent Syverud announced in early August that the disability services audit was moving “slowly” because the external reviewers SU hired can’t work as fast as expected.

Christopher Finkle, communications manager for SU’s Information Technology Services, said ITS is helping the university implement the policy by conducting workshops for faculty and staff to make their content accessible.

It’s possible to convert the text to voice a Microsoft Word document, but a PDF can run the risk of inaccessibility depending how it is made, Finkle said. A plugin for Adobe Acrobat called CommonLook helps make PDFs more accessible, he said.

ITS can determine the accessibility of a document and point that out to an instructor so that they can change something about it or convert it to a more accessible format, Finkle added.

“Your content as a writer or an instructor is not going to be available to everybody who would like to see it,” Finkle said. “We’re about getting people to understand that (with) something like 10 percent of your students or readers, you run into issues.”

Diane Wiener, director of SU’s Disability Cultural Center, said the university-wide review has not happened yet. The university is calling third-party evaluators to analyze the ICT policy, but the project is ongoing.

Wiener said the review will be about every single aspect of campus life related to disability and access — an access broadly defined but specifically related to disability justice, inclusion, identity and culture.

An Office of Civil Rights complaint was filed against the university because of an alleged inaccessible website, she said. She believes SU put together a team of people to create a strategic plan to address the issue — any accessibility concerns are being addressed immediately, she said.

If somebody’s ordering new software or hardware, it must be accessible, Wiener said.

“We shouldn’t have to retrofit things. If we buy a product and we find out there’s some concern with it, we have to work with the company to make sure that they mitigate it and address it immediately,” she said. “The law is a baseline, it’s not about the bare minimum. We want to be better than that and we are.”

Priya Penner, a junior in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management and president of the Disability Student Union, said that the DSU has been trying to continue conversations about accessibility among students.

She added that the Theta Tau controversy, where a video was released that showed people miming the sexual assault of a person with disabilities, shifted campus-wide discussions toward disability rights.

“I’ve heard that (SU has) been trying to make it more accessible and that’s great, but you shouldn’t have bought a program that was inaccessible in the first place,” she said. “It’s great that they’re making strides to make this campus more accessible, and have more accessible forums, but I think that’s one very small step in the grand scheme of things.”

Published on October 2, 2018 at 10:19 pm

Contact Sajida: skkunjum@syr.edu