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Assistive Technologies: Moving forward with accessibility

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Posted: January 29, 2016

A number of LTS Staff members serve on the accessibility/assistive technology subcommittee of the campus group, the Disability Advisory Committee. This committee is charged with coordinating, advancing, and tracking initiatives to make campus systems and services accessible to all students, faculty, and staff. Read this summary of progress made in the past year.
Raising awareness - LTS provided support and assistance with a campus-wide exhibit, a 25­ year celebration of ADA, Allies for Inclusion: The Ability Exhibit.
Captioning movies and audio recordings - Communications and Public Affairs (CPA) now captions all of its new video content using ​Threeplay media. CPA has 500 videos, 392 are captioned. Newer content is captioned. Recently LTS began captioning selected course videos using Threeplay or Ensemble’s CaptionEx. For highly technical content, a real-time transcriptionist is hired to live-caption courses.
Web site accessibility with WebAim - Web sites developed by Communications and Public Affairs are evaluated by WebAIM, a third­ party authority in web accessibility, and certified to be conformant with Level A and Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Version 2.0 and all requirements of Federal Section 508 §1194.22 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1998.
Web site quality control with SiteImprove - ​In 2015, Communications and Public Affairs and LTS acquired SiteImprove, a service that helps with web site checking. It flags broken links, misspellings, accessibility issues in web pages and pdfs, and also helps improve searching.
Software testing and trials- Several online software packages to support all learners have been tested. Sensus Access and Read and Write.
Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) - V​PATS are released by software companies and contain responses to a template of questions concerning a product’s accessibility. LTS is participating in a campus-wide effort to promote review of VPATs to ensure that new software is accessible.

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