[“Peacoat’” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Perry: Welcome to the University of Washington Libraries Digital Scholarship Summer Immersion podcast. This podcast is a companion piece to the Digital Scholarship Summer Immersion program, or DSSI and is meant to give you a greater insight to the world of digital scholarship at the UW Libraries. In each episode, we interview a UW Libraries staff member whose work impacts or intersects with digital scholarship in some way.  I’m Perry Yee and I’m the Online Learning Support Manager for the UW Libraries.

Dovi: And I’m Dovi Patiño, an Online Learning and Engagement Specialist at the UW Libraries.

Elliott: I’m Elliott Stevens, an English Studies Librarian and Research Commons Librarian. And we are the teaching team for the DSSI Podcast Track. For the last three years, we have offered online digital storytelling workshops using video and podcasting formats. We thought this podcast would be a great way to introduce ourselves, introduce our colleagues, and give you an idea of the breadth of digital scholarship support at the Libraries.

Our guest today is Andy Andrews. Andy is the Accessibility Coordinator at the UW Libraries and he works in Information Technology Services & Digital Strategies. He is an experienced Assistive Technology Specialist with a history of working in higher education. Andy, welcome to the show.

Andy: Thank you.

Elliott: All right, Andy. So we have some questions for you today: what is your favorite thing about the summer?

Andy: I think it's that you actually get to go outside and do some fun stuff like camping, hiking or just sitting outside and hanging out with friends.

Elliott: Do you have any specific summer stories to tell us? Anything short and sweet?

Andy: My wife and I just got back from camping at Orcas Islands. It was the first time we’ve ever been there so that was pretty cool.

Elliott: And can you tell us a little bit about...I mean we know the title of what you do here, but can you tell us a little bit about what do you do at the University of Washington Libraries?

Andy: So my role is really to help support staff members in their accessibility endeavors.  Whether that's helping a department figuring out what they need to do to make the content that they're creating more accessible… I help them with that and lead them to resources. I also provide training for staff so that they can improve what they’re doing for accessibility whether it's document creation or video work to help them understand how to do captioning.

Perry: So you mention accessibility and accessible items. Can you explain what accessibility is with those who might be unfamiliar with the topic?

Andy: Accessibility is really just access to the information. We have kind of, I say “we” as in generally, we have created roadblocks to other people having access to information. So you have videos but you don't have captioning. You have basically chosen to not allow access to that information for someone who is maybe deaf or hard-of-hearing or someone who has some type of cognitive audio disability where they can hear the words being spoken but they can't necessarily make sense of it because maybe the person speaking it is off screen. Since they aren’t seeing that face, they can’t process the information correctly. They kind of lose that information. So that’s what I'm talking about with accessibility - having that access.

Perry: Where do the UW libraries fit into all of this?

Andy: In so many ways! Libraries are providers of information. I mean whether it's online like a digital collection or a book on a shelf; DVDs in the media arcade...we provide a lot of information in a lot of different ways so accessibility is really important for the Libraries because our reach is huge. When we have stuff on the catalog that's online or if it's someone's dissertation that's online on our servers, that has a global reach.

Perry: So say someone comes to you and asks, “how can I integrate accessibility into my classroom or into my assignments or into my teaching?” What would you tell them?

Andy: You’d want to look at what formats they're providing that information in. If someone is using a lot of YouTube videos, it might just be showing them how to turn on the captioning feature in YouTube. If it's on their own channel, their own YouTube channel, showing them how to edit the captions because YouTube isn’t perfect. It’s AI so it doesn’t do everything perfect. It's doing its best to figure out what's being said but if there's a little bit of background noise or if maybe someone has a strong Boston accent or something like that it's going to mess up with the AI a little bit and you need to know how to fix that. So you really want to look at what they're trying to do and start pointing them in the direction and giving them the tools how to get there.

Perry: Say someone comes to you and says, “Okay, that’s great!” What resources do you give them to get started?

Andy: It depends. It's going to be the same resources whether it's a library staff member or a faculty member were to come to me. It’s just how I can get them there is going to be different. With faculty members, it would be that I have a list of links. Like, UW-IT Accessibility has a lot of great information on the website so I'm going to point them there. There are quite a few blogs out there that I'm a big fan of and I might point them to some of the disability advocates that are working on stuff like captioning. There are websites dedicated to captioning like WebAim. It’s a really great website to go to because it really breaks down what you need to be thinking about for someone who is using a screen reader when it comes to web design. What you need to be thinking about  when it comes to captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. Transcripts that work for deaf or hard-of-hearing or blind-low vision individuals. So having the web is actually kind of great. It creates its own accessibility issues obviously if someone is not thinking about accessible web design but it also has a breadth of resources to get people thinking about accessibility, too.

Perry: So that's for faculty and staff. What about students? Where do they turn?

Andy: They can go to a lot of the same resources. Sometimes a student might contact one of the librarians here because they’re like, “Oh, librarians! They know how to find things.” So they contact a librarian who will then direct the student to me and then I will point them to a lot of the same pages that I point out to faculty and staff. The resources I’m using are going to be stuff people can use for free so they don't have to worry about - you know, like a big company can  afford to pay some corporation to go out - a company to go out to make their videos accessible. Everything that I’m going to promote is going to be at low-cost to usually no-cost.

Dovi: That’s really great. It sounds like you’re pointing to a lot of resources that already exist. And so where do you turn to when you want to find new resources, more innovative practices?

Andy: So I subscribe to a lot of different this so there are there there’s a unit usability universal access list that the American Library Association has so I subscribe to stuff like that. There’s a liaison group that the University of Washington has that I sit on so I can get information from other people in the IT world. Accessibility is something that takes a lot of people to work on. As technology changes, how we make things accessible kind of has to change too to adapt. In my opinion, it’s kind of problematic how we go about creating technology. We make technology to work for us but it’s not always thinking about another user and how they might interact with the technology so it does require a lot of educating yourself and listservs are great for that. I get stuff from InsideHigherEd on stuff that’s going on with accessibility.

Dovi: Internally, thinking about the needs of UW Libraries students and faculty, what kind of needs assessments do you provide or support?

Andy: Are you thinking about staff?

Dovi: Sure!

Andy: Okay, well for staff that involves really finding out what kind of content different departments are making. Having to look at what you make. One of the big things is that libraries produce a lot of PDFs and in the early times of PDFs, those were scanned as images and not as a text-based file which created an accessibility issue. So looking at that, looking at how we fix that, where do we make the improvements, coming up with a...from this point forward we make sure that everything that is going up, all new content, is accessible. And worrying about the historical backlog.

Dovi: So we are talking about the history of accessibility and also how it’s continuing to evolve. How do you feel that in accessibility intersects or interact with digital scholarship at the UW  Libraries.

Andy: It intersects because anything could be made inaccessible. Digital inherently should be accessible because it’s born digital. Born digital, it started on a computer - that’s with we mean by born digital instead of starting on a piece of paper it actually started on something that assistive technology can interact with but there are so many ways to break that. So you make a website but you don’t use good document creation standards like using things like headings when you create a website that makes it less accessible for a screen reader. That’s something that’s going to apply when you’re doing a digital journal or something like that. Or you’re doing a podcast here. By having a podcast you have a very audio format so somebody who uses a screen reader is probably going to be fine because they’re just listening to the audio. But if someone is deaf or hard of hearing or has a cognitive disability, you might have a problem again with it being accessible because there is no transcript necessarily there or captioning. Because it’s a podcast, it’s just this audio file. So you can create some issues if you don’t think about what you’re doing and actively making sure that you don’t cut off some of your users.

Dovi: So that about wraps up our questions for today. Is there anything else that you’d like to mention that we may not have covered?

Andy: I think just when you’re out there doing your work, just really try to put yourself into it. If this was me and I had something that made it so I couldn’t listen to the audio. Maybe it’s not a disability. Maybe I’m going to be listening to it in the library and I don’t have headphones available. How can I still make sure someone can still have that podcast? How do I do that ? Transcripts! Always try to look at it from your point of view. If you took something where you couldn’t have  100% access to that, what can you do to solve that problem?

Dovi: Great! Thanks, Andy.

[“Peacoat’” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Dovi: That’s all the time we have for today. Check the show notes for a link to the transcript for today’s recording. And subscribe to the DSSI Podcast on iTunes and Google Play and wherever you get your podcasts.

Music for this episode is provided by Blue Dot Sessions. Their song, Peacoat, served as our intro and outro music. Check them out at www.sessions.blue for recordings that are Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial work.

Thanks to Andy for chatting with us. And a big thanks to you for listening to the DSSI Podcast. Catch you on the next episode.