Skip to content
Accessible Technology

UW Accessible Technology in 2020

Posted on

Welcome to 2020! We in UW-IT Accessible Technology Services (ATS) are excited for the new year and new decade. We wrapped up 2019 with momentum:

  • On November 13, 36 people participated in the Fall meeting of the IT Accessibility Liaisons network. The meeting was a “strategies session,” focusing on implementing IT accessibility within units or departments and including accessibility in staff trainings. Representatives from various UW groups shared their experiences, promising practices, and challenges.
  • On December 6, IT accessibility specialist Hadi Rangin was joined by Mary Mulvill, UW service owner of ServiceNow, and Aaron Powell, Vice President for UW Information Technology and CIO, in traveling to San Diego for a productive meeting with ServiceNow leadership, which resulted in ServiceNow taking concrete actions to improve their products’ accessibility.
  • On December 12, 38 people gathered for the first ever UW Drupal/WordPress accessibility sprint. Web designers, developers, and/or content authors worked together to fix accessibility issues on their websites. We provided coffee and pizza, and some people stayed for the entire all-day event.

We have already continued to build on that momentum in 2020. Just as New Years celebrations were winding down, I gave a presentation on January 2 called “Web Accessibility in 2020,” presented at the year’s first Web Council meeting, which was attended by 30 people (20 in person and 10 remote). Then later that morning, ATS hosted its first IT Accessibility Office Hours, something we’ll be doing every month in 2020 except February. Please stop by HUB 238 with your IT accessibility questions the first Thursday of each month at 11:00 am.

One of our activities in the new year is this blog. We anticipate having lots of news items to share, and this blog will provide a new channel for doing that.

As I said in the January 2 Web Council meeting, please consider adding accessibility-related goals to your New Years resolutions. We in ATS are here to support you however we can in meeting those goals. Feel free to reach out via help@uw.edu and let us know how we can help.