Campus leaders value IT accessibility

AccessComputing has produced a new video that features university presidents, chief information officers, and other information technology (IT) leaders discussing the importance of IT accessibility on campus.

In the video, leaders stress the importance of planning ahead and choosing technology that is already accessible rather than retrofitting products after they've been purchased. As indicated by University of Washington President Michael Young, "Universal design is a very powerful concept because what it means is we look at the issue of accessibility at the outset rather than buying something or engaging something or developing something that we have to retrofit which not only makes it cheaper and more efficient, it likely makes it much better in terms of both the quality of the product and the accessibility to all the people that we want to be able to use it."

Having buy-in from key leaders can assist accessibility advocates on campus. Institutions nationwide are encouraged to share this video with their faculty and administrators and to link to it from key websites.

The video is available on the DO-IT Video site, which includes captioned and audio described versions, a fully accessible media player, an interactive transcript, links to YouTube versions, and downloadable versions in Quicktime and Windows media formats: https://www.washington.edu/doit/videos/index.php?vid=55

For more information, visit Accessible Technology at the UW.

AccessComputing is funded by the National Science Foundation as part of the Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) program (grant #CNS-0540615, CNS-0837508, and CNS-1042260) and led by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and DO-IT at the University of Washington.