This month, the Digital Accessibility Office celebrates five years of making UNC-Chapel Hill a more digitally inclusive campus. Since its creation in 2019, the office has made significant strides in policy, education and culture around digital accessibility at Carolina. Here’s a look back at the origins and timeline of UNC’s Digital Accessibility Office (DAO).
As long as there has been digital content, there has been a need to make it accessible. Generally, the University must follow state and federal requirements to make digital content accessible to people with disabilities. According to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, UNC must ensure equal access to its programs, services and activities for all individuals, regardless of their abilities or assistive technologies.
Content creators at the University, whether individuals or units, must make a good faith effort to make digital content, like websites, videos, apps, social media, PDFs, slide decks and more, accessible to everyone. The DAO helps content creators understand their responsibilities and empowers them to make accessibility part of daily work.
2017: Office for Civil Rights spurs action
2017 was a pivotal year for digital accessibility at UNC. Before 2017, many people, units and groups at the University, including the Accessibility Working Group, were actively working to make Carolina a more digitally inclusive place.
The Office for Civil Rights filed a complaint on June 6, 2017, alleging that several University websites were not accessible. The complaint stated that these websites were not in compliance with Section 504 and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is a federal agency that enforces civil rights laws for education programs and activities that receive funding from the U.S. Department of Education.
The OCR complaint process is a way for individuals or groups to report violations and seek remediation for violations of civil rights laws. The OCR reviews complaints, determines if it has jurisdiction and potentially investigates the violation. If the OCR finds a violation, the office works with the recipient — in this case, UNC — to negotiate a resolution agreement. The agreement outlines corrective actions and a plan to prevent future occurrences. The OCR then monitors to ensure that the recipient fulfills the obligations.
Ultimately, the OCR found that some of the University’s websites in the complaint were not accessible.
2017: Call to action and commitment to accessibility
While people and groups at the University had long been passionate about making content accessible, the OCR complaint provided a timeline and focus for further action.
UNC quickly focused its digital accessibility work on addressing the imminent threat of the OCR complaint. In June 2017, the same month the OCR filed the complaint, the University created a new Digital Access Issue reporting form. Also in June, ITS Digital Services began to work on remediating websites, created accessible design options to campus and recommitted to an accessibility-first approach to web development.
On October 11, 2017, in response to the Office for Civil Rights complaint, UNC’s Equal Opportunity and Compliance Office published a commitment and call to action on digital accessibility. This statement underscored the University’s commitment to digital accessibility and created a pathway for content owners to remediate inaccessible content.
2017-2019: Digital Accessibility Advisory Team
At about the same time as the call to action, the University made a major investment in digital accessibility and created the Digital Access Advisory Team. The group was later renamed the Digital Accessibility Advisory Team.
University leadership charged the Digital Accessibility Advisory Team (DAAT) to work on key accessibility initiatives in categories including web content, learning tools, mobile applications and multimedia.
The DAAT included accessibility leaders and advocates from a cross section of University groups, including staff from the Office of University Counsel, Student Affairs, two units in what is now the Equal Opportunity and Compliance Office, ITS and many others.
This interdisciplinary team laid the foundation to make digital content accessible at Carolina.
To address the OCR complaint, the DAAT members met weekly. They also met regularly with an external vendor to prioritize remediation, provide on-campus training opportunities and to organize making UNC’s web content accessible. ITS and ITS Digital Services played a key role in leading training sessions and consultations and providing technical solutions for web content.
As part of its charge, the DAAT created a roadmap to chart a course for building and sustaining a practice of accessibility at the University. Not only did the DAAT create the first digital accessibility policies for UNC, by creating the accessibility roadmap, the DAAT laid the foundation for the Digital Accessibility Office and centralizing digital accessibility on campus.
2019: Formalizing and funding the Digital Accessibility Office
In 2019, the DAAT worked to recruit and hire the first head of the Digital Accessibility Office, Brad Held, and three digital accessibility consultants.
The Digital Accessibility Office officially launched on July 1, 2019.
The DAO had initial two-year funding from the University to fix immediate accessibility concerns from the Office for Civil Rights complaint. But the DAO proved its value. The University renewed DAO’s funding and permanently budgeted the office through ITS. As for the DAAT, the group served as an advisory board for the DAO before dissolving in 2021.
2020-2022: Building the DAO’s core offerings
Soon after its founding, the DAO created two standards for UNC around digital accessibility, created training and began the long-term goal of fostering a culture of digital accessibility at Carolina.
The DAO’s trainings are a key part of the mission to educate the campus community. The trainings are also essential to UNC’s agreement with the OCR.
The team started with three courses — digital accessibility awareness, captioning and web accessibility basics. From July 2019 until March 2020, the DAO provided in-person training before transitioning permanently to a virtual format.
By Fall 2021, the DAO had expanded its offerings to include document remediation, social media accessibility, digital accessibility in course design and Zoom accessibility. Also in 2021, ITS began requiring that all ITS employees complete digital accessibility training.
In 2021, 608 people attended a DAO training session. In 2023, a rebuilding year for the DAO, the office had 270 attendees across 40 training sessions and 84 attendees who took asynchronous courses.
Another key outreach arm for the DAO is the Digital Accessibility Liaisons program. The Liaisons program, which grew directly from the work with the DAAT, engages accessibility advocates from across campus units. These liaisons act as an accessibility resource within their departments.
The Digital Accessibility Liaisons membership grew from 40 members at the first meeting on August 14, 2019, to 170 in 2022.
2023 and beyond: New team, new initiatives
The DAO experienced another transformational year in 2023.
In February 2023, Chelsea Porter was named the new head of the DAO. Porter joined the DAO as a consultant in 2020 and became interim head in August 2022. A few months later, Porter hired three new accessibility consultants, Sherose Badruddin, Lane Fields and Craig Hayward.
With the office fully staffed with fresh ideas and talent, the team began working on new projects and revamping existing ones.
One of these projects was to redesign the DAO website to include more self-service resources and make it easier for people to find information. The DAO launched the new site in early July after months of development and testing. The new website is also the first implementation of the DAO’s new brand. The new Carolina-forward brand colors reflect the DAO’s optimism and commitment to Carolina.
The office is currently working on updating training courses and converting the courses to new interactive asynchronous formats. The team plans to release four refreshed training courses by the end of 2024.
A major focus for the DAO over the next two years is to ensure compliance with the new rules for ADA Title II, which the US Department of Justice finalized earlier this year. The ruling requires state and local governments to make their web information and services accessible to people with disabilities. While UNC has always been required to comply with Title II, the new rules clarify the technical standards and legal obligations for web accessibility and provide guidance on how to achieve and measure compliance. The DAO will help UNC meet these requirements by updating UNC’s accessibility policy, providing training, support and resources to campus units.
The DAO plans to announce additional new projects and campus initiatives in the coming months.
As the DAO celebrates its five-year milestone, the team looks to the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. The office hopes to expand its reach and continue its work to make UNC a more digitally inclusive space for all.