As an academic hub, MSU will expand upon an existing partnership with Teach Access, consulting with them on curriculum updates and using its student experience programs to offer real-world learning opportunities, according to a news release last week. MSU will also provide insights on working with Teach Access to universities interested in serving as additional hubs.
“Promoting our programs and resources among their faculty, staff and students is critical for scaling our programs,” Rolando Méndez-Fernández, Teach Access director of education, said in a public statement.
AN ONGOING PARTNERSHIP
Teach Access is a Michigan-based nonprofit organization founded in 2015 to ensure technology developers consider the needs of people with disabilities before they go to market. The organization has been working with MSU for seven years through education and employment opportunities, recruiting students for internships and other programs. Teach Access Executive Director Kate Sonka also worked at MSU for seven years, two of which she spent teaching an Intro to Accessibility class for the university’s Experience Architecture (XA) program, which is focused on making user experiences in digital environments more accessible.
“[Teach Access] has been a constant partner, and their mission and vision align really well with what we’re trying to accomplish,” XA program director Casey McArdle said.
HIGH DEMAND
According to Teach Access, the need for this kind of education is great. A fact sheet on the organization’s website says 9 in 10 American adults use the Internet, and nearly 1 in 5 have a disability that could affect their ability to do so. It also counts more than 2,200 accessibility-related lawsuits filed in 2018 by plaintiffs who had problems with websites, which amounted to a 181 percent increase from the previous year.
Tech organizations want more accessibility education, too.
In 2022, Teach Access surveyed its membership, partners and networks to see how they fared with digital accessibility. Of the 107 respondents, two-thirds said their products were not as accessible as they wanted, and only 3 percent said their staff had the skills to bridge that gap.
HELPFUL RESOURCES
Teach Access has resources to help create a workforce that meets these needs.
“Getting people together from multiple disciplines to have these conversations is essential, because the world is interdisciplinary,” McArdle said. “Otherwise, people are building accessibility features in a silo.”
For students, Teach Access offers a student academy and an ambassador program through sponsorships with major tech companies like Google and Meta. The student academy offers insights and networking opportunities through monthly webinars on disability and accessibility topics. The student ambassadors program meets monthly as well, with discussions culminating in awareness and advocacy projects.
For educators, Teach Access offers yearlong fellowships for learning how accessibility informs the teaching practice, how to teach it to others and how to embed it into existing curriculum. This year, McArdle and MSU Associate Professor Amanda Cote are part of the 20-member cohort of Teach Access Fellows.
For employers, Teach Access also has a toolkit of languages and interview questions that companies can incorporate into the hiring process to find candidates with knowledge of digital accessibility issues.
Through the online learning management system Canvas, Teach Access also offers free educational modules for various career fields such as web development, graphic design and bioengineering. For example, one module explains that there are several ways to write code so that an image appears on a webpage, but only some of them provide descriptive texts for people using screen readers. If that image is a colorful graphic with text, the module recommends that developers and designers consider the color combinations and level of contrast, as well as using alt text.
McArdle said MSU will continue to use these resources, sponsor student experiences and connect faculty with Teach Access as an academic hub.
“We hope we can be a launching point for other universities across the nation and the world,” she said.
