Moving past panic mode

For academics, compliance is a dirty word, evoking visions of Vogons stomping through our lovely courses yelling Resistance is useless! We're happy to insist that students comply with disciplinary conventions regarding format, syntax, citation styles, and so on, and we absolutely insist that students comply with requirements for completing their programs, but we balk at complying with procedures mandated by our own institutions, much less federal mandates.

Which is why I had to try to talk some colleagues down off the ledge this morning. Panic may be an appropriate response to some situations, but it's not my favorite way to start a faculty workshop.

The topic was accessibility--big scary word that means a million different things, but at the moment it means that federal law requires us to make course materials accessible to all kinds of students, including those who are visually impaired. The deadline, thankfully, has been extended until next April, but that doesn't mean we should sit on our hands until the Vogons come stomping through and hold a gun to our heads--or, more likely, a lawsuit. So the Instructional Technologist and I invited faculty to join us for two workdays in a computer-equipped classroom, and we even fed them muffins and lunch. 

The plan was to provide guidelines and techniques for making course materials accessible and then set faculty loose to work on their own materials (documents, presentations, Canvas pages) while we offered one-on-one assistance. But first we had to defuse the panic.

I can understand the source of the panic: if someone told me to insert alternative text descriptions for every image I've ever used in a PowerPoint presentation, I'd panic too. But no one is asking anyone to do that. This workshop was called "Small Change, Big Impact," and the goal was to persuade a few faculty members to, at the bare minimum, make their syllabi fully accessible and to think about accessibility when creating new course materials. We're not interested in the past; we want to make small changes moving forward so that eventually we'll all be in full compliance with the law, though maybe the best we can hope for is that most of us will be closer to partial compliance.

Well this morning you'd have thought we were asking people to sacrifice their firstborns on the altar of Moloch. No one was holding a gun to anyone's head! We were just trying to help! Baby steps, people! Move the needle a few degrees! A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step! And now I'm running out of cliches to describe the minimal changes we're requesting.

At one point I looked at the sea (well, puddle) of angry faces and realized that I don't even need to be there. I'm retiring in December! I could just ignore these new guidelines and fade off into the sunset before the deadline, but instead I was sitting there trying to figure out how to format class readings so they're be comprehensible to a student relying on a text reader. It has to do with formatting headings, and establishing reading order in PowerPoints, and inserting alternative text for images. Not rocket science, in other words, except for the STEM people in the room who have to figure out how to translate complex scientific images into readable text. But we have a year to figure this out! Let's take advantage of the time available and get it done.

(What about a student too visually impaired to be able to see through a microscope? He could become James Thurber is what I want to say, but probably someone else is better equipped to come up with a helpful response.)

By the end of the day we'd all learned a thing or two and made at least a few improvements, and many of us will go back and continue the process tomorrow, keeping the panic at bay as much as possible. Here's what really scares me, though: Less than one-fifth of our faculty showed up for today's workshop. What about the rest? Who will motivate them to make the changes needed to comply with this federal mandate?

Maybe it's time to send in the Vogons.