**Ravish Khanna:** Hi, everybody! Welcome on in! I am very, very happy to introduce you all and have you here today with me. Now, today, we're going to get into an extra special webinar, the one of which, like, Yuju have never seen before, and we're gonna start off today with one of my favorite people that I've talked to in a very, very long time. I'm sure you've seen his work before, I'm sure you've been introduced to his content, but today we have the honor of Shawn Jordison joining us. Now, Shawn, also known as the Accessibility Guy, is an Accessibility Specialist with more than 17 years of experience helping organizations creates, produce, and remediate, right, accessible documents, digital content, and training programs. He provides training and consulting on Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF Accessibility, Section W508, WCAG, PDF, UA, and so much more. Shawn also practices Accessibility Guidelines, through which many of you may know him, through his YouTube channel, on the Accessibility Guy, with more than 45,000 subscribers. And of course, he is the champion with the belt as well, too. So, without further ado. Shawn, why don't you come on board, brother? Very, very happy to have you, man. How you doing, bro?

**Shawn Jordison:** I'm doing so good! That was, like, the best intro I've ever received in my whole life. You're hired. Thank you so much for that, I appreciate you.

**Ravish Khanna:** Alright, you're all good, brother. You go take the reins, man, start us off.

**Shawn Jordison:** Awesome, awesome. Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar on building a Culture of Accessibility. Ravish said it perfectly, I've been doing this for way too long, it feels like it's been my only grown-up job, and over the last few years, I've personally been able to assist a whole bunch of different organizations move from not that accessible to very accessible. And I'm hoping that today's presentation of building a Culture of Accessibility will resonate with some of you, and I'm gonna get real technical on you. I know we do a lot of play and a lot of fun, you know, being a champion and all of these things, but the underlying value is that Accessibility is important, you can do it today, and I'm hopefully gonna give you some ideas to take back to your organization, to best implement accessibility, especially with that, main event match coming in, April of 2027. No, I'm not talking about WrestleMania, I'm talking about the Title II deadline. So, let's begin screen sharing. And we will take it away. Now, typically, if you have attended any of my normal stuff that I do as the Accessibility Guy, I love to be interrupted, but it appears we have a Q&A feature, Don't let me misspeak, though, Yuja, here, if there is not a Q&A, but please put any questions you may have as we go along, and my plan is to get through this slide deck and, answer any remaining questions.

**Ravish Khanna:** We do Ravish Q&A feature. I was gonna say, yeah, you're all good, yeah, so for everybody.

**Shawn Jordison:** Awesome.

**Ravish Khanna:** questions, we'll facilitate them right at the end as well, too, so go ahead and drop them in Q&A. Thanks.

**Shawn Jordison:** Excellent. Thank you, my friend. Alright, let's jump right into this. Building a Culture of Accessibility, a practical framework for audit resources, champions, and training, presented by yours truly. So, in our 45 minutes together today, we are going to, talk about the following. So, I'd love to know… I guess this is gonna be a little challenging to do, let's do some emojis. I'd love to get a thumbs up if you own the accessibility at your organization. I'm just curious, are you the person that everyone goes to? Are you the person passing out the information? Are you the person doing all of the work? Oh, I see a whole bunch of hands and laughing faces. I feel the laughy face, like, I get it. Amazing. Wow, look at all of those thumbs up. And party. Woohoo, it's a party. Amazing. So you are the right people to be talking to, but I think it's important to note that not one individual should own the accessibility. So, it's not really a trick question, but more of just getting to know my audience here. And, we're gonna talk about why accessibility culture matters in your organization. And I also have a four-step framework Which includes auditing your resources, building out champions, and designated… designating training. We're gonna take a look at accountability for things like owners, schedules and measures, some action planning, and then we'll close for some questions. Sound like a good time? Alright. So, who currently owns accessibility in your organization? And my bad, I didn't realize we weren't going to have an active chat. That's… it's probably better this way, because I get carried away going in the chat. you can think about this question to yourself. So, if you are the leader of your organization, or maybe your department, or if you just have you know, your own accessibility guy or gal in your organization that does all of this stuff, you might consider opening that up a little bit. It's a little bit unfair. What if that person leaves? what is your organization going to do to maintain accessibility? This stuff isn't easy. I've been doing this, like I said, for way too long, and I still learn stuff on a day-to-day basis about accessibility. You know, how do we tag don't let me go down this rabbit hole, but how do you tag math formulas inside of a PDF with the new PDF 2.0? that has recently been released this year. You know, how do you understand how different assistive technologies work with your documents, your web pages, your course content? There are so many nuances to accessibility, it's honestly unfair for that to be on the shoulders of one person. Let me tell you, as someone that has often been the only champion, these shoulders are tired. You know, I need some help. I need some tag team partners, if you will. So, accessibility belongs in the work. We tend to find it in two places right now. Usually, I'll be honest, the companies that I personally support are, reactive companies. Now, my favorite companies to work with are the ones that make it a part of their process, but it really just depends. So, reactive is when we fix errors after they've been reported. So work typically starts with a complaint or a request. The effort is kind of unplanned, and it's urgent, and there's no money, right? That's usually the situation that we find. The same problems tend to repeat over and over in your new content. And typically, one person is doing the panicking. and they're absorbing that workload, they find me on YouTube, and they're like, how do I tag a PDF? And then they realize they're working with a scanned image, or something like that, and let me tell you, that's a much more difficult process. In addition to that, when you are reactive, your cost and risk are much more unpredictable. You know, in that same example where you have a one-page file. Thinking it's something, like, super easy to tag, and then you realize it's a form, or a scanned image, or it contains math, you've just, like, tripled your cost and your time. Now, anytime we can build it in as part of the regular process, you're going to get, brownie points from me, or internet points, if you want them. Consider this the road to accessibility, okay? So when it's built in, work is scheduled, and it's budgeted, it's accounted for. Your requirements are known before the content is even created. Templates can help prevent repeated errors, and responsibility is distributed, and that cost and risk becomes much more predictable. By a show of thumbs up, or whatever your favorite emoji is, it could be anything, I'd love to know how many of you have been asked to make this thing accessible, last notice, or late notice, there's no additional funding, and you have to fix it, like, right now. That's… that's everybody. That's actually, like. you're my people, alright? We've got a common… some trauma bonding here, am I right? Here's another one. Raise your hand if you've ever been personally victimized by Adobe Acrobat Pro, DC. Alright, just kidding, we're gonna move on. You guys know me, I'm a… I'm a goofball. So, here's an example that we're gonna kind of carry on our back throughout this session today, and it's kind of just like a talking point. It is a fictional, made-up example. I have plenty of real ones, but I don't want to accidentally name-drop. So, let's see, we've got a sample county. And here are some typical numbers that we actually see. So, I worked for the county. And they have, 4,000 PDF documents. And I'm not talking pages. Our own internal data tells us that a typical PDF, on average, is between 3 and 8 pages. It really has, like, a large scale, but that's because we work with a lot of, financial end-of-year reports that are hundreds of pages that tend to skew that number. We also work on a lot of textbooks, and then we… the bulk of the work is in… in this example, with this sample county, agenda and meeting minutes. Pro tip. Get those templatized, okay? That's what you want to do. Now, this county also had a public website. Intranet and a learning management system. That's so much content to review. They've also purchased a whole bunch of platforms, for their county, including one for permits, payments, and job applications, and there's over 300 employees who create or publish content as part of their job. And, they've got one Accessibility Coordinator who was hired 8 months ago. Raise your hand if that's… if that's you. Just kidding. I… I appreciate all your engagement here. Thank you, friends. So this is, like, this is a tough situation. This is a tough situation to be in, especially for this new Accessibility Coordinator who's, like, just getting their teeth in to what accessibility even is. Yeah, so let's… let's keep going here. Now, this four-step framework, this is something we use live with clients whenever we possibly can, and it begins with step one, which is an audit. You have to understand what you have before you can begin this accessibility journey. After you've done your audit, we can then look at resource allocation. How is this work going to be completed? Are you going to do it in-house? Are you going to send it to the accessibility guy? Or are you going to do a combination of those things together? Now, once we have an audit, once we understand, like, the true scope of this, I've worked in an organization, or with an organization, that actually had 25,000 PDFs, and they only had about 6 people to distribute this work. There's no possible way they would be able to complete this work. That same organization in the example I just shared, they were creating 500 new pages per week in content. This was for a huge county. Anyways, let's keep talking. So after we do the audit, we understand what we're gonna do internal or external, if we even have any money to outsource the work, we're going to do champion identification. Now, don't get hung up on the language here, this is me nerding out, okay? I love the champion language, it resonates with my, love for professional wrestling. The idea here is you want someone to… that you can point to, someone that you can go to, to help build a network of support. And if you don't have anyone, I'll be that guy for you, okay? So, you're not alone in this, we can do this together. Step 4 is to figure out what the heck we're gonna do for training, okay? There's no way we can make 4,000 documents accessible with no training. So give people the skills needed for their specific role. for their specific roles. Now, it's important to repeat this as your organization changes. If you get a new director, if there's new staff, if there's new tech procurement, it's important to keep this cycle going, and This is the best thing you could do, in my opinion. So let's deep dive a little bit into that audit step, understanding what exactly you have. So what an audit is and what to ask. An audit is basically an inventory, not a test of every item. This is not, This is the other definition of audit. Just like accessibility, there's a couple definitions of it. This is a spreadsheet. if you want to be really basic about it, it's enough to start. And what it's going to include is what digital content do we create, and who owns it? Which department? Maybe which website? What assets are public-facing? Which assets are required to complete a task or receive a service? This is such an important question to ask yourself. And, which assets did we purchase rather than build? If you put some money behind it, there's a good chance that that vendor is actually responsible for the accessibility. So, this is what I would include in your inventory as you go and build it. Now, you might need a couple of staff people to help you build this inventory. This is what we find covers pretty much everything. First, we're gonna look at content and documents. Excuse me. And that's going to include things like websites, any web applications that you might be using, and yes, a fully comprehensive list of every PDF and Office document, Do you… does your website use video, audio, podcasts? What about your learning management system? Do you have faculty creating video, audio podcasts? What about forms and surveys that are available on the web? And you could even get into email templates, social posts, or web templates, too. Now, as far as your systems and platforms, there are a lot of, tools out there that can help you categorize this data. But just start with writing them down, okay? And they might include learning management systems, your internal employee systems, mobile applications, purchase software and platforms, any kiosks and digital displays, policies, procedures, and templates. I once worked with an organization I won't name. They had a bunch of kiosks, and I have to tell you, it was one of the more fun projects, because it's very unique on how to make a kiosk Accessible. Anyways, that's another discussion. Next, we're gonna talk about how to prioritize what you actually found during your audit. This is a graphic which has several different items on it. On the left-hand side, we have an impact score from low to high, and on the bottom, going from left to right, we have frequency of use, going from low to high. Now. In this example, you want to start with your essential services, your public content, and your highest traffic assets, okay? Plan your remediation for high impact, low use, review and monitor your lower impact and lower use content. You want to address first your high-impact, high-use components, and improve in the workflow the lower impact, high-use pieces of information, okay? So, here's the leadership takeaway for step one. You cannot build an accessibility plan until you understand the size and location of the work. So here's, like, a discussion, thing to help you out. Name 3 types of digital content your organization creates or purchases. And now answer this, who owns those 3 items? This is gonna help you get started in building that audit. And, in the sample county, the audit's real finding was that no one owned the 4,000 PDFs. They were just, you know, in the wind, if you will. Alright, step two, resource allocation. Decide how that work is actually going to be completed. So, are you gonna do this internally, or send it out to the accessibility guy? I'm just kidding, you don't have to send it to me. There are lots of companies out there, I get it. So, here's my advice. Try to do it internally whenever you can. Here's some criteria to make that decision. If you have staff regularly creating content. You should probably do it internally. If the accessibility requirements are predictable, you're working with the same content. Templates can help you reduce repeated work. Staff have protected time for the work. Training and quality review are available. So, I don't want you giving these 4,000 PDFs to your staff if they have a regular full-time job. It's just not fair, okay? We have estimates internally that it can take 10 minutes to a full hour to remediate a PDF using traditional non-AI tools, okay? Now, you also are going to need to send them someplace if they have a problem. It's one thing to make an agenda accessible, it's another to make a 100-page budget report, okay? So they're gonna need access to training, whether that's internal or external, There's a lot of free stuff out there, but you probably need, like, a structured training program in order to get your staff up to speed to where they could even accomplish this work. Now, outside support, when should you actually outsource it if you have a huge backlog? Okay, if there's just no way you're gonna make a dent, by April of 2027, you might consider sending it out. If your documents are super complex or highly technical, this is typically the work that's sent to me. People never send me easy stuff, okay? I only get the 100-page budget reports, the environmental impact reports, the tri-fold county displays, failing color contrast, and just, like. they're… They're really intense, ones that send me. And it makes sense. This is what I do all day, every day. So… Maybe you delineate some of those really complex files, and you… Send them out at a later time. Sorry, I lost my… I lost my train of thought here, one moment. And if you have short deadlines, so if your deadlines, You don't have a lot of time, this is a good time to send them out. Also, what if you need specialized testing? So, if your organization is tasked with, like, filling out a VPAT, I hope you have a staff member that uses a screen reader who can kind of talk the talk with WCAG, because otherwise, they should not be filling out a VPAT. Sometimes, you need third-party independent validation for your product, your tool, or just someone to give you, like, a good ol' thumbs up that you're doing the right you're doing the right project. That is a good time to outsource the work. Alright, we're gonna keep on going before I review the QA. Here's a blended approach in practice. So, number one, your content or service is identified. Then, number two, you're gonna ask yourself, can staff handle the accessibility work in-house? If the answer is yes. I highly recommend developing some type of workflow that is going to help your internal team. If the answer's no, you might look at a specialist or vendor support, and the work is completed by external experts. Either way, this is going to take you to the next step, which is totally misnumbered, it should be number 4. You want to do a quality review. Verify accuracy and the accessibility, even of the vendor-provided work. And then finally, I give you permission to finally hit that publish button and, try to keep Your accessibility current and consistent. Here are some examples. New Word and PowerPoint files. Give them to your champion, or the people on the champion's team, to help make them accessible. For any complex legacy PDFs, we've worked with a ton of organizations that, you know, they just scanned in all their documents, threw them on the website, and called it a day. Those are good ones to outsource because there's so many of them. If you have high-impact testing required, you probably want to have an independent specialist, unless you have someone on your team, to ensure the real-world accessibility. Typically, this is for, like, if you have an online form or an application that needs that VPAT. Which is a voluntary product Accessibility Template, for those of you who don't know. Here's a leadership takeaway for step two, your resource allocation. Resource allocation is more than a budget line. It's a decision about people, time, tools, expectations, and quality control. I'm not super religious, but I want to be like, can I get an amen? Because this is, like, so important, right? That leadership understand that this takes time, okay? You can't just go make a PDF accessible if a person has a regular full-time job. As someone with a regular full-time job of making PDFs accessible, and I get another PDF, I have to put it in queue. Right? It comes after the work that has already been prioritized. That's just the way that it is, and your staff needs to know that too, okay? So here's the discussion for internal, outsourced, or blended. Let's say your organization… I want you to think about you for a moment, okay? you have a backlog of 2,000 legacy PDFs you do weekly PowerPoint presentations, and you have a new public-facing software platform. What are you gonna do? There's no right answer here, this is just to get ya… get you thinking, okay? In this sample county we've been talking about, a vendor took the entire backlog, staff kept the new content and the templates, and they worked with the vendor to make those templates accessible. Now they've been able to plug the holes, and… Get the water out of the boat with the backlog, okay? Alright, we're getting through this bad boy. Next up is champion identification. Build a network of support. So, what Accessibility Champions do. Now, this is my, personal professional hat, okay? What I say here isn't, like, the holy grail, if you will. This is just what we've seen working in large organizations. So, champions connect Accessibility to their department's work. They are not a remediation team. However, in some situations, they are also the remediation team, okay? What we see works best, though, is they're kind of like the point person. So they can answer everyday questions and share accessibility updates throughout the organization. They can reinforce department expectations and use the… of accessible templates. An example might be. Thank you for submitting this document, Shawn. I noticed you didn't use the approved template that went through the accessibility rigor from last week. Please update your template. please update your document using the accessible template, and resend it. So this is a way of, like, helping spread the accessibility work across your org, instead of it just being on… on Shawn's hands, okay? Next, we need to, this champion should hopefully be able to identify training needs and raise them with leadership. So, if they find, like, that the Accessibility Guy does comprehensive accessibility training on Word, PowerPoint, PDF, Excel, closed captioning, they should reach out to them, right? I'm using myself as a… Placeholder, obviously, but the goal, you need somebody to communicate that to leadership. Okay, leadership is also busy. They're trying to run a whole college or a county, there's a lot going on, and so we need that champion to be a champion. They need to bring the training needs, they need to share the updates, they kind of need to be the point person or the lead for the accessibility. And finally, they're going to be responsible for escalating complex issues to the right people. Alright. In my opinion, the champion's role could be done in just 2 hours a month. We'll see about that, though. Responsible for answering routine questions in their department, sharing updates in accessible templates, flagging training needs to leadership. Thank you for that one laughy emoji. That was for you. You must be a specialist in this field. I can't see who's doing it, but I… I feel it. Okay, don't distract me. Let's see. They're also going to be representing the department in the champion network. So, in this big organization I've helped with, they had, like, 14 different departments. Every department got a champion, and we would hold bi-weekly meetings for the champions. get them trained up as much as possible so that they were able to communicate this information across the constituents. Now, this organization, they also had instructor-led training, they had self-paced training, they had a whole bunch of resources. So, when you have the right puzzle pieces on the board, you can build that puzzle pretty quickly. But if you're like my kids, and you huck them all over the place, that puzzle's always gonna feel a little incomplete. Now, in my opinion, the champion's role, they are not responsible for the following. Remediating the department's document backlog. They are not responsible for texting testing or fixing purchased software. They are not responsible for writing policy or technical standards. They are not responsible for being the department's accessibility expert. They are not responsible for absorbing the work in unprotected time. Where champions belong, and who fits. So, it's my opinion, you should cover these areas first. Now, this totally is dependent on your org, okay? I kind of used, in the back of my mind, the organization we had worked with. cover these areas first, because they make the most amount of content. Communications and marketing, information technology, procurement, human resources, learning and development, and customer or student services. And strong champions usually understand their department's process, they can communicate well with others. This one's really important, okay? This person needs to be able to communicate. I've personally never met a stranger, so you want to find somebody… I'm not saying you need to find somebody like me, but… it's important that this person is approachable, okay? Because they're gonna get a lot of questions. Strong champions usually have support from their manager, they can help influence routine decisions in the workflow, and they're gonna have protected time for that role. Alright, here's the leadership takeaway, step 3 for champions. Champions help extend accessibility knowledge across your organization. They should not become the only people responsible for the work. Here's a discussion item for you. Which 3 departments in your organization need an Accessibility Champion first? I'm sure you got something going on, thinking about it. The sample county, we did communications, public works, and procurement. We felt those were the highest impact first. Alright, step 4, we are almost near the end of my, scheduled lecture content. Training. Give people the skills needed for their roles. Training should definitely follow the job. So start with your leadership. Everything below depends on these four decisions. So, you need to set accessibility expectations for staff and for vendors. Like, if you're working with a third-party vendor, and they say, what is accessibility? You probably need to find another vendor. Make sure you assign budget, tools, and protected time for this work. This is, like, the biggest item that doesn't have a line item in most people's organization. And it requires the most amount of time, training, and resources. People just… Sweep it under the rug. Not anymore, we can't… we can't do that anymore. It's important that you review progression and set a schedule, okay? This isn't gonna happen overnight. 2,000 PDFs, if you sent it to me and my team. it's probably roughly 10,000 to 15,000 pages, you're looking at a month turnaround time, and that's with my entire team working on it, everybody full-time, okay? This stuff takes time, and… It's already August. And it's also important that leadership helps support the Champion network, okay? Alright. Role-based training, you can take these slides. This is kind of, like, my personal opinion. Not everybody does role-based training. A lot of orgs do, okay? People who create and publish, like content creators, their roles that they need to learn. So if you're a content creator, you need to learn all about headings, alt text, contrasts, links, and tables. If you're a document specialist, you need to understand, like, Word, PowerPoint as a whole, PDF remediation as a whole. If you are creating video content, and you have a media team, you need to look at captions, transcripts, audio description, that full process. And the people who buy, build, and support your organization, this might be the web and dev teams. They need to be responsible for the web content accessibility guidelines, keyboard access, screen reader testing. Your procurement teams need to update the contract language, the conformance reports, and vendor questions. And your champions are going to help with common barriers, department requirements, and when to escalate to leadership. Alright, leadership takeaway for training, do not give everyone the same training, okay? Bob, over here, who makes agendas. maybe doesn't need the multimedia training, but Jill, who's doing your, weekly town hall meeting that's getting published to YouTube each month. she's gonna need to know what tools to caption that video, and what captioning even means. So, try to match the role to the training. If you're in a smaller organization, this is much more difficult. I can recognize that. You might consider an executive leader, communications employee, procurement specialist, web developer, and the Accessibility Champion. They might all have different training, okay? In that same county example, procurement training prevented the next inaccessible platform purchase. So when you got procurement on board, this happens a lot at colleges, where they go to buy third-party LTIs to integrate into their LMS, Nobody did a review, and then that college gets sued because a student failed because of an inaccessible issue. That's actually the college's responsibility, not the vendor's. The college needs to ensure that the vendor is You know, up to par with these accessibility requirements. Alright. Every step needs an owner and a measure, without a date. a name and a number, the framework becomes a document that just lives on the web instead of practice. So… You might consider an audit owner. This is gonna be maybe the Accessibility Coordinator. You can review annually, measure asset with a named owner, resources, you want to figure out who's the owner of that, your champions, they maybe meet monthly, they measure the departments covered, and where the process is along the way, and training owner. You need to have someone that's in learning and development, and… Perhaps they can help assign the training to the specific staff. They could also measure completion and understand in the organization who needs additional training. There's a lot that goes on with this. As a reminder, the framework is a cycle, it's not a project, so it's… it's going. Okay, you start with the audit, understanding what you have, figuring out your resource allocation, the budget, whether you're gonna do it internally, send it out, your champion identification, building a network of support in your org, and figuring out what skills People need for their roles, and you repeat. Accessibility is a shared responsibility. Everyone has a role. Leaders should set expectations and approve resources. Your department champions should connect Accessibility to department processes. Procurement teams should review accessibility before purchasing. Your accessibility specialists should provide guidance, testing, and quality review. Your content creators need to apply accessibility when creating that content, and technology teams include accessibility in design, testing, and maintenance. So… who owns responsibility… excuse me… who owns accessibility in your organization? Everyone has a role, we don't need everybody to be the accessibility guy, but we need everyone to understand that this is important, and that they can make a real difference by implementing whatever they can today. Alright, before you leave, I'd like for you to make Four decisions, okay? Your action plan boils down into these… these four things here, okay? Asset category and inventory. Departments that need champions, the training needs, and the resource decision. Okay? So, closing message, a culture of accessibility is built when accessibility becomes part of how work is assigned, completed, reviewed, and improved. Understand what you have, and then decide how the work gets done. Identify the people who can support the effort, and train them for their roles. Give every step an owner, a schedule, and a measure, and you cannot fail. that concludes today's session. I'm gonna hang out, we're gonna answer some questions. And this is the first time I give in this session. Felt pretty good, I must say. Excuse me. Alright, let me open up this Q&A. First question is, Shawn, how are you so incre- just kidding. Alright, Robin asked, if a document is created in Word, with headings and navigation, then saved as PDF, will that PDF be appropriately searchable and accessible? Robin, that's a great question. I would say it's possible. So, the process from Word to PDF, if you do everything accurately in Word, and you have a fairly simple document, I would say it's gonna be totally accessible in PDF. But here's the rub. It depends on your organization. So, some organizations have to meet compliance to WCAG 2.1 AA. Some organizations have internal policies where we make our PDF documents PDF UA compliant, which stands for Universal Accessibility. It's an international standard. So, if you needed to pass reports, you need, like, a document that says, yes, it's accessible. you might have to do a couple extra steps, but if you format that Word document to your little heart's desire, you ensure that you've used styles, hyperlinks, images with alt text, properly formatted links, table of contents, You're probably gonna be okay. Marty asks, can you share a resource on tagging math equations in PDF, like you mentioned at the beginning? This is new to me. Marty, my friend, it is new to me, too. I don't have a direct resource for you offhand, so this is a new guidance from the PDF Association. There's a PDF 2.0, and it's a little rigid, so… In a perfect world, you are able to export from a LaTeX editor to PDF, The equations will be nested inside of a formula tag. And inside the formula tag, they will actually have MathML tags. Here's the rub. Works great with NVDA, JAWS can't read it at all. So there's a lot of nuance happening with math accessibility. It's also something that I specialize in personally, It just becomes the nature when you do this work, and there's a lot changing. I have never seen more changes than I have in the last year around accessibility, particularly in math. Megan said, how do you see AI playing a role in accessibility? I've tried to use it for remediation purposes to see what happens, but it's very inconsistent so far. Megan, that's a great question. I think it totally depends on the platform you're using and your overarching goal. There are some organizations that are choosing to ditch all of their PDFs in favor of HTML. I think that's one good use of AI. It just depends on your org. I personally… if the Accessibility Guide does the document, we use Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. I love all the shiny tools out there, but the truth of the matter is that They tend to cost more than Adobe Acrobat, okay? And in my personal, professional opinion. they… they're just a shinier box. I don't know. I go with the devil I know, which is Adobe Acrobat Pro. Most of the shiny tools, I can do everything that they can do in Acrobat. However, I will say, if you're a power user, and your job is to make documents accessible every single day, you might consider another tool to help leverage that process, but I definitely would, test the AI, and it really depends on the object. Don Dunaway, I recognize you. Hello, Don, how are you? Have you worked with any higher education digital textbook organizations on their accessibility, especially for STEM? I have. touched on a couple of OER textbooks, here's what you do. if they're… It's a tricky answer. If your textbooks are in PDF, Right now, we're kind of defaulting to alternate text on the stem. However, it is my preference, if we can get those textbooks in HTML, we can make the math in STEM fully accessible via MathML. there are some tools to help that process, but Don, I would say, it totally depends on, like, the platform provider, right? If it's an OER textbook, if we're locked into a library system, our, our options are a little limited. If you just, like, have the PDF in your back pocket on your computer ready to rock. It is my preference that we would do spoken math alternate text until… the formula in MathML tags become a little more stable. Like I said previously, JAWS can't read that content right now, but NVDA can, so it just depends. Alright. KRISTIN asked, how can higher institutions structure outsourcing workflows for PDF remediation, specifically for complex course materials like discipline-specific charts. graphs and diagrams, so that external vendors generate alt text without placing an undue burden on faculty researchers, while also preventing a scenario where faculty remediation leaves non-technical instruction… instructors unable to fix errors. As a vendor, is there something in your workflow to account for this? I can't speak for other vendors. What I would say is you kind of have to do your due diligence. So, for me personally, Shawn, the accessibility guy. I've worked with a couple of institutions that we kind of have this same problem. They're more advanced technical courses. Here's what we do. We tend to either set up a workflow where our team is handwriting the alternate text using AI for context. That's how we write them in-house for more technical accessibility, for alt text. Now, if you're working with it… some faculty want to approve everything, KRISTIN, so if you were like, alright, Shawn, we've got several STEM faculty, some compsci, and fit… physical science courses that need to be made accessible. What I would do is I would prep you a spreadsheet with a screenshot of the image and the proposed alt text, and we would either approve it or deny it. So, the takeaway here, KRISTIN, is that I would work with your vendor, or, like. if it were me, I would work with you to develop a workflow. A lot of the bigger accessibility companies, there's no face, right? Part of why I do what I do is because I'm front and center all the way, which is a good and bad thing. The bigger companies don't have a face, so who are you gonna call? When you email Shawn, you're gonna get Shawn and, our team that has been trained up to these important standards, so… I hope that helps answer your question. I would say we need to, like. We would need to talk together to make that process work, but we totally could do that. Krista said, any tips for establishing faculty champions? I find that faculty are more likely to listen to other faculty. Krista, that is a great question. I've personally worked at several different colleges here in… I'm based in California, but I've worked with probably over 100 colleges across the U.S. and several international. It's really hard. It depends on your campus culture. You probably would already know who those faculty champions are. Like, when you wrote that comment, you're like, oh, I've got somebody in mind. Reach out to them and ask them. at a local community college before I was the accessibility guy where I worked, we had department chairs, and they weren't necessarily designated as champions. However, we kind of did a similar process where they would help share information in their monthly meetings, so it really is just like. Krista, you would probably be the main champ, right? You'd be the world heavyweight, if you will, and your job would probably be figuring out what that process looks like for your college. If you want any particular help, feel free to reach out to me, but I feel ya. It's a… it's a little bit of a journey to establish, and they gotta want it. And they gotta be approachable, which is a unique faculty member in itself. Kristen said, do you really think that there aren't some training that is applicable to all? I'd argue that everyone needs Accessibility Core Fundamentals, typography, alt text, etc. as anything that is university business, including emails, as they fall under Title II, I agree in the past that some Topics may be positioned. It really depends. So, in my mind, this presentation is geared towards government and higher ed. I don't think that… the people… it's really challenging. It's really challenging. As an example, I have an in-depth math accessibility training. Based on your question, right, does everyone need that? Probably not, probably just the math faculty. But does that same math faculty need the closed captioning training, or how to make their Canvas course accessible? Maybe. It really depends. So, I would say… use this as a jumping-off point, not as, like, a definitive, not every staff needs all training. If your organization has the time, the money, the resources to help facilitate it. Of course, I would love everyone to be up there with their accessibility knowledge. The simple fact is, when you have an org with 1,000 plus employees, or some college universities where they have 300 to 500 faculty. It becomes a bit of hurting cats, and we find that if you narrow the focus on training, more people are apt to sign up for the ones that resonate with them. Just my two cents, but it could really go in a lot of directions. Alright, I'm gonna keep running these questions, Ravish. I think I got to the top of the hour. If you want to pop in at any time to stop me, by all means, otherwise I'm gonna keep going. Alright, Meredith…

**Ravish Khanna:** You are free to keep asking as many as you want, but I feel like we're, like, nearing the time. How about this? Why don't you go ahead, let's do one last one, and then…

**Shawn Jordison:** One last one.

**Ravish Khanna:** Yeah, one last.

**Shawn Jordison:** Alright.

**Ravish Khanna:** Excellent.

**Shawn Jordison:** Oh, let's see. Oh, there's so many in here! Alright, let's see, let's see, I wish we could vote! I don't know. I don't know. What are some document remediation vendors? That's unfair. I'm gonna say me. The Accessibility Guy handles at volume. tons of documents, we do it all. Environmental impact reports, agendas, minutes, textbooks. There are others. There are others, but I'm not gonna name them, so… With… with love and respect. There's… I work with a lot of them, right? There's… there's Grackle, there's Alliant, there's the prep tool, there's Adobe Acro… I mean, there's so many options today than there have ever been. I would say go with the one that makes you feel good, but I'm a hippie in my heart. There's so many questions in here, it's hard to pick. Let's see, from your… we're gonna do one more here. Mike WHITE gets the last one. My apologies, friends. From your experience, what is the best type of training to get non-technical users to adopt accessibility practices in their daily tasks? I wanna unders… I wanna be sure our teams understand the theory of what they're doing. 100%. So, I'm so biased, and I… I hope you all, like, know I'm coming here with love, I'm not trying to just recommend what I do. The truth is, I'm so immersed in what I do, it's hard to give you an answer on what other accessibility companies are doing. So… Here's my answer. The Accessibility Guy, we offer, accessibility no matter the platform training. I'm sure there are other vendors out there, and we talk holistically about people with lived experiences that have a disability. Why are headings important? The nuance of alt text, and it leaves out, like. how to apply alternate text to an image or a chart or graph in PowerPoint. We're not talking about that. We're talking about the difference between what do you write for, maybe a STEM graphic versus a decorative logo, versus if you were to take a snapshot of Shawn right now. It's not gonna matter that you say, you know, I'm a male in his mid-30s wearing a beanie and a blue shirt. Who cares? I instead want to be known as Shawn Jordison, the Accessibility Guy, you know, your Accessibility Champion. That's better alt text. So a session like that is going to connect what we do in our daily work to people with lived experiences that have a disability. In my opinion, that makes the biggest impact. Instead of being like, it's required, it's the law, those things are important too, but they don't carry as much weight. One more experience, Before I was out on my own, one thing that resonated with me, and I actually give this guy a lot of credit as to why I continue to do this work, I helped at the time, it was a very large man, okay? I'm about 5'7". At the time, I was 18 years old, working at my local community college. I've always been a freak of nature, and this guy… he, He didn't know how to read, and this was… this dude is, like, 6'4", built, and he's done manual labor his entire life, right? he wanted to become a firefighter, and I was able to help this guy learn how to read using assistive technology. It changed my life. He ended up getting multiple certificates in fire science, and he came and thanked me, and this big, giant guy was crying in my office, gave me a hug, and you know, I could probably give him the credit for, like, why I still do this work today. Alright. There's a lot of questions in here. I don't know what, information you have shared with them of how to get in contact with me, but reach out to… to Yuja here about my contact information. It's Shawn at the Accessibilityguy.com, and I'd love to get in touch with you and Ravish over to you, my friend. Thank you for having me. This was great.

**Ravish Khanna:** That was sensational, brother. Like, thank you for being here, man. I… I know there's so much I can consistently learn as well, too, being here, and I appreciate a lot of people with a lot of questions as well, too. I just didn't want to just… Shout out two quick things, though, before we go end off. Now, the first one, naturally, I do have to make sure that, you know, if you are interested in services, like, for Accessibility, other resources, other webinars we've done, you can go reach out to us to be able to learn more and get more inquiries on PDF, documents, and everything to do with math, LMS, and making sure that you can make your institution much more accessible for upcoming guidelines. And of course, our community page for all questions, and join the community people, of Black-owned people like yours, this is also where we'll be posting Shawn's webinar as well in about 48 hours or so. So, not too long afterwards. And one more thing as well, too, Shawn, is, like. wanted to make sure they also bring up, is that you also have something that you wanted to make sure that you get across for much more individuals.

**Shawn Jordison:** Yeah!

**Ravish Khanna:** Go back.

**Shawn Jordison:** Thank you so much! I… I totally forgot to send this to you, so, I've, I've created a new company with a partner of mine called Liminally, and we are offering professional Accessibility training, we have designated workshops over the next couple of weeks where users can sign up as an individual. We're charging a little bit of money for these workshops, they're one hour long, you'll receive a certificate of completion, and if you would like any organizational training for your excuse me, accessibility training for your organization, please reach out to me. We work with small orgs, large orgs, and we can help your team get Accessible today. So, thanks again, Ravish, for sharing this resource, and, thanks for having me. Oh, I think… is your audio working?

**Ravish Khanna:** I was gonna say, yeah, thank you so much, Shawn. I appreciate it, yeah, and go ahead and share your emails one more time, just for anybody out there who may have missed it. Beautiful. And of course, for all of the services, and of course, you know, any of the type of trainings, and of course, for being able to help make your institution a bit more accessible, and aside from that, you know, offering. Much more software issues, much more software institu- software ex- solutions, I should say, sorry. for institutions and colleges and a lot more. Make sure to reach out to us at Yuja to see what we can do and how we can work together as well. That'll be all from us. Thank you all once again, everybody, for joining us. Shawn, you all good? Yeah?

**Shawn Jordison:** We're all good. Sorry, I had a guest in my office for a moment. You're okay, man.

**Ravish Khanna:** Thank you all once again, everybody. We'll see you all next time in the next Yuju webinar. Y'all take care. Bye-bye, everyone.

**Shawn Jordison:** Thank you.