Presented at 11:15am in Cotton Creek II on Wednesday, November 14, 2018.
#17359Speaker(s)
- Corrine Schoeb, Accessibility Technology Coordinator, Swarthmore College
Session Details
- Length of Session: 1-hr
- Format: Lecture
- Expertise Level: Beginner
- Type of session: General Conference
Summary
Using a multi pronged intradepartmental model, Swarthmore college is moving toward a paradigm of proactive inclusion of accessibility and away from a reactive model of accommodation. [additional sentence forthcoming]
Abstract
The voices most often heard in national conversations about higher education technology accessibility typically reflect the views of large universities. While many of these translate to a small school environment, many are not scaleable or practical for a smaller college. In this session you’ll hear from a panel of collaborators at one small institution about the ways in which they’ve created structures and procedures without the addition of many staff, or great expenditures.
Keypoints
- Our guiding principle has been to move towards a paradigm of proactive inclusion of accessibility
- We will outline the still evolving “roadmap” for EIT, and the development of a larger group of stakeholders
- We will discuss tools and processes we've put in place to help us with accessible course materials
Disability Areas
Topic Areas
Administrative/Campus Policy, Legal, Web/Media/App Access
Speaker Bio(s)
Corrine Schoeb
Corrine Schoeb was previously a front-end web developer and is now Swarthmore’s Accessibility Technology Coordinator. As a foreign service kid she was exposed to many points of view and uses this experience to help build alliances across diverse areas of the college. She became passionate about equitable web access while working as an intranet front end developer at a Fortune 100 company. She is the point person for electronic accessibility and leads the effort of accessibility inclusion in the areas of procurement, web, learning management, and course materials.
Mike Jones is the Director of Language and Media Services at Swarthmore and became interested and passionate about accessibility after working with a student with blindness who had to fulfill a foreign language requirement. He became intimately knowledgeable about screen readers and language changes.
Susan Smythe is the ADA Program Manager at Swarthmore College, where her primary responsibilities include developing and managing all barrier removal projects to meet the terms of the College's Settlement Agreement with the US Department of Justice. Recent work includes development of the College's five year plan for compliance, within the framework of existing Capital Budget constraints and overall College planning goals. A key component of the plan has been balancing the need for barrier removal and increased accessibility with the overall Mission of the College. Her experience includes 20 years at Swarthmore as the Director of the Performing Arts Center, and Director of Media Services, where she managed more than 300 events per year, including major college events such as Commencement as well and national and international performing arts groups. She is now also acting as a Senior Project manager in Facilities where she has completed several recent major new construction projects on campus.
Jessica Brangiel is the Electronic Resources Management Librarian and is particularly interested in how libraries can play a critical role in this arena.
Jason Hamilton has a dual role in ITS and the library. He is integral in guiding and helping students get accessible textbooks, and understanding the available tools to interact with them.