State Perspective:
How Utah is Strengthening Its Infrastructure
to Support Accessible Materials
American Institutes for Research and
Utah State Board of Education
May 23, 2017
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Presentation accessibility information
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About the Center on Technology and
Disability
• Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, OSEP, we are a
learning and technical assistance center designed to:
• Increase the capacity of education leaders, teachers, and parents to
understand and implement appropriate assistive and instructional
technology, strategies, and tools
• Develop products that promote best practices to enhance teaching and
learning
• Deliver technical assistance to state and district leaders to strengthen
programs and services
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About the Utah State Board of Education
• Panelists from USBE:
• Glenna Gallo, State Director of Special Education
• Brent Page, IT Director
• Anita Sorensen, IT Supervisor
• Kellie Tyrrell, IT Administrative Secretary
• Rebecca Peterson, Education Specialist
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Outline
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Accessibility Introduction
Utah’s SEA Accessibility Team
USBE Process
Eating the Elephant
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Capacity building – Utah’s approach
Tools we use
How do we know it’s working?
Lessons we learned
Resources
• Q&A
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Accessibility Toolkit
Digital Accessibility Toolkit: What Education Leaders Need to Know
• Provides resources, tips, and information for SEAs & LEAs with guidance on
how to ensure accessibility is part of the educational equation
• Supports leaders in being proactive instead of reactive
• Four sections of the toolkit:
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What is Accessibility?
Procuring Accessible Materials
Benefits of Digital Accessibility
Legal Requirements for Digital Accessibility
• Utah’s approach to ensuring accessibility
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Utah’s SEA Accessibility Team
• Cross-departmental team promotes a common vision and purpose, enables alignment, facilitates integration of
effort, and avoids duplication of work
• Important for addressing needs at multiple levels and for multiple audiences
Superintendent
& Leadership
Information
Technology
team
Education
Specialists
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Utah’s SEA
Accessibility
Team
Process
February 2016
Plan for Section 508
compliance
proposed to
superintendent
March 2016
Accessibility plan
approved by Utah
School Board and
OCR complaint
received for website
March – Sept. 2016
Plan generated for
website redesign in
collaboration with
stakeholders
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October 2016
Accessibility team
began developing,
training, and
coaching staff
June 2017
New website
launched, training
and coaching
continues
Capacity building: How do you eat an elephant?
• Educate administration and leadership
• Plan to build capacity of all staff
• Develop reference and coaching materials
• Carry out overview trainings
• Complete in-depth trainings
• Reach out to LEAs and other agencies
• Create a go-to team for quick access to expertise
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Tools We Use
• Training
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Presentations
Small group and individual coaching
Work groups
Newsletter articles for LEAs
Trainings for LEAs at state meetings
• Ready resources
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How-to videos/tutorials
Example materials
Checklists
Color contrast guide
Weekly tidbits
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Some examples – making it real
• Build understanding
• Use yellow text, difficult fonts, or other favorite “teacher decoration tricks” to
illustrate
• If this sentence that is written in bright yellow contained really important
information, I would be in trouble . . . .
• PBS distraction reading activity
The sentence written in bright yellow text is designed to illustrate the difficulties that individuals with visual impairments might face when color contrast is not adequate.
The PBS reading distraction activity is a video from the PBS Misunderstood Minds series that is designed to provide experiences and build understanding about how learning disabilities can affect tasks that students commonly encounter. The video activity included here has text from a reading comprehension paragraph with distracting images that fade in and out over the top of the text - making it difficult to
read the text. The video is timed and after 1 minute a set of reading comprehension questions show up and the paragraph goes away. The point of this activity is to provide a personal experience for what it might be like to access materials that have distracting elements, designs, or images as an individual who is negatively affected by these unnecessary elements. The comprehension questions that are
included as text at the bottom of the video are: Alt text: questions Check the button next to the best answer for each of the following questions:
1. What was Tom trying but failing to fasten?
a) his seatbelt
b) his trousers
c) his mind
d) a new banjo string
2. How many students were in Tom's class?
a) seven
b) two
c) eleven
d) twenty-five
3. What object(s) described in the passage has/have soft sides?
a) a nearby hill
b) Tom's pillow
c) the cows in the meadow
d) the birds floating silently overhead
• Help individuals to understand the impact creating accessible materials –
personalize it
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How Do We Know It Is Working?
• Surveys – progress monitoring
• Feedback from trainings
• Products being created
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Lessons learned
• Keep it simple – bite-sized pieces
• Use on-going coaching to build capacity
• Locate experts who can answer questions and provide technical assistance
while capacity at SEA is developed
• Create a public workspace to post resources for “anytime, anywhere”
access
• Work on website and document accessibility simultaneously
• Create collaborative teams that cross the agency
• Frequent communication
• Don’t wait for perfection – just dive in
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Where do we start? Leverage Implementation Science
“It is always less expensive
to do it right the first time.” –Dad
• SISEP (State Implementation & Scaling-up of Evidencebased Practices Center)
• NIRN (National Implementation Research Network)
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Example: Based on The Hexagon Tool
(Blase, Kiser, & Van Dyke, 2013)
Successful implementation of innovations:
Need
• What are our specific needs? How will our plan meet the needs?
Fit
• How will our plan fit with existing innovations and priorities?
Resources
• Do we have adequate resources?
Evidence
• Likelihood of anticipated outcomes – Have other groups implemented plans like this and had
success? What did they do?
Readiness
• Do we have clear definitions and are our practices operationalized? Do we have the training and
coaching materials we need?
Capacity
• Do we have staff with the skills and knowledge to support implementation?
Blase, K., Kiser, L. and Van Dyke, M. (2013). The Hexagon Tool: Exploring Context. Chapel Hill, NC: National Implementation Research Network, FPG Child Development Institute, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Resources
• Group site includes items from federal websites, other education
entities, and materials created by USBE staff
• Example resources: How-to video, resource from Microsoft’s website,
training presentation, weekly accessibility advice, and LEA newsletter
article
• New website will include a link to all of the accessibility materials we
have collected and created
• Feel free to utilize any of these resources for your agency
• [email protected] or
[email protected]
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“Assistive and Instructional Technology Supporting Learners with Disabilities”
The Center on Technology and Disability is funded by the U.S. Department of Education,
Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) under award #H327F130003.
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