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MAGGIE SOKOLIK: I don't really like the word compliance. It has that meaning that it's something we don't want to do, but we're going to do it anyway. And I don't feel I'm needing to comply with this. It's something that we do willingly in order to increase access for everyone. TRACIE ALLEN: You're listening to Finding Space, a podcast about disability justice, access, and belonging in higher education. I'm Tracie Allen, the Access and Innovation Strategist at the Center for Teaching and Learning at UC Berkeley. In this series, I talk with students, educators, and staff from the disability community as they share their stories and invite us into acts of advocacy. In our last episode, we shared five actions instructors can take to meet the updated Title II Digital Accessibility Requirements. Today, we're going one step further, because this work isn't about doing more alone, it's about starting small, working together, and building accessible habits that last. In the last episode, we had Anne Marie share the top five things instructors should do, and now I want to really focus on having faculty understand that we're giving you a list of things to do, but you're not alone. And Maggie, first of all, I just want to thank you so much for being here. It's been an absolute pleasure getting to know you the last couple of months. You're doing really great work. It was a couple of days ago when we were talking and I told you about the five steps instructors can do and how you and I have been in this conversation for almost over a decade. But we're here now, and I do appreciate that campus as a whole is putting a priority and focus on how instructors can fulfill Title II requirements. And mainly we are talking about the digital accessibility portion in terms of the update. So today, Maggie, I would love for you to share a little bit about yourself. MAGGIE SOKOLIK: Oh, lovely. Thank you, Tracie. So I am Maggie Sokolik. I am the current Director of College Writing Programs. We're a large multidisciplinary writing program. We're independent, not part of the English Department, as many people believe. But I've been on campus since 1992, which is a good long time, primarily in college writing programs, but I also have done some administrative work in Graduate Division, as well as been a faculty member and administrator in the College of Engineering for four years. So I've gotten around campus and gotten to know lots of different aspects of this campus. TRACIE ALLEN: And I do want to also put some note here, Maggie, that not only have you been working here on campus, you've also been an integral part of the MOOCs, which I don't know if everyone knows, but a MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course, and it's run through edX here. And you've been part of that for how long? MAGGIE SOKOLIK: Since 2014, I believe. TRACIE ALLEN: OK. MAGGIE SOKOLIK: Yeah. I was originally asked to do this-- their pitch was, oh, you can just record some lectures and put them online, and I said, but that's not the way I teach. I don't lecture, I teach writing courses. We talk, we have seminars. So I said no originally, I don't want to do one of these. And then Armando Fox from EECS came by my office again later and said, but you can do it the way you want. And so I said, well, if I can do it the way I want and make it more interactive, then I'd be thrilled to do it. So we launched a couple of courses, like How to Write an Essay, although it had a different name in its first iteration, in 2015. And we actually crashed the edX servers because they weren't accustomed to courses where students were using chat and interacting so much, and so they had to rethink their approach, which was very video lecture-based. TRACIE ALLEN: Right. I love from the very beginning that you wanted to do your classes where it was engaging with active learning. And a lot of times I think there's a misinterpretation that, oh, if you're taking an online course, there's no engagement. And I love that you as an instructor, you made that a priority even from the very beginning. And just a little history with Berkeley. At that time, 2015, that's when we heard when we had DOJ coming at us in terms of accessibility. So UC Berkeley, even though we have Title II requirements from the federal government now, we've been in the accessibility world of remediating, and you are, I would say, a pioneer and part of that in this movement part of campus culture and shifting on how making accessibility is a priority, and you've always thought about that. I want to switch gears and really start talking about digital accessibility. I know that instructors are not here to just hear a list of things to do, but they need to know how. And the other thing is is that I know that a lot of times when we get these requirements and instructors are told that you have to do this and that, they end up feeling really overwhelmed. Because first of all, I do want to acknowledge, it is overwhelming. When you look at all of your curriculum and then you think, as a whole, I've got to make everything digitally accessible. But the one thing that we always come back to is start with one thing. So that's why the checklist is a positive thing for us to have. So here, this is what I know about the College Writing Department. Your department is great at remediating source documents to be accessible. And maybe people don't understand what remediation is, so you can talk about what I mean by that. MAGGIE SOKOLIK: When we talk about remediation, we're talking about looking at the source material and what might make that difficult for someone, for example, who's using a screen reader to access that document. And often, it can be things as simple as contrast. I see a lot of lovely book design with these light-blue headers and using color to indicate meaning. All of those things don't translate well to screen readers. And so part of it is looking at, what are the elements of this document that a screen reader may not be able to access? What's not logical about this document? Things like hyphenated words-- not compounded, hyphenated, but words that are broken up by hyphen. Headers that are weird colors that don't read well. And so remediation is just taking that document, changing its format, making the headers make sense, describing images in alt tags, or even just saying this is not an important image-- it's amazing how many unimportant images there are decorating texts out there. Also, sometimes changing fonts. We try to use fonts that have been recognized as being easy for people, for example, with dyslexia. Might be easier for them to read. And so it's a bit of work. For me, it's the kind of work that you can do with Netflix on in the background. So it's not a terrible experience. It doesn't require an extraordinary amount of brainpower to do it, but it's time-consuming, sometimes, and a little tedious. TRACIE ALLEN: Yes, I agree, I agree. Thank you for the really great explanation of what a remediated source document is. So when you were doing your remediations and learning about them, was there anybody on campus that you felt that you were able to partner with and learn about this and was a resource for you? MAGGIE SOKOLIK: Yeah. Early in the process of developing the writing MOOCs, like 2014, 2015, I was fortunate to meet Joe Feria-Galicia, and he kind of helped remediate some of the issues that would come up in the MOOCs. But one of the things I really appreciated about his approach was that whenever he found a problem, he always explained why it was a problem, not just, you need to change this from this to this, or I have changed the blue to black, but it was always an explanation of why. So it always felt like this system of developing an understanding of what makes things accessible, even before people were really talking about a specific set of rules or tools. For example, I remember having a chart where I was using color to signify meaning, and the video that went with it said something like, the red shows this and the green shows this. And it was pointed out, well, someone with colorblindness isn't going to see red and green there, so this is not really meaningful. TRACIE ALLEN: When I approached you, I really was talking to you about we're not alone and you're a team that can do this. I do want you to share how you have done that, and how you cultivate that kind of mindset in terms of the team that you're with. MAGGIE SOKOLIK: I think one of the keys is that we've been talking about this for quite a long time. And it's one of the benefits of my having been involved, for example, with MOOCs, but also with the 2015 DOJ inquiry, one of my courses was one of the named courses in that. And I looked at that as more of a challenge than a criticism because my feeling has always been about online materials, is why wouldn't we want it to be as accessible as possible? We understand, yes, there may be some work involved, but why would we not want to do that work? There's not a person out there, if they want access to materials, that they shouldn't have that access just because they may have a particular disability or a sight problem or hearing problem, whatever the issue may be, there's no reason that there should be a barrier for anyone. And so we've tried to cultivate this mindset. Fortunately, we have a lot of faculty who are very student-oriented and very much kind of social justice-oriented. And so they might look at that checklist and think, yeah, there's a lot of work to do, but it's not about the work, it's about the connection with students and the ability to really reach every student where they need to be. So that's really, I think helped. And the fact we've talked about it for a long time, not just in this latest iteration. TRACIE ALLEN: Now one of the other highlights about the College Writing Department is that your team scored as one of the highest in Ally. And most people on campus already know what Ally is, but I would like to just define it. Ally is a set of tools within bCourses that helps make course content more accessible. Tell me more about your usage of Ally, and how you use it individually. And then did you actually take some time with your faculty also to learn it, or did you just tell them, oh, here, this is how you use it? MAGGIE SOKOLIK: Yeah, it's really interesting with Ally because I was made aware of it a number of years ago and started checking things, it's now built into bCourses, and I was delighted to learn everybody already knew about it when I brought it up. Everybody's like, oh yeah, I already use it. My course is like 93%, I'm working on improving the score. So yes and no. I would have loved to have said, yeah, like, I taught them all about it, but they were really proactive in learning this tool and using it to figure out what in their course needed to be remediated. TRACIE ALLEN: Well, you did mention a lot of the instructors that come in with a social justice mindset-- MAGGIE SOKOLIK: Yeah, for sure. And also, we really foster a sense of collaboration in our program. So if one instructor learns about a tool-- for example, we have a Slack channel that we use to try to keep the email mass a little less overwhelming. So somebody learns something and they post something there, hey, I just found this great article or I found a great tool. And so there's a lot of collaboration, which I think helps as well. TRACIE ALLEN: I wish there was a way where we could say, what can we do to cultivate that more. MAGGIE SOKOLIK: Yeah, I mean, I think it does have a lot to do with our students. We're fortunate to teach nothing but small classes. And so instructors really get to know their students, they get to know what they need, what their individual barriers or advantages might be. And so I think the immediacy of the need becomes a little more apparent than if you're sitting in front of a room of 500 students in a lecture hall where you may see the letters of accommodation and what you need to do there, but you may not really see it up close in the same way. And that's not an advantage every department can or will have, it's just the nature, that we teach primarily small writing classes. TRACIE ALLEN: I think about statistically here on campus, that between faculty, staff, and students, you have 30% of them with a disability. We're talking about the ones who identify. There are many who don't identify, we don't even count those. And if you really sit and think about that, then you don't look at people as this group of people, but what can you do, as you were saying, individually in that class every time you have a student come in? You don't look at them and say, oh, this is a student with a disability. What you're saying is, I see this student, and I want to hear their needs, and then let's figure it out from there. It's part of us giving access to education to students. Could you share with me what you were doing in your department now to meet the Title II requirements? MAGGIE SOKOLIK: One of the current initiatives is to really get everyone feeling comfortable with understanding what the requirements are, what they can do, how to prioritize because some of our faculty have said, I have so many files on bCourses, I don't know where to start. And so the first thing we're doing is doing a series of workshops. We had our first one that dealt just with document remediation, and we just walked through the remediation of a shared document that we were using with students and just very nitty gritty, very hands-on, just do this, do this, do this, lots of opportunity to ask questions, to offer alternate suggestions. Because one of the things, when you start doing this sort of document remediation, realize there's a lot of different ways to do it. There's not one set of rules or one order. And not every document needs every step. Some documents need a lot of things, some need very little. So that's our first step, is just to offer these. They were held on Zoom. They were recorded for faculty that could not attend, and so they're accessible to everyone. And because it goes through a document, let them know, this will be permanently available so they can access it anytime. TRACIE ALLEN: As an example of-- MAGGIE SOKOLIK: As an example of what you can do, and so you can fast forward, do what you need to do to find the information. About half of our program participate and that included staff, and then the next set of workshops will be about video and other types of media. And we'll talk a bit about not just using a service like 3Play or a paid service, but how to edit a YouTube transcript or the YouTube captions so that they're accurate and not just the standard generated ones, which we know can really vary often depending on the quality of the video and the audio, but other factors as well. TRACIE ALLEN: I was very excited when you told me that the way that you were approaching Title II was by having the department-- and not just faculty, but you had staff, that you extended an invitation for all of them to come together. Just as you said, you definitely have a team that is very collaborative. I love that you brought them together and that they were doing the remediations, and then I'm sure there came lots of questions. Were there any questions in particular that you saw more-- or was more challenging for instructors that you could share with us? MAGGIE SOKOLIK: Well, the biggest questions came around bCourses itself. So not so much with individual files, which I think the procedures were fairly clear, but there was a fair number of questions about, for example, on bCourses, there are course files, but there are also things called projects. They're not tied to a class. For example, we use a project site for our department handbook. And so do those need to also have the same level of accessibility? What about past courses that students still may have access to even though the course is not active? Do those have to meet the same levels of accessibility? So we were able to reach out to the bCourses team, who, fortunately, could provide those answers for us. And for those listening from campus, the answer is, yes, project sites count if you have students in them, and yes, past courses count If you haven't put an end date to them. As long as students still have access to the material, it has to be accessible. So if you've got a bunch of old classes that you just haven't bothered to officially close, that's the first thing you can do. Just put in an end date and close access to students. TRACIE ALLEN: OK. Unpublish it? MAGGIE SOKOLIK: You can't technically unpublish, so don't-- TRACIE ALLEN: OK. MAGGIE SOKOLIK: Yeah, which surprised us, but there's a thing you check off saying to cease access for students. TRACIE ALLEN: So cease access, and then the end date-- MAGGIE SOKOLIK: And put in an end date, and then it's not part of the overall score. So that, I think, put a lot of people's minds to rest because a lot of our faculty had lots of open old courses, and so-- TRACIE ALLEN: I was about to ask you, when you brought up projects and old courses, I was going to say, what is the answer? I need to know! MAGGIE SOKOLIK: I know. It took us a while to find the answer. Fortunately, we finally located the right person for that answer. And for example, for our department handbook, which is a project site, all of the participants are listed as teachers, they're not listed as students, and so that won't count because it's just student-facing materials. TRACIE ALLEN: Right. MAGGIE SOKOLIK: Nonetheless, we're still working to make it all accessible because it's not just students that need accessible materials. TRACIE ALLEN: Right. We have faculty and staff who also are part of the disability community that we get reminded that, yes, we're talking about requirements, but at the end of the day, I like how you're still back to, but I want to make it just, why not already have that social justice mindset of what can I do to make this accessible for students to learn beyond that. MAGGIE SOKOLIK: Well, it's also about modeling behavior as well, which we've asked all of our staff and faculty, it's like in all of your email communications, describe your links, don't just paste a bunch of HTTP in there. No "Click heres." No-- just get into the practice of doing these better sorts of accessible behaviors, then it's not so hard when you need to remediate a document. You already know it because you do it in your daily life. TRACIE ALLEN: Awesome. Thank you so much for that. Is there anything else that comes to mind that you would love to share? MAGGIE SOKOLIK: There are small fixes that can help a lot. One is fixing headers on a document, and one is alt-tagging images. Those two things alone, even before you get to some of the other potentially more complex things, will fix a huge percentage of what's wrong with the document. When a couple of our faculty sort of expressed a little bit of overwhelm just because of the number of documents that they felt they needed to work with, first off, just triage. One faculty member, for example, said he had just an amazing number-- I won't even say what the number is-- of documents. It's like, just unpublish them all, and then what do you need next week? Just focus on those. Just start small. It's really hard to look at your whole directory of documents and go, how could I possibly ever do this? But you can say, what do I need next week? I'm going to prioritize that. Also, look at that list. How many of these do I really need? Some of these may have been useful two years ago. Are they still serving that same use right now? Maybe they can just be unpublished. Also, just using the library sources as well without thinking like you need to remediate every single thing, maybe there's already a good source out there. Because if you're looking at a document and you think, oh, there's so much work that needs to be done on this, well, there could be another version out there on JSTOR or the library. Some of the documents that I've seen faculty using look like things that were photocopied from old DITos and then re-photocopied, and they bled to the edges of the page. There's a better version out there. I know the library has photocopiers that will do optical character recognition, so you can scan a book page and it will actually send you text, not an image. For our department, we also bought a unit for our photocopier that will do the same thing. Faculty can use our photocopier, scan a book page, an article, it scans it to optical text, not an image, emails it to them, and then they've got a more accessible document to work with. TRACIE ALLEN: And it sounds like you have an older version of a printer. I wonder if a lot of new printers already have that-- MAGGIE SOKOLIK: Yeah, I think a lot of them do. Ours didn't originally have that. It was only about $250 to have this unit installed on our photocopier, so it was not a big department expense, really minimal expense for the gain that we get from that. I think the last kind of final thought is, one of the things that I've tried to do is get rid of not just the word in our documents, but also the thought of compliance. I don't really like the word "compliance" when it comes to this because it kind of has that meaning that it's something we don't want to do, but we're going to do it anyway. And I don't feel I'm needing to comply with this. This is not a rule that's come down. It's something that we do willingly in order to increase access for everyone. TRACIE ALLEN: I'm with you. For me, it's an embedded process when I create things. For me specifically, I work in the Center for Teaching and Learning, and we've come up with so many different resources to offer in terms of support to instructors. And Marie talked about the Accessibility Hub that we have. Just start digging in there, and know that you can dig into it with other colleagues. Like, I cannot emphasize enough that I really admire how you cultivate that kind of environment in your department, and it goes a long way. Because when you're supporting one student's needs, it's helping other students that you don't even realize because a lot of students, they're scared, intimidated to talk to an instructor. I just met with a student that I'm mentoring this morning, and she talked about how she gets intimidated by instructors. And there is this intimidation that they feel. And if we just already embed into our processes accessibility, it's not a difficult and challenging thing. It just becomes part of your process. MAGGIE SOKOLIK: Yeah. And it gets easier, as you said. And once you've got that remediated document, you're done. TRACIE ALLEN: Exactly. MAGGIE SOKOLIK: You can keep using it and move on. And a year from now, it will still be a document that's good to use. TRACIE ALLEN: Exactly. Well, thank you so much, Maggie, for being here, and it's just-- again, it's been a real pleasure getting to know you more. And just thank you for the tips and just sharing about your journey in terms of how you support students here on campus. MAGGIE SOKOLIK: Thank you, Tracie, it's been a pleasure to be here. TRACIE ALLEN: Oh, thank you. Digital accessibility doesn't have to feel overwhelming. Start with one document. Close an old course. Fix your headers. Add alt text. Because remember, small fixes really do create big impact. You'll find links to resources, tools, and support in the episode description. And remember, you don't have to do this alone. Finding Space was produced by Tracie Allen, with help from the Research, Teaching, and Learning Communications and Media Team, Melanie Green, Betsy Greer, Laura Hart, Robert Hold, and Stephanie Mackley. Our theme song is "Golden Grass" by Blue Dot Sessions. And if you are inspired to share your story in a future episode, email us. We're at findingspace@berkeley.edu. Please tune in next time for a brand-new episode. [MUSIC PLAYING]