(upbeat music)
-: Welcome to "The Accessible Learning Experience"
where we help you turn learning barriers
into learning opportunities.
We're excited to bring you this season two bonus episode
featuring the South Carolina Department of Education
or SCDE.
We were introduced to SCDE by both the
Office of Special Education Programs
and the Office of Educational Technology
at the US Department of Education.
This past May, OSEP and OET partnered
on a month long campaign to celebrate
Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
And that campaign included hosting
a joint webinar featuring the evolution of SCDE's
digital accessibility initiative.
Alerted by a 2017 letter of complaint
from the Office for Civil Rights
at the US Department of Education
that cited accessibility violations on its website,
SCDE has taken multiple actions
to improve digital accessibility within the agency
and for districts across the state.
In this episode, AEM Center Project Director, Cynthia Curry,
interviews SCDE digital accessibility leaders,
Valerie Byrd, who's the senior consultant,
and Lydia Hutto, who is a training coordinator
and staff technology instructor.
Here's the conversation between Cynthia, Valerie and Lydia.
-: Valerie and Lydia,
welcome to "The Accessible Learning Experience."
Let's start with introductions.
Tell us a little bit about yourselves
and your work in digital accessibility
and what brought you here.
-: Prior to joining the State Department of Education,
I actually worked for a state
information technology division,
and my role was serving as the state e-rate coordinator
and network administrator for K-12
and state library systems.
My responsibility was to ensure that all school districts
as well as public library systems statewide
had internet connectivity and bandwidth.
So I was already in the arena of making sure that
from a statewide approach, all individuals,
students, schools and libraries in our general public
had access to internet and connectivity.
So it would fall right in my wheelhouse
that I would want those individuals
to also have equal access to digital content.
-: Great, thanks for sharing that relationship
between accessibility really does cross a lot of context
around equity for students so I appreciate how you make
that connection to digital accessibility.
Lydia, how about you?
What were you doing before joining
the South Carolina Department of Education?
-: So before I came to the Department of Education
I actually was a teacher, I was in the classroom.
I started out elementary certified,
just kind of going into the world
not knowing what I would be.
My first job was actually in a high school.
I was in a computer lab in a high school
with voc ed kids.
So I kind of got a interesting introduction
to using technology to try and meet things
that were missing with those students.
We did a lot of screening to see what they needed
and helping them with math and reading.
But I taught, I ended up in middle school science.
That's what I love to do.
And then just kind of moving around
and doing different things.
I worked at ETV for a while
and I got to interact with the Department of Education
with some of the PBS Kids programming that they developed.
And then I decided to go back into the classroom
and I did Montessori.
And I am ashamed to say that through all of that
I really didn't know very much at all about accessibility.
It wasn't until I actually came to the department
and we kind of got our hand slapped a little bit
that I thought, oh my word,
this has been law for a long time
and how come we don't know about it?
So that was what really motivated me to say,
we gotta do a better job,
we need to be teaching everybody and our staff,
they are parents, they have kids in the school system.
We need to do a better job with this.
-: I love how you make that connection
through capacity building based on your experience.
So I think South Carolina Department of Ed
is really fortunate to have you
because you come with some compassion for those teachers
for whom accessibility is new
and thinking about it from your own career
and all of the competing factors and the complexities
of being a teacher and thinking about
what are the best approaches to introduce
and to scaffold and to support teachers in this process.
So thanks for that.
Let's talk about the origins of digital accessibility
in the South Carolina Department of Education
as it is today.
Say a little bit more about how digital accessibility
for students with disabilities was brought to the attention
of your agency.
How did that come about?
-: Well, how digital accessibility became, was brought to the
attention of the State Department of Education
was that I would say we had a little bit of a advantage here
in that we had representatives of different organizations,
public and private sectors and state agencies
that were a part of ATAC
which later became known as ASCIT
that we already had kind of like a collaboration
and partnership going on amongst different entities
with different backgrounds.
And from that perspective we had a little bit about
assistive technology which later transitioned to
accessibility, became more so ingrained
with digital accessibility when receiving an audit,
a compliance audit indicator from the
US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights Justice.
Which let us know that some key things
that we were doing wrong impacted
those with disabilities.
Such as our website having a carousel of images
that continuously rotated without giving the option
to stop that rotation and start at will.
Also, the way we improperly had our PDF documents
posted on our website without having any type of tagging.
Key components of that that would impact individuals
with disabilities of being able to access content
on our website.
And us being public servants,
we should not want to exclude anyone
if there's a way for us to avoid in doing so.
Training also was very important for us.
Once we found out more about accessibility
and how we could implement some of the best practices,
we began training the right people in-house,
as well as all of our staff to start
transitioning that culture of applying more accessibility
ingrained into our processes and procedures.
And of course, with us being
the State Department of Education,
we wanted those entities that we serve which are schools
and districts as well as which included teachers
and students to have access to the same
important information and those practices to help them.
-: Thanks, Valerie.
Picking up on the focus of the compliance audit
from the Office for Civil Rights,
being focused on your agency's website,
Lydia, why don't you pick up there?
Because SCDE, the South Carolina Department of Education
has really gone much deeper.
You've gone beyond just thinking
about your agency's website.
A lot of states and districts are under the impression
that digital accessibility really only begin and end
at a public facing website.
But what have you learned about deeper needs
for digital accessibility for students with disabilities
in South Carolina?
-: So I really think that a lot of things
just sort of came together at the right time
at the Department of Ed.
I started right after Val like I said,
under just our chief information officer,
a staff tech trainer.
Shortly after that, the decision was made
that we needed a chief strategy officer
to come in and make sure that all the administrators,
deputies, directors, were hitting their targets
that they needed to be doing on their work
for the department.
And she was part of that team
that got notified about our website.
So we met with our new chief information officer
and our webmaster to say, what can we do about this?
How are we gonna attack this?
And one of the very first things we realized was
we have a lot of people across the agency creating content
for this website, and they're not sort of going through
a set process to make sure that checks
have been put in place and that we're all trying
to adhere to the same process and the way we do things.
So the decision was made to sort of try to narrow that down,
make sure that they meet once a month
and have a training with the webmaster
about how to use the content management system.
Just some sort of basic things.
But I think this could apply
across a lot of different settings.
You got to just sort of determine what's the process,
make sure that we're all doing it the same way.
Make sure that people have a place to come to
to ask their questions,
make sure that someone's looking to see
that it's being done properly.
All these different things have contributed
to addressing that issue.
We also partnered with some of our community partners
to sponsor big name trainers like WebAIM.
We've had them come several times.
The first time was goodness, I think maybe 2018, Valerie.
They came to the USC Law School who was our neighbor,
and we actually invited school district staff to come
if they were interested.
And a lot of their tech people came.
And we kind of realized, oh, another audience,
that that may or may not be trained
in this accessibility thing.
So we've repeated that.
And because of that we met Judy Risch
at the Department of of Education's Office for Civil Rights.
And we found out about
the National Digital Accessibility Team,
and we started having them do some trainings
in the afternoons for teachers.
So just a lot of these different things
trying to open it up and invite people to participate,
and getting people to not be afraid to admit
that they didn't know or they didn't know how to fix it
and that we wanted to help.
That we weren't trying to make them look bad,
we wanted to help make things look better.
I think that was kind of where it really started,
and I've learned that from previous jobs.
You gotta find that trust factor first
so that people will tell you about their problems
so you can help them find their solution to their problems.
-: The concepts of partnerships are so important
in this work around accessibility
and building those relationships obviously requires trust.
And it sounds like you've had a lot of success with that
at SCDE, and you've picked some good partners.
So WebAIM and the Office for Civil Rights,
National Digital Access Team really couldn't be
much better supporters in this work
and the way you identified them
as supports for your districts.
I think that's a great model.
It certainly could be replicated by other states
because WebAIM and the National Digital Access Team
really are available for these types of supports,
particularly Judy Risch and Mary Lou Mobley
at the Office for Civil Rights are always willing
to support states and districts
around digital accessibility.
As I'll put in a plug for ourselves here
at the National AEM Center.
We are here as TA specialists as well.
And so delighted that we're working together.
So Valerie, with this work that SCDE
has started with districts,
what recommendations do you have
for district administrators?
What's important for them to know
about starting an initiative around digital accessibility
and then sustaining it over time?
-: First and foremost, as far as school district
administrators, they need to understand
that the greatest challenge is the change of mindset
and having patience because adapting to change takes time.
We are public servants serving our various communities
from the perspective of K-12.
Some key points that they need to consider
include connecting with the right people.
That will be your internal and your external collaborations.
This could be new partnerships, new individuals,
as well as those that are already in-house.
For example, your web masters,
some of your knowledge level experts,
especially those that do web design
or are responsible for your website.
Different departments collaborate together
from a team approach.
This could be your IT leaders
plus your instructional technology leaders,
and your special education departments
and those roles as well.
Train the right people, very important,
your content specialists.
Anyone that's responsible for creating content
be it documents or even in-house customized systems,
this could include the procurement department
for they need to know what specifications
need to be included into those contracts
to make sure that they're doing due diligence
in ensuring that no students are being left out of
some of the content or products that are purchased.
Also, considering establishing
a support team of individuals.
This could include those individuals
that create policies such as your HR department.
It could also include developing a team in-house
that will be a collaboration of different departments
including HR, and most importantly senior staff.
Having those components in place would help to assist
and enable a change of mindset
and thus building a culture of accessibility.
-: Valerie, what you're saying really underscores
that digital accessibility in general is so different
from assistive technology or making sure that materials
and technologies are available to students,
but it's really about making sure that they can be used
by students with disabilities in general education.
It's not a a special education initiative.
It really requires leadership but also a distribution
of people from cross-functional multidisciplinary areas
of the system in order to coordinate it.
And I also love your reference to the term components
because there are so many components of accessibility
because there are so many pathways by which materials
and technologies reach students.
Lydia, what services and resources does SCDE
make available to districts?
-: My role has primarily been for our agency staff,
but what we have done in the last since January actually is
as we've invited districts to trainings from a tech point
like with the WebAIM to Department of Education,
to teachers, is we've seen that need that's there, right?
And the realization that Val and I were not enough people
to cover the whole state even though we're a small state.
So we have used some of our funding
to bring on some more staff.
So it kind of began with inviting them
to these accessibility trainings as teachers
or district tech folks that support the accessibility work
in the districts, to, hey, let's have a dedicated staff
person to look at school district websites
for things that could be a problem
and reach out to them and say,
hey, I noticed these things that are on your website.
And we've pitched it at some of our,
there's a couple professional organizations
for administrators.
We've gone to those different round table meetings
and pitched it to them as a
hey, these are things that we anticipate
at not just being if you receive federal funding
you are required to do this,
but hey, if you have a public facing website
you're going to be required to do this, can we help you?
If we look at your website and find something
do you have somebody that would like to talk about that?
So that's been in place since actually last October
is when Sean Osborne came on board.
And we had a little kind of hesitancy at first,
they weren't sure what we were trying to do
but then as it has worked through and people have started
to hear it and we've had some consolidations where people
have needed to create a new website,
it's kind of picking up momentum
and it's been really exciting to see how
people now want us to like, let me be next,
I wanna get in line for this.
And then in January we added someone
to be a district accessibility trainer for teachers.
So she's been working on content
specifically for classroom teachers
as a former special education teacher
to kind of think about, hey, somebody in the classroom.
They're thinking about teaching,
they're thinking about children,
they're thinking about the children's needs,
what are they missing?
And a lot of them were like me.
They'd never heard of it, they had no idea.
But as we've all gone online since the pandemic,
we've realized there's an increased need like you said.
We're trying to communicate,
we are communicating to the whole state.
We need to make sure everything we put out there
is accessible.
Even just at the basic level of can I read it
and it makes sense to me?
Can I print your picture and read the words on it
not just see it?
'Cause we know how that works
if you have no alternative text or no captions
sometimes it doesn't make sense.
So we're working on our resources to districts,
we're building and we actually have a bootcamp
for teachers this summer.
It's our first annual one that I think
Valerie is gonna talk about in a little bit
that we're very excited about.
-: I love this notion of incentivized accountability.
You're going out and looking for opportunities
to help people do better.
This coming from an agency, reaching out
see your website is not accessible,
but we also wanna help you.
So it's not a gotcha.
SCDE is there to provide supports
for continuous improvement.
Thank you for that, for those examples of what's happening
in SCDE around services and resources.
And as you mentioned, there is an exciting
bootcamp coming up this summer.
Valerie, so tell us about that
and some of the other things
that are coming next for SCDE around digital accessibility.
-: Well sure, as Lydia mentioned and as you've stated,
we're very excited to host our first ever
accessibility bootcamp this summer,
July 18th through 19th in person.
Some of our partners include, the AEM Center, CAST,
Teach Access, our State Department of Education, of course
in collaboration with our USC Assistive Technology Program,
as well as some of our guest speakers
will be featured from North Carolina and Georgia as well.
We are very excited to do this event.
Our focus will be educators and teaching them
about accessibility as well as teaching them
how to teach students how to be more accessible.
So we're very excited about this event
and hosting it for our educators,
and if need be staff, superintendents as well.
So it's not limited because we do know that in some cases
those are certified educators as well.
We also will be doing a lot of presentations
during some of our statewide conferences over the summer.
The Education Business Summit,
our state education technology conference
which occurs in October.
And most importantly, any opportunity we can
hosting some one-on-one events for districts.
-: SCDE also has a really interesting perspective
on how accessibility relates to your standards.
Tell us about that.
-: Well, SCDE recognizes the fact that
one of our initiatives as far as the vision for our agency
is to make sure that all students graduate career
and college ready.
So with that component, the keyword all we want to make sure
within regards to our curriculum standards
that we do adapt as many components of accessibility
as possible.
This could include the online resources that we offer
such as our learning management system,
our learning object repository for which content is loaded
from different resources.
We are trying to build in-house some cohort models
for districts this year that they could use.
We are also having conversations with different departments
such as our virtual education component
of the State Department of Education
and other offices such as our career
and education technology divisions
to see how we could be of some support
to those individuals that are responsible
for educating teachers as well as students.
Our hopes is too that this will be ingrained
into our standards statewide at some point
so that we know that we're covering all bases.
As mentioned, our department does not develop standards
but we do try our best to help do influence
some of those that make those decisions
to keep digital accessibility in mind.
-: Last question, how can people stay in touch
with the work that you're doing
at the South Carolina Department of Education?
Social media, is there an email address
that people might be able to follow up with some questions
about the work that you're doing?
How can people reach out?
-: People can reach out to us via email from Valerie.
It's V Byrd, that is V-B-Y-R-D
at ed.sc.gov.
And they can also reach Lydia Hutto at L Hutto
which is L-H-U-T-T-O at ed.sc.gov.
Individuals can also reach us via our website
at ed.sc.gov.
And that's the South Carolina State Department of Education.
-: Lydia and Valerie, thanks so much for joining us
on today's episode of "The Accessible Learning Experience"
Podcast for sharing all of the great work that's happening
in South Carolina around digital accessibility.
And we wish you all the best
and we look forward to following along and supporting you.
-: Thank you.
-: Thank you so much, we enjoyed it.
-: Thanks for tuning in to this episode
of "The Accessible Learning Experience,"
brought to you by the National Center
on Accessible Educational Materials at CAST.
You can find us on the web at aem.cast.org.
There you'll find show notes we link to all of the resources
mentioned on each episode.
Thanks again for listening and remember,
accessibility is everyone's responsibility.
(upbeat music)
The contents of this podcast were developed
under a cooperative agreement
with the US Department of Education.
However, those contents do not necessarily represent
the policy of the US Department of Education
and you should not assume endorsement
by the federal government.