Tips for Liaisons

Being a Digital Accessibility Liaison can be a little intimidating, and it can be hard to know where to start. Here are some suggestions for things you can do to promote digital accessibility compliance in your unit:

Basic Responsibilities

• Familiarize yourself with the Digital Accessibility Policy
• Read the Liaison Responsibilities page
• Join the MS Teams group using the instructions at the top of the Liaisons Page
• Attend the liaison meetings
• Familiarize yourself with the Accessibility Dashboard, which has metrics for each unit
• Each unit's primary liaison will fill out the Annual Self-Review each year
• Be aware of the new ADA Title II rule regarding digital accessibility
• Be aware of the university's values regarding equity and inclusion, which call on us to "Create and support a campus culture and environment that is accessible, both physically and virtually, to all students, staff, faculty and visitors with disabilities"

Communication and Training

• Refer employees in your unit to the Digital Accessibility Website (webaccess.msu.edu), the basic accessibility checklist (webaccess.msu.edu/basiclist), and the tutorials
• Send out accessibility hints and tips from the liaison meetings to your unit
• Make use of the "Why Digital Accessibility" document, which was created to help liaisons explain digital accessibility to faculty and staff.
• Encourage Faculty and course creators, DEI professionals, IT professionals, and Communicators in your unit to take digital accessibility training. Different training paths are listed on that page for each accessibility topic area.
• Be aware of communications your unit sends out and ensure they are in accessible formats. Talk to anyone who emails images of text and ask them to use more accessible formats
• Refer employees in your unit to the Accessibility Review Team if any important materials have been checked for accessibility but need to be double-checked
• Encourage faculty and staff to take prompt action to remediate or report an accessibility issue if a student or other member of the MSU community brings something to their attention.

Relationships

• Make contact with the individuals and teams in charge of your unit's websites, social media, digital content and publications, email newsletters, videos, etc.
• Make contact with any vendors your unit uses to create digital systems or content and emphasize the importance of following MSU's technical guidelines
• Identify a group of people from the departments in your unit who can serve as points of contact for digital accessibility compliance and consider updating the liaisons page to list them if desired
• Consider meeting regularly with the other liaisons in your unit to establish a digital accessibility committee
• Consider joining other meetings, such as department or team meetings in your unit, to promote digital accessibility awareness and training
• Collaborate with unit leadership by sharing metrics from the Accessibility Dashboard and when filling out the Annual Self-Review

Courses

• Work with your faculty and course creators to help them use Spartan Ally and encourage them to remediate any issues it highlights
• Encourage the use of Stable Links for Electronic Resources through the MSU Libraries.
• Refer faculty and instructors to the trainings offered by the MSU IT Educational Technology department
• Make sure faculty and instructors know they can request a consultation from the MSU IT Educational Technology department. Consider arranging large group remediation or training sessions with this group
• Some colleges run Course Accessibility Review Teams who check course materials each term and notify faculty and course creators of any issues.
• If feasible, it may help to encourage the use of D2L in your college or department for any instructors who aren't yet using it.

Websites

• Make sure the public can reach the Report Inaccessible Content form from your website
• Work on resolving any known issues with your websites that appear on the Accessibility Dashboard
• Consider requesting a review of your main website from the Accessibility Review Team if it hasn't been reviewed in a while

Videos

• Encourage video creators to communicate all visual content in the audio track rather than only showing information visually, in order to avoid the need to create alternate audio tracks.
• Videos saved to MediaSpace and YouTube receive automatic machine captioning. Encourage video creators to use a high-quality microphone, speak slowly and clearly, and minimize background noise to improve the accuracy of these captions.

Digital Content

• Keep an eye on web content, emails, videos, and social media posts to ensure they are being sent out in accessible formats
• Encourage the use of native file formats (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) rather than converting documents to PDF
• Encourage the conversion of digital files to HTML pages in your website or in D2L where feasible, rather than hosting documents.
• Encourage the use of digital accessibility checkers in Word, PowerPoint, and Acrobat.
• You can help individuals who need to frequently check non-course documents by creating a development D2L "course" so they can use Spartan Ally.
• Be cautious of advocating for the removal of materials, but it can improve digital accessibility metrics to delete files from websites and courses that are no longer in use.