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

Communication and Training

• Send out accessibility hints and tips from the liaison meetings to your unit
• Refer employees in your unit to the Digital Accessibility Website (webaccess.msu.edu), the basic accessibility checklist (webaccess.msu.edu/basiclist), and the tutorials
• Encourage Faculty and course creators, DEI professionals, IT professionals, and Communicators in your unit to take digital accessibility training. Note that 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 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.

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.
• Talk with unit leadership to emphasize the importance of digital accessibility compliance.

Courses

• Work with your faculty and course creators to help them use Spartan Ally and encourage them to remediate any issues it highlights.
• 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 Review Teams who check course materials each term and notify faculty and course creators of any issues.

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.

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 use of Stable Links for Electronic Resources through the MSU Libraries.
• You can also use D2L to check non-course content by uploading files for Spartan Ally to check.