2022 Catalysts Interview – Iowa State University

Digital accessibility is a term for when all users can equally access the information and functionality of a website or any type of digital content. According to Nucleus Research, 70 percent of United States-based websites are inaccessible.

A team at Iowa State University led by Cyndi Wiley is working to ensure digital accessibility for everyone at the university, including those with disabilities. The Technology Association of Iowa connected with Cyndi to learn more.

Tell us more about your role at Iowa State and how it relates to the university’s DEI efforts. 

My role at Iowa State is within information technology services, and I run the digital accessibility team. We audit software that the university is going to purchase to see if it’s compliant with standards for digital accessibility. And if it’s not compliant, then we make some initial recommendations and really try and get our vendors to become compliant. 

We also run the digital accessibility lab, which is a space that the Iowa State community has access to. We’ve been researching alongside faculty and adding attention to accessibility into their grants and grant proposals, particularly with accessible gaming. So we have several gaming systems, virtual reality, and we also have XR, which is extended reality, where we work with different cameras and games without controllers, like gesture-based with 3D cameras that track locations.

We also support campus for our websites. We set up a vendor for a web accessibility tool, and we do training and demos of assistive technology through the digital accessibility lab as well. And we are implementing a new software that will help all of our online digital course materials become more accessible. 

We are really trying to stick within our strategic plan and be a university that cultivates diversity, as well as having an equitable and inclusive environment where students, faculty and staff can flourish rather than just simply exist.

We are really trying to stick within our strategic plan and be a university that cultivates diversity, as well as having an equitable and inclusive environment where students, faculty and staff can flourish rather than just simply exist.

Ensuring digital accessibility for all is an important line of work. How’d you get into it?

I have been in this position since November 2018. It was just me to start with, and my responsibility was to assess where we were at with our digital accessibility. 

We have student accessibility services, and I work a lot with them. I partner with people on campus who are doing all kinds of good things toward accessibility. Within my role in information technology services, I try to get tools, software, resources and training centralized within our decentralized environment. We’re all spread out, doing different things in different departments. 

I also started the digital accessibility lab in 2019. I got some funds from a committee that we call CASTLE. It’s students, faculty and staff who basically decide where student tech fees are spent. So students have some immediate buy in, and I got $25,000 from that to buy some initial equipment, like adjustable height desks. 

Last year, I was able to hire a full-time person. This digital accessibility specialist helps with the software audits and some other eye-level initiatives. And then in April we hired a second full-time person, so there’s three of us all together, full time. We also work with student workers and a graduate assistant as well.

Not all public universities have a digital accessibility team. What have you heard from colleagues around the country?

They have talked about how hard it is to get people interested in disability and accessibility and not to just rely on compliance factors or possible litigation, but to actually embrace the culture and include accessibility from the beginning in any project. 

The lab has really helped us to gain some buy-in from students, faculty, and staff, just to be able to come into a space where there’s gaming equipment. A lot of our faculty are using games and game-based learning in their courses and in their research projects. We consult a ton of projects with faculty about how to add accessibility to whatever they’re working on. 

I’ve been part of a few National Science Foundation grants, and we just recently submitted one for some faculty who are working to develop a game to teach civil engineering construction and city planning. So that’s a big collaboration. That’s where we work best collaborating with others and increasing partnerships, providing resources, and paying attention to accessibility.

What are some of your goals moving forward?

One thing we’re working on as a team is building a game called all Cats. It’s really playing up some puns and adding some humor just to make accessibility and visibility more approachable for people and to build it into our culture. 

Most of us [on the team] play games, and most of us have at least one disability. It’s not a game that is going to necessarily teach people about disability, but it will offer some disability etiquette. That’s a big thing on our campus is how do you say something and what are the right words so that you don’t offend people. 

We’re also working on a graphic novel. We don’t want to utilize super academic language, even though we’re at a university, but we want to remain approachable for people who are moving to campus. The novel will be first-person stories of people who live or work at Iowa State. Things that we experience on a daily basis that are stories of inclusion, exclusion. Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes they’re really awful stories. Using a format that hopefully more people can feel applies to them too, because they’re part of our community. Having a graphic novel makes it more approachable.

Overall, how is your work on the digital accessibility team leading to a more inclusive environment?

With the work that we are doing within the accessibility field, we do follow the disability studies and academic theory, even within our games and things that are more fun for us. We do view our work as really important and imperative, and it should be fun. We’re hoping to flip the narrative a little bit on what disability is, what it looks like, what accessibility looks like and how it affects everybody’s lives, because we are on screens a lot. We also pay attention to other DEI initiatives. Gender identity is a big characteristic for us to not only pay attention to, but definitely to embrace racial diversity and ethnicity. We want to be as inclusive as we can while realizing that nothing is ever going to be fully accessible for every single person, but we really do want to make things accessible for as many people as possible and honor everybody’s individual identities.

We really do want to make things accessible for as many people as possible and honor everybody’s individual identities.



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