The CPACC covers disability models, law, universal design, and technical applications of accessibility. This certification is important for a holistic approach to accessibility.
Accessibility core competencies include a recognized, shared language and framework for accessibility work. That helps when I talk with instructors, administrators, and peers at other institutions. While my focus is on digital accessibility, a broader perspective informs that work.
The concepts will feed into my faculty guidance and future development of digital accessibility resources. I also created a practice quiz to prepare for the exam, which serves as a useful practical application of generative AI as a study tool.
The ADS is much more hands-on than the CPACC, and it focuses on the documents I fix every day. This certification is a formal badge of my core skillset and solidifies my expertise as a recognized authority.
Most of the inaccessible content at Langara is in documents, not websites. A credential focused on Word, PowerPoint, and PDF fits the real need.
I'll use what I learned to tighten our document remediation workflows and the training we offer instructors. As with the CPACC, I created a practice quiz to prepare for the exam, which could be held up as an exemplar of a positive use of AI as a study tool.
I completed the CPACC and ADS exams at an onsite testing centre. I cannot sympathize with the absurd security and rigorous identity verification, but it is what it is. The staff had to inspect my wireframe glasses to ensure they weren't AI-enabled. I don't blame them. I blame protocol and the world's insistence on rote memorization as a metric of understanding.
I had previously written a remotely proctored IAAP exam and the process was equally ridiculous. They now use AI for this process, which is known to be discriminatory to disabled people. There is also something incredibly sad and misguided that someone writing an accessibility certification exam may need to be accommodated.
IAAP may have lost sight of the forest for the trees.
]]>In Taking UDL from Theory to Practice: A Resource for Access in Higher Education the presenters offered a reflection exercise to "help educators take universal design for learning from theory to practice using a scaffolded series of informational chapters, reflections, and case studies." That may be useful to some, but the document is dense (create a copy of UDL Reflections Template) and contains many references to other readings. I think the majority of instructors would look at this workbook and think 'I want to but that's too much.' I don't have a better method, and while this session was interesting progress on a seemingly wicked problem, more is needed to translate 'good ideas' into tangible action.
Google Slides - Taking UDL from Theory to Practice: A Resource for Access in Higher Education
Create a copy of UDL Reflections Template
The keynote speaker was Jack McElaney, the Chief Revenue Officer at Microassist. Microassist is an accessibility consultancy focused on legal compliance with the Americans with Disabilities act. Unfortunately, much of this talk was about the dangers of being sued for inaccessible content. While that fear may be a powerful cudgel, it does not apply to my context and is not how I advocate for accessibility.
The Lightning Round Sponsor Session was a series of 5–10 minute talks by various sponsors including:
Mary-Colleen Jenkins presented Building an Accessibility Outreach Ecosystem for Faculty Engagement.
The session began with discussing the common methods of teaching instructors, including:
The presenter noted the shortcomings of these methods, including:
To address this complexity, the presenter offered the idea of an outreach ecosystem that is efficient (easy to schedule, organize, and facilitate), replicable (customizable content for multiple audiences, easily adapted to digital literacy level), sustainable (appropriate workload for facilitators including content that participants could teach to others), and interactive (sessions allow participants to immediately apply what they’re learning to their own materials).
The Outreach Ecosystem proposed offers multiple ways to engage:
As presented, the ecosystem approach intends to address:
Professional constraints
Personal constraints
The presenter indicated that in their experience most faculty want to incorporate UDL and make content accessible, but they don't know how to add to their existing workflow. The outreach ecosystem offers creative new options to address these concerns. Suggestions include building trust and generating interest by collaborating with internal partners, visiting groups instead of waiting for individuals to approach you, customizing material for the audience, identifying specific pain points to ensure relevance, scaffolding for different skill sets, empathizing with constraints, and offering to continue the conversation.
The presentation continued with a review of pilot projects, including monthly meetups/lunch & learns (60 minutes, expert presenters, and Q&A); accessibility cafes (20 minutes presentation, 70 minutes working time to co-work with peers, spur discussion, support peers, and network); progress over perfection working groups; and department specific accessibility cafes. More details are available in the Google Slides presentation.
The presenter emphasized that these multiple options make it easier for faculty to start, and continue, learning. As with many presentations, this session left me with questions about how to put this idea into practice. Creating multiple options is easier said than done but starting by designing content to be reusable and adaptable could eliminate excess work. By placing the topic at the center of the ecosystem and deliberately designing material for reuse could be a useful starting point to offer multiple options to instructors.
Kim Ashbourne presented Developing a Personal Transformative Digital Accessibility Praxis; an engaging session that invited educators, learning designers, and instructional staff to move beyond viewing accessibility as a checklist for compliance. Instead, it encouraged understanding digital accessibility as an embodied, sociocultural experience that affects how people with disabilities interact with digital learning environments. Accessibility is framed not just as a technical issue, but as an issue of agency, equity, and participation in digital spaces.
The session explored how digital accessibility practices can become a part of one’s everyday teaching, learning, and design routines. Participants are guided through key digital accessibility literacy skills, including:
- Writing Skills: Proficiency with the five main WCAG 2 text-based strategies (headings, hyperlinks, alt text, text formats for audio/visual material, plain language)
- Editing/Checking: Proficiency checking the accessibility of your or others’ work
- Publishing: Proficiency saving and sharing files with accessibility features intact
- Reading: Proficiency identifying and sourcing accessible texts and media
Kim Ashbourne Google Slides - Transformative Praxis
while reflecting on how personal habits, course structures, and assumptions about 'normal' bodies influence inclusion. Activities prompted participants to identify where they need help to nurture equitable, agentive outcomes—like full participation in group work or timely access to materials—for all learners. A focus on access and agency instead of compliance makes this a more human, and hopefully more effective, approach to more accessible digital content and experiences.
Google Slides - Transformative Praxis
Overall, Accessibility Summer Camp 2025 was an engaging event that offered interesting approaches and concepts. Like many resources and events, it is easy enough to look at something and say, 'that's neat.' The challenge comes from incorporating new ideas into, or completely changing, praxis.
]]>Richard Tape from UBC introduced a Wordpress plugin called Socrates. The plugin started from one instructor's "News of the week" email newsletter.
'My job is to take something that works for one instructor and make it possible for others'
Richard Tape
The "News of the week" newsletter was created to connect learning outcomes to current events. According to Richard, student feedback was incredibly positive. With the explosion of LLMs and generative AI, Socrates evolved. The plugin autopopulates the "News of the week" newsletter from weighted RSS feeds that employs (user-chosen) AI to rate each article 1-10 based on keywords and a detailed prompt. The plugin allows users to automatically curate a list of links and create and send a "News of the week" post.
Additionally, Socrates can be used as an AI-enchanced chatbot that prompts students with contextual questions asking students to critically reflect on their learning. This function is not unique to Socrates, but having a pre-prompted and subject specific chatbot streamlines the reflective process for students.
As it is, generative AI is better at asking questions than it is at answering them. The Socrates plugin and contextual chatbot could be an excellent tool for students to reflect and critically consider complex topics.
Using AI in this way is also a useful introduction to (academically) ethical use of AI. As opposed to putting a blanket ban on AI, this approach shows some uses of AI can be useful without presenting any academic integrity concerns.
A certain level of trust is required to allow AI to curate a newsfeed. I am unsure if I personally trust it less than the 4 oligarchs that control almost all of western media.
As we have limited control over plugins on our (soon to be replaced?) Langara Wordpress, I will look into having Socrates added to opened.ca.
I do not personally foresee a use for the AI-enhanced chat bot, but the link aggregator strikes me as an incredibly useful tool for efficiently sifting through the deluge of information available. An automatically curated collection of articles could inform a newsletter, professional devleopment playlists, or other knowledge base.
ETUG included an afternoon "Demo Fest" where various presenters offered quick demos and conversations in an exhibition style.
While ETUG presentations are always interesting, the change of pace was welcome.
The exhibition style allowed participants to wander, browse, or engage with various tools, interfaces, and projects at their leisure. Instead of pretending to listen politely to a presentation that did not interest me, I could wander from booth to booth, eavesdropping and stealing glances at the demonstration, and moving along once my interest was satiated.
One specific use gleaned from the Demo Fest was a plan to impliment a Digital Literacy Challenge based on the BCcampus demo booth. I missed the announcement of these challenges and was pleased to hear about this one directly from the creator.
Admitedly, I did not take useful notes on this session. However, I found a few elements extremely useful, particulalry the results of the presenters' focus group testing with doctors that instruct at UBC.
According to their findings, instructors want just-in-time resources. By just-in-time, the focus group meant no more than 5 clicks to get to, no logins, and to be consumed in less than 5 minutes. While this was a specific group, the lessons of their wants are ubiquitous. Instructors may not have a lot of time to learn about something, especially as it relates to something outside their field, such as educational technology. Meeting people where they are may be a useful way to increase engagement with our professional development offerings and support resources.
Admitedly, I am not sure. This session may be food for thought or a reminder to (re)engage with instructors to ensure we are delivering what they need in formats that work for them. However, that is only a half measure because it is essential that instructors know what students need, in formats that work for students. Meeting instructors where they are at may not actually be useful, because some instructors are not using educational technology in ways that benefit students.
This presentation was an extremely practical session just gently outside the realm of the regular ETUG fare. Britt from BCcampus presented their workflow on how to store digital artifacts using the PARA method. PARA (Project, Areas, Resources, and Archive) is a framework for sorting and storing information such as files, notes, links, and other bits. I personally use that method for files, email, and task organization using AARV (Active, Areas, Resources, and Vault) because those labels sort alphabetically.
Watching the demo reinforced my hunch that Obsidian is not for me. Exploring Notion revealed that Microsoft Loop is very similar and should be used to greater effect for note-taking, project management, and collaboration.
Britt stressed the idea of a digital garden, focusing more on the idea of gardening than having a finished garden. It might be a leap in logic that only tracks for me, but this session has inspired me to revisit the idea of tagging all my content with an eye to reducing or even eliminating digital folders. Where to start... where to start? Unfortunately OneDrive/SharePoint does not offer a useful tagging tool.
ETUG Spring 2025 concluded with table talks. Attendees were asked to choose 3 of 8 topics and discuss with peers for 10 minute table talks. Tables hosted topics such as assessment, AI, trends, and the BC Digitial Learning Strategy and Digital Literacy Framework.
The final presentation at ETUG is often given to a half-empty room of people packing up their laptops. The activity initially felt like a chore (no one likes group work), but the lively conversation with peers from other institutions was engaging and informative.
Apart from making the final afternoon of ETUG more lively, the chance to hear from other instutitions prompted excellent discussion. Hearing ideas, struggles, missteps, and concerns from others was an excellent opportunity for empathy, community-building, and reflection.
Like many discussions, there may not have been concrete takeaways from the table talks. Given the general mood of the sector and the seemingly wicked nature of the problems, the table talks may have been more of a release valve than a call to action. That is a useful exercise too.
]]>Multiple means of connection: A decolonial approach to UDL
This session explored the decolonial approach to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) undertaken at Royal Roads University. If UDL emphasizes multiple ways of knowing, a decolonial approach requires incorporating Indigenous Ways of Knowing. The speakers presented their research and practical examples of how they incorporate multiple means of connection into their work.
This presentation was a useful reminder to not silo initiatives. To operate as if UDL, EDI, Indigenization, accessibility and others are discrete initiatives that exist in a vacuum does a disservice to each.
I will begin with a careful consideration of how to practically incorporate Indigenization into all of my work. Focusing on Indigenization is better than ignoring the important work, but segregating Indigenization to separate effort is not effective or inclusive. This is ongoing work requiring a flexible mindset and willingness to retool my workflow.
Developing Connected Writing Using Obsidian
While I had heard of Obsidian, I had not seen it used. Loosely akin to Notion, Obsidian is a note-taking app that allows for nearly unlimited formats, concept mapping, and database creation. This session was a useful introduction to Obsidian in a practical education context. This demonstration showed how to add items to Obsidian, how to link topics, and different ways to view material added to Obsidian. I was very intrigued.
Obsidian could be used to catalogue and archive student artifacts. The ability to link notes and create wiki-style content could make large numbers of items easily manageable, searchable, and findable. Such a tool could be used as an eportfolio (or at least the source material for an eportfolio) of student learning.
Twist! I will not use it. Even as someone who works with technology and is keenly interested in new opportunities to use technology in learning, I found the steep learning curve and complexity of Obsidian to be too significant. While some students may find it useful, most will be overwhelmed by Obsidian. When recommending a specific tool, I often consider that even in relevant fields (computer science, technology), a similar but different tool (e.g. Notion) may be used. There would be no harm in using Obsidian, but I would not recommend it as a required tool.
However, what I learned from this presentation is that technology is exciting and powerful, but not always the answer. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Creating Engaging Educational Content on Social Media
Trefor Bazett is a mathematics professor and a YouTuber. This presentation outlined Trefor's experience as both and how using social media to reach students (his and those around the world) has been an effective method to enhance engagement.
The constant effort to keep students engaged requires continuous rethinking and non-traditional thinking. Trefor's YouTube math channel is wildly successful and an excellent example of using non-traditional media to reach students.
It would be interesting to be the personality type that can captivate an asynchronous audience wanting to learn maths. However, that is unfathomable to me. That said, this presentation reminded me that it may be best to meet your audience where they are at. If that's online, educators should make an effort to embrace that.
]]>This intensive 3-day workshop taught me many introductory teaching skills and useful reflective techniques for continuous improvement. While an intense experience, the base skills learned are invaluable.
Incorporating feedback in an iterative process to evaluate and improve instructional practice has immediately proven to be useful to EdTech workshop offerings. By (re)considering learning outcomes and incorporating more active participation, the EdTech workshop offerings I contribute to have improved to be more engaging and effective.
Using the BOPPPS model to craft lessons and learning material for EdTech workshops.
]]>