ROUGH EDITED COPY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
CIRCLE CAMPUS
DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY EXPO
SESSION 2
USING ACCESSIBLE TEACHING & LEARNING TECHNOLOGY AND CLASS MATERIALS
11:00 a.m. - 11:50 a.m.
APRIL 9, 2009
CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY:
DILLON REPORTING SERVICE
100 NORTH LA SALLE STREET, SUITE 1500
CHICAGO, IL 60602
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This is being provided in a rough‑draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facility communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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>> ED GARAY: Good morning. And thank you very much for coming to the Disability Expo. This session will disclose how faculty, how instructors on campus can create successful materials and select good technology materials that are successful. But before we start, we're very privileged to have our wonderful provost who found some time to come here and give a little message. Dr. Tanner has been very supportive of the web accessibility, the work with the web accessibility community committee and on behalf of the disability resource center and the chancellor's committee for persons with disability, welcome, Dr. Tanner. We want to hear your message.
(Applause).
>> MICHAEL TANNER: Good morning, everyone. I see someone is visibly typing, so I think I may have to speak more slowly than usual, unless you're really fast on the keyboard.
What I wanted to lend my support to is just the moves that this has tried to open up access. I have had the good fortune in my career of being part of the digital revolution. I'm now an old timer. My first job in 1962, I worked on a circuit that had six transistors on a single ship. In 1962 that was state of the art. And the world has changed a great deal. And it's really opening up amazing horizons in terms of our being able to see worlds that we couldn't see, to make contacts that we couldn't make before. I sometimes, you know, try to transport myself back to the time that we were actually handwriting letters, which is, of course, from my generation what you used to do. And it's a rare privilege when you get to do it nowadays. But then you say, this has just opened up the whole world. We've created the worldwide web. But in doing that, we have also to think about who's not part of that new world and who's not getting access to it. And take steps to make sure that we have not created within the language of computer and the computer age this digital divide.
With respect to people who have impairments of one variety or another, have disabilities in, say, visual, one has to recognize that much of what we are now taking for granted is assuming a visual capability. And we have to take steps to make sure that we are not creating a different kind of digital divide. The slogan that we had arrived at after the planning process, Carole Snow was reminding me, was access to excellence. And, in fact, that's what we hope to provide here for a wide variety of different modalities, put it that way, that we have to look at ways in which thinking systematically about universal design, we can make everything we do or better for the entire audience that would like to have that access. So it's about expanding that access.
I want to emphasize that it's important, there were a wide variety of sponsors, many of them internals, and thank you very much for the external sponsors. But in order to achieve that, digital access, it really is important that we do it as a whole community at UIC. It's important that we set a standard across the entire campus so that it becomes an expectation in everything we do. You know, one group doing a wonderful job is great, but it doesn't have anywhere near the impact as if we can make sure that it's across the entire campus and that we maintain those minimum standards. So I think it's marvelous. I've been in technology, and every once in awhile I sit back in my chair and say, it's an amazing transition that we have seen during my lifetime in terms of things that we can do as a human race, contacts that I can have around the world, things I have access to. A new verb Google, and all these things have been such amazing revolution, that it really is up to us to make sure that that revolution is open to everybody. And I appreciate everybody being here to hear about it. Unfortunately I've got other obligations and I couldn't get to the first session, that I should have been there. I'm sure the same thing will be true of the second session. So I thank you all in advance for your attendance here this morning.
(Applause).
>> ED GARAY: Thank you very much, Dr. Tanner. And with that let me very quickly introduce the group of folks that will be talking with me today. We are on a tight schedule, so we will ‑‑ it's very hard to end at 50 minutes, 10 minutes before noon. And I'm Ed Garay with the communication center, and with me I will have Peggy Cassey, the instructor at the college of nursing, and Marc from the champagne campus, so we're each going to go into 10 or 15 minutes. I believe we're being recorded. I recognize that. So the sessions are being recorded, the audio of these sessions, and our representations will also be up on line.
We will leave time for questions, particularly Marc's session. And in his instruction, he can take at heart a lot of the issues there are, but really signing courses is so nobody is left behind, as Mike had mentioned.
With that, let me very quickly go through my little presentation. And in terms of the equal accessibility, really the key thing is to think about it right at the beginning, whether you're writing a document or you're making class materials as a handout, sooner or later, these things will be on line most of the time. And if you think about disability from the beginning, structure your files, when you add images to your class materials, you put some alternate text that goes along with the images in your educational content or if you have animation, you have a long description of what the actual animation is doing, what the video clip is doing. Mike earlier session had a number of excellent ideas and excellent examples of things that are available and things that we can do. And let me just remind you that this Illinois accessibility act that was implemented last August was not for just university web sites. It's also for class materials, I run the idea. I run blackboard. My group does. I know there's a lot of material there that's not accessible, a lot of material. And hopefully as time goes by and every semester we have the opportunity, the instructors, faculty members, have the opportunity to start making things more accessible, to start using things that are not and these things are more accessible. So very quickly I will go through a list of what these things are. And in general, what we want is if we're going to put class materials on line, on the web, we want html, and we want successful HTML. I think there is discussion about this later, and there is a lot more later. But what we mean is HTML web pages, documents, in HTML they are easy for browsers to read, with jaws, with browse aloud, and different programs. It's better than pdf and certainly better than prefatory documents, and I can tell you a number of our students are consuming this information at computers where they cannot install the new version of office or word perfect or something. So it's important that this information can really be played without the browsers and the latest versions of programs and things like that. Also faculty members, how many of you are actually teaching and are new instructors, teaching staff, or help people with, faculty members? Realize that when you put out word documents and power points, source files on blackboard or on web sites, you actually are giving away your intellectual property, entire file, entire document. You're giving it away. So that's another reason why you don't want to do it. And I will also mention that I think Mike alluded to that Mike Scott, not Michael, the provost, but it's important that really in universal design and web accessible documents, also get very fluid and they work very well. And devices that our students and colleagues, faculty and staff are using. They're using this little browser windows, these little phones I phones and the pod touch. So if we do it, all this content still works on small devices like Blackberries. Also we mentioned captions and I'm going to be talking a lot about transcription, I will mention a lot of times transcription and video. And those again, that's plain text, which is what? Searchable. I am not vision impaired, but I can search for something and know that what I am looking for is now in minute 3 of that video clip. Very useful. So again it's not just about making things developed for people with disabilities, but really making people, providing universal access and design for everybody.
The last thing I want to say about this little web page is that I know some of these things are not easy to do, but there is a lot of stuff that is easy to do. Unfortunately this was in Urbana and other schools. We do have resources available. My group, the instruction for technology lab works very closely with Kevin and the disability resource center. We're part of the big unit so we can work together and help students. We actually do and have been for a number of years now. And so when you're ready or when you have faculty in your department ready to do the next thing, you know where they can go.
Next I'll mention web accessible. And sometimes using the right tool is very important as well. For years I've been telling faculty at this university, Microsoft word is not a web authoring tool. It's not. I can say other bad things about Microsoft word, but one thing it really isn't is it's not a web powered tool. Micro web dream, this is called lesson builder and what it does is creates simple web pages. I'm creating lessons for the web very easily. Licenses for the whole campus, teachers, instructors, and teaching staff can download it for free. We joined forces with Urbana campus, so in web store, if you go to that web store in Illinois.edu, you can download it at your office, put it at home, and without knowing HTML and without being really a graphic designer or web developer, using dream weaver and all these programs, you can create. And this will take care of the table of contents and points and all these things, and by the way, it's very accessible. As you add graphics, you get prompted. What's the name of the image, the long description, the short description, and things like that.
That's on windows and Macs, and that's one thing you can do next time you're teaching a class, take some of this and copy it and paste it with lesson builder.
I don't want to spend too much time in here, but something else that a lot of faculty do, and increasingly do, and it's not a bad thing. They are narrating presentations, power presentations. They are doing programs by point as publisher and other programs. These are programs that we support again, and one of the good things about it is that you have the images of the power point presentation and you have audio. So now you have like two formats, working together very nice, but I think you should take a step further and also provide the speaker note. And most of the instructors do have the speaker notes so they can make those available and they become available to the student as well if they want to see that.
And captions or plain text transcriptions of the content is also a plus.
So that's publishing like power representations. We go here back to word and power point. We have a wonderful tool that was developed several years ago by our colleagues, our friends in Urbana. John Gunderson is here. He spearheaded this project. Essentially what this is is a free add on, essentially free to us at U. So it's a simple program in your copy of windows, Microsoft office, and then instead of using Microsoft corporation's way of creating web pages, which is not very good. Those pages are not very accessible. Instead what you do is you now create a nice, a very accessible HTML pages, for power point, for word, for excel. So if you have up loaded images in your Microsoft word document and you don't have an alternate description of what the image says, John Gunderson, this program, this wizard, will ask you, this image, give me the short text description. Give me the long one. And it will create in the case of power point a plain text version of the power point presentation as well as a graphic Al version, two graphical versions, actually, and then applications like this, next and first slide and that sort of stuff. It will do that and also a printable version. You can't beat the price. We have it also available on the web store. Yes. And we have it in all the computer labs, PC labs. And for those of you, and sometimes people say, well, I still want to get a little training on it, we will train you in 10 minutes, 20 minutes, you can do it over the network too. And then it's a no brainer really. So use that, and output HTML, good HTML. That's another simple thing to do.
How we doing on time? Somebody give me 5 minutes.
Next thinking about accessibility from the outset, I cannot stress this enough. Kevin and ‑‑ but the key thing is that quite often, this also happens to instructors. We used to have handouts, I don't know if you notice but a lot of faculty at this university and most universities are saving money by not printing all these handouts and giving it to students, and guess who does the printing? Blackboard does the printing. The computer center pays for the pages. So they are up loading these pdf files. So make sure they are accessible because some people want to read them. And again with the WIZARD, you can create a passport. But do think about styling your documents, setting up a structure. Because by doing so, you can also when you read a pdf out of those documents, that pdf can be very accessible file, a pdf file. And that's really good.
A couple more slides here. So what we want is again, from the beginning, think about accessibility, and don't worry about this tough words, like structure and tagged, what does that mean. But if your word documents or if you're using in design or express or whatever tool you're using, word perfect, word star, I don't know if it's still around. And you structure the documents, you style them so you don't just go in and change fonts, instead you say heading one, heading two, you do that, then you are essentially making a document accessible right at the ultimate stage, which is what you want to do. But if you haven't, and some people haven't and I know a lot of people haven't, there are tools to do that. And one of them is AK row bat professional, which is some people don't have Acrobat professional, so they can come to east or west and use it there. But I just use the software and everybody on my staff knows how to use these things very well. Watch it, those of you who are using those new fancy ‑‑ not that fancy, what are they called? This departmental copiers in outbook pdf. That's the ugliest pdf I've ever seen, huge, 10, 15 mega bites. So don't think you're just scanning things with those copiers, you're creating good pdf files. You're not. And I don't know how many of you knew this, but in addition to browse aloud and jaws and other things, Adobe reader, the last couple versions of reader 8 and reader 9, they have read aloud capability. And if you don't know how to get there, just call the ITL. And click, click, click, your students can do it. So that's nice.
I think Mike's covered a lot about this. I will just simply say that the key really is to provide a very high‑quality experience for people with disabilities, and that's very important. And you can look at this on your own later on, but there are always ways of making things accessible, providing a relatively similar rich experience for people, for one disability or another. So I mentioned power point and web accessibility and power tools. How are you going to learn this? You can go to the ADL or call the ADL, but at least for this month and something we will keep in U I C says we want this, we have over 9 tutorials are using all these programs. To make documents. Acrobat, version 7, version 8, how to manage spam, nothing to do with accessibility, but still quite usable. One of the things I did when we were negotiating with these companies, I said, okay, this is good but you better start providing how committed are you to accessibility for your own tutorials, and they have shown me very proudly that quite a few dozens and dozens of the most recent titles, all the recent titles, have closed captioning built in. So they are committed to that. They're not going to go fix Microsoft 2.0 editorial, closed captioning, but they are doing those things. And soon they will have a blackboard tutorial as well. So go take a look. It's free. It's always going to be free to U I C, but certainly in April you can use it. I have people from Urbana who want to use it. But trust me. This is very nice.
Blackboard, I'll just say that blackboard is really just a ‑‑ I usually say it's a file cabinet. But it's more than a file cabinet. But really it's a repository of stuff. You can do discussion boards and different activities, different things, assignments, but in reality, blackboard is really, it's a filing cabinet, student faculty, teaching assistants, load documents, pdf documents, HTML documents, links to pod casts, links to different things. And it's very popular, highly used. 22,000, we have almost 25,000 full‑time students here, and 22,000 have at least one class with blackboard this semester alone. I think we have 19,000 course sites over the years. But blackboard does have its problems, certainly the version we're running. And the problems usually are with the real time tools. Like in blackboard, you can click and get a virtual tool, virtual office hours, and it will, instead of the student walking from SES all the way to SSB, to see you, maybe they can open blackboard over there and text you a question. And if you get all these questions from different students and you like it, you could save that and share it with the students who didn't ask the question. So that's not accessible, and there are other complications with the frames and very poor fluid design. Again, Hodde at Urbana Champaign and John Gunderson, are very active. I don't know how many schools. John, how many schools? About 30 schools, they meet every Monday afternoon, I rarely can make the meeting, and they've been working very hard on the new blackboard. With the new blackboard which is already available. Started shipping in January. We're not running it introductory at UIC yet. We already have a sandbox, but they're concentrating on that. And the way I tell blackboard, I have very close friends in that company, I tell them if Hardy and John are happy, I'm happy. And normally that's my criteria with them. And depending on when you ask, I think they are happy.
So this new version, which we have sent, we will run introduction in the fall for just a select number of members. By selective few, I mean couple hundred faculty members. It's very accessible. It has ways to essentially make blackboard be very fluid, very linearized, so jaws and different assistive technology can really use it. It does have the keyboard short cuts, right?
>> JOHN GUNDERSON: It does have some, yeah.
>> ED GARAY: Mapping, some of that? So it's very nice. And with that I think I have one more slide. And I will transition now to bring to the podium our next presenter, Peggy Cassey who is a wonderful resource for the college of nursing and UIC. Well, you know where we are, and with that, Peggy, thank you very much for joining us.
>> MARGARET CASSEY: That's fine. Thank you.
Just one second while I get my presentation up.
I want to build on some of the things that Mike said today, and I want to add to just from a very practical perspective some of the things that we just heard from ed. So the first thing I want to emphasize is that when we create materials, we always try to create them with objectives, in our, at least in our department, we always have an objective. But I want to point out that with office 2007, the item that we're looking at right here, as nice as it looks with the pictures and the label, I'm not sure a screen reader can read it because it's an image. So I'll have to ask Ed to speak to that or someone else can speak to that. But I do like the way it looks. So today I'm going to talk to you very briefly, probably 5 minutes total, about lesson builder, which is the soft chalk tool that Ed mentioned earlier, a little bit about audio tools for use of students, and then a small amount of Camtasia software. You heard Mike mention how important alternative text is, and you can see on the slide here, you insert your media through the lesson builder, and it gives you an image. This is a graph, an excel spread sheet graph. It gives me whether this is going to be a good source and then it also asks me to provide an alternative text and a long description which the screen reader could do. This is all preset when you're building an HTML soft chalk lesson. And that's what Ed's was. His was a soft chalk lesson. I'm showing you a power point lesson here. And after you put those in, that's done for you. I did watch the webnar that's going to be released at the end of May. There are some wonderful additional new pieces including the ease of putting in widgets and things like that. So you may want to watch for that and download a new version of the lesson builder in May.
A couple of audio tools I wanted to mention, very simple tools and there's other things about this, including some lessons that have already been giving through ITL about using source four audacity, which is the built in editors on your computer will only do a minute or two of recording for the most part. So having this particular tool allows you to edit what you've created.
Now, I'm also showing you the very small Sony digital recorder that many of your students actually bring, but I actually bring this to class with me. I turn it on when I'm speaking. And when I go home, I just put a chord in the recorder and the software for the running of this recorder is on my computer at home. And I download it in and can immediately turn it into an MP 3 that they can then put on their I phone or I pod or whatever.
So that's the source forge.
Then the last thing I want to mention is the Camtasia studio and the reason I bring this up is includes screen capture. Learning is a lot broader than just looking at a power point slide. So I do a lot of capturing of things. Students have said, I don't know how to find something like this. I'll create a demo, a short demo. And I turn it into a Camtasia file. Now I'm going to caution you. I've seen the new one, 6. It does not create an easily inserted flash file with the controls on the bottom. So I really encourage if you want to try Camtasia, its academic version runs about $9500. And it includes something that you can literally just drop into the soft chalk lesson builder and it will run beautifully with all the controls on the bottom. It sets up all your slides as outlined, the index, and then it also will take the notes that you have and incorporate them in so that while you are speaking, the notes run across the bottom of the slide for accessibility. Notice, too, you can make a web version, a CD version, blog, I pod, and then you can also do custom settings.
This gives you an example of the easy interface. And once you have recorded your file with it, you just go up to the image here that looks like a little disk, and it will automatically convert in. I encourage you to change your properties so that it reflects the right information before you let it go. And once it's produced, you can crop it, you can change things, then you can insert it into your lesson. I know there's a lot of other things I would like to tell you about but the time is very limited and I want to leave room for Marc.
Thank you.
(Applause).
>> MARC THOMPSON: Hello. I think that probably what I could do at this point that would be of greatest value would be to raise some questions that we could all talk about in the Q and A session. I think that Ed has covered a lot of important ground about some of the learning management systems, and I think that's ‑‑ one, from an instruction al design point of view, that's one of the features we look at, whether we call it a filing cabinet, it's an infrastructure. Where we place the instructional material, the instructional content and to some extent the accessibility of that material is only as good as the structure in which it's placed. On that note, a lot of headway has been made, and Ed mentioned that we've worked with collaboration groups with blackboard. Vendors are becoming more responsive. I think we're also looking at ways of making the tools in blackboard, authoring tools, some of the authoring tools, working toward making those tools more functional in terms of accessible, creating accessible content but also in looking ahead, maybe even at ways of making those tools serve some educational value for the people who are using them. One example might be if someone were to up load a pdf file and the learning management system could check to see if that file is tagged, documented, or a graphic file. And then let the user know about that so that the tool itself, environment itself, becomes a way of teaching. And this is sort of keying into one of the questions I want to put out to all of you today, and that is how do we reach faculty about this issue? As an instructional designer, I work regularly with faculty and helping faculty to transform maybe a course that they do in the traditional brick and mortar classroom into perhaps an on line course or a hybrid course. And one of the considerations that I try to bring to mind as we work through the development process is accessibility and making that material accessible.
We are under a lot of pressure as designers to make sure that the content that we provide is media rich and interactive and engaging. And that brings with it a lot of challenges. Anybody who's worked with flash know ‑‑ I know there's still a lot going on there in terms of captioning, but I think there is progress being made.
I think then we've got both that infrastructure of the LMS but also the content that goes into that learning management system, whether it be blackboard or mood or desire to learn. What are the contents? How much can we expect our faculty to know? I taught for 20 years before I became an instructional designer, and I can tell you that faculty are busy. And how much can we expect them to know? What are the best ways of reaching faculty? What is the role of the instructional designer in helping to educate faculty about accessible, instructional content? And then beyond that, what can be done at the departmental level? Case in point within my division, my division head has allocated roughly a fifth of my time to accessibility concerns so that I can share that with my instructional design staff. And I work closely with other people at our university who are involved with accessibility, our accessibility liaison, Tim Offenstein, and with Hodde and John, and there are other people too at our institution. Robert Shrader is here from the library and also in some capacity his department or division has allocated some time to pursue that and share that with other people on the staff. More recently Joy Be and Robert know more about the particular concerns in their field, and then they can bring these issues to the attention of other people who are working in the area of accessibility. So all of this is to say what can be done then at the departmental level to encourage and foster more interest in accessible instructional content. And I'll sort of leave you with those four questions. How much can we expect faculty to know? What are the best ways of reaching faculty? And what is the role of the instructional designer in all of this, and what can be done at the departmental level? With that I think we'll just open it up to Q and A.
>> ED GARAY: Any questions for any of us?
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think with a good bulk of the content, it's pretty easy to work with blackboard and add the captioning and so forth. But once you move into the sciences and statistical formulas and so forth, who's going to spend the time converting that into the math mark up language that nothing in an automated system is doing. I don't know that any of our faculty has the time to do it or even we have extra student staff time to do that kind of mark up language.
>> ED GARAY: Yes, that's a very good question. We see this a lot as campuses put more lecturing in the classroom. So I just walk in and without doing anything, the session is being recorded and with screen shots and live video, and audio sync. So yes, all these different things, the annotating, most people are not in the practice of converting very easily.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm even thinking the LSAT or science journals, none of that has been marked up so that it's inaccessible for our patrons.
>> ED GARAY: Right. Anybody want to answer?
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: There's a number of companies that will assist with doing captions or transcriptions for science. Largely what you have to do is hand over a textbook so that they can at least understand the scientific context or the medical context of what it is. But largely you have to hire out to, you know, you send your video to the company and then you get the transcription back.
>> ED GARAY: Something that I've heard and some schools do, particularly instructors in large classes, there's always a handful of people who are really interested in making things accessible, students. So it's a part of their attending the class and so forth, they are tasked with helping making some of these, particularly the key points, that key animation, those images and drawings accessible. And they will do it on their own. And it can be done, but it's labor intensive. You're right.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: As another possible route to an answer to the question that's asked, what about going to the publisher as the person or group of people who do it? For instance, I'm very familiar with something called my math lab. And math zone and several others, where you talk about math books, they create a proprietary learning system. And what you have to do as an instructor to make it work is link their system and pull it into what it is that you're actually trying to do so that you become the administrator, the monitor of student learning, and you still provide workable tools that students can use to get the practice that they need in order to learn to your specifications.
>> ED GARAY: Right. Very good point.
Any other questions? And not just for me or the panel, but just questions in general you may have about ‑‑ yes, Karen?
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a question and maybe John Gunderson, you can address this. I don't know. I've got a lot of faculty who are putting courses on blackboard for the first time and they have very specific questions about what is not accessible in blackboard, what is a work around, and where can they find this information.
>> JOHN GUNDERSON: Well, I think the big issue, I think, with instructors in general, it's great that you have instructors that even care or even think about it, but the vast majority of instructors, I think probably don't have as much concern. Certainly blackboard is a complicated program that the tools and the way people create stuff is probably widely variable. And so it's kind of hard to give a specific answer. I think some of the things Ed talked about, well, let's make sure people are using the tools that support accessibility, like this court lesson builder tool, I'd like to take a look at that. So faculty that is concerned about accessibility, instead of using power point, let's use lesson builder. So we talked about Camtasia and captions, but let's focus people on the tools because that's really going to be the critical thing for faculty, is the more faculty have to know about accessibility, probably the less accessible instruction materials are. So we need tools that support accessibility. And when companies come here to UIC or whatever campus they're from, it's important to ask companies not can I create successful content because I've never met a company who said you can't create successful content. It's show me how I do this in a successful way and show me the accessible features after I create it. And we really need to start asking companies those questions to not just tell us they're accessible, but show me how I create the accessible content and show me how it's accessible to my students once it gets done because that's really going to make the biggest difference, I think, in the long run, that it's easier to create accessible content than inaccessible content. Right now it's easier to create inaccessible content than accessible content. And just one other thing too, I think really for accessibility to become part of what instructors do, the things that we want for people with disabilities also have to be seen as beneficial to all my learners, that I think kind of the model many instructors have on campus is this is the way I teach. If you can learn that way, hey, you're going to probably do well in my class. But if you don't learn that way, well, you might struggle. But I think as we've ‑‑ you know, just like our campus in Urbana, Champaign, I think here at UIC, people are starting to rethink that technology. We want to be able to teach instructors that need tools that not only teach to their strengths but their students' strengths. So I want to teach how I want to teach, if you can learn that way. Technology can also make learning materials that are MULTy mode AL, so people can learn in their own modal strength, and that will also help students with disabilities, so things like captions aren't just for hearing impaired students but people with English as a second language. I talked to a faculty member who comes from another country so their English is hard to understand. Well if they have on line material and it's transcribed now, they will have a better understanding of what the instruct or said. So these things will all be important as people think about accessible content. How does this affect our student learning and how does it set our instructional materials apart from other choices people can be making to learn things.
>> ED GARAY: Let me just very quickly add and we'll take your question in a second. Let me just very quickly add that in the context of your question, I'm very pleased to know that we as customers, and John and Hadde's group, this big accessibility special interest group, we actually have blackboard developed, the new blackboard 9, the new blackboard exploration system, what's the document called? It's blackboard tutorial for people using screen readers, and that document describes in very good easy to understand terms what the students have to do to use it and what teachers also should stay away or how they can use the tool better so that the accessibility usage is increased. And that's for the new blackboard 9. For the existing blackboard version, 8 and earlier versions, blackboard used to have a screen reader tutorial version 6 which is out of date. They don't want to make a new one because this blackboard new one is coming out already. But the IDL many times will take this version 6 and will go with the instructors, and we can do it with you too, and tell you it still applies, this doesn't apply. So it's very possible.
Let's take two more questions and we need to wrap up. So there was a question back there. Yes, sir?
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just want to endorse what John said and what Peggy said. I used this last semester that's going on now to convert one of my forces on line and it is one of the best web developed pages. You don't have to worry about dream weaver anymore or any of that BS. It will minimize the damage that blackboard does to your students with disabilities. Because blackboard, you have to find ways to minimize the damage that it does on your delivery, and this is one of the ways you can do it.
>> ED GARAY: Okay. That's very good. I don't know who's next.
Yes?
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: One ITL tool that didn't make the list up there, I'm curious, what's the status of using assistive technology with Egrans?
>> ED GARAY: Yeah, Centra, also known as Egrans, that's what we use in Urbana or Adobe connect. And Egrans has a few problems left but increasingly becomes very accessible. And we started using this system well before most schools in the big ten at CIC did. But we're pushing on that and now we went from version 5 to 7 or 8 we're running now and it's pretty much accessible. Every button, everything is neatly labeled and things work. And there's room for improvement still.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I wanted to ask maybe last question. Do you have testing policy?
>> ED GARAY: Yeah.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: You mentioned about the soft chalk product. Have you done any of ‑‑
>> ED GARAY: Great question. John alluded to it a little earlier. As part of the web accessibility committee that Kevin price chairs, and I'm a member of and we have a number of people from the university, from the library and other organizations helping with that, academic affairs is very active on it, we have worked and we have continued to work at different levels of the university and something that is very important, you just mentioned, procurement documents. So we want the purchasing agents, purchasing people at this university and Urbana and so forth to really take a look and say if you're going to buy the next banner or the next whatever it is, we actually now have some language in these documents in a process that the university will ensure that these things are accessible. Working with them, the IDL is supposed to train everybody in purchasing about accessibility and using their functional accessibility, evaluator, FAE. So all this stuff is in place, is beginning to come into place with the Illinois disability act so that no more inaccessible banner systems or whatever gets purchased by U of I. Okay. With that we can continue talking forever, but we are really short on time so let me now ask you to thank you again for being here, thank you for the speakers, especially Marc who came from down state. And now would you please, let's all join us at the Expo exhibits room where we're going to have a quick opening remarks by Carole Snow. And by Peter Berg.
Thank you very much.
