Low Tech entry to digital inclusion
Be A Digital Ally

February 27, 2025 - 5:00 PM CT

This interactive session equips educators, instructional designers, and technology developers with tools to create inclusive learning environments for students with cognitive disabilities. It covers a range of cognitive disabilities, including dyslexia, ADHD, autism, and traumatic brain injuries, which often result in perception, memory, attention, and problem-solving challenges. The presentation will define cognitive and learning disabilities, distinguish them from intellectual disabilities, and emphasize the need for inclusive content and user interface designs. Key design principles, and Plain Language will be discussed, along with practical design patterns from the W3C’s Cognitive Accessibility Task Force. A popular Ed Tech product will be reviewed to show how its design affects screen reader users.

Desiree is a wife and mom, Musician and an Accessibility Professional. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from The University Of Texas at Austin in Vocal Performance. During High School and College, Desiree competed musically in a variety of contests and won a few awards. She worked as a Customer Service Representative at a bank and cable company before her first daughter was born. She home schooled her daughter for 3 years and in 2007 began doing contract work for a local accessibility company in Austin called Knowbility. At Knowbility, Desiree learned about accessible design techniques, presented at various accessibility conferences and demonstrated screen readers and other assistive devices.

In 2017, Desiree began working at Pearson VUE as a Senior Quality Assurance Engineer For Blindness Technologies. She attained certifications in JAWS and NVDA, as well as the Certified Professional of Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC) certification from the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP). She conducts accessibility tests on exams and certifications offered by Pearson using JAWS, NVDA, Voiceover, Narrator, and various refreshable braille displays. She also collaborates with Pearson VUE's accessibility team to provide documentation for product developers as well as test candidates regarding access to exams.”

Desiree is a practitioner, a person with a disability, and the parent of a child with a disability.

Jan has 27 years of experience as a K-12 special educator and Assistive Technology Specialist. In June 2013, she joined Pearson's Assessment division as an Accessibility Specialist and was promoted to VP of Accessibility for Psychometrics & Testing Services in 2014. While at Pearson, she built and led a team of 23 accessibility specialists, 68% of whom were people with disabilities. Jan has direct experience working with students with a wide variety of disabilities and understands the unique access needs these students have in the classroom and on high stakes assessment. Jan is currently serving as an accessibility consultant for Knowbility, where she manages K-12 accessibility contracts and supports Knowbility’s business development efforts.

You have a website and you want to see if it's accessible to your users. Maybe you have to recommend websites to others as part of your job and you want to make sure your clients can access the information. Accessibility checkers can provide a quick diagnostic to see if those websites will be accessible. This month we will review how to make the most of these tools with our tips and tricks.

What’s a CMS? What does CSS stand for? Is the URL the same thing as my website? If you are not a web developer or designer, making a new website can be a confusing mess of products and subscriptions. We will walk through the steps one needs to take to start a new website, plus what to look for and consider to make sure your website can be as accessible as possible.

You interact with various documents regularly, but how accessible are they to your co-workers or audience? This session will review the basic accessibility requirements for documents & PDFs, how to utilize accessibility checkers, and tips & tricks for easily creating accessible materials.

In Part One of the series, we focused on alternative ways to deliver your content to blind users, primarily through audio description and proper heading structure. In this session, we will go over the various obstacles and considerations for low vision users, including brightness, contrast, page setup, and making good branding choices.

Anything containing visual information including gifs and photos should have visual descriptions!

Visual and audio descriptions ensure access to visual information for those who are blind or have low vision. Join us in this session as we cover available services, tools, and best practices for ensuring your content meets the gold standard for Visual Information.

You are likely familiar with captioning, the text version of whatever is being spoken in a video, but do you know how to caption your own video content?   

In this session, we will be going over all things captioning: available services and tools, adding captions manually, and best practices for video content. Come learn how to make your videos accessible to your audience! 

When writing new content for your website, whether it's a job posting, a blog post, or for a new section or page, it's important that the language and links be accessible to all users. 

In the second session of the Be A Digital Ally series, we will be covering two topics: descriptive links and plain language. The first topic will be descriptive internal and external link text, which is especially important to screen reader users. The second topic will be the use of plain language. Clear, concise language makes your message more readable for everyone. It is especially important for people with dyslexia or other cognitive issues. We'll explore techniques and guidelines to help you simplify your writing and make it more easily understood for all.

Alternative text is a textual substitute for non-text content in web pages. important because it allows blind and visually impaired users to access the information on your site, making it a hallmark of accessibility.

In this session, we will be covering the ins and outs of alternative text. The first half of the session will cover all of the information and guidelines you'll need to create effective alt text: when and where to place it, the purposes it serves, and how to (and not to) write it.