This May, ITS Digital Accessibility is highlighting training and resources to help you create accessible math and STEM materials. The focus this month is on making sure technical content — like equations, formulas, and data — is usable by everyone, every time. Whether you are preparing materials for teaching, research, or communications, these resources are here to support… Read More »
Learn how three U-M teams have built accessible document templates (in Word, Google Docs, and beyond), and how to build your own.
Document accessibility means using best practices, tools, and workflows, so that you can easily create accessible documents each and every time. Explore tools and step-by-step guidance on how to improve your documents at your own pace.
For many, the Sindecuse Museum of Dentistry brings to mind rows of artifacts behind glass with small printed labels. That version of the museum still exists, but it’s no longer the whole story. Today, the space uses tech to create a more intentional and interactive experience for curious visitors. A layered experience, not just a display Tamara Barnes,… Read More »
The ITS Digital Accessibility team is highlighting website accessibility — what it is, why it matters, and the practical steps U-M technology staff and faculty can take to improve the web experience for everyone, including people with disabilities and people who use assistive technology.
Brought together at U-M in the early 1960s, Rackham alumni Jim Thatcher and Jesse Wright went on to create IBM’s first screen readers for blind and low-vision computer users. Over six decades later, a Rackham alum and his faculty mentors are preparing the next leap in accessible computing.
This month’s tip is PiccyBot, an AI app that provides spoken descriptions of photos and videos, helping blind and low-vision users gain greater independence.
Rackham doctoral candidate and human-computer interaction researcher Jaylin Herskovitz co-designs accessible tech with blind people, improving their experience with the world, online and off.
Research is how we learn, but our findings depend upon robust data, derived from the populations we seek to serve. As teams build digital environments for research, effort must be put into ensuring that those environments support the populations of study. When constructing digital environments for research, teams must think broadly about the full research experience to include emails or SMS sent, websites, webapps or native apps provided, and any devices included or issued. In addition, it cannot be stressed enough: the work in creating these environments is never done!
The leadership team from Student Accessibility and Accommodation Services (SAAS) approached Student Life Technology Solutions (SLTS) with the challenge of modernizing a primarily paper-based set of workflows and associated record-keeping.
ITS maintains licenses for screen reader and magnification software as part of their provision of assistive technology to U-M faculty, staff, and students. The U-M community can now use ITS’s license to access JAWS, ZoomText, and Fusion on their U-M-owned and personal Windows computers in addition to public Sites computers.
On August 21, 2023, the University of Michigan launched what we believe to be the first accessible web chat interface to send prompts to GPT-4 and other large language models — U-M GPT. This application is designed for accessibility according to international standards, optimized for usability with common assistive technology, and built without the barriers found in some… Read More »
Chapter 3 of the ITS LinkedIn Newsletter, Interns Telling Stories, by Adria Shines, Yu-Jin Choi and Josephine Anderson in collaboration with Kat Hanchon, Daki Ravinder and Achaia Murphy went live this afternoon. The new chapter features an interview with Christopher Eagle, strategist and enterprise architect for Information and Technology Services, along with a piece highlighting accessibility services through the Knox Center. The full newsletter is… Read More »
New activity translating academic research and technology, reported by Innovation Partnerships, a unit based in the Office of the Vice President for Research, ranges in scope from genetic data accessibility to internet interfaces for the visually impaired.
Learn how ITS Teaching & Learning collaborated with ITS Digital UX and DISC teams to bring a crucial Canvas app up to current technology standards and meet the needs of faculty and course administrators.
U-M will be a beta site for Morphic, a new system that makes technology significantly more usable for individuals with disabilities and others who have difficulty using standard digital setups. Morphic is now available on all Campus Computing Sites computers on the UM-Ann Arbor campus. Learn about how Morphic came to U-M, the benefits of Morphic, and how you can provide your feedback on new features as they are developed.
University of Michigan Press is now a Benetech Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA) publisher, and is the first university press to receive this certification. Benetech, a nonprofit that empowers communities with software for social good, issues this accreditation to those publishers who produce EPUBs that meet a full range of accessibility features required to support readers with and without disabilities… Read More »
The Michigan IT News website and newsletter have been redesigned with input from the Michigan IT News Working Group and the ITS Communications Team.
The winter term that begins in January will be the third term in a row that instructor David Chesney’s unique software design course will be online, and he has learned from each iteration. For the past decade, the U-M electrical engineering and computer science lecturer has taught Software for Accessibility, a class he designed in which undergraduate students… Read More »
This year, Information and Technology Services has been implementing Deque Comply – a best-in-market, cloud-based enterprise accessibility scanner. The product, which is switching its name to Axe Monitor, is designed to help schools, colleges and units have a clearer understanding of the accessibility effectiveness of their websites, and to be able to assess how they are doing. The… Read More »