Welcome to our new unit and our new blog site! We’re excited to have a specific team promoting Digital Accessibility at York, consisting of Lilian Joy and Alice Bennett. Both of us have been working in this area for a while under separate teams but we now form a unit under the Student Success area led by Jan Ball-Smith. Working with the E-accessibility Working Group, we hope to make an impact on the digital experience of students and staff at the university.
We’re off to a good start; one of the first things we did at the start of the academic year was to organise a workshop on Supporting Visually Impaired students (blog post coming soon). We’re busy developing resources from that workshop and will share these with all at the Uni. We’re planning to run a workshop on supporting students who screen magnify and supporting hearing-impaired students.
We have also set up a new Salesforce queue to help us manage student and staff queries. You can contact us at digacc-support@york.ac.uk.
It’s very timely that we should be starting the blog now; it’s International Day for Disabled People on 3 Dec. One of our unit’s remits is to ensure we improve the experience and outcomes for our disabled students in the community. We also hope to help progress support for our disabled staff by working with the EDIC (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee).
We look forward to working with everyone. We’re here to help embed digital accessibility as a foundation of everything we create. Several teams already promote this ethos and expectation and we’re very grateful for the progress made at the University over the years, but we have more to do as standards and regulations change. Ultimately, this is to ensure nobody experiences any challenges with using the things we create as a University.
Progress transforms problems into invisible infrastructure.
Please do let us know if there is anything we can support you with as we plan our work for the year!
Lilian Joy & Alice Bennett
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