The UCOP IT Accessibility Work Group is charged with advocating for accessibility, implementing web accessibility standards and providing accessibility education and training to UCOP staff. Accessibility Champions are UCOP employees nominated by the work group or any UCOP colleague for their demonstrated commitment to ensuring that UCOP websites and digital content are accessible to people with disabilities.

Congratulations to the following employees:

Teresa Alvarez has done important accessibility work on the UC systemwide policy PDFs, which are some of the most viewed documents on the entire UCOP website. Every time a UC systemwide policy is updated or issued, Teresa has diligently used the accessible template to make sure that UCOP creates and distributes policy documents that are usable by everyone. We really appreciate her work and unwavering support in this area!

Jenn Bejaka was an accessibility champion before it was cool! Jenn was brought in to make the UC systemwide policy templates accessible, and within two weeks, she was diving into advanced PDF accessibility territory. She’s moved on to bigger and better things, but will always be an accessibility champion because of her role in ensuring that UCOP distributes policy documents that are usable by everyone.

Sylvia Jiang is the systemwide Clery Act coordinator and a general analyst in the Ethics, Compliance and Audit Services (ECAS) department. She developed the webpage for the 2022 ECAS Symposium and co-led this event with Sean Halligan. She is a great help in reformatting difficult and/or huge policies for accessibility. She’s the accessibility expert at ECAS and helps colleagues update documents and presentations for accessibility.

Jayme Mogen helps manage the UC Learning Center (UCLC) across the entire UC system, including coordinating the delivery of eCourse training that other departments procure and offer systemwide. Jayme is the primary person in the procurement and delivery process who champions the need for accessibility. She routinely takes the lead on validating vendors’ accessibility claims and spurring them to improve accessibility as needed. This is no easy task: Vendors are resistant to additional work and UC partners are often uninformed about accessibility needs and eager to deliver training as soon as possible. Thank you to Jayme for taking on this responsibility and helping improve access to our UCLC offerings!

Chris Procello, academic planning & policy analyst, is responsible for a monthly PDF report that is published on the Institutional Research and Academic Planning website. Chris committed to developing an accessible template for the report and now uses it successfully. 

Robyn Shelenz, web editor on the Marketing Communications team, works with the University of California website and its contents daily and is a diligent steward of the site’s accessibility. Robyn has worked with outside organizations to ensure PDFs they’ve produced for us are accessible and has flagged issues she’s seen in HTML content and the publishing process, bringing in help as needed and making suggestions as to how the tools we’ve tried could be improved. It’s really great to have her as a thoughtful partner in taking care of such a large and varied website!

Wendy Welsh is an employee communications strategist and passionate advocate for digital accessibility. When UCOP’s Internal Communications team redesigned the Open Enrollment website last year, a project that Wendy led, she was committed to ensuring its content would be accessible to all employees. And this year is no exception — she is currently working with the UCPath Center and third-party partners to make sure that all web pages, PDFs and videos meet accessibility guidelines and best practices.

UCOP Accessibility Champions email signature

UCOP Accessibility Champions can be identified by the following email signature badge:

To nominate a colleague who promotes web accessibility, email Judy Thai with their name and a brief explanation of why they are an accessibility champion.

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