The UCOP IT Accessibility Work Group advocates for accessibility, implements web accessibility standards and provides 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!

Katie Fortney serves as the copyright policy and education officer at the California Digital Library (CDL) — a role in which she provides UC campus libraries and their communities with educational resources and policy guidance on copyright and rights-management issues. She was recently pulled into the world of accessibility after taking part in an assessment of CDL services to help understand areas where accessibility compliance could be strengthened. Since then, she has advocated for accessibility throughout her CDL work.

Devin Dominguez is a front-end developer for the Web Application Engineering team in Information Technology Services. His team develops websites and web apps that support current and potential students, as well as UC employees. While developing a degree search application that allows prospective graduate and doctoral students to find programs across UC’s 10 campuses, he ensured that the search interface, which updates listings with users’ filters, would work well for visitors with visual impairment who rely on keyboards and screen readers to navigate web pages. Devin brings this type of thoughtfulness and attention to detail to all his work, helping to ensure that information about UC is available to a wider audience.

As a senior knowledge management analyst for UCPath, Eliseo Perez manages web page content and documents to support UCPath activities. Eliseo recently worked on five multi-page PDF forms to help UCPath prepare for 2024 Open Enrollment. For this project, he dove head-first into digital accessibility, learning as much as possible about PDF form remediation. He spent considerable time studying the ins and outs of Adobe Acrobat to make forms usable for all users, including those who have disabilities. He has modeled leadership in the accessibility arena by learning as much as possible about accessibility while training other team members  on PDF Forms and remediation.

Sophie Luna encountered the Web Support Team while generating annual financial reports for the UC Controller. Sophie remediated dozens of pages of tables for accessibility, repeatedly going above and beyond to design content with accessibility in mind. This resulted in significantly less work processing reports as compared to previous years. Additionally, Sophie’s work will serve as a template for future years of financial reports, ensuring higher accessibility standards in the future.

Michelle Simone in Internal Communications is the production powerhouse behind our monthly newsletter for UC staff, UCnetwork, and our weekly newsletter for UCOP staff, Link. In addition to ensuring the t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted, she makes sure that each issue meets accessibility standards — with descriptive text for hyperlinks and meaningful descriptions for image alternative text, to name two features. She is also responsible for the Oakland digital signage content, making sure every image is on brand and follows the accessible color guide.

UCOP Accessibility Champions email signature

UCOP Accessibility Champions are distinguished by this 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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