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!

Zina Slaughter and Gema Fonseca led the effort to improve the accessibility of PDF documents on the UC Student Health Insurance Plan (UC SHIP) website. The UC SHIP website is the main resource for health insurance information for UC students. Despite the challenges of working with multiple locations and health insurance vendors who produce these documents, Zina, Gema and their team have advocated for accessibility improvements and ensured that the vendor provided documents that are usable to students with disabilities. Thank you, Zina and Gema, for making sure that these important resources are accessible.

Neil Ramos was proactive in creating an accessible PDF flyer to promote Electronic Records Day, which was on November 1. He tirelessly tried multiple export options to generate the most accessible file, and when he finally landed on a usable version, he sought guidance to make final tweaks to ensure that everyone who accessed the flyer —via email, online or social media — would be able to access the information. Thank you, Neil, for championing accessibility on Electronic Records Day and every day!

Rachel DeLetto, Sarah Oldenburg and Jessica Wheelock are committed to making our social media channels more accessible. They are exploring how social media elements integrate to produce best practices and guidelines (e.g. auto video captioning), and are determining how to approach platforms with functionality that does not support accessibility features. From critically thinking through challenges that don’t have easy answers (it’s such a new space and we don’t have control over these third-party platforms) to creating resources and networking with colleagues, they are putting in the work to make our channels better each day.

Randy Kemish made it possible for UCOP staff to automatically enable captions in their individual online profile settings. That setting has been automatically turned on for all UCOP Zoom users, making it even easier for participants in Zoom meetings to access captions. Randy was helpful and efficient, and he did his due diligence to ensure that the overall setting wouldn’t lead to a detrimental experience for end users. We wanted to express our appreciation for his work in making UCOP a more accessible place for everyone!

Ava Calanog reached out in January with a few PDF accessibility questions and was really dedicated to learning about how to work with Acrobat & conduct more advanced accessibility work. In addition to document tags, she was interested in solving malformed table tags and even restructuring Word templates so that they would export as cleaner PDFs. Since then, Ava has encountered more advanced challenges and has worked to deepen her knowledge. She is a pleasure to work with and we appreciate the interest and dedication to improving document accessibility that she brings to her work.

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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