SUBJECT: Digital Accessibility Updates - New Grants, Incentives, and Office Hours Available!

This message expands on the information and resources shared in the Winter 2025 - Digital Accessibility Overview email sent a few weeks ago by Associate Provost Joan Remski and Director of Digital Education Chris Casey.

We heard you when you said that you need support to make accessibility changes in your classes. See below for incentives for training, the opportunity to apply for student assistants to do some of the work in your Canvas sites, and human captioning services, to take some of that work off your shoulders. 

New Training Course

The Office of Digital Education and Hub for Teaching and Learning Resource are pleased to announce a new asynchronous Digital Accessibility Course.  The course is focused on faculty using Canvas and related digital learning tools, though it is open to anyone with a UM-Dearborn login and the concepts covered are universal (but the fixing processes are focused on Canvas). To access the course, please enroll with this join link to add the course to your Canvas dashboard.

The course has 8 module paths, each focused on a specific digital accessibility topic. Upon completion of each module, a badge for that path will be awarded.  Once all eight individual path badges have been earned, a final Digital Accessibility Pathfinder badge will be available to signify completion of the course.  The badges can be added to your email signature, LinkedIn profiles, or other places to show your knowledge and skills around accessibility.

It is expected that the course will take 4-6 hours to complete, which we realize is a lot of time to commit.  We will provide a $200 incentive to the first 250 instructors (tenure track faculty or lecturers) who complete the full course and earn the Digital Education Pathfinder badge.

Office Hours

The Office of Digital Education will offer open digital accessibility office hours via Zoom for faculty.  Please feel free to join any of these office hours to ask questions or get assistance with digital accessibility issues. Days/Times are listed below:

• Mondays from 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm with Chris Casey (zoom)

• Tuesdays from 9:30 am - 10:30am with Chris Casey (zoom)

• Wednesdays from 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm with Chen Wang (zoom)

• Thursdays from 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm with Chen Wang (zoom)

New Initiatives for Assistance

Student Assistance

We recognize that making content accessible can take a significant amount of time, especially for courses which use a lot of images, graphs, equations, or handwritten materials.  We are offering 250 small grants so that instructors (tenure track faculty or lecturers) can hire a student in their discipline to assist with this work. The grants cover up to $450 of pay for the student assistant and are limited to one per instructor at this time.  Please complete the grant application form if you are interested.  Courses where materials are reused will be prioritized in order to maximize the benefits of this program.

Captions

Machine-generated captions are automatically added to all video content though we are aware those captions can have accuracy issues, especially for instructors with an accent or for courses with a lot of discipline specific terminology.  If you have video content in MiVideo/Kaltura that is used on an ongoing basis and has substantively incorrect captions currently, you can request human-generated captions for those videos via the human-generated caption request form, which should be much more accurate.  Funding for this one-time initiative will prioritize asynchronous videos that are reused for multiple semesters. Once funding for this initiative runs out, instructors will be responsible for reviewing and correcting machine-generated captions for all video in their courses.

Yuja Panorama Tool Info

Here are a few key pieces of information around the Yuja Panorama tool that was made available for all UM-Dearborn Canvas courses earlier this year.

• Course and item scores have been recalculated to align with U-M standards agreed upon by a tri-campus implementation committee.  Some scores may have gone up, while others may have gone down.  Early indications are that scores should be slightly higher overall.

• The Yuja Panorama tool is meant to assist in finding and fixing some accessibility problems, but it is only a tool, may not offer a perfect overall assessment of each document, and certainly isn’t an indictment of you or your teaching.  If you have questions about why a document may be scored a certain way or need guidance on fixing certain issues, please let us know by emailing umdearborn-de-accessibility@umich.edu.

• Yuja will continue to make enhancements and refinements to the tool going forward.

• A recording of the Yuja Panorama training for faculty is available for those who were unable to attend the live session earlier this year.

Kaltura/MiVideo Captions Update

Machine-generated captions have now been added to all UM-Dearborn Canvas videos uploaded to Kaltura/MiVideo.  As a best practice, faculty should check the captions and correct any obvious errors to ensure viewers have the best experience possible.

We’re Here to Help!

If you have any questions or concerns regarding the information in this message, please email umdearborn-de-accessibility@umich.edu.