{"id":7696,"date":"2024-05-27T13:31:41","date_gmt":"2024-05-27T17:31:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/accessibility-institute\/?p=7696"},"modified":"2025-04-21T09:08:58","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T13:08:58","slug":"web-architect-champions-accessibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/accessibility-institute\/2024\/web-architect-champions-accessibility\/","title":{"rendered":"Carleton University Web Architect Champions Accessibility, Shifting Perspectives and Practices"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Carleton University Web Architect Champions Accessibility, Shifting Perspectives and Practices\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

Meet Andrew<\/h2>\n\n\n
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It\u2019s about doing the right thing<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\"A<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To some people, accessibility means \u2018protecting ourselves from legal ramifications.\u2019 To others, it is about \u2018helping people who have a disability to access a website, digital information, or physical campus.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I think when you get down to it, accessibility is about doing the right thing, simply allowing people to access information or space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I work in Web Services and I\u2019m a huge fan of digital information, because it is generally more accessible. If someone were to ask me how to make their website accessible, I would advise looking at it in terms of \u2018How can I improve this for everybody?\u2019 And the accessibility will follow that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, if you have a lot of textual information, how can you improve that text to be easy to access for anybody who\u2019s on the go and very busy? Or who may come to your website in a panic for some information, or have a learning disability, or a visual disability. If there\u2019s less extraneous text, it\u2019s easier to consume. So then you are improving it for everybody.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andrew\u2019s Story<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m Andrew Riddles and I\u2019m a web architect in Information Technology Services (ITS) at Carleton University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My journey started in a very different place from an IT department. I was a high school history teacher and in the mid-nineties, when the internet was discovered, I was working at a school which had no interest in having a website. I thought that was ridiculous, so I took it upon myself to learn how to build a basic website for the school. It seems unbelievable now but even among educators there was a lot of skepticism that the internet was going to take off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From there, when the internet really took off and they were giving jobs to anyone who knew something about building sites, I jumped ship from teaching to web development for a large IT consultancy in London. When I moved to Canada I worked part-time in the field and became a freelancer when I moved to Ottawa, before answering a job listing on the Carleton website. I feel very fortunate: I have been here now 16 years.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"A<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In 2011, I was directed by my manager to help ensure all new websites Web Services created were compliant with the new AODA deadline in 2014. I\u2019d be the first to admit we weren\u2019t coming at it from an angle of \u2018This is the right thing to do.\u2019 This was about, \u2018We have this deadline.\u2019 We met that deadline with 2 years to spare. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But sometime after, we definitely shifted from the idea that this was just about compliance to the idea that we were making our websites better for everybody who has a disability \u2013 and for those who do not. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was the biggest and most important shift: web accessibility is about doing the right thing and helping people.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Something else that has changed since I have been at Carleton is people\u2019s understanding of what disability and accessibility are. Thinking has moved away from \u2018This is for people who have physical disabilities, like people with cerebral palsy who have difficulty clicking links or going to the next page.\u2019 Now there is a clearer grasp of the idea, \u2018This is for people who are neurodivergent, or have a partial disability, or even who are simply nearsighted.\u2019 That there is, in other words, a scale of disability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is also noticeable that people have come to not question the necessity for accessibility and integrating it into their websites. One thing I am very proud of the Carleton community for is the fact I don\u2019t have to convince anybody. If people could learn about accessibility all day long, I think that\u2019s what they would do. There\u2019s a huge appetite for it amongst our core clientele: administrators of websites in the academic departments. They\u2019re not asking, \u2018Why do I have to do this?\u2019 They\u2019re asking, \u2018How do I do this? Can you put out more information about this to help guide us?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before the pandemic, we ran in-person workshops on the basics of web accessibility. But we found that people always wanted to know more. So, we built a series of units online, originally because of the pandemic. But we realized there\u2019s also an accessibility component to this: People can learn at their own pace and in their own way using these self-guided and self-paced units.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We make a big point of the fact that those training units are for anyone at the university \u2013 even if a department is not using our web template, we want people to create accessible web content.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"A<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I have conversations with friends who are faculty, and they want to know about accessibility, so I guide them to our resources. Our team has been invited occasionally to speak to classes in communications about accessibility, where we can guide them on the basics.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, the highlight of working here, as for many people at Carleton, is the community. Just getting to go out and meet a lot of different people. It\u2019s really the joy of coming to work for me, and going out into the community to talk about accessibility is a big part of that.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Carleton does a lot of things on campus to help students, but we also need to attract people to come here in the first place. There are people who won\u2019t come here if they can\u2019t view the admissions page, or view the course offerings properly online, or find out what the services are available to support them with their disability. They may ask themselves, \u2018If I can\u2019t find the services offered on their website, are they going to be easy to access when I\u2019m there?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Two<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

My dream would be that all the promotional photos of students at Carleton would feature people with disabilities. People with disabilities might feel, \u2018This is the place I want to go to because they\u2019re representing disabled students.\u2019 <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it doesn\u2019t only have to be students with visible disabilities. We put it out there that all our photographs represent students with disabilities. Some of those disabilities you can\u2019t see, but we guarantee that at least one person in every photograph has a disability.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

I\u2019ve found, since starting down the accessibility route, everything becomes about the accessibility mindset. Suddenly you think: \u2018This door handle is terrible. Look how they\u2019re serving this food. How am I supposed to\u2026\u2019 My friends also say, \u2018Until you started talking about this, I never thought about it, but now it\u2019s obvious.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something that influenced me further was the experience of having aging parents, one with a disability which affected motor skills. You start to realize how even just opening a package of crackers can be extremely limited when you have a particular disability, not because of the disability but because of thoughtless design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A piece of language that has really impacted me is World Health Organizations\u2019 description of disability as being part of the human experience. Disability is something that can come and go. Most people become disabled at some point or other in their life, even if it\u2019s only for a period of time. For example, I was identified as having a disability (aplastic dysplasia) at birth which was corrected in my first year of life, and then next identified as living with a disability (ADHD) when I was 55 years old. I think we miss an opportunity, of helping children to understand that disability is something that is not necessarily permanent or chronic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think we miss that opportunity when children are young and I think it\u2019s something we can help with, in our community at Carleton, to help everyone appreciate disability as a feature of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note: The Humans of Accessibility stories represent personal experiences and views.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Meet Andrew It\u2019s about doing the right thing To some people, accessibility means \u2018protecting ourselves from legal ramifications.\u2019 To others, it is about \u2018helping people who have a disability to access a website, digital information, or physical campus.\u2019 But I think when you get down to it, accessibility is about doing the right thing, simply […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humans-of-accessibility"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/accessibility-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/accessibility-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/accessibility-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/accessibility-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/accessibility-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7696"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/accessibility-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7721,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/accessibility-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7696\/revisions\/7721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/accessibility-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/accessibility-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/accessibility-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}