IT Accessibility Office Honors DASA Employees as Accessibility Champions

In celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day last week, the IT Accessibility Office honored several NC State employees as Spring 2020 Accessibility Champions.

Honorees from the Division of Academic and Student Affairs

Hilary Leggette, museum operations manager for the Gregg Museum

Hilary was honored for her passion about accessibility. She serves on several groups that support accessibility awareness and is a constant reminder that inclusion is important to consider in all the museum’s activities.

Josh Williams, web application developer for the Division of Academic and Student Affairs

Josh has helped teach others the importance of evaluating every piece of software used and developed from an accessibility perspective. He can often be heard to remark, “Is it accessible?” when discussing projects. From making sure that menus can be traversed with a keyboard to simply making others aware of the IT Accessibility resources available at the university, Josh has been a great partner in creating a more accessible world.

John Starbuck, web manager and marketing technology specialist for the Division of Academic and Student Affairs

John has shown his dedication to accessibility by making sure all of the websites he oversees have the main campus accessibility link in the footer. Additionally, when he builds sites or evaluates any technology, he always has accessibility concerns top-of-mind. He pushes others to think about how folks with different abilities experience our digital platforms.

Student Champions

Rebecca Ross, student staff for Industrial and Systems Engineering

Rebecca has taken on the project of making the upcoming Industrial and Systems Engineering website accessible. That includes all pages and posts, removing inaccessible PDFs and tables and making all remaining PDFs accessible.

Lauren Murillo, student staff for University Libraries

Lauren has reduced the number of accessibility errors on the Libraries website by 363,573 errors — a reduction of 97 percent. Lauren has spent her time in quarantine eradicating and learning about accessibility issues. Using the PopeTech automated web checker tool, she was able to identify and fix this massive amount of errors across a large and very complicated site while coordinating with various staff members and departments. Her work has made the Libraries website profoundly better for all of our users.

Other Faculty/Staff Champions

Christopher Beeson, instructional technologist for DELTA

Christopher always has accessibility in mind when he works with faculty on their Moodle courses. He exemplifies the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) model and works on all materials with this model in mind. Christopher makes it easy to understand how to make things accessible.

Melissa Ramirez, assistant teaching professor for biological sciences

Melissa is an amazing online instructor in microbiology and values accessible content in her courses. She embodies what NC State wants its instructors to do and think about when it comes to accessibility in the classroom. She is also a model for others in how they can implement accessible items in their courses as well.