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Welcome back everyone. My name is Gina Watts and co-hosting with me is the one, the true and only highest sci-fi fan. McPhee. Glad to be with you, Gina. Oh, we have a little bit of the giggles, but we are here and we're excited to be here with you.

So if you believe that school should be more than just essays and GPAs, if you believe that EQs are as important as IQs, if you expect amazing things from the next generation, then you are in the right place because we believe that too. But before we get in today's topic, let's answer today's opening question. Let's do it. All right, Andrew. What's the most surprising way you've seen technology solve a problem? Well, technology does have that

amazing ability to solve problems in ways we never thought possible. I think my favorite one is crowdsourcing. What a cool technology. Yeah. Just, mean, even how people use it as a startup, like a Kickstarter, you know? I'm just like, I have a really good idea, and I'm going to reality test that by seeing if there are thousand people out there who would give me $10 for it, you know? I love that. And I just think that's a really cool thing because they're...

That idea of crowdsourcing is upsetting traditional gatekeeping methodologies, which can sometimes be bad. But oftentimes it's providing opportunity to people who would never have had it another way. So crowdsourcing is my answer to the question. That was such a good answer. What's yours? I hate when I let you go first. So mine is I had the privilege of teaching a phenomenal student back in my higher ed days. And she, in undergrad, developed an app.

that would help young people who were diagnosed at that, I think she's modified it since then, but they were diagnosed with autism. And it would help them prepare for going to like a store or a dentist appointment or a doctor's appointment. And so what it would do, it would help address the gaps in the mirror neuron functions because basically the science at the time had shown that young people being able to see themselves in that setting.

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So like if Andrew and I have to get ready to go to the dentist, if I were to see my face, like in a picture of me going to the dentist, that could better prepare me because I can't hear, Andrew, it's time for us to go to the dentist and me to like self-regulate and get myself ready for that experience. So this app that she had created allowed her to test that theory that if a child was able to see themselves in the setting, that they could prepare to interact and

typical social settings a little bit, have more success in doing this a student who came up Student, straight up student, undergrad. Amazing. We went to Madrid, Spain to present the research. People were like, so what doctoral program are you in? She was like, I'm graduating with my bachelor's degree in human development and family studies. It was so much fun. But yeah, she's a really awesome professional now. a great example. But yeah, she's just creativity. And a perfect picture of our conversation today. Yeah, awesome. Yeah.

And that was back in the day. That was like 2011, so long ago. Ancient times, compare it when you think about technology. Well, we've come obviously so far with technology. It's solving all kinds of problems. But of course, like so many things, we have much further to go, especially when it comes to our subject today. As we were thinking about, you know, this season we're exploring technology and innovation and how those things are affecting education in the classroom. And as we were thinking about all the different ways technology is affecting the classroom, one of those is accessibility, right?

We don't all operate the same. We don't all learn in the same way. We don't all process information the same way. Things that work for you may not work for other people. And the reality is technology can really help with those kinds of realities to make things better. Technology can also make that worse, right? You know, I actually was thinking about a story as we were getting ready for this podcast. Just like a year ago, I was at a conference and I heard this guy speak and he was telling his story.

And he talked about how growing up, everybody thought he was dumb. And he got this message for years and years and years in elementary school, in middle school, even in high school, his family tried to love him. I think his teachers tried, but oftentimes they would just say like, why can't you just get with this? And this guy made it all the way to 10th grade. And he finally walked into a classroom and one of his teachers had a hunch after they spent a little time with him. So they send him down.

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or they like order a specific test for him. They send him down to the guidance counselor's office where he gets this test. And sure enough, his entire life he had been born with hearing loss. Wow. He had 75 % hearing loss in both of his ears. And so he had spent his entire life up to that point with everybody around him thinking, are you dumb? And what was actually happening is no, he just couldn't hear. He couldn't hear what people were saying to him. And he had...

because that had been his reality for his whole life, he didn't even realize that other people didn't have this problem too. He thought of himself as the outlier. And it's such an amazing story to me because it reminds me of the reality of what we're dealing with today. Young people who are going about life and maybe they don't even realize all the ways in which their reality, their perspective is creating gaps for them. But if there was an army of educators who were

paying attention. Everything could change. Imagine how different that young man's life had been if somebody had noticed in kindergarten or first grade and not in 10th grade. Crazy. I'm silent. I know some of you are like, what? It's never happened before. That is an insane story that I'm thinking of all of the developmental things that happened to him, the seeds that were planted, just because he'd never had a hearing test and how he was shaped and his identity formed off of that.

Wow, thank you for sharing that. Thank you. I hope it makes all of us take time and pause and think about that. It really does speak though to what our guest is going to talk about today. Lindsay Foster is going to talk to us in today's podcast. She has over two decades of educational experience as an elementary classroom educator. She's been a technology applications instructor and instructional technology coach and coordinator. She's also

focused on instructional design and is very, very passionate about accessibility in the classroom. She is very passionate. So I actually got the chance to sit down and speak with her about this very important topic. So let's actually let her introduce herself. I started my educational journey as an educator when I was in elementary, middle, and high school. My mother was a sixth grade social studies teacher. My grandmother was a first grade teacher for over 25 years.

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And so I said, I'll never be a teacher. That was not something I wanted to do. I sort of fell into education. I worked a summer job in an inclusion school. It was a local district school where we had students who came from a wide variety of ability levels and differences. And I worked in the autism room and I worked with students who signed primarily. They were mostly non-speaking.

students on the autism spectrum and they were using sign language as a form of communication. And I started taking sign language classes because I wanted to know what the students were saying to me, which turned out to be mostly curse words. So I learned the swear words first, and then I ended up getting a degree in elementary education from Oklahoma City University. I went on and got a master's in curriculum and instruction from Grand Canyon University. And I've taught in the classroom, I taught technology applications at the elementary level, K-5.

I then moved into, I went to teach sixth grade ELA for a year, and then I moved into ed tech coaching for a while, and then I became an ed tech coordinator, and then I moved up to higher ed and got involved with instructional design, specializing in accessibility. And now I've boomeranged back to the classroom and I'm teaching seventh grade ELA. But I've kind of like, along the way, I've been like a snowball down the hill picking up skills and everywhere I go, everything that I do, I've picked up and added onto. So.

That's what I'm doing. So that's where I am now. So I'm in middle school. Gina, as you heard, teaching runs deep in Lindsay's family. And even though she tried to avoid it, I hear that story a lot when I talk to educators. I tried to get out of it, but I found myself teaching. Lindsay, same. Yeah. It sounds like she ended up right where she belonged, right? You can hear the passion in her voice and especially showing how much she belonged there. The fact that she picked up sign language along the way and a few curse words as well as sign language, which is hilarious. I don't think

I've met any hearing person who hasn't also learned curse words in sign language as they dabbled in it. But yeah, Lindsay's definitely had quite the journey from teaching in the classroom to tackling ed tech and specializing in accessibility in higher ed. It's a wild mix of experiences. So let's break that down. She actually describes two types of accessibility, what it means in practice and how digital learning environments can either help or hinder it.

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I had that phrase that almost all educators use that all means all. teach all the children who come to me. I want to meet them where they are. want to meet them with their needs. And I'm going to give them access to information. And since I started doing the accessibility and I use the different small a versus capital A. So when we're talking about having access to information, like a PDF is a format that gives everybody access to information no matter what.

platform you're using, whether using a phone or a laptop, whether you're an Apple device or a Windows device. That's small a accessibility. The kind of accessibility work that I just came out of doing that I still do contract and consultation work for is capital A accessibility. That's more in what people would think of in line of the Americans with Disabilities Act or the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which is sections 504 and 508, that kind of accessibility.

where you're working with students or stakeholders who have visual impairments or hearing impairments or mobility impairments or cognitive impairments or maybe they have some sort of speech impairment, those kinds of things, and making sure that what we're delivering, they can have access to and that it is able to be understood, it's clear, it's perceivable, it's operable.

And I had no idea when I was teaching and I had that all means all mentality that I was missing an entire segment of my population because I didn't know about the capital A accessibility. So it's really important when we use that phrasing and I like to kind of reframe small a accessibility and say that you can have access to it. But when we're talking about accessibility, what we're talking about is making sure that everyone can read it, hear it.

understand it and be able to navigate it. So that means is it keyboard navigable? it, are the color contrasts, is that sufficient? If someone is color blind or what we actually color deficiency, if they have that, can they actually see what it is? And so that's, it's really important that we have those definitions and we use those terms so that everybody understands exactly what we're talking about. Because if we don't have the same vocabulary, we're not

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speaking the same language, so it's really important. That phrase, all means all, is something every teacher can relate to, right? Making sure that every student has access to the information. But Lindsay also really highlighted the difference between that small a and that capital A accessibility. What a great example. Yeah, that small a accessibility is about making sure everyone can get to the information, like making a PDF work on any device.

Capital A accessibility goes deeper, ensuring students with disabilities can actually use that information. Things like screen reader capability, proper color contrast, and keyboard navigation. Those are really clear and great examples. And of course, this is where the digital environments come in. They can be great for accessibility, but there are a lot of regulations that come with it that a lot of school leaders need to know about. So, kind of broke this down for us a little bit. Digital environments.

are particularly affected by Capital A accessibility because back in April of 2024, the Department of Justice, the US Department of Justice, issued a final ruling on mobile accessibility and digital accessibility. And a lot of people are like, oh, well, that doesn't impact me. The final ruling impacts all government agencies and all government subsidiary agencies. So, and there's a list of about 12 of those subsidiary agencies and under that list,

are public K-12 institutions and public universities and colleges. If you receive federal funding from the federal government, Title II, Title III, Title I, you fall under those subsidiary entities and you have to comply with being with the Web Consortium Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG, or as they call it in the industry, WCAG. You have to comply with those guidelines and there are...

They're divided into five subgroups. There are about 40 of them and they have subset, but it's really, really specific to make sure that every website that you have at your school, every digital device app that you're using at your school or your district, every piece of digital curriculum, every PDF that you send out is accessible to a wide population. needs to be accessible to someone who's using a screen reader.

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It needs to be accessible to someone who doesn't use a mouse and is maybe using a keyboard. It needs to have a specific color contrast so that it's legible and readable. There's a whole lot of pieces that fall into that. And so it's really important. And what I learned as I was working in the higher ed industry, and then I moved back down to K-12, was that a lot of K-12 people said, well, our special ed department will handle that. And special ed people don't know any more than any other person doesn't know.

And what you don't know really can hurt not only your district, but hurt your stakeholders. So it's important that we're aware. Okay, so Lindsay's dropping some legal knowledge on us in this Department of Justice ruling, but she mentioned that even something like keyboard navigation or color contrast can make or break accessibility. And it really hits home how much thought needs to go into these digital tools. We shouldn't just adopt them without thinking. Yes, so speaking of those little things.

How do educators even begin to identify and address these barriers that students with disabilities might face in a tech-enabled classroom? Because let's be honest, it's not just about checking the boxes. We really need to do this right. One of the things that I did when I was working in higher ed was worked on a campus accessibility roadmap program initiative. We called it the CAR, campus accessibility roadmap, and we had little cars that we used and we picked five.

common issues that we saw that were related to ADA accessibility that we found as a result of curating our Canvas courses. And Canvas, I will mention as a tool, I know we're going to talk about tools in just a little bit, but a lot of the major LMSs already have built-in accessibility checkers that do a really good job of catching about 85 to 90 percent of your common accessibility issues. So if you can pinpoint

one thing or a list of five things that maybe you see that you're not doing well. In our case, it was we focused on color contrast, which was easily fixed because we had an accessibility checker that would tell us whether the color contrast was met or not. We focused on hyperlinks and making sure that those were formatted properly. We focused on the use of tables and making sure that tables were being used to convey information, not

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as a design choice so that if we're putting in tables, it's because we have a table of information and it's replacing a visual representation of that, such as like a bar graph or a pie chart. It wasn't because we wanted the website to appear to have columns. There's specific HTML that you can write for that. We did images and making sure that all of our images had alternative text. And that was a whole thing because that has a lot of layers to it. So it was images, tables, links.

color contrast and list. Items that if they look like a list and it appears to be a list of items that it's format as a list. And we focused on those five areas and then we created training for those five areas. And we asked them to get really good and choose one so that as they were building courses in the future, they were focusing on getting really good at, let's say, making sure that all hyperlinks are formatted well and properly. And then when they got really good at that and that sort of became natural to them,

just like every educator, you when you have something new, you have to kind of do it lots and lots, and then it sort of becomes habit. And then you can pick up the next thing and you can say, okay, now I do hyperlinks really well, what's the next thing I can do well? Okay, I can focus on remediating my old courses and making sure that all of my items that are in a list appear to be, are formatted as a list and that I have headings and I've applied heading structure to all of my documents. And so we ask them to focus on one thing at a time. And I really encourage,

classroom educators, administrators, your ARD facilitators or your special ed facilitators, your special ed support people like your speech people, pick one thing and get really good at the one thing. Because if you go and you look up the web consortium, the W3 that wrote the web consortium accessibility guidelines, and you start reading that information, you can get really overwhelmed really quickly.

because you realize, my gosh, I'm not doing this, I'm not doing that, I'm not doing this and such and so and so. And then you feel, at least I did, I was like, I am a horrible human being who didn't serve these people and I'm a terrible person. And you're not a terrible person, you just didn't know what you didn't know. When you see the list of items and you actually make like a checklist, you realize that you can't do all of those things. Sometimes you can't do all those things because you literally don't have the staff to do all of those things.

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Sometimes you can't do it because some of those WCAG standards, they actually have three levels. They have a level A, which is the expectation that everybody, like the bare minimum that everybody has to meet. They have a double A, which is the recommended level that pretty much, if you have reasonable expectations, you could get there. And then they have this triple A level that's really high. And I say that that's the high cost level because it either costs a lot of money, you either have to invest.

in either a third party or you have to invest in software to do something, or you have to hire additional people to be responsible for that. And there's either a human cost of human time and energy or software financial fiscal costs. And there's a fiscal cost with hiring additional people. So usually that AAA level is something you have to put into your budget and be planning for. So we shot for the single A level for sure, and the double A level when we could get there. And that's where we began.

And I equate this whole process, if you're familiar with the running program Couch to 5K, you know, in the Couch to 5K, they encourage you to get up off the couch. They're like, if you're up off the couch, even if you're just walking and you're not running a 5K, you are ahead of the people still sitting on the couch. So no matter where you are in your journey, as long as you're up off the couch and you're running the 5K, you're in good shape because you're making forward progress.

So think that's really important. And classroom teachers pick one thing, investigate, do your research and choose one thing and then focus on that and fix it. See what you're doing and fix it. Okay, so Lindsay was definitely putting the pedal to the metal with that campus accessibility roadmap. She is, as we said earlier, a very passionate leader, but I actually, really love that they called it CAR, C-A-R. You know you're serious when you name your initiative something.

That sounds like it could be in a Fast and Furious movie, you know? Acronyms and alliterations are my love language. Yep, yep. We speak that language. they are for probably almost all educators. I don't know that I've met an educator who doesn't like We love a good learning tool. Yes, we do. Campus accessibility roadmap, zooming towards inclusion. I love it. Is that the name of the next movie? That's what it is. I love it. That's Fast and Furious 87. But seriously, what stood out to me?

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in this conversation was really how Lindsay broke down the five common issues, like color contrast and hyperlinks. And just focused on getting better one thing at a time. I think sometimes we hear stuff like this and we're like, oh, I need to become an expert. And if I'm not an expert, then I'm just not going to do it. We actually still need to take steps to make the environment for all. Absolutely. Yeah. It's like that example, you know, she talked about with the couch to 5K for accessibility, right?

You start small, but as long as you're moving, you're ahead of the game. And I could see how that approach would keep educators from getting overwhelmed by all these standards, because otherwise it would be really, really easy. So now that she's got us revved up, focusing on small steps, let's talk about the tools that can help educators get there. Lindsay mentioned some built-in accessibility checkers. But what other tools or platforms have been game changers in making learning more accessible? I highly recommend the WebAIM.

organization, it's WEB and then capital A, capital I, capital WebAIM. And I am modeling accessibility by spelling that out, by the way. I just want to point that out. They have an extension that is available for your major browsers for Chrome, as well as Edge and Safari called WAVE, W-A-V-E. And it specifically will check for the major accessibility issues.

and we'll flag them for you. That's a really easy thing that you can do on your website. You can do it on PDF, can use it within your various LMSs. I mentioned Canvas and Blackboard. Blackboard has a tool called Ally. Canvas has a little accessibility guide that is at the bottom of every editable page. I call him the little blue man because he's blue and he lights up and has a number next to him when he finds an accessibility error.

and I highly encourage you to use that. Microsoft has an amazing resource sub-department within their organization called the Microsoft Inclusive Design Division. And if you search Microsoft Inclusive Design, you will find a plethora of resources. And within all Microsoft Office tools, so your Word, your PowerPoint, they have a built-in accessibility checker as well.

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The Google Suite, Google Workspace has not yet caught up to that. There are some extensions that you can use that you can find through the web store, the Chrome Web Store that will do a-ish decent job. I personally would use Wave over those, but that's a personal choice. And of course Adobe, a lot of people use Adobe. Adobe has built-in accessibility checkers as well. Although I highly encourage you to check out DaxCastro's, it's D-A-X.

C-A-S-T-R-O. If you go on to LinkedIn Learning or you go to YouTube, you can find both him and Chris Cellios. And you will find that they have training on how to use that accessibility checker in Adobe because it can be a little bit tricky and it has some finesse to it making things accessible in PDFs. But they have amazing training. And I highly encourage you to check out

sites like LinkedIn Learning or Coursera. There are some amazing accessibility classes. There's one offered through the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana, that was done by their accessibility division. And it's offered through Coursera. And for $49, you can get a certificate at the end. You can take it for free, but you don't get the certificate. So you actually get an endorsement certificate. You pay the $49. But it is literally taught by their accessibility folks in their division.

And they specifically hire individuals, people with disabilities in their division. So when someone who is talking about visual impairments, you get to hear about visual impairments from someone who's actually blind. And that makes a difference because that person has some straight credibility and some gravitas that maybe I, as a person who just, you I wear glasses and if I took my glasses off, I'd be legally blind, but I'm not that as far visually impaired, at least to this point.

So I think it's important. And so there's lots and lots of resources out there. I highly encourage you. There's organizations like Deque, De-e-q-u-e is a great company. They have tons of training that's available for free and a company called Three Play Media. It's the number three, the digit and P-l-a-y media. They offer monthly webinars that are free, that are highly, highly sought after and incredible information.

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that really breaks it down so that everybody can understand it. I just love how she's literally spelling it out for us. Modeling accessibility as she goes. I mean, there are so many resources. It's almost like a treasure trove for anyone looking to make their classrooms or websites more accessible. Yes, exactly. And frankly, the best part to me is that a lot of these tools are right there in the platforms we're already using, right? So it's not like you have to reinvent the wheel to make things more accessible or even go, you know, sign up for some other web platform.

You just hit up those built-in checkers that are already on those platforms. Totally. It's one thing to have all of these tools available. The real challenge is making sure schools and districts are actually using them. Which brings us to a bigger question. How can teachers and administrators advocate for their schools to have better accessibility resources and training? I was the person in higher ed in the job that I had writing the campus accessibility roadmap. I was the person that was the advocate.

I was the only person at that time at an institution that had six campuses. I worked at the fully online campus, so it was really urgent at our level because of the digital accessibility piece. But I was like a lone person shouting into a hurricane for a while. And yes, it absolutely is one of those things. And it's very, very difficult. So this is my recommendation. You can come at it with a three-pronged approach if you think of the Trident. You can hit them with the law and the compliance.

hammer and say, know, like, like I mentioned at the beginning, the Department of Justice issued a final ruling in April of 2024. And when I started the work that I started, it was three years prior to that. We were kind of seeing what was coming, but it wasn't necessarily the law. So the second thing we said was we address the human aspect of it, which was there's a person on the other side of the screen and there's a person that you're serving in your class and

you are impacting a person. And then the third prong that you can always go with is I always try to turn it into a remember. And I think the book Mismatch, M-I-S-M-A-T-C-H, which is written by a person with disabilities, it's an amazing book. She makes an excellent point in the book and she says, if you live long enough, you will be a person with a disability. Being able-bodied is a luxury that you get with youth and a short lifespan.

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Because if you live long enough, one of several things is gonna happen to you. You're gonna end up wearing glasses, you're gonna have a visual impairment, you're gonna end up using hearing aids, you'll have a hearing impairment, you will end up using a cane or a walker or some other mobility device because you will lose your mobility, and you may end up with a cognitive impairment. Or you're gonna end up with some combination of all of those. So if you live long enough, you will live your life as a person with a disability. So saying that...

people with disabilities or in the minority really isn't fair. And I often, my third prong was often statistics and facts. So I either hit them with the compliance hammer, which I really don't like to do. I don't like to say we're gonna do this because you have to do it, it's the law. I like to say do this because it's the right thing to do because we're good humans and we're serving people. And this is not the only advice Lindsay had for these teachers and administrators. Let's listen in.

We're not just talking about within the classroom. When we're talking about accessibility, remember your website is your advertisement for potential families that are moving into your district. It's communication for the guardians of your students. And if you have a student who's not necessarily hearing impaired, but their parent is, and you don't have closed captioning on the video, the parent's not getting the same information as a parent who's hearing is. You don't have an accessible PDF. A parent who's using a screen reader doesn't get the same information as a parent who can just read it.

And we always say a picture says a thousand words, it replaces a thousand words. Well, not when you need alt text, it doesn't. And it's important because we're missing an entire population. The part about if you live long enough, you'll be a person with a disability really makes you think, right? I mean, we're all headed in that direction eventually. So why not think about this, like begin to wrap our minds around this and start to make things accessible now?

And she's right, it's not just about classrooms, it's about the whole digital ecosystem, websites, PDFs, videos, anything parents or students interact with. Absolutely. So speaking of the future, with all these challenges and opportunities around accessibility, Lindsay named some trends or emerging technologies that could shape the future of accessibility in education. I think one that, of course, everybody is going to come immediately to everybody's mind is AI. Artificial intelligence.

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Ken is already doing some of the accessibility work. For example, your videos, I mentioned closed captioning. YouTube has an automated generator that will generate captions for your videos. That's an amazing, wonderful thing. Do not stop there. Please do check those captions because the deaf community has a term for those. It's called hashtag craptions. You can look it up. They actually have an entire series on YouTube because people don't...

double-check, they trust the AI and I have stories, I'll probably share one with you. But AI doing, it's already doing the work. Text-to-speech and speech-to-text are already technologies that were developed for people with disabilities that everybody uses. And that's going to be amazing. I've talked a little bit about alternative text and for images, and there are all text generators that are currently being developed.

and are working, I find them to be about 50 % accurate. I don't trust them again. I trust but verify. Because there's a whole lot of human discernment that goes into developing alternative text for images. And I think AI is just not there yet, but it has the potential to be there. I have a student that I just got who exclusively speaks French. I took high school French and it's rusty for me. It's coming back because he's in my class.

but he uses Google Translate to communicate. And that's something you can use on your phone. There's a Microsoft Translate. That's a wonderful thing. There are apps on your phone that will simulate color blindness so that you can run color blindness checkers and see what that looks like. One of my favorites is called Be My Eyes. B-E-M-Y-E-Y-E-S developed for individuals with visual impairment.

and they can take their phone and they can hold it up and it will generate a spoken and written description of what the person is looking at. So they can take a picture of a sign and it will read the sign to them. Now it's not 100 % effective and font choice does impact the result. So if you get kind of a wonky result, you actually can hit a button and contact a live human being. There are people that sit on the phone.

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And that person will look, they get access to the camera through the app and they can actually do a visual description for the person with a visual impairment. And they're developing a sub tool within Be My Eyes called Be My AI that is starting to do alt text description for images and other things. And it's really active. Google has one called Google Lookout. It looks like the app is little pair of binoculars and it does a similar thing. And I have found those to be

much more accurate than the AI generators on just your generic ones that we're all using to turn ourselves into, I don't know, Charlie Brown or our version of Charlie Brown or whatever it is. Okay, so AI is out here doing a lot of heavy lifting for accessibility, which is a good thing. But I got to say, Lindsay's hashtag craptions thing had me cracking up. Automated captions that make zero sense. Yeah, we've...

all been there. And I think for some people that has been a bigger deal than maybe even it would be for somebody like me. Right. I mean, it's great that AI is stepping in to help, but she's totally right. You can't just trust it blindly. There's still a lot of human input needed to make it actually work, especially with things like text and translations. Absolutely. Yeah, like Lindsay's story about using Google Translate with her French-speaking student.

AI can be a game changer, but it's not perfect. we really all need to verify what it's doing. It's about using these tools, but using them smartly. And not like fully relying on them at all. translation is so important. Yeah. Things get lost in translation. So true. So true. And with all of these emerging technologies, it's easy to feel overwhelmed, especially for teachers who want to improve accessibility, but aren't sure about where to start.

So what advice would Lindsay give to the educators who are just starting out in this journey? Absolutely. So a couple of resources, two or three I'll mention, top one. I would absolutely check out John Slayton, S-L-A-T-I-N, Access U. It is a conference that happens in the spring. It's hosted down in Austin, and it's named after a guy who was very, very prominent in the accessibility community.

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That will get you connected with all of these other people and organizations that I've mentioned. And they have information for people at the base level. Like I'm just getting in, I'm new, I'm started. They have stuff for people at the intermediate level. They have stuff for people at the advanced level. And you can get in that network because the accessibility community is a smaller community. I would check out Deque, D-E-Q-U-E. I would check out 3Play Media. And I would also check out Accessibility Oz, O-Z.

It's run by a woman named G.N. Wild. Her name is spelled G-I-A-N. She's out of Austria. And she exclusively hires individuals who are people with disabilities. They are one of those third party companies that will do an accessibility check on your website and tell you what they found, how you can fix it. They will help you fix it. But she exclusively hires people with disabilities because now there are nothing about them without them.

because they are one of the most underemployed populations that, you know, people are like, I can't hire someone with disability because they think that it's too much of a challenge to make the accommodation. So, and the other thing is, that as you're working through this and as you're looking at these opportunities and seeking out these people, think about you probably have someone on your staff who has an accessibility need. The more that you are aware and the more that you

create an environment that is welcoming to individuals with accessibilities. Think about it as I equate it to if your arm is broken and you have to ask somebody to open the door for you, you sort of feel like you're burdening them to ask. And no one should feel like they're a burden, I think. And if we make the space for everybody and we say, look at what we've already done, and maybe it's not 100 % perfect.

But just like when you go travel to a foreign country and you try to speak their language, they appreciate that you're attempting to speak their language, not forcing them to speak yours. They appreciate that you're making that effort and they understand that you might not be a native speaker. You might ruin the conjugation, they see the attempt. The same thing is true with accessibility. You know, as we focus as a country, we're starting to become much more aware of those microaggressions that we make.

Growing Leaders (37:53.528)
for people of color and for different ethnicities and those sorts of things. People with disabilities is a subset and we have lots of those, you like think of those Venn diagrams where you have all these people who belong to all these subsets. You're not exclusive to one cluster of individuals. You know, so we need to think about as we're considering microaggressions and as we're considering safe spaces, is our workplace a safe space? Is our classroom a safe space? Are we really...

making it, when we say you belong and we welcome you, are we ready for you to be here or are we going to make you have to ask and feel really bad that some accessibility accommodation has to be made? Lindsay's so good. It's such amazing advice. I know, man. She packed so much wisdom, but also practical advice into this episode. It was a lot, like a whole lot. So much, actually.

I've got too much information. I got TMI. Gina, I think it's time for DMI. Yes, I've been waiting for this moment. And friends, if you've been listening to us for a while now, you know that DMI stands for Don't Miss It. So, Andrew and I will both share a highlight from today's episode that we think you should pay a little bit more attention to because we don't want you to miss it.

Growing Leaders (39:23.118)
So, Andrew, what is one takeaway the listeners need to keep close to them as they start thinking about accessibility in the classroom? Yeah. Well, you know me. I always start at the baseline. Like, where do we start? Where do we start? Where do we start? And so baseline is awareness, right? I think there are many teachers out there that are operating as if everybody can see the same way, can hear the same way, can access the same way. And so if we aren't aware that

every single time a new group of students walks into our classroom, it is likely, not just possible, it is likely that somebody's in there who needs just a little bit of help in order to get to the same level of accessibility as other people. just awareness as an issue is one thing I definitely want to bring up. The second thing is I loved her example of the little a versus big A accessibility.

I won't go too much into detail because it looks like you want to talk about that. stole your thunder. No, you can take it. You can just love that example because, it's a perfect picture of the challenge that we face in using words and making sure that we're speaking the same language as we're engaging. Yeah, I was reaching across the table. She tried to choke me. Andrew gave that DMI. But friends, seriously, it is this little A.

Like, we have to be intentional about making sure accessibility is a real thing and not just doing the least amount of effort. But it is important that we start somewhere. And so if you haven't started, there is a place to just at least get started in making accessibility a real thing in your classroom. I think the other thing that really stood out to me was that she said, if you live long enough, you yourself might have a disability.

if you're fortunate to live long enough. And so I think that really makes it hit home. I think for most people, being affected by disability, whether it's raising a child with disability, teaching in a classroom with people who have disabilities, it doesn't affect us. For a lot of people, doesn't affect us. And so to talk to us about it in terms of like, well, if you are fortunate to live long enough that it will affect you, I think that really brings it home. And maybe it even gets to your original point of awareness too.

Growing Leaders (41:35.182)
It's not a they challenge. It's a we challenge. We are all going to experience it. I just want to say this is such an important topic. It might end up being the most important topic we talk about this entire season. And technology can be the best answer to this. It can also be the greatest challenge to this. So I just want to encourage everybody as you're doing more and more of this technology stuff in your schools, make this a part of the conversation.

Well, thank you for joining us today on this episode of the School on a Mission podcast. Now, before you hit skip on your next podcast, we've got a little challenge for you. Grab a pen, a notebook, a sticky note, or even the back of your hand and write down one action that you're going to take this week. Maybe it's something you're going to do, something you're going to investigate, something to read more about, or a person that you want to meet with. You got it? Perfect. Now, DM us with your action step.

We can't wait to see what awesome things you're up to. Until next time, stay curious, stay bold, and keep leading your school on a mission. The School on a Mission podcast is produced by Growing Leaders, powered by Maxwell Leadership Foundation. You can find out more about Growing Leaders at growingleaders.com. We want to especially thank Lindsay Foster for joining us as a guest in today's episode. This podcast was co-produced by Angelica Oliver and Kara Mallory.

To find out more about the School on Emission podcast, head over to schoolonemissionpodcast.com.