June 2024 Meeting Recap: AUG 10 Year Anniversary

Our June 2024 meeting was a celebratory event in that it marked the 10th year anniversary of the Accessibility Users Group. Sonya began by detailing a brief history of the group’s origins, and revealed the original charge of the group which was the following:

“To bring together those working in online education at Penn State who are doing the hands-on accessibility consultation, remediation, and training for their unit in order to find solutions or share solutions to accessibility-related problems and to create some documentation around best practices so that we can benefit from each other’s knowledge and experience and possibly share that knowledge with the wider Penn State community and beyond. Doing this would save us all time by allowing us to benefit from solutions others have found and increase our effectiveness at finding good solutions by benefiting from the different strengths and perspectives of the group.”

In the beginning the group consisted of less than a dozen members, met face-to-face, and primarily used Yammer to communicate. Since then many things have changed, least of which is the change in group membership. There are now more than 70 members and we have expanded beyond Instructional Designers in online education to also include multimedia specialists, programmers, IT specialists, and people in other roles across the University. We also made the shift to meeting online before the pandemic, and over the years have created a number of resources like our website and Teams space.

One of the biggest developments to come out of the AUG was our working groups that focused on a number of different topics. Lots of great work was done in these groups, and many AUG members helped create the Canvas Styles resource.

While so much has happened in the past decade, with the recent DOJ ruling and increased awareness about accessibility the next 10 years of the AUG may be even more eventful. The majority of the meeting was spent by group members sharing their stories related to their history with AUG and accessibility in general, and what they envision the future landscape to look like, so we highly encourage you to watch the June 2024 meeting record. We’ve also included the meeting chat so you can read all of the great conversation that was happening there.