What is the Olin Accessibility Hub?
The Olin Accessibility Hub (or OAH) is the home of accessibility information, guides, resources, and more written and collected by the Olin Accessibility Team (OAT), a group of students and faculty working on increasing accessibility in Olin's classes, community, and culture.
The resources on this site are divided into four main sections: For Educators, For Students, Discussing Disability, and @Olin. The For Educators section focuses on how to create experiences and resources more accessible, while the For Students section is focused on improving one's own access to resources and experiences that may not have been created with accessibility in mind. We would encourage taking a look at all sections of the site.
Our goal is to make all this information available in a website; despite the hard work of the team and many others at Olin, we are not quite ready to launch that project. But we still wanted you to have access to all this wonderful information, so we’ve made our in-development site public. Take look around and keep an eye out for the final OAH website, coming soon!
How Did This Site Come to Be?
The Olin Accessibility Team, otherwise known as OAT, is a team of students and faculty dedicated to creating a more accessible Olin. Along with researching and writing all of the content for the OAH, OAT worked with six Olin courses to improve the accessibility of course content and structure.
If you are interested in working with OAT, have any questions, comments, or concerns, or just want to talk accessibility, please reach out to OAT (oat@olin.edu).
This site would not be possible without the hard work of our 2022 and 2023 teams; a big shoutout to Regan Mah (’23), Evelyn Kessler (’24), Myles Lack-Zell ('24), Adva Waranyuwat, Paul Ruvolo, and Shannon Tocher.
Reflections from the Team
Paul: Creating a website about accessible practices that was also accessible itself presented a number of challenges. We had to find tools that enabled multiple stakeholders to contribute to the site while also supporting accessibility. We eventually landed on this Drupal 9 site, which provided significant support for customization and accessibility. There were several hurdles we had to clear along the way as we transferred content between our rough draft articles (in Microsoft Word format) to the Drupal site.
Adva: When we started this project, I did not fully appreciate the difference between creating information content that promotes accessibility and making the actual retrieval of that content accessible. I understand now why so many resources on accessibility may not actually be accessibly designed! The OAT team has really dedicated themselves to building a site about accessibility that is itself accessible and we know we have more work to do. I have some big dreams for this site and hopes for the future. I would love to see more visual representations of information as well as audio and video options. Making the site more interactive with downloadable accessibility checklists and instruction sheets would also be great! I would also like for the community at Olin to utilize the site but also offer resources and contributions to it so that it continuously grows and remains up-to-date, since the world of accessibility is constantly changing.
Shannon: It was super interesting to talk and write about accessibility while working toward our goal of delivering an accessible website experience at the same time. It can be harder than you think! Things like formatting texts and links, adding alt text to images, using the tags and the term fields, were all important and really time-consuming things to consider and execute. We constantly had to keep in the back of our minds how this looks and feels for all different types of users. What we have delivered is a foundation, and by sharing it with the community, it can only get better! A huge shout out needs to go to our wonderful OAT students, Evelyn, Regan, and Myles for their work on this and helping Adva, Paul and I make this site what it is today!
Myles: I had a great experience working with the Olin Accessibility Team (OAT) and helping to build out the Olin Accessibility Hub (OAH). The project was an opportunity to contribute to the Olin community in a meaningful way and I felt like I was really part of the team. By the time I joined OAT, I was the only student actively working on the site but didn’t feel alone since we still had conversations within the team and worked together to find solutions to issues that came up.
While working on the OAH, I experienced firsthand the process of identifying accessibility issues and making decisions about what fixes to prioritize. A major area of focus for me was color contrast and trying to meet accessibility guidelines for not only text on a background, but also maintaining contrast during state changes on links. Working on a Drupal based site, I saw how even some basic functionality had accessibility issues, such as the main menu, and as the web developer, I had to come up with workarounds to make the site more usable. The site is still a work-in-progress, with plans to rebuild the menu systems to function properly, but sticking to workarounds for the initial launch allowed us to make content available as quickly as possible while addressing the most likely issues to come up within the Olin community.
In some cases, we made decisions about what to prioritize for our own community because it isn’t possible to achieve 100% accessibility for everyone. A change that increases accessibility for one person can reduce accessibility for someone else, like how adding different modes of accessing information makes that information available to more people but can be overwhelming and difficult to navigate for others.
Our Hopes for the Site
Adva: "Accessibility is a mindset, not an endpoint." This quote summarizes a great hope that I for this site - that it will hone our practice of building accessibility into everything we do and also that the community will feel a sense of participation in the site. I hope for this to become a go-to resource for anyone looking to have a more accessible experience! I would also love community input in sending the OAT team resources and information that could be included in this site, so that it constantly grows and remains up-to-date. I hope that the community can feel like they can contribute to this effort because accessibility belongs to all of us! In the future, I would love to see downloadable checklists for people, more instructional videos, and a robust Glossary for people to learn the language of accessibility!