The Layperson’s Prescriptive to ADA Compliance in Higher Education:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 246 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Eugene Woo

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed Podcast 246 – with Eugene Woo

Introduction to Changing Higher Ed^®

David: Welcome to Changing Higher Ed®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.

[00:00:20] Introduction and Guest Welcome

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.

My guest today is Eugene Woo, CEO and founder of Venngage. Who is Venngage, you may ask? They’re one of the top companies helping solve ADA issues in higher education. Recently, the Department of Justice formally added new language to Title II of the Americans with Disability Act that establishes technical standards for web content and mobile apps. Sounds boring, right? Except that colleges and universities that receive any federal funds, think federal financial aid, research dollars, or COVID or disaster relief funds, must comply with these issues. And those issues impact literally thousands of websites, webpages, and even online education, recruiting pages, etc. So this is a big deal, and Eugene joins me today to talk about these requirements and what higher ed institutions must do to become compliant. And oh, by the way some institutions only have a year and a half to get this done. Eugene, welcome to the program.

Eugene Woo: Thank you, Drumm.

Drumm McNaughton: I’m looking forward to our conversation.

[00:01:28] Eugene Woo’s Background and Venngage

Drumm McNaughton: You have started a company called Venngage, which is into ADA compliance. Before we get to that please give us a little bit of your background, help our listeners understand who you are.

Eugene Woo: Sure. First of all, thanks for having me in a podcast. Really appreciate it. I’m an engineer by training, so I’m a software engineer by training and I’ve been building software products, digital products for over 20 years now. And I do have some ed tech experience. I sold my first company to Parchment, which is a credentialing company, which is now owned by Instructure. A fairly big ed tech company, and I started Venngage about 10 years ago. Been in the industry, working for some larger companies, but now have been running my own company for the last 10 years.

Drumm McNaughton: So you come under the title of a serial entrepreneur. Is that it?

Eugene Woo: Yeah, I guess so. I’ve had more than one. So yes, I, I suppose, although I think most people think a serial entrepreneur has like more than two, I’ve only had two. So

Drumm McNaughton: Well, I do know a number of serial entrepreneurs and you have that gene in you. I can just tell by talking with you. It’s like, “okay, once I’ve got this one going, I’ll sell it to somebody else. And then I’m bored cause I want to do something else”.

Eugene Woo: Yeah, I would say, yes, I, I like to build things. I like to be kind of active. It’s hard for me to imagine just not doing anything. So, yeah, guilty.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, guilty. as charged. Yeah. I’m the same way with higher education. I just love what I do. I love being able to help institutions get better, get themselves out of problems. That’s just my DNA, running a consulting company. It’s a little different than a software company, but the principles are the same. You’ve got to have more money coming in than you have going out.

Eugene Woo: And I think we’re kind of built the same, right? Like, you’re an entrepreneur too. View consultants as entrepreneurs. It’s, the same. You kind of need to have that drive. And I think for most of us, it’s that purpose, right, it’s not, personally I’m not motivated by money. I’m more motivated by purpose. I get out of bed and say I have this problem I want to solve and it’s a mission for me and I enjoy doing it. So it’s not a grind because I get out of bed and saying, “Yeah. What else can I do? There’s some problems I got to fix”. it’s always interesting every day, every year is, it’s the end of the year, I’m doing some reflection on it and I’m like, wow, there’s all these things I’m going to do next year, but I have done all these things. So I’m sure it’s the same for you as well.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, absolutely. There, there have been projects that just because of what was the deliverables and things like that, I’d be staying up until. 12:00, 1 AM, 2 AM at night because it was just so Interesting what we were doing.

Eugene Woo: Yeah, a hundred percent. I can definitely agree with you on that. I’ve stayed up many a nights just going down, often, rabbit holes, but interesting things just because I was so interested in it.

Drumm McNaughton: So Eugene, thank you for that background. That was fascinating.

[00:04:37] Understanding ADA Compliance in Higher Education

Drumm McNaughton: Interesting to know that we have more in common than just being serial entrepreneurs We’re here to talk about ADA compliance. Some new regulations recently came out about higher ed web pages. And basically, an article from the Chronicle on December 6th said that all public institutions are going to have to meet these heightened requirements.

Let’s talk a little bit about the requirements first, because for anybody who accesses online education, either through the website, or their mobile device, which more and more people are doing, these new regulations are going to apply. So what are these new regulations?

Eugene Woo: Sure. Yeah.

[00:05:22] New ADA Regulations and Their Impact

Eugene Woo: Earlier this year, the Department of Justice came out with, an update on the ADA Title II. ADA has been around since the 90s and this update, though, made it very, very specific. So the one thing it did was it essentially said that websites, government funded websites, so entities like universities, state and local governments, agencies, and universities now have to comply with what we call “WCAG”, W C A G standards, which stands for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Standard, and the version is 2. 1.

So not to bore you with all the details, but this is a standard. WCAG has been around for about 20 years. So it’s not a new standard. The 2. 1 standard has been around since 2018. So this ruling essentially defines that standard as the standard that all web content or digital content has to comply with. In addition to that, it also made clear that things like mobile apps, which I think for a while was, in this gray zone to mobile apps need to comply or not. Was it just websites? So it made it very explicit that mobile apps. Also have to comply and there’s a lot more details of what needs to comply.

So before I think it was some confusion on does every single web page need to comply. How about old content, all the archive content? So this ruling made all of it very clear what needs to be compliant, what are the exceptions? And it puts a deadline to it. I think very importantly, it has a deadline and that’s next. And the deadline also depends on the size of the entity. So for higher ed, if it’s larger than 50,000 students, or the organization is larger than 50,000. It would have to be compliant by April of next year, 2026. And for those that are smaller, less than 50,000, it would, they would get an extra year. So that would be in April 2027.

Drumm McNaughton: Mhm. So with this, what’s the precipitous? What was event? ADA has been around, like you said, for many, many years and it was groundbreaking legislation. What is the driver behind this new clarification?

Eugene Woo: So ADA is never really enforced. Right? The driving force to compliance is usually a lawsuit. It could be a lawsuit from an organization. It could be from an individual, usually a student. Or it could be a complaint filed to the OCR, the Office of Civil Rights, that has the jurisdiction around matters of accessibility and discrimination. And so they’re very reactive. They’re usually driven by a complaint or by a lawsuit.

And I think what this ruling is trying to do is to try and shift it so that universities, higher ed, they’re more proactive. They’re not just reactive to lawsuits and then they have to fix it. They’re trying to make everyone do the right thing and to be more proactive.

And to give a little bit more teeth to the regulation because there’s really no enforcement, to be honest. I would say there’s definitely a lack of enforcement because, ADA has been around for a while. WCAG has been around for a while and no one actually really enforces anything, to be honest, until now where there’s a deadline and there’s a clear expectation of what needs to be compliant, what doesn’t need to be compliant?

Drumm McNaughton: Well, there was a big lawsuit a number of years ago at UC Berkeley about this type of thing. What were the details behind it? Because that was groundbreaking in many respects.

Eugene Woo: Yeah. So they’ve been a few major lawsuits, and I think that UC Berkeley one is one of the bigger ones. Essentially, the lawsuit was initiated by the National Association of the Deaf. Berkeley had this, or has this site that basically makes all of the instructional videos, so these are courses, and They had a lot of them.

Basically, most of their courses were recorded and they made that public. And unfortunately, they were not accessible. And what I mean by that is that they did not have captions. The main complaint was that like they didn’t have captions in the videos. I think most of us now, when you watch TV, you’re probably familiar with captions. You can turn it on, like if you watch Netflix and you can read the captions without hearing the conversation. So, that was the impetus of that lawsuit. There was a lot of back and forth, but this year they did come to an agreement. So UC Berkeley did come to an agreement with the D. O. J. that they will make all of these videos compliant and accessible. They’ll put captions into them. I think the technology has also caught up. It’s a lot easier now to auto caption as opposed to doing it manually.

Drumm McNaughton: It’s interesting you say that because we use captions a lot. We watch a lot of British television and you’ve got British, Irish, Scottish actors on there and sometimes the accent makes it difficult to pick up the words. And so we use closed captions frequently with that. And we find it very helpful.

It has nothing to do with my hearing loss that my wife says I have. But, I think that’s just a typical marriage thing.

Eugene Woo: I would say that’s a great observation because this is an example where accessibility, compliance, and actually solving the problem for what people think is a small group of people actually benefits everyone. And this is what we call universal design, where you’re designing something to be accessible or usable for everyone, and it improves everyone’s lives, right? Not just people with disabilities and captions, closed captions is a great example. It was really invented for people with hearing disabilities, for the deaf community. And now a lot of people, I use closed captions too. I live in a noisy household, so I like to have them so I can actually understand what’s going on.

Drumm McNaughton: Exactly. It makes it so much easier for everybody. So these new regs, new regulations, and they were not legislated, they were put into place by I would assume an executive order or something along those lines coming from the DOJ. And that’s not to say that under the next administration, they could say, “well, no, we’re not going to implement these”. But because it’s published in the Federal Register, that is going to make a big difference. It details, like we talked about, details what needs to be made accessible. Go through a little bit of what this new regulation, It’s not a regulation, but you know what I’m talking about.

Eugene Woo: The standards. Just at a very, very high level. So the WCAG standards have four main principles. The first one is perceivable. So it basically means that whatever content you have in your website has to be perceivable for everyone. So the example you gave is if you were deaf, you should have alt text, alternative text, or closed captions. For example, if you are blind, you should have alternative text or audio description for videos. So that’s perceivable.

The second one is operable. So the content should be operable by everyone, including people who don’t use a mouse, so a lot of us use mouse and we take that for granted. But there are people who do not use the mouse. They use what you know what you would call is assistive technology or AT for short. These would include screen readers, a variety of Braille keyboard, for example, or just a keyboard without a mouse. And so your content has to be navigable, accessible, operable by people using something that is not just the mouse.

And then the third one is understandable. That’s pretty obvious that the language and everything in the content should be easily understandable.

And the last one is R, robust. So robustness basically means that it should essentially be clean, it should be adaptable to if you were reading on a mobile phone, it shouldn’t break easily. That’s robustness.

So, WCAG covers has standards that covers all these four principles from, and so it have standards on if you have an image, you should have an alt text, you’ve got a video, you should have captions, and so forth. And if you have a website, it should work for both a mobile view, an iPad view, it should be adaptable to different views and so forth.

 That is WCAG at a very, very high level. In summary, it basically makes your content accessible to everyone to consume that content.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, that’s part of what you called universal design earlier.

Eugene Woo: Yes. So if you designed something with the WCAG principles, it’s not just for people with disabilities, it’s for everyone. It’s good design, it’s actually just good design, to be honest.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. So some of the things that the new regs detail, what needs to be accessible, flowcharts, password protected, timelines. Let’s go through some of those if we may.

[00:14:18] ADA and WCAG Challenges and Solutions for Universities

Eugene Woo: Sure, so I think the biggest problem that most universities will face is, it’s like, Oh my gosh, I have such huge websites and most universities, it’s not just one website. They are dealing with hundreds. I think the Chronicle article had some quotes which some they literally have thousands of websites. And why do they have thousands of websites? Every department or every, college will have a website. Some programs have their own websites. Some within each program will have their own websites, and now a university will have literally thousands of websites. Bigger state schools for sure have 500 to 1000 separate, disparate websites and they’re all managed by different people. It’s a decentralized management system. Right?

And I think the problem that most universities face is that it’s overwhelming, like, Oh my gosh, I’ve got, it’s a huge problem. And, and it’s like almost boiling the ocean. How do I fix this? It’s so huge.

Drumm McNaughton: Let me ask a question because that number, thousands of websites, and even if it’s 500, that is a mind-boggling number to be able to manage. Why do institutions do this? Does it have to do with having one major site that is just so big that if something breaks it takes the entire site down?

Why do they do this?

Eugene Woo: I don’t think so. I think it’s just how the universities are organized. And they’re usually organized by units. So each unit has their own IT department and they have their own tech, you have your own websites, they manage your own tech. And then some within the departments or units, they have programs and within that they have to, I think it’s just how they’re organized.

 And it’s over time just became this. I think it’s good and bad. So I’m not against a decentralized system. I think you move faster because each team can make their own content, publish their own content, they’re more independent, they don’t have to go through this big approval process.

So I don’t think that’s a problem. I think the problem is really, they don’t really know much about accessibility. There’s a very low kind of education level or awareness level of accessibility. That has changed recently, but it’s still fairly low in general.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. Well, that makes sense. So let’s continue through. I apologize for interrupting, but that was one of those things. It’s like, I know I’ve got questions and if I do, my listeners are going to have questions as well, because, shocking to hear one university, like The Ohio State University, would have 500 different websites.

Eugene Woo: Yeah, it’s shocking to me too when I read that and actually now having talked to a few IT people, I was in an IT conference for higher ed and yeah, it’s, it is fairly common. So going back to the question, I think the best thing any university can do is to essentially do an audit. Figure out what all these websites are and then prioritize them based on what the ADA has said needs to be compliant and not compliant. And in that list, not everything has to be compliant. So for example, there are exceptions. So archive content, existing documents. So you’ve got, .PDFs is a huge issue. There’s .PDFs all over websites. So if it’s already there, that’s an exception. There’s third party content, there’s an exception there. And then there’s a question of social media. Do you need to make that compliant? There’s so much social media content out there right now produced by universities. So they’ve said that preexisting is an exception as well. So all the old stuff, you don’t have to go back and remediate it. So remediation is the term. Yeah. Remediation is a term you’ll hear a lot where you have to go back and fix. Essentially you have to fix or remediate a content, or page, or a document that isn’t accessible to go in and fix it so that it is accessible.

So I think that’s what universities can do, is it can, take stock of what they have and then put them in different buckets, like which ones need to be remediated or fixed and which don’t. And then they can prioritize it. They can figure out which are the ones that have the most traffic.

Because even after doing that, you’ll still end up with hundreds of sites and each site maybe have hundreds to thousands of pages. And you’ll still have to figure out which ones do I fix first. And that’s where prioritization comes in. And obviously that depends on the university, but for the most part, the more traffic, the more eyes, and the more useful that site is, or the page is, that’s where you should, focus your attention. So you would prioritize it based on traffic or based on usage, and try and tackle that problem. So it doesn’t feel like I’m trying to boil an ocean kind of a problem.

Drumm McNaughton: Where do you see the most issues for non-compliance? I know we came up with a brief list, but if you’re not having to go back and fix a bunch of things, if it’s from this point going forward, which makes a lot of sense, where are the big problems that you see or have seen?

Eugene Woo: Yeah. So, the answer I’m going to give is actually from a survey that WebName, so WebName is this nonprofit, out of Utah, that essentially looks at the top 1 million websites, including a lot of higher end websites. They do this every year, so these are like actual numbers that the top problems are fairly consistent every year.

The first one is very similar to what we talked about. It’s missing alternative descriptions, alternative text and these include alt text for images, captions. That’s about 54 percent of all homepages. So not just minor pages. These are just homepages. It’s huge. So more than half of homepages are missing alt text.

So somebody who cannot see or has a vision impairment will not understand images. And then forms is the other one. We all have to fill out forms for many, many reasons. It’s very difficult to fill out a form if it’s not accessible. So this could mean either, they don’t know what the form fields mean, cause if someone’s using a screen reader, either because it’s formatted wrongly, they don’t have the input fields. That’s a big problem.

Links and buttons are a big problem, too, because oftentimes they’re not descriptive enough. They’ll just have the whole URL. Can you imagine a screen reader will just read out, HTTPS? Dot, it’ll just be this long string and you won’t know what am I clicking on until you click on it. So that is also a big problem. This was quoted in the Chronicle article, PDF documents are a big, big problem. There was a quote by, someone from Western Washington University, and they said that PDF is the biggest challenge for compliance. And I kind of agree. There’s lots of PDFs on websites. There’s lots of PDFs being used in universities, and the vast majority of them are not compliant.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, there was another one that I found interesting was color contrast. That 20 percent of all males have some sort of color blindness.

Eugene Woo: Yeah, so color contrast is very important. I missed that, but you’re absolutely right. It’s also part of the WCAG guidelines that sufficient color contrast allows you to read text or whatever you’re trying to display on the screen. That is one of the main issues that most people, that comes up in the WebAIM report as well. And you’re right. The colorblindness in males is a lot higher than what people think. It’s fairly common. Yeah, it’s between 10 and 20%.

It’s something that is quite easily fixed, actually. It’s something you could address up front quite easily when you’re designing the site, when you’re coming up with the color scheme, as opposed to having to fix it later on. This is some of those things that surprisingly easy to fix, but not a lot of people are aware of it and they probably don’t do it.

Drumm McNaughton: So the errors that people are finding, where do you find the most noncompliance to these standards? You talked about PDFs, like some of the lower pages. Things like that, but mobile apps, social media, online education, to me that’s a huge issue, is you’ve got so many institutions who are involved in online education. That could be a nightmare.

Eugene Woo: Hundred percent. So for the most part, a lot of the focus is on websites on homepages, but there’s all this content outside of that, as you mentioned, courses is huge, right? A lot of us now take courses online, even as a student, even if you’re attending a live session, there is an online portion or portal that you go to where you can access resources and all of that.

So that is an area that is, it’s given less attention so there’s a lot of non-compliance there. Mobile app, as I’ve mentioned earlier on, was an area that was always kind of gray. Like if I have a mobile app, do I need it to be compliant or not? That area is definitely a gray area as well.

Social media is definitely a gray area. It’s clear now that yeah, even social media posts need to be compliant. And then a lot of these, I would say, it’s the smaller sites. We talked about how universities have hundreds and hundreds of sites. A lot of the smaller sites, whether because they were created by a small program, that don’t have the resources as the bigger IT department and may not have an accessibility person on staff. A lot of those are non-compliant as well.

Drumm McNaughton: So with that, how do you find these errors.

[00:23:25] Tools and Strategies for Compliance

Drumm McNaughton: You know in the quote “age of AI”, is AI helpful in finding these?

Eugene Woo: Yes, Yes, it can be. So to answer your question, there are tools that go out and scan your pages, your websites. They’re able to crawl your websites, crawl to the minor sites, but the non, homepage sites go to the other sites. They can crawl all of the different smaller sites that a university has, and it can compile a report.

Now this is obviously a first level check. It doesn’t give you all the errors. It just gives you all the obvious errors that can be detected from the code. Right? It’s a good enough check and you can run those too. So there’s tools like Wave, there’s Lighthouse, Axe. A lot of them have some AI component into it. That’s one way of figuring it out.

Since you mentioned AI, that there’s definitely tools now that are using AI to fix those pages or fix the document, fixing pages PDFs. So there is some auto remediation that goes on right now. So I’m mainly involved in PDF remediation and PDF compliance. I know there are a lot of tools now that do mass remediation so you can just pump in documents and they use AI to remediate those documents. And it’s not 100%, but it gets it there like 90 percent and then, a human sort of just does the finishing touches to it.

Drumm McNaughton: Sure. That’s really good. So what do presidents need to know about this? This is not something that they are going to do themselves or even have their CTO do. They need to be aware and be smart about these changes. So what are some of those things that they really need to be aware of?

Eugene Woo: I think a president needs to appoint a leader and someone who’s going to be accountable for this compliance. So whether it’s the chief compliance officer, the CIO. Oftentimes it’s not clear does this fall under IT? Does it fall under, if it’s content in courses, does it fall under the actual departments? It’s often not very clear, so there’s no clear mandate. So I think, the leadership just needs to appoint someone and have some policy in place to say “look, this is either the department or the role that’s going to be in charge for compliance”. And then obviously with that, budgeting always comes up. Like they need to put a budget to it.

And so did they take it seriously, right? The deadlines are very, very soon. Like it’s only a year and a half for a big university, for a big school, and even two years and a half isn’t a lot of time. So everyone else has two years and a half, even that’s not a lot of time.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. So the one piece we haven’t touched on. We talked about public universities and all these guidelines are required for public universities. What about private universities? You’ve got quite a number of those out there here in the U. S. and worldwide. What are their requirements or do they have any?

Eugene Woo: So if anything is funded by the government, and a lot of private universities do receive funding, then they have to be compliant.

Drumm McNaughton: So Title IV, Federal Financial Aid, all of those things, requires you’re being compliant.

Eugene Woo: Yes. So I think that even though private, some universities may think they don’t have to be compliant, but as they dig into the reg, I would say, yeah, one of the things that they should do is get their legal team to go in and figure out, for a private university, do we need to be compliant? And I think, I’m not a lawyer, so I cannot really speak to whether they should be compliant or not. But the ruling states really clear that if they receive federal funding to be compliant. And I believe a lot of them will have to be compliant. Yeah,

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, there’s at least 75%, if not more, of universities who receive federal financial aid or federal dollars in one way or another. I can think of an example, if a university didn’t receive Title IV federal funding, but they had a disaster there and they took disaster dollars to get them back on their feet, that could count.

Eugene Woo: Yeah, for sure. And I also think that because there’s more visibility now in the ADA due to the deadlines, and we talked about lawsuits earlier on, I think the exposure and the risk is a lot higher now as well. So even as a private institution, even if you technically don’t have to comply with the ADA and Title II regulations, your risk of lawsuits is definitely going to be higher next year when these rules come into effect.

Drumm McNaughton: Eugene. This has been a fascinating conversation for me. I want to thank you for coming on and sharing your knowledge and your expertise in this area

[00:27:58] Three Key Takeaways for Higher Education Presidents and Boards

Drumm McNaughton: Three takeaways for higher ed presidents and boards. What do they need to know about the new regs and how their institution can be affected?

Eugene Woo: So number one is just figure out are you going to have to be compliant when, because that’s important, because I think that drives how soon you need to, to make decisions.

 Number two is unique direction. As I mentioned, leadership, like definitely a point, if it’s not obvious, and oftentimes it’s not obvious, where does accessibility compliance fall under, appoint somebody and or a team or somebody usually to basically drive this initiative and then have a budget to it, I think. Without money nothing moves. I think i’m just being very practical here. You know, we can talk all we want, “oh, we want to do the good thing We want to make sure anything’s accessible”, and then there’s no budget to it and it’s like well nothing’s going to move if there’s no budget. .

Drumm McNaughton: This is true. That rubber meets the road. So what’s next for you?

[00:28:53] What’s Next for Venngage?

Drumm McNaughton: What’s next for Venngage?

Eugene Woo: Vanguage, we make a tool, a design tool, that is accessible. So we help with people producing accessible PDFs, and we’re going to forms. So forms is a big area and we’re launching that soon. And we’re continuously trying to integrate AI in our tools as well. So yeah, we’re continuing our journey and our mission.

Drumm McNaughton: Very good. Well, Eugene, thank you so much for being on the show. I’ve enjoyed our conversation. I look forward to the next time that we get a chance to have a talk.

Eugene Woo: Likewise, this is, this is great, Drumm. I really appreciate you inviting me to the show. Thank you.

Drumm McNaughton: My pleasure. Take care.

Thanks for listening today. And a special thank you to my guest, Eugene Woo, CEO and founder of Venngage. Eugene, thanks for a great and informative session. I look forward to the next time our paths cross.

Folks, thanks again for listening. See you next week.