Dr. Joyner’s Blog: Advancing Digital Accessibility in GME

The GME Office has been working to bring our robust web and digital resources into compliance with new Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements. We strongly believe that this work dovetails with our strategic values and makes our community more inclusive. This month, I’ve asked Jessica Kruse and Allison Shults, who have led this work on behalf of the GME Team, to share our process and changes.

Byron D. Joyner, MD, MPA
Vice Dean for GME and DIO

In April 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released new regulations affecting digital accessibility under Title II of the ADA. These rules require that all the University’s digital content meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.

Digital accessibility is more than just compliance, it reflects our GME Strategic Values: Advocacy, Communication, Expertise, Integration, People, and Quality and Value. It ensures that everyone can fully access our digital content and encourages us all to be better communicators, advocates, and experts in the support we provide.

Guided by these values, the GME Office has taken meaningful steps towards building a culture of digital accessibility to set our team up for success for the upcoming compliance deadline and beyond.

Two-Pronged Approach to Accessibility

To support over 200 residency and fellowship programs at UWSOM, the GME Office hosts a robust website filled with resources, policies, processes, and more. We knew that improving digital accessibility would need to be a collective effort amongst our many subject matter experts.

With that complexity in mind, we decided to approach the work from two equally important directions: the technology and the content.

Jessica Kruse, Information Systems and Web Support Specialist, joined the GME team in January and has already started improving the technical accessibility of the website (a time intensive and detail-oriented process).

Her expertise and unique skillset continue to make an impact, but to catalyze this work across the office we needed to empower every team member to incorporate accessibility into their own digital content workflows.

Accessibility Bites: Small Steps for Big Impact

Our goal was to create a culture of shared responsibility around accessible content and documents. We wanted to demystify the language of digital accessibility; we identified key document accessibility skills for all experience levels and Jessica presented brief, targeted training at our monthly team meetings.

Each of these “Accessibility Bites” covered easy but impactful tips that the entire office could implement immediately.

By clarifying the technical jargon of WCAG and showing how simple changes make a big impact, we saw growing confidence and engagement across the office.

Turning Training into Action

In July, we reached the culmination of our Accessibility Bites training with a half-day professional development session dedicated to digital accessibility. The Office came together for a deeper dive into the technical requirements, the law, and the importance of digital accessibility.

We were honored to partner with two leaders from the University of Washington Civil Rights Compliance Office and Accessible Technology Office: Beth Somerfield, Deputy ADA Coordinator for Digital Accessibility, and Mary Colleen-Jenkins, Instruction Accessibility Specialist, who helped us understand the complex legal requirements of the DOJ ruling, provide strategies for prioritization, and offer a welcome opportunity to ask questions of the University experts.

Most exciting was the time dedicated to practicing hands-on document remediation strategies. Each team had the chance to update real documents with the support of our accessibility liaisons – turning their bite-sized training into immediate progress. It was satisfying to see the lively discussion, team strategizing, and real-time updates happening across content and technology.

The session reinforced that digital accessibility is not only important work, but a high-impact opportunity to make our web presence and digital content more effective for everyone in our community.

From PDF to HTML: A Blueprint for Accessibility

To reflect our shared responsibility for digital accessibility, we saw the ACGME’s new number format requirements as a strategic opportunity to tackle GME content as collaborative projects.

Instead of asking each policy owner to remediate individual PDFs, we launched our Policy Conversion Project to convert over 50 GME policies into a more accessible format: HTML webpages. With Jessica leading the technical accessibility of each webpage, policy owners can focus on making their content both accessible and ACGME compliant.

By engaging policy owners in the content update process, this project is a key example of the cross-functional teamwork that digital accessibility requires, and it will serve as a blueprint for reimagining how we share content in the future.

Looking Ahead

From bite-sized training to large-scale remediation projects, our team has embraced digital accessibility as a reflection of our strategic values. We have seen the small steps that make a big impact, whether it’s adopting an accessibility-first mindset or strategically rethinking workflows.

We know that we will continue to learn, share, and improve together, remembering the importance of progress over perfection. Digital accessibility is an ongoing commitment to creating inclusive content for our GME community, and we are proud of what we have already accomplished!

Thank you,