Module and News

Thanks for your patience while I reformat and add to the modules. I appreciate feedback that the modules were a bit long, so I’m breaking the content up into more manageable sections. Our upcoming module will look at disability laws and guidelines, which will provide some context about the upcoming April 24, 2026 compliance deadline.

UCOP recently posted this resource on the ADA Title II Update:

Sign up to be added to the UC A11Y Canvas course!

*Note: Remember that, once added, you’ll need to navigate to and bookmark the UCO Canvas link here, as it’s not available through your campus Canvas.

Suggest content or nominate an Access Hero at your campus here.

*Note: as an accessibility best practice, links will open in the same tab; right-click and select Open Link in New Tab if you prefer.

Document Remediation Drop-In: April 23 @ 3 PM

Are your syllabi, readings, flyers, and other documents compliant?

Register here for our first UC Accessibility Project Document Remediation Drop-In Session on Wednesday, April 23 from 3-4PM on Zoom.

• Folks are welcome to bring their own documents for accessibility assessment and remediation help.

• Please submit your materials here. We might not get to all of them, but we're planning for regular drop-in sessions, so no worries!

• Feel free to just watch. This is an informal opportunity to learn more about making your documents accessible.

• Review our workshop on What Makes a Document Accessible? with Dax Castro here.

***For those of us who have yearly performance reviews, be sure to highlight the awesome work you’re doing in accessibility and your goals for continued learning!

Body Doubling Session: Monday, April 28, 12-1PM

Body doubling is a strategy where a person works alongside someone else, either in person or virtually, to stay focused and motivated. For many folks—particularly those with ADHD or autism—body doubling provides accountability, reduces feelings of isolation, and creates a structured environment that makes tasks feel more manageable. The presence of another person can help redirect attention back to the task at hand and foster a sense of shared purpose.

If you’d benefit from body doubling to help motivate you through the UC A11Y Project Canvas modules, please join us this month on Zoom; we’ll offer more sessions each month. Folks can choose to work individually in quiet breakout rooms or discuss with others in collaborative breakout rooms.

Register: Monday, April 28, 12-1PM

*If you request ASL interpretation or other access needs, please let me know as soon as possible and at least 72 hours before the meeting.

May 2: Discussion of Documentary Change, Not Charity

Change Not Charity: The Americans with Disabilities Act is a recent documentary directed by Jim LeBrecht (whose Crip Camp was nominated for an Academy Award) and narrated by Peter Dinklage that explores the history and impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), highlighting the activism and advocacy that led to its passage and the ongoing fight for disability rights.

Register for an informal discussion on Friday, May 2 from 1-2PM

Watch it here: Change, Not Charity: The Americans with Disabilities Act 

53 minutes with captions, audio description, and ASL

*If you request ASL interpretation or other access needs, please let me know as soon as possible and at least 72 hours before the meeting.

April Disability and Accessibility Dates:

• Autism Acceptance Month

• IBS Awareness Month

• Parkinson’s Awareness Month

• Limb Loss and Limb Difference Awareness Month

Learn more with the Disability Daily Podcast! Follow on Bluesky

UC Disability Hero: Robert Weitbrecht

Robert Weitbrecht was a Deaf American physicist, astronomer, and engineer best known for co-inventing the teletypewriter (TTY), a groundbreaking device that enabled Deaf individuals to communicate over the telephone.

Weitbrecht was born deaf and earned a bachelor’s degree in Astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley in 1942. During World War II, Weitbrecht he worked on the Manhattan Project, the top-secret initiative that developed the first nuclear weapons. As part of his contributions, he helped create the modern version of the Geiger counter, a tool used to detect and measure radiation. He worked as a physicist at the University of California and as an electronics scientist at the U.S. Naval Air Missile Test Center in Point Mugu, California, where he created an electronic system for capturing images of missiles during flight.

The invention of the telephone in the late 19th century, while revolutionary for communication, inadvertently isolated Deaf people by creating a new communication barrier. In the early 1960s, Weitbrecht, in collaboration with Dr. James Carlyle Marsters, developed a system that allowed Deaf people to communicate via the telephone using a teletypewriter. This invention was a game-changer for the Deaf community, making it possible for them to engage in real-time conversations over long distances, just as hearing people did with telephones.

The iconic first words spoken into the telephone in March of 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell were, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.”

88 years later, the first words by the TTY in May of 1954 sent from Weitbrecht to Marsters were: "Are you printing me now? Let's quit for now and gloat over the success."

This video is silent; you can listen to the captions read aloud here.

The signer in this video is Dr. Barbara Spiecker (a former postdoc at UC Santa Barbara!) of Atomic Hands. We’ll meet her soon for our UC A11Y programming on making STEM spaces more Deaf-inclusive.

A11Y Tip: Copyfish OCR

When writing alternative text (alt text)—or written descriptions of visual information like images, photos, charts, and graphs—for screen readers to read aloud to blind folks, we need to include text contained within images as well.

You can retype this text, or you can use an OCR (optical character recognition) tool like Copyfish to accomplish this faster.

In the example below, there’s an image that includes a photo of Deafblind lawyer Haben Girma, a hashtag #NoBarriersSummit, and a quote, “I want a future where disabled people are not underemployed, where we have equal employment opportunities.”

A screen reader (like VoiceOver, NVDA, or JAWS) that reads text aloud to folks for accessibility purposes won’t read anything when it hits his image unless we add a description in the alt text field. When I click the Copyfish Chrome extension, I simply select the text within the image to convert it to actual words, which I can then paste into the alt text field.

Check out the UC A11Y Canvas course for other accessibility best practices.

Access Hero:

April’s Access Hero is Dr. Stacy Branham, an associate professor in the Department of informatics at UC Irvine!

Branhamresearches accessible computing by focusing on how technology supports interdependence rather than just independence. She highlights that designs centered on disabled users often benefit everyone and emphasizes including disabled people as active collaborators, not just subjects.

Check out Stacy Branham’s website 

 Thank you, Stacy!

Nominate an Access Hero who works to make your campus more accessible!

Nominees can be anyone on campus -- staff members, students, or instructors.

We’ll give them a shout-out in a future newsletter.

UC Campus News:

Share your campus news here!

UC Berkeley has a new podcast on which students, educators, and staff from the disability community tell their stories and call the campus community in on acts of advocacy and disability justice. Check out Finding Space here (with transcripts!).

On March 7, UC Berkeley’s Disability Access and Compliance Office, Center for Teaching and Learning, and Disability Cultural Community Center co-hosted a film festival called “Beyond the Frame: Amplifying Disability Stories.” These five short films were screened:

Chicken, Directed by Lucy McNulty & Emma Pollard. When Sam splits up with her partner, she is forced to move back into her childhood home with her mother and neurodivergent brother. When depression sinks in, her brother Emmett gets in her face trying to cheer her up and in doing so makes everything worse. But when Emmett is confronted with a situation at a baseball game where he is called a chicken, Sam rises to the challenge to come to his aid and is reminded of what is truly important (14 minutes).

Turn up the bass, Directed by Ted Evans. Turn Up The Bass tells the remarkable and little-known story of Troi Lee, aka DJ Chinaman, the unstoppable force behind the UK's deaf music and rave scene (12 minutes).

Diagnonsense, Directed by Samuel Dore. Diagnonsense is a drama set in 1996 at a psychiatric hospital where Deaf Social Worker Louise meets Patrick, a Deaf patient who has been kept there for 36 years and wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic by Dr. Nicholson. Louise has to fight discriminatory attitudes to get an institutionalized Patrick to appeal against his diagnosis to get him released but he has to recall his painful memories of the events that led to his incarceration (27 Minutes).

The Hip Hops, Directed by Sandra Vivas. A story of disability and inclusion from the point of view of a child, based on the filmmaker’s own life (4 Minutes).

These are the sounds I make, Directed by Andy Bambach & Suzanne Whiteman. Simi, a young woman with disabilities, communicates in many different ways from making sounds and gestures to using conversation cards and new technologies. She enjoys getting out into nature, dancing, creating art, connecting with friends and being involved in decisions that affect her (8 Minutes).