At the iSchool Help Desk, we are excited to help the school as it prepares to meet updated federal standards about digital accessibility. Making education accessible and equitable is a huge task, and no one person can take it on alone. We want to recognize those who have been stepping up to become Accessibility Advocates at the iSchool.
Whether they have been educating others about accessibility for years, or they’ve recently made the commitment to jump in and try their best, we think it’s important to recognize the efforts being made and the amazing impact that we can make as an iSchool community if we all do our part!
We will be spotlighting some of these advocates monthly during the school year. This is a great chance to recognize and uplift these efforts, to encourage one another as a community to keep striving, and to help students get to know our instructors a little better!
Now, meet our featured Accessibility Advocate for April: Craig Evans!
Lecturer
MS, Library and Information Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Currently Teaching: Spring 2025 – Intro Database Concepts & Apps – IS206 (Sections AB1, AB2, AB3, AB4, AL, BB1, BB2, BB3, BL)
We recognize Mr. Evans’ efforts to improve his course materials and build new course materials with accessibility in mind. He attended training offered by the iSchool Help Desk to learn about updating PowerPoint materials, and has been working to update his classes this semester.
I (Help Desk GA Elliot) had the chance to chat with him about accessibility and what is motivating him to learn. He had some wonderful insights to share on why accessibility is so important to making our workforce more diverse and making sure students aren’t being left behind. Check them out below!
Q: Why is it important to you to work towards more accessible classes?
It’s something we should be doing. It shouldn’t be something extra, it should just be part of our workflow. Everyone deserves an education, and everyone deserves to have the same access to information. I want to see a more diverse workforce in technology. I don’t want [students] left behind. I want to make sure that if there’s due dates and that sort of thing, that [they] are there for a reason… so that you’re not getting to the end of the semester and then going into panic mode and shutting down. And, strictly speaking, that doesn’t fall under Title II. But it all feeds into the same experience a student is having. When I was an undergrad, I broke my pelvis parachuting and… I couldn’t leave my house for weeks until I was mobile again. And that sort of feeds back to what could have been done differently to help support me when I was a student. Just the understanding, the flexibility. I try to treat students how I’d have liked to have been treated when I was a student. The students are all over 18. Let’s treat them like adults. And again, that doesn’t matter whether it’s somebody who falls under an ADA label or not; you have to treat all the students with that level of respect.
Q: What is a favorite thing that you’ve learned from an impactful professor?
I think the most important thing was to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to speak up. I’ve had professors in the past who were very standoffish, others who were very open, and the ones you get the most out of are the ones who are open to asking questions. If they can see that you’ve got some intellectual curiosity, they’ll go further for you. Coming back and saying, “Oh, I liked your lecture on X, how would that apply to Y?” and illustrating that you’ve made that connection… Academics like to breed academics. You’re trying to get as many people out the door as you can who have got intellectual curiosity. And it may not be specific skills, it may not be specific knowledge, but it’s having the curiosity to say, “I’ve seen something like this, I wonder how it could apply to that?” and using that as a way of learning, moving forward.
Q: What is your teaching style?
I would say that it is fairly casual. I want the students to know the basics. I want them to be able to take the basics and realize how they can be assembled together to give you more. You’re not just going from point A to point B to point C to point D, you’re multiplying along the way. You want something that’s going to start accelerating your learning. I tend to start fairly basic. I do a lot of repetition. But each time, I repeat and I add something. Then I repeat and I add something… And if somebody just retains the bit that was at the core, great. They’ve learned something. If they realize that we’ve been adding along the way and they’ve been learning more and more, that’s even better. I want to see every student succeed. And I want to give them the skills and the material that will see them succeed… And some people learn differently. I’m a visual learner… I’ve had professors in the past who were very much, a lot of reading based learning. And I try to mix it up. I want to give the students a way of succeeding, no matter which way they find themselves being better suited. But a student’s got to want to do that as well. Some just want to be spoon fed. Others are a little bit more curious. And I like to feed the curious students.
Bonus Q: What advice do you have for students who may be struggling in a class?
I think students need to recognize that all the faculty… they were all students at one point. And they’ve all been through it before as well. If you’ve got a problem, talk to us. If there’s material that you don’t understand, come and talk to us. There may be something else that we need to explore. It may mean a tweak in a slide deck or something, and suddenly, it’s a lot clearer. We’re as much a resource as anything else. And if somebody’s having a struggle, having a problem, don’t be afraid to come and talk to your professors. The big thing is, if there’s an issue, reach out early. If you’re struggling with something, talk to us as soon as you can. If you’ve got a TA for the class, talk to your TA as soon as you can. If it’s something they can’t address, they’ll raise it to us without any problems.
Q: What classes do you really love teaching?
At the moment I am very much involved in databases… I’m in the process of developing a new database class that will be offered hopefully next year, in graph databases, which is a little bit different to what most people see here. That’s a class that will be familiar to people who come from the LIS side of things, because graph databases get used in ontologies and ontology development quite extensively. But most of the people on that side of the fence are familiar with GraphDB and a company called Ontotext. My interests are a little bit wider than that. They still handle that ontology side of things, but they go much bigger. And I want to expose the students to that much bigger side of things. Classes like that, something which is expanding what people are being exposed to, excite me the most.
Q: Do you have any advice for others who are working to learn more about course accessibility?
Try it. You’ve got to go out, you’ve got to experience it. You’ve got to go through the process of updating a slide deck; you’ve got to go through the process of finding alternate materials. Most of the materials I use for readings are in PDF format at the moment, and I’m trying to find HTML equivalents, because HTML is more accessible from a reader perspective. That’s not going to be possible for all my readings; next semester, I’ll be converting my readings over to HTML or finding alternative materials. But you’ve got to start early. There’s just so many pieces to this that if we don’t start now, we’re going to be so far behind. Go piece by piece. If you’re updating slide decks, update it to an appropriate format now. If you’re doing work, make sure it’s compliant as you go. That’s the biggest piece of advice- don’t just keep doing the same thing. If you’ve got to make a change, make the change now, and build that into your workflow.
I think this is important from a school perspective and from a campus perspective. We want to make sure that students aren’t being left behind. We want to open the options up to students who may not have considered these types of classes in the past because they didn’t have the accessibility that they required. Even just things like dyslexia- choosing the right fonts, choosing the right colors and the color contrasts for visualizations. We as faculty need to be aware of that. But we also need to make sure our students are aware of it as well. So that as they move forward, they’re aware of colorblindness issues or the choice of fonts influencing the ability [for people] to read particular things. We need to start feeding that sort of thing, not just for our own benefit, but we need to start nudging students to have an awareness of this sort of thing as well.
(This conversation has been edited for clarity & time).
Thank you so much to Craig for such a wonderful conversation, and for your commitment to helping all of your students succeed! And thank you to everyone who is working towards a better and more inclusive iSchool. Let’s keep this up!
If you know someone who has been exemplifying this effort in some way, please reach out to us at ischool-support@illinois.edu to nominate them and tell us a little bit about what you want to celebrate!
– iSchool Help Desk
