Q&A with Luke Rosenberger: Advancing Digital Accessibility at UVA

In May, Luke Rosenberger joined the CTE as our inaugural Assistant Director of Digital Accessibility Initiatives, a role created to lead the University’s efforts to advance digital accessibility in teaching and learning.

With decades of experience, Luke is eager to support instructors in creating more inclusive learning environments for their students. In this Q&A, he shares his journey to UVA, priorities for the position, and one thing he wishes more people understood about digital accessibility.

Q: Tell me a little bit about your background and how you got involved in digital accessibility.

My background is in librarianship. I have moved between librarianship and technology over a number of years, in different positions. The last place that I was at before here was the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, and I was there for 18 years. The first six or so years that I was there, I was their Director of Library Technology and Historical Collections. When I was there, part of what I was working on was the library's web presence and just all of its online platforms.

… Then they asked me to come over from the library to the central IT organization to lead [their institutional web strategy project] and I became their first Institutional Director of Web Initiatives and Strategy. I was in that role for quite a while.

As I was working on that, I really started coming to see web accessibility as this extension of user experience. Traditionally, we had been looking at what can make the experience usable and improved for the majority of our users. Now we were going that step further to say, ‘Okay, how can we go beyond just the majority of our users and actually reach the rest?’ And also realizing that the more we did that, the better the outcomes were for everybody. So that got my interest in web accessibility.

After working on that for a little while, I started looking around and realizing that as we were maturing in web accessibility, there was a lot more outside of just the web that we were missing out on. … So that was how I ended up becoming the institution’s first Digital Accessibility Officer for the institution and trying to build a program. It was an excellent experience.

Q: Why were you interested in UVA's Assistant Director of Digital Accessibility Initiatives position?

A big part of it was the opportunity to be part of a team and part of a larger organization working on [digital accessibility]. I will say the opportunity to do this in a center for teaching and learning was interesting. My bachelor’s degree is in Spanish education, and my master’s in libraries. I had that educational, library background and had been in higher ed, but out of the academic side and squarely in the IT side of things for the last dozen plus years.

The idea of having a digital accessibility position in a center for teaching and learning was just very interesting and held a lot of potential.

Q: As the CTE's first-ever Assistant Director of Digital Accessibility Initiatives, what are a few of your top priorities in this role?

I want to make sure that the work that we're doing with accessibility and the way that we're communicating about it with instructors is grounded in the lived experiences of students and people in our University community who use or benefit from assistive technology and accessible content. I think that if we can really bring their lived experience into how instructors think about their courses, I think it's going to connect with them in a very different way than if we were just driving this on the basis of compliance or mandates.

I really want to make sure we're grounding the stuff that we're doing in their students’ needs. What do they need to be successful? We're trying to be proactive, instead of reacting to just accommodating one particular person. We need to think about what our students’ needs are generally and the more we can understand about that and the variety of needs that they may have, the better we can design approaches that are going to address all of them, or as many of them as possible. … So keep[ing] the focus on progress and improvement [will be important].

Q: What’s one thing you wish more people understood about digital accessibility?

I think the first one is, why? Why does it matter? I think the biggest misconception that we have to overcome is that digital accessibility—or accessibility generally—is only for the benefit of a few people.

… What I think people don't think about is that the kinds of changes that we're talking about when we're talking about digital accessibility are useful for people, not just when they have permanent disabilities, but also when they have temporary disabilities. That can be anything from … somebody has a broken arm or broken leg, right? They still have some of the same needs, even though it's not permanent, but they really have some of the same adjustment that they have to go through—and accessibility helps both of them. It also helps people with situational disabilities. If somebody has their arms full of groceries, then the little push button to open the door helps them in that situational disability too, right?

There are things that we do for accessibility that help people not only with permanent disabilities, but with temporary disabilities, situational disabilities. … Anything we can do to improve usability, attention, focus, it's going to help in those kinds of situations. I guess that's the one thing I wish more people understood and thought about is the breadth of the impact of accessibility. It affects so many more people than many people realize.

Q: How are you liking UVA so far?

One of the things that I have really appreciated about coming to UVA is, I was still at a point in developing the maturity of that organization (UT Health San Antonio), where I was still pretty much on my own. I had lots of connections that I had worked with through the years that I had been there, but there wasn't really anybody else who was really focused on [digital accessibility] yet.

… Coming here, it's great to be part of a team already working on the same [thing] and also making connections with people across the institution who are working on digital accessibility in some capacity or another, or trying to figure it out, right? That's been good to feel like I'm part of a larger effort, both within the CTE and across the University.

Q: What’s a fun fact about you?

I'm fluent in Spanish. I did my third year of undergrad in Spain, and then I've just kind of used it ever since. After I got my bachelor’s degree, I went into volunteer service for a couple of years. ... That's actually what took me to Texas. One of those years was at a refugee shelter in East Austin and then after that, I was worked for a year with a labor education project where I was going across the river into northern Mexico every day and just meeting with folks in their homes to kind of have discussion groups about Mexican labor law. That was an interesting educational experience, and that's what took me to Texas.

If you’d like to get in touch with Luke, you can email him at jdu2zu@virginia.edu or connect on LinkedIn.