February 2025 Meeting

Meeting Date
  • Opening quotation 
    • “It’s a very common narrative in our society that disabled people succeed despite disability when really, we succeed despite ableism.” - Lydia X.Z Brown Educator, Activist, and Director of the Autistic People of Color Fund
  • Agenda 
    • Topic: Using AI to leverage inclusivity and accessibility
    • Speakers:
      • Nick Gaspar, Director of Online and Digital Education
      • Carson Waites, Instructional Learning Senior - Online and Digital Education
    • Conversation:
      • It is important to make accessibility the default
        • Having captions on all videos as soon as they are uploaded
      • Tools to make things accessible
        • At this meeting we have human assisted captioning
        • But technology is improving
          • Text to Speech
        • Benefits of using this technology
          • Helps individuals with hearing impairments
          • English as a second language individuals
          • Helps everybody
            • Universal advantage to captioning
      • Text to speech improvements
        • Helps learners with visual impairments, learners with dyslexia, anybody who prefers listening to reading
          • The technology is becoming more natural and accurate
      • Drawbacks to the available technology
        • Issues with jargon and technical terms
        • They are not plug and play
        • Need to be evaluated for use in specific applications
        • ElevenLabs example
          • There are a lot of tools that can generate speech from text but they are not perfect recreations
            • Not easy to listen to for long term and regular periods
        • Technology is more accessible if it sounds like a person
          • Effects that can improve this:
            • Inhale sound effects 
            • Sounds like a person
          • Not often talked about as an accessibility issue if the text to speech does not sound human
            • Human-like readings advance accessibility
      • Using AI to break down complex ideas into understandable concepts
        • Wolverine Summarizer- tool created for the office to create content with more context.
          • Summarizes videos
            • Pulls out important points and summaries
            • Creates frequently asked questions and answers from the video
              • Allows faculty to be more proactive in answering potential questions.
      • Google Notebook LM
        • A system where you can upload content and use it to create different types of media
          • Example: Podcast generation
            • Not perfect
              • Talking over each other
              • A little robotic
      • Instructors should educate students on the availability of AI technology but leave it up to the student if they would like to use it or not.
      • Accessibility Audits
        • Panorama
          • Captioning
            • Removes burden from professors while making education accessible
            • Makes sure content is accessible at a mechanical standpoint for the audits
        • Students and faculty engaging with the technology
          • Flint campus 63% accessibility score
            • Students and faculty using the tools for alternate downloads:
              • Braille, text to speech content
        • Remediation assistance
          • DOJ laws about being fully digitally accessible by April 2026
            • Create descriptions for images
              • If you are not worried about chat gpt seeing them
            • The Wolverine Describer
              • Can upload images and get descriptions and change the format of those descriptions
          • Risks
            • Don't upload sensitive information to chat GPT
        • AI tutors- Maizey
          • Can help learn educational material
          • But we are hoping tools will answer administrative questions that often have to be repeated over and over
            • To save time
            • Gives custom feedback and explanations for students
            • It is a way to supplement information when instructors aren’t there to provide students with information
          • Encourage students to give feedback on the AI tools available to them
      • Maizey Canvas Connector
        • Students and instructors can get writing feedback from these tools
      • Wolverine Writing Assistant
        • Helps neurodivergent students learn from their writing mistakes 
          • Gives grammatical feedback and explains the corrections to help the student understand their mistakes and the professor identify mistakes.
            • Can give improvement suggestions too!
      • Tutoring and learning assistance in Maizey and chat GPT
        • If you log into Maizey you should have access to the Wolverine Learning Assistant
          • Allows for more comprehensive learning and personalized conversation
          • Gives practice problems to students
            • And critiques their work and answers to the practice problems
            • If a student is struggling it will work through problems with a student
      • Pronunciation tools
        • Gives phonetic spellings
      • Can create study tools without giving the answer
      • Can simulate difficult conversations and find potential solutions
      • AI can pick up on cues
        • Frustration or confusion by:
          • The way someone is typing
          • Posture
          • Facial expression
          • Response time
        • Why does this help?:
          • Learning adjustment to the individual
    • Questions:
      • Will users be able to turn off emotional analysis
        • Yes!
          • A social consideration. It may be a problem if we make students have their webcams on while learning
      • Consideration that not all tools are trained on atypical individuals
        • Example: A tool that was developed in Canada to diagnose Alzheimers worked in Canada but when shared outside of Canada it did not work due to the accent difference. 
          • Can change the ability to use these programs with people of varying abilities
      • How is U of M working AI usage into our carbon neutrality plan?
        • This is a worry
        • However, the tools are becoming more efficient