ALEJANDRA DASHE

My interest in accessibility started when I asked about math accessibility in PDFs. While I figured out how to put a math document into a PDF with accessibility in mind, my effort made me a recognizable name at ASU as a leader and advocate for universal design for learning and accessibility in learning environments. 

Current projects include:

• Community of Practice Leadership: 

  • I'm part of a community of practice focused on building awareness and support for accessibility in learning environments, the Universal Design & Accessible Technology Working Group (UDAT). UDAT manages the accessibility events and advocacy through the Provost's Office.

  • I co-lead a group of accessibility-supporting professionals called the Digital Accessibility Liaisons (DAL). Each group meets monthly and has invited speakers every month.

• Conference Planning:

  • As a part of the leadership of these groups, I took on being a project co-lead for the 2023 and 2024 ASU Accessibility Awareness Day Conference. We scheduled in-person and virtual conference presentations. I provided project management skills and services for the day-of portion of the event. Over both years, I supported managing food/drink, Zoom setup and the run of show, swag, speakers, speaker arrangements and speaker's fees, and cross-functional teamwork.

• Instructional Design & Training: 

  • With a team of instructional designers, I co-built a training course on building an online learning experience with accessibility in mind, called Accessible Course Creator Pathway. We presented this course to four different audiences in 2023: the ASU Instructional Designers, at The Accessibility Awareness Day Conference, EdTech Open House, and InstructureCon.

  • I also co-built a training course about Universal Design for Learning for instructional designers and professors, called Empowering Learners through Universal Design. I contributed digital accessibility editing, where I went page by page testing the pages for adherence to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and provided advice and support on how to meet the guidelines, and remediation where requested. We presented the course at the 2024 ASU Accessibility Awareness Day Conference and plan to present it at the 2025 FOLC Fest Conference. 

• AI Tool Creation, Conference Presentations, & Grant Funding:

  • I am on a team that built an AI Transcription Tool to transcribe videos in mp4 format and from YouTube. I wrote the HTML that the tool produces and co-wrote the AI prompts. 

  • The tool has saved our team a lot of money. In a course with 100 videos and each, video is about 7 minutes long, the cost for human transcribing the videos would be $1,050. The tool we created costs cents on the dollar to transcribe each video, saving the organization a lot of money over time.  

  • My team and I presented this tool at the inaugural 2024 FOLC Fest Conference and will be presenting this tool at the 2025 FOLC Fest Conference. 

  • My team and I also applied for the Principled Innovation in AI Mini-Grant sponsored by the ASU Learning Engineering Institute and ASU Principled Innovation to build the tool at scale. Our grant application was accepted for the full amount. 

I was on the team that built the StudyHall course series, and my role involved leading the MAT 142: College Math build in Canvas, and then converted to Google Classroom. 

I redesigned the MAT 142 course around a story about house building. I also improved the course's digital accessibility using tools like Equati0, support from PDF remediation services, and recreated PDFs into webpages & Google Doc templates. 

Likewise, I also co-created our team's project management tools for this project, co-designed the HTML for the video transcripts, and led the quality assurance process for all the Canvas versions of the four courses, which launched on March 7, 2023.