Come by and browse St. Rita's offerings and climb aboard her mobile bookstore. Follow St. Rita on Instagram at @stritasbooks or visit https://saintritasbooks.com/ to learn more about her work. Hope to see you there!
Come by and browse St. Rita's offerings and climb aboard her mobile bookstore. Follow St. Rita on Instagram at @stritasbooks or visit https://saintritasbooks.com/ to learn more about her work. Hope to see you there!
To the amazing UMBC Mechanical Engineering Community!
We’ve officially hit the final stretch! As we wrap up the last day of classes, take a second to breathe—you’ve worked incredibly hard to get here. Whether you’re fueling up on coffee for finals or prepping your final grades, we’re rooting for you every step of the way.
Here’s your quick "Finish Line Checklist" to keep things running smoothly:
And finally, a huge CONGRATULATIONS to our graduating students for reaching the finish line! 🎓 It’s an incredible achievement. You’ve officially "Extended Beyond"—now go out there and show the world what UMBC engineers can do!!
Best of luck to everyone with finals (and grading)!
]]>Dear UMBC Community,
Happy Last Day of Classes! To our students: I wish you all the best on your final exams, papers, and projects—you are almost there, and I know you can finish strong. To our faculty and staff: Thank you for your dedication to our students and to your work across all departments and every corner of our campus.
To our entire campus community: Congratulations on all you have achieved during this semester and throughout the academic year. I know it has been challenging on many fronts; I hope you all take time to pause and reflect on what you have accomplished and the positive difference you have made for others.
I look forward to joining you in celebrating our graduating students at Spring Commencement next week!
Sincerely,
President Valerie Sheares Ashby
]]>Attached you will find updated hours for exam week - for more information, please visit our dining website.
]]>Good morning,
Due to Midnight Breakfast taking place in The Commons, there will be no service for True Grit's Late Night this evening (5/12/26).
Please join us for Midnight Breakfast from 10pm to 1am tonight!
Thank you!
]]>Living Water is hosting a study night tonight Tuesday, 5/12 at 7:00PM - Midnight in ILSB 101 (Main Room) and ILSB 201 (Quiet Room).
Since you'll be studying for finals anyways, come do it with us! We booked two rooms for yappers and quiet ones :) bring your friends and let's lock in together!
We'll have lo-fi music, coffee, monster, matcha, and chicken nuggets (and maybe go to midnight breakfast after)!
]]>Good morning, Retrievers!
Yesterday, a post went out regarding hiring Front Office Assistants in the Financial Aid Office. Unfortuantely, the link that was included was a faulty link and we apologize for the confusion and frustration that came from that.
If you are interested in applying to work in our front office starting this summer, please log into Handshake and search for job #11033303 which should be listed as Front Office Assistant. From there, you can read the job description and apply directly. This posting will be active until May 29th, 2026.
Again, we apologize for the error and appreciate your patience and all of you who have reached out! If you have any further questions or issues, please contact the Financial Aid Office.
~The Office of Financial Aid and Scholarships
]]>Join us for a celebration of disability justice ancestor Alice Wong! We will also celebrate the inaugural Critical Disability Studies Minor graduates and showcase work by students in Dr. Drew Holladay’s class. Attendees can enter a book raffle!
Our special guest speaker will be Ly Xīnzhèn M. Zhǎngsūn Brown.
Snacks and drinks will be available.
Location: The Mosaic (Commons 2B23)
Time: 12:00-1:30 PM
Imagine a student learning Spanish who relies on a screen reader to access course materials. They open a PDF of a restaurant menu and instead of hearing the items and prices their classmates are discussing, the screen reader attempts to read the Spanish text using English phonetics, turning “huevos rancheros” into something unrecognizable. The lesson doesn’t just become harder. It becomes inaccessible.
Scenarios like this are why digital accessibility in a language department is more than a compliance checkbox. It’s a pedagogy question. And it’s why the Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics & Intercultural Communication (MLLI) at UMBC has become one of the most compelling examples of what it looks like when a department decides to take accessibility seriously, not as a one-time project, but as a sustained commitment.
In 2019, UMBC began using Ally, an accessibility tool built into Blackboard, UMBC’s learning management system, to scan course materials and score them on accessibility. Ally looks at everything instructors upload: PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, images. It flags issues like missing alt text, unreadable scanned documents, and inaccessible table structures, and it gives instructors direct feedback on what to fix and how.
Since Spring 2025, faculty from across the MLLI department engaged with accessibility training in meaningful numbers. More than 30 unique MLLI faculty participated in workshops offered by the Instructional Technology team, ranging from broader campus offerings on creating accessible content to comprehensive accessibility camps.
“Our department has always engaged intentionally with instructional technology because accessibility is central to how we teach languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication.” ~ Dr. Golubeva
When MLLI Chair Dr. Irina Golubeva invited the team to bring a tailored Digital Accessibility 101 session to the department, it opened a conversation that has continued ever since. The session wasn’t a generic overview. It was built around MLLI’s own data, their actual Ally scores, their specific file types, and their unique challenges. Dr. Golubeva shares in more detail the needs they are addressing:
“Working across multiple writing systems and alphabets, we are constantly attending to how students encounter content in different forms. The consultation and Ally data helped us connect those long-standing practices with a data-informed approach -- and reinforced our understanding that accessibility is not just a compliance issue, but an indispensable component of inclusive pedagogy.” ~ Dr. Golubeva
Most discussions of course accessibility center on standard document issues: missing headings, untagged PDFs, images without descriptions. Those challenges are real in every discipline. But MLLI faces a layer of complexity that few other departments share.
Language courses depend heavily on images as pedagogical tools -- vocabulary flashcards, cultural artifacts, maps of regions where a language is spoken, menus and signs that appear in the target language. For these images, a generic description like “a restaurant menu” is technically compliant but pedagogically useless. A student who cannot see the image doesn’t just need to know what it is; they need to engage with it the way their sighted peers do. That’s the difference between standard accessibility alt text (“a kitchen with a stove, sink, and fridge”) and what the team started calling pedagogical alt text (“a room in a house where meals are cooked, used to identify household nouns”).
Then there’s the language tagging problem. PDFs and Word documents contain metadata that tells screen readers which language to use when reading text aloud. When a document in Russian isn’t tagged as Russian, the screen reader defaults to English phonetics -- mangling the very sounds a student is trying to learn. For a department teaching Spanish, French, Arabic, Japanese, and other languages, ensuring the right language tag is set isn’t a technicality. It’s a learning outcome.
“A course task turned into asking students to craft alternative text for images used in some of our courses, taking the image's purpose into account,” said Maria Manni, Spanish Area Coordinator. “The useful, community-engaged purpose of the task -- to students who are learning how to use descriptive language in Spanish -- elevates the experience from boring to meaningful, and it generates a better sense of caring about accuracy.” What started as an accessibility task became a language lesson, and a reminder that the constraints a discipline faces can sometimes point toward authentic pedagogical experience for learners.
UMBC uses Ally's institutional data to track accessibility scores across departments and terms. Scores reflect two things: an overall score that blends all course content together, and a files score that looks specifically at uploaded documents and images -- that is, the materials faculty create and curate. Because Blackboard's built-in content creation tools are already designed to be accessible, the files score is a meaningful indicator of faculty effort and, more importantly, of what students actually encounter.
For MLLI, the trend is clear and encouraging. On UMBC's overall accessibility score, the department climbed from 80.7% in Spring 2025 to 86.2% in Spring 2026, meeting the institution's Strive for 85 target. But the more telling story is in the files score, which measures the documents and images most directly in an instructor's hands. That score rose from 52.0% in Spring 2025 to 66.6% in Spring 2026, a 14.6-point gain across 131 active courses serving 2,548 students.
That kind of shift doesn't happen by accident. It's the result of faculty making different choices about how they describe an image, format a document, or tag a file -- one course at a time.
Progress doesn't mean finished. MLLI's ongoing focus is on two areas that represent the most remaining opportunity: images and PDFs. Images are plentiful in language instruction, and writing meaningful descriptions at the pedagogical level the discipline demands takes thought and time. It's the difference between noting that a menu exists and helping a student engage with it the way everyone else in the room can. PDFs remain the dominant file format in many courses, and ensuring that scanned documents are text-readable and that all files carry the correct language tag continues to be active work.
If you’re an instructor curious about your own course’s accessibility score, Ally’s course report is available directly in Blackboard -- look for the Ally Accessibility Report under Books & Course Tools. If your department is interested in a tailored session like the one MLLI received, reach out to the Instructional Technology team to schedule a conversation.
For more information, see the following resources:
umbc.edu/go/allyreport (requires UMBC VPN to view from off-campus)