 But I can stop sharing. That would be awesome if you don't mind. Looks like everybody's coming in now. All right. Good morning, everyone. Morning. All right. Well, I guess we'll get started here. Hello everyone and welcome to our first session workshop and today's first day of our conference. The workshop is entitled ETD Accessibility, Defined, Designed, Reviewed and Refined. Sharing this information with you is going to be Terry Green from the University of Toledo College of Graduate Studies, Kim Fletchman, Bowling Green State University's Graduate College, and Allison Thompson from ProQuest. My name is John Fadrom, the repository librarian at the University of Pittsburgh, and I'll be your moderator for the next 120 or so minutes. And a quick reminder that before we begin, during the presentation portion, please keep your audio and video muted. You can use the chat tab to ask questions, which will then be addressed during the question and answer portion of the workshop. So please make sure to mute your audio and video and turn off the video unless you are presenting or asked to participate. So thank you for joining us. Terry, Kim and Allison, I'll hand things over to you and please be sure to try to reserve some time for questions and or discussion at the end and I'll try to make sure I reach out within five minutes of the end of the session just to make sure we're within time. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, John. First of all, I just want to let everybody know I am, for some reason, my husband, David, has hijacked my Zoom account. So I am here. I am not David. I am also not a cat if any of you get that reference from during the COVID years. Excuse me. I'm going to go ahead and bring up my presentation. And again, this is a workshop. And so there will be some, you know, covering of, you know, different concepts and philosophies, maybe defining things at the beginning, and then getting input as we look to the future. And right in the middle of it, Kimberly and I will go ahead and run us through what it looks like to create accessibility in a Word document and a PDF. So we will also be asking, reaching back out and asking for input throughout. But of course, we have two hours. So there should be ample time for questions and conversations and whatever it is that you want to know more about. So without further ado, let me, here we are. Okay. All right. So hopefully everybody can see the title screen, ETD accessibility, defined design, reviewed and refined. I really wanted to just leave it as ETD workshop. But I was trying to be clever because I think we all go through different stages, you know, as we are approaching this. I would also like to point out that my presentation also has alt text as you probably saw that popping up. So I'm Terry Green. I am with the University of Toledo. I have been with their graduate college since 2010. And my role has evolved from ETD specialist to now director of academic and student affairs. But the ETD portion has been thrown back on my lap. But I'm also the ADA liaison and diversity liaison to the university for the College of Graduate Studies. So accessibility is part and parcel, right, of diversity of inclusion. And that is the spirit with which I have put some information, you know, in this workshop. And I will let my partner in crime introduce herself. Kim. I am Kim Fleschman and I have been handling theses and dissertations since 2013 and Terry was kind enough to kind of guide me along to help kind of revamp out was done at BGSU. So I work in our graduate college and also handle our website and social media. So accessibility is big to me. I have an IT background. So become a copy editor. It's kind of evolved. Thank you. Thank you. And then we're joined by one of our primary sponsor ProQuest Clarivate. So Allison, would you go ahead and introduce yourself. Hi, good morning, everybody. My name is Allison Thompson. I am a product manager at ProQuest for graduate solutions. So my products include ETD administrator. And the dissertations dashboard and I'm really, really interested in the topic of accessibility been talking to a lot of you and trying to understand more so very excited to be participating today. Thank you so much. Without further ado, let's go ahead and dig in. All right, so what we're going to be covering today as implied by the title defined. What does accessibility mean in the context of ETDs. I am going to go a little bit large view aerial view. And then we'll focus back in on the concept of document accessibility. Designed. How do we build accessibility into the writing of an ETD so that we're not all stuck trying to remediate documents and really not being able to adequately put them in the proper shape that they should be reviewed. So I'm assuming if you're joining us that you have in some form or fashion, you know, part of your job is to either educate, train and form review, you know, publish, remediate different, you know, ETD documents. And so how do we do that. Right. How do we check how do we find and fix not accessible components of an ETD. This is also related to website design document design, but we're going to be focused in on the use of Adobe for PDFs. We're fine. What do we need to know, right to improve on the basic principles and best practices. Many of us already have kind of a cobbled together toolkit. Some of us are very lucky to be at institutions who've really put a lot of thought behind digital accessibility. And they have entire offices devoted to that and staff and I don't know that that is necessarily common amongst all of us. So, you know, where do we find this information. How can we improve on what's already in place. We're looking forward right so we're going to be talking about which resources are the most robust that will help us. Who are people right where the communities of practice where we can get together. Good news. There are already several in place, including right with the US ETDA so. The last part of that is always be learning, right. We may have to design something ourselves we may have to seek out and be proactive to assemble these communities to get the training. So, we'll be talking about these things. You'll see here. I went ahead I was looking for an image right and so the title of this side slide is course outline. I went to Google and I just typed in outline and then look through the images. And I found this, these pair of glasses, and it's an outline right so it's not filled in or anything. So, when we talk about all text, right, we are also talking about making meaning out of non text elements, so that they are easily percepted and understood, you know, by by your reader. So, here I've just, I've defined I could have just said, I glasses, I could have just said an outline, because that's what I googled. This is a front view outline illustration of eyeglasses, and I don't know, I just thought it was just an interesting concept. Also, I wear glasses, I have like four frames, I love them all. And also, we're looking to the future, right so let's get on our rose colored glasses and move forward. Defined. What does accessibility mean in the context of the TDs. It's really, it's about people. It's about compliance and usability. It's about context. And also, our clarivates quest to achieve accessibility as well. So, people. So really what accessibility is it's a practice right it's it's something that's purposeful that you do. It's, it's making information activities or environments, sensible, meaningful, and usable for as many people as possible. When we say something is accessible, and this definition I took right off of the ADA.gov website. It refers to a site facility work environment service or program that's easy to approach. Enter, operate participate in and or use safely and with dignity by a person with a disability. So, when we think about accessible documents, oftentimes we automatically go to a person with a disability, who has to use adaptive technology to access the information so primarily we tend our default is like to think of low vision or blind, right. But an accessibility user is anyone whose access to the information activities or environments are impeded. Okay, they are blocked. There's a mismatch going on. And it can be temporary, it could be recurring or situational, or it could be a permanent condition. And so, when we expand our concept of what accessibility is and how people use, you know, products and services and read documents right they include things like cognitive, you know, physical mobility, auditory verbal, molecular vision, but they can also include things like age or language, education, technological aptitude, and just sheer access right if someone can't afford to buy, you know, an electric wheelchair, right. And someone does not have, you know, a screen reader downloaded, you know, maybe they're just using everything with a phone, even. So, when we think about those things that informs what kind of fixes we make to these documents. And so, when we think about that, you know, we think about like what is the purpose, right, of the author of the ETD. I'd welcome anybody to enter into the chat right now. What you think the purpose of the author of the ETD is what is their purpose for writing and sending this out. And second to that what is the goal of the reader or the user, right, of the ETD. So, John, if anything's coming in through the chat yet. Not quite yet. I'll let you know. Okay. All right. You know, we can return to those also or just as they come to you just again enter them in the chat. I want people to be thinking, right. The third question is, who's responsible for lowering these barriers, right, whether it's a barrier of access, a barrier of design, a barrier of even lack of staff to make fixes, for example, who is responsible for for lowering those barriers. I would suggest that it's everyone's responsibility. But in different levels, right, and in different ways. And so, I think probably many of ETD practitioners. You know, it's their responsibility because it's part of their job. It was assigned to them. And or they may have already have a passion for design or, you know, they're technologically savvy. These things may have grown, you know, they may have learned along the way. And so, it's okay to not lead the charge, right. But everyone needs to shoulder some of this responsibility. So, I think it's just helpful, given some of the feedback and the previous conversations that have surrounded, you know, this issue, right, is where do I fit in. How much do I need to know how much do I need to do. Is it ever going to be good enough, right. And so, if we're having those questions, then certainly, you know, our institutions may be having those questions, faculty and students may be having those questions. So, you know, again, this is not the hands on part of it. This is more of a broader view of philosophical underpinning, if you will. I do have several things in the chat here. Oh, good. Yeah, there was quite a few about disseminating and sharing scholarship and their creativity. Yes. There are some of the to get their information to the public and sharing their research. There are some to what was it just to graduate, which I thought I appreciate there's a lot that's on the students minds for sure. It's great for them helps them graduate. And basically writing and sharing their research and future research and disseminating their work from the university. Trying to see the advisors responsibility to review content but uploaders responsibility to make sure it's findable and other back end things in that regard so yes that is true. The author roles to share their understanding of the topic of the ETD and engage with their scholarly colleagues so yes, starting up the scholarly communication role. The role of the authors to expand a knowledge base through scholarly evidence based research while making accessible. And the readers role to gather information to get to learn more about the topic and ETD and further engaged with the scholars in their area. And the goal of the reader was to did the student learn enough about the research writing the topic and communicate that well. See quite a few good, good points are what they can make sure we compile these and have them for for viewing later. I think you're still muted there. Okay, yes I am. Not anymore. Thank you everyone for your for your input and and john for monitoring that and getting that all together so to preserve that. So when we move on from accessibility is about people. We also talk about frameworks right with which to view accessibility, and probably the two that are the most helpful, perhaps, when we're asking those questions of what do I have to do what should I do what can I do how do I do it. Who can help me. What is the standard. So we can think about that in terms of compliance and usability, right so when we talk about compliance, we're talking about, you know, like section 508 or WCAG, for example, and, and those have very well defined standards and accessibility. But it can be intimidating, right to go on to the WCAG site and, and look through and try and decipher, you know, when I, you know, a compliance and my triple a compliance, you know, is this for whatever purpose. If we understand the basic tenants of that compliance and that compliance is often built into, you know, your universities, for example, or governments, government websites, for example, is built in as a standard or, you know, even, you know, these are the standards we have to meet to be in compliance to be, you know, to be legal. And, but that is a kind of a shifting boundary right there there isn't just one size fits all hard and fast rules. You know, I mean there are hard and fast rules but they don't necessarily apply in every situation or for every context. And so we talk about usability right so compliance doesn't necessarily mean that it's usable. And I discovered this when I fell down the rabbit hole of color contrast and the use of color that is accessible. And it's a rabbit hole but it's fascinating. And I learned about things like luminance and vibration of colors. And so what may technically be a good ratio of contrast, you know, blue on white or white on black, for example. It may be, if it's a particular color that has a high vibration, it can appear, you know, it can pass the test, but it can appear to just the average user to, you know, it would measure with your eyes, you know, you wouldn't be able to really clearly distinguish, you know, sharp outlines. So just because it's compliant doesn't necessarily mean that it's usable by as many people as possible. And not everybody is using, for example, a screen reader, right. So we're also when we're talking about usability, we're talking about, I have practically trifocals at this point. And I'm in front of a screen. Is my screen too bright? Is there glare? Am I having trouble seeing? My eyes don't bounce back and forth anymore like they used to because I'm approaching 60 years old. So I don't have that same physical capacity to apprehend and comprehend, you know, the printed word in the same way I did when I was 30. So there is no such thing though as 100% accessibility. And I say that because, and this is somewhat anecdotal, but when I first started as an ETD specialist, this was all very new to me. And in terms of like formatting and reviewing, and I was a perfectionist detail oriented. And it took months to like pull myself out of that and understand that perfection is not achievable. That, you know, it really at the end of the day, it kind of doesn't matter if your copyright page is supposed to not have a page number, but it does. A worst problem is that there are no page numbers, right? And so I think many of us who work in that in this realm have this need to fix things and make things right and make things perfect, if you will. And you'll never achieve that. And so I think, kind of stepping back and looking at, you know, easier pathways, right? And that's what I'm going to talk about next. Context, right? Let's put it all, let's put it all into in the right context. So if a document's accessibility is so varied, right? Someone's using a screen reader, someone has, you know, triple bifocal, you know, someone else is, you know, maybe they have dexterity or mobility issues and they have to use their eyes, you know, to move a cursor, all these, all these different ways of interacting. And so how do you create that document that meets the needs that allows all these different types of access to occur? Basically, you need to approach it as accessible in context, right? So you're going to apply design decisions that are responsive to the document's intended user, right? And the conditions of inaccess that they face. So if one issue is, you know, there are people that are going to be using screen readers, then you focus on things like, you know, heading levels and bookmarks and proper tagging. If you have someone who may have dyslexia, well then maybe you look at what kind of font is being used. Years ago, I received a dissertation written in Comic Sans and I made a huge joke out of it. Like I was like, what is going on, right? It didn't look important and stately and it wasn't in Times New Roman. Well, I have subsequently found out that Comic Sans, in addition to a few other specialty fonts, is actually very, very readable by users with dyslexia and it's because of the individual unique shape of each character. And so it's about just talking about and deciding what is more important, the look of something or we've always done it that way, or hey, we could have someone with dyslexia who really needs to know more about this research. And if you're going to throw up these barriers, you know, but don't need to be there, then maybe the research gets overlooked, right? And again, it's about offering the opportunity to as wide a group of people as possible to use and understand, you know, what they're interacting with. So, you know, if really, if you can ensure that the file does not break any of the stated compliance rules for that document type, and then you can also, you know, think about the design of it in the first place to avoid having to remediate, then really, that's a great framework to work within, right? And it's really, it's, you know, in prior discussions, like with the Ohio lane group, you know, we've talked about, you know, acting in good faith, right? In good faith, you are meeting these needs of, you know, opening up the accessibility of a document to as many readers as possible and removing barriers. And some is going to be technological, or, you know, like, you know, re-tagging a document, for example. Others might be more design oriented. So, how is it organized? Is it organized in a way that I could just as a user without adaptive technology tabbed to where I want to go, specifically select a portion of the document that I want to look at is everything linked together. So, my best advice would be to just stay informed on your school's standards and guidelines and operate within that and focus on that. So, any questions or comments? There were actually some great comments given earlier about some article, the color contrasts and things about that. So, there's links in chat about that as well. And we're just having a bit of a discussion about sans serif versus serif fonts and the difference between screen versus print. And those with reading disabilities may have some issues reading serif fonts, which is why Open Dyslexic is a great font to use. So, a lot of interesting things going on in chat. Well, I'm really, I'm excited that people are aware of these things. And, you know, and so, again, you know, when we're thinking about in our own schools and whomever designed the formatting guidelines, right? And who has the authority to change them? You know, those are the types of things that we should also think about, you know. But the middle part of this is going to be focused on kind of the technical issues, right, of Word and PDF. But before we get to that, I'm going to stop sharing and we are going to have Allison join us here. And she has, I guess she has some different slides. So, let me see here. How can I? I'm sorry. Talk about technically savvy. I think if you just do the stop share. Here we go. Yeah, I had it on my second monitor. So. All right. All right. Awesome. Thank you, Terry. Can somebody confirm that you can see my screen. Yes, awesome. All right. Well, good morning again, everybody. Super excited to be here. I do want to just chat for a quick 10 minutes prior to the workshop and then revisit a couple topics after. But I think Terry did a really great job of sort of giving some background about digital accessibility. What is it? Why is it important? And I would like to sort of piggyback off of that and talk about some of the discovery that we've done here at ProQuest. So really trying to understand, okay, this, this topic has been thrown around. We know that there's standards in place. People are doing stuff. What is everybody doing? What are institutions and our partners and our stakeholders and community doing around accessibility and really trying to get a good idea of that. And I think it would be helpful to share that with this group. So that's what I plan to do today. Like Terry mentioned, we've got the workshop component in the middle. And then I'd like to share some of the things that we've done at ProQuest around developing a community of kind of thought leaders and institutional partners in this space and considerations for resources and tools for the future. But to jump in, I think most people on this call are pretty familiar with ProQuest. So I'll keep this one brief. But we've, we've been doing this a lot, a long time. We've got over 80 years in graduate content expertise. First manuscript was disseminated in 1939. So prior to the E in ETD, right, a long time ago. We've recently partnered with the Web of Science. We've expanded our reach from 4 million to over 10 million users with the Web of Science. So a lot of amplification and great exposure for, for authors work. And like all of you, we are navigating this changing landscape of ETDs, right? We're seeing differences in file types, non-traditional ETD files maybe that aren't PDFs. Plagiarism and AI detection, chat, GPT, all of that is everywhere. And of course digital accessibility, what we're going to talk about today. So we're cognizant that the space is changing and trying to really stay sort of informed about market needs and how we can best support our community. So like Terry said, we've, we've done some good discovery around accessibility and I want to share some of the outreach that we've done, some of the, the information that, that we've, some of the channels that we've used rather to solicit feedback. And some of what we've found. So it was really important to understand with accessibility, what is the baseline? What are our institutional partners doing? Where, where is everybody with this? So we deployed an ETD admin user survey, we got almost 350 responses, which was great. We have an ETD admin user group where we've had this discussion. We've done some great customer interviews and worked with the Ohio link organization, some of the people on this call participated in those interviews as well. And this discovery gave us some really interesting and key insights that I wanted to share with you. One of our respondents said that digital accessibility is critically or very important at their institution. So this is a top priority for folks. But at the same time, and maybe some of you on this call can relate to this, our respondents felt a lack of guidance around ETDs and accessibility specifically. So maybe they're being told that this is really important. They know that it is. Maybe there's some website guidance. We talked about WCAG earlier, but really specifically pertaining to ETDs, there's not much. And respondents did say that they expect future mandates. So a lot of institutions started with websites or digital course materials potentially for accessibility efforts. So maybe the easier grabs, right, but ETDs and other resources are expected to follow in terms of needing to meet these standards set by the institution. One really remarkable piece I thought was that there is a lot of institutional differences in how this is handled. So who Terry mentioned who is responsible for removing these barriers who's who's taking the ownership of digital accessibility. She's absolutely right. It should be a collective effort. But what I've seen in our discovery is that it's sort of falling to wherever there's space. So maybe that's an IT, maybe that's Office of Accessibility, maybe that's the library. It really varies widely by institution. And typically you're all in higher education, so this likely will not surprise you. But there's not a lot of dedicated resources in most instances for digital accessibility. So this work is maybe being added on to the plates of a staff member that has another primary responsibility and sort of just being absorbed by whoever has or maybe doesn't have capacity to do the work. And finally, we see a big training and equipment gap so we're going to talk about some resources today there are things out there. But one common denominator that we heard is some of the existing tools have have cost barriers or cost prohibitive, or there's a level of sort of user savviness that they, you know, really need somebody well trained and well versed in digital accessibility to get the most out of this tool. And some of the interview takeaways I thought were really important and things I'd like to share with you we talked about erratic solutions right so typically or frequently the ETD is writing to review the publication process is really decentralized. And so different processes and kind of capacity constraints means this work will fall to kind of whoever can do it. Whether that maybe makes the most sense strategically or not institutions are finding it's very difficult to enforce any kind of student participation and I get it right I mean these are graduate students they're under a ton of pressure they're at a very very busy time in their academic career. And, and is it the right thing to do to delay graduation or put up barriers, if they can't get there with accessibility standards. Often a lack of expertise came up in these interviews so folks felt like they were charged with doing this work where maybe they weren't completely qualified or educated in that space. The threat of lawsuits came up again and again so when we talk about reasons for doing this work. Of course, people want to support all different types of learners it's the right thing to do. The student affairs professionals I spoke with were very very much in that place, but there was this looming concern of risk to the institution and as am I, as the person now responsible for digital accessibility am I doing enough to protect us and that really a heavy weight on some of these folks that I spoke with. And I think this quote really illustrates sort of the challenges unique to ETD is in digital accessibility. This individual said the highly complex and technical writing of many dissertations can make it especially challenging to ensure accessibility. Anybody on this call that's tried to do this work within ETD can relate. Even if a staff member can review and flag compliance issues it's highly burdensome to ask a student author to revise a dissertation that may have many hundreds of pages, complex charts, plots and graphics. It requires detailed technical and disciplinary knowledge. So, not a quick and easy win in most instances. And likewise hearing kind of from some of our content partners, I think this feedback really illustrates the need for more research in in digital accessibility and the opportunity for pro quest to really provide some partnership and some resources. And I think because you can kind of sense and hear the frustration that that the folks doing this work are our feelings so we have guidelines for accessibility for websites and other platforms. PDFs and ETDs are unique and there's significant barriers to enacting requirements around them. This is something that we hope to do in the future. We did a big push for accessibility compliance, it was thrown at us regular staff those who have no expertise in web design. Looking through the web accessibility boot camps they had us attend was incredibly challenging PDF remediation though was next to impossible and we were hit to removing PDFs entirely. And lastly we value accessibility but requiring accessibility and checking for it would add a lot to our workload and slow our turnaround times for improving materials. Many of our students have limited experience with document formatting and may not be able to afford additional software. So I think you can kind of see the context here is, we know that this work is important we know it's valuable. We know it benefits and supports our learners with diverse needs. But how can we get there. And, and that's something I'm going to talk about a little bit more at the end of the discussion after our workshop so Terry I will throw it back over to you. Thank you very much. I was just looking here at the chat as well. So, one user said you won't use PDF in the future. So, is that a prediction that we will move away from PDFs entirely or is there an alternative. Just curious. Feel free to put your comments continue to putting your comments in the, in the chat. Excuse me. Whoops. Okay. I almost logged out of the meeting. Okay. Speaking of things I can't even see on my own large screen. Okay, so let me go back to sharing your presentation. I'm going to fast forward through, because I already had some of the slide some of Alison slides already built in so let me move through that. Okay. So now we get to the start of our more nuts and bolts, hands on. Really, when I was asked to offer this workshop, June 28. I immediately turned to Kim to help me with this. She may have come to Toledo for some initial training, but she has a much more robust, you know background in it and technical writing and she was running a sort of a. I can't remember now Kim can you describe that that lab that you used to run. So it originally was the student technology center and then it became the collab lab. So we tutored students faculty staff when it became the collab lab on work selling PowerPoint and Photoshop and design illustrator acrobat. Web software video software, 3D software and several other programs. Thank you. Yes. So, you know, the master now becomes a student. So, you know, Kim is going to be, I think, doing the heavier lift as we move into away from word and into PDFs and a little bit more tricky. Solutions. So, how do we build accessibility into the writing of an ETD? Well, we need to think about what is your source document? What are you going to author and do they have built in tools and are you using them? Do you know that you can use them? Did you know that you can check accessibility as you're working? So I think, you know, one of the comments earlier remarked on how a student just needs to graduate right they they're doing this because they need their degree. It's very accurate for many of them. It may not be their sole reason, but they have not prepared all along in terms of being familiar with authoring software with, you know, organizing a document. And so for many, if not most, the formatting, right, is the last flaming hoop that they have to jump through. And so they've already, even if they've used a template, they've probably corrupted it, you know, and they have created something that is just kind of a tangled mess. And then so, you know, now with accessibility thrown into the mix, that's just additional undoing of things that could have been done better from the start. And so that's the approach that I think makes the most sense, you know, for ETD practitioners is to know best practices to know, you know, the softwares, you know, the tools, the built-in tools, and that is something that students and faculty would need to be educated in. But it's probably a little bit of an easier lift to do that than to, at the very late stage, talk about how do we make this PDF, you know, how do we tag it in the right order and all of that. So in the beginning there was Word, right. So I know there are a lot of different, you know, there's open source programs, there's, you know, Google Docs, you know, and of course there is Microsoft Office Word, right, or Word for Microsoft 365. And the reason I'm focusing on this is because it's pretty much broadly accessible through schools, right, whether it's a free license for downloading onto devices. I know at UToledo we can download it, students can download it up to five devices, for example. Or it might be a cloud-based service where they're, you know, they access it through, you know, their SSO sign-on. It may be part of machines in computer labs. But the whole point is that it is very widely used and is almost always free to the student. And Microsoft themselves have really made tremendous strides towards improving the accessibility for the user and the product. So it's accompanied by a wealth of best practices, step-by-step instructions, and those instructions are presented in very easily navigable and understandable formats on their Office Accessibility website. You can also use the help button, right, and it will take you to, you know, specific tutorials. I find those a little, sometimes they're a little hard to understand. So, but again, with having built in, for example, an accessibility wizard, you know. In fact, in Microsoft 365, they also have the editor function and the accessibility wizard, and it will start reformatting for you and reminding you along the way to put alt text or, you know, how to create tables. So I think it's, it is probably, you know, when we, I think about like at Utilio, right, as they're going through website redesign, and they keep talking about, you know, single source of truth, right? Well, if we're working inward, then we should be using their tools and their guides, you know, instructions to achieve the results. So I have here a link. I don't know if it'll open up. You'll have to let me, yes, allow it. Although I don't know if it's going to show up as being shared. You'll have to stop sharing your PDF and then share your browser. Yep. Okay. There we go. So you should be seeing, making Word documents accessible to people with disabilities. I can't see it. Nope. Okay. Hmm. Well, it says it's being shared. Oh, no, I didn't, I didn't click share. I'm so sorry. That's okay. I can see it. Okay. Great. That's another little thing, right? The fewer buttons you have to click to accomplish something that's accessibility, right? I mean, you know, if you've, if you've moved things around and you don't know, you know, where you put them. But anyway, so make your Word documents accessible to people with disabilities. So this is part of their office accessibility. I won't call it a line, but they're, they're, they're division. And right here, it talks about best practices, how to check your accessibility while you work in Word. Avoid using tables, use built in titles, subtitles and heading styles. Use text for visuals. Use accessible font format and color. Create accessible lists. I mean, the list goes on, right? And so they give very, they give a kind of a checklist so you could kind of do it manually. You could set it right out in the front and be like, I'm this, these are the, these are the five things I'm going to focus on, right? I'm going to focus on document structure, headings, bookmarks, alt text and tables, right? Your, your school may be asking for more, but this is a very good place to start and we'll go a long ways towards removing common barriers. So anyway, I will stop sharing that. And I will go back. Okay, there we go. Yay, it worked. Okay, so. So for these reasons, this is why I am suggesting that you promote the most accessible, easily, you know, or ubiquitous authoring program that you can to your students, whether you're creating templates for them or providing instructions for how they can set up their own document and use the tools. Obviously, we'd want to make sure that they do have access to it, but a lot of students, they don't really don't necessarily have experience. So I received a, an ETD couple, about a month ago, and it was composed in Google Docs, but they did not use Google Doc accessibility tools. And it, there was no formatting. It was, I didn't even know what to do with it. Now, luckily, okay, it was at the format review stage and it was an early one. So I wound up sending her our template, which is a word template, but I also just put her content into the template and sent that to her as well. And suggested that she should continue drafting within the template. And it really, it made a difference, you know, her committee was amazed that they, that now it had structure and it was, you know, easy to follow. They could identify gaps, you know, in the research or how she explained things that they were able to focus in on, because they weren't distracted by disorganization and lack of formatting. So in the beginning there was work. Yes. Okay. So at this point, I am going to share. I'm sorry. I'm going to share a document. And it's a just a sample document. Okay. Okay, I'm sorry. Hold on a second. Where did my, there we go. Okay. So this is a sample thesis. Okay. Very minimal. And I'm going to kind of scroll through it a little bit. And I would like for folks to put in the chat if they kind of see anything that could possibly be wrong with it that could potentially not be accessible. Yeah, this is in the word version. I'm going to reduce this just a little bit. All right. Everybody still see it. Okay, good. We have a couple responses about the font. Okay, like what. One person said Sarah font otherwise just said font. I'd like to say there's no styles included on the page other than normal so bookmarks are probably not going to be created when converted to a PDF. But we've got but we've got everything organized right like we've got page numbers we've we've got, you know, section headings. Let me do this. Let me turn on the formatting. So, if we look up to the styles. Well, it's just normal. Right. It's not any type of heading. It's just a name as this paragraph. Right. Page numbers. Guess what they're not actually real page numbers. Someone has gone ahead because they didn't know how to put page numbers in and use, you know, page breaks and section breaks. And so they just typed it. Right. And so, so there's that. Me also to comment that the redundancy of table of contents and the table of contents. We love circular links. Don't we. And so that is courtesy of the University of Toledo format guidelines, which I did not invent. I attempted to forked the person responsible that was in 2011 and it hasn't been changed. So I might have the power now. But that's still somewhat in question. But exactly. Right. So when we talk about what are useful, you know, links in a table of contents, how do people use them? Where do they want to go? What do they need to know? Very well seen. Okay. So, clearly, Rocky Rocket basically just type this into a blank Word document. Right. Did not use any styles. Did not use any headings. Did not use any built in tools. And so if I am looking here. Oh, this version I have at home doesn't have the accessibility wizard, but I can go to accessibility checker. Okay. Wow. Okay. Well, let's take a look here. Missing alt text. So for any who are not familiar, alt text means alternative text. It is a way to describe the action or purpose of non text illustrative material. And it can be fairly simple, like my, you know, image of the eyeglasses, or it could be, you know, oh gosh, it could be, you know, a very complex chart, for example. So if I click on the picture, it'll take me to what's that question here. Okay. No alt text. So if someone is using a screen reader, it is just going to read and then just skip right over this. Okay. Terry, just we had a question and try I thought maybe somebody asked what do you mean by using styles so if we could maybe some people are not familiar with that. Yes, yes, thank you. Okay. Let me go back to home. Okay. Styles is a way to identify what role or organization this text has. So for example, when we talk about heading levels right we want a hierarchical heading level. And so a heading one should be reserved for like the title of your document. Whereas a heading to, for example, would be used repeatedly for every level to heading. So in something like we'll just pretend that each chapter is its own title, right its own discrete unit. So if I wanted this to be appear in a table of contents, and also be able to be navigated to immediately, I can highlight it. And I can click on heading one. Okay, I'm going to turn this off. There's little little arrows there. Okay. And so if I click on this, it is now a heading one is what it's labeled as. Well so then we want so then the next level right we have several sections, subsections. So, and they are identified with the chapter and then the order of appearance. So we have for example the first subsection is permanent disability section 2.1. I can create a numbering system. I can also go to heading to, and I've already, and if it's something that you if it's something that looks weird, right, like if I clicked heading three. So that's what I'm going to do with a heading three, which is in. I think it's back in chapter one. There we go. So see how this is chapter one section subsection to the third item, right, so it is, you know, it is a level three, right so the titles first, then your sub sections and your sub sub sections. It's like an outline like how we used to do in school. So I'm like, okay, this is a level three. Well, if I go to heading three, well, this is already pre programmed, right, but it doesn't have to stay that way. I can right click, and I can update this heading to match the selection, or I can go to modify and put in what I want it to look like. In this case, it looks like what I wanted. It has the font and the size and the boldness and everything that I already want. So in this case, I'm going to right click and just say update heading three to match selection. This is now heading three. And I can click on that. And since it was already updated, I can just continue assigning that heading level. So now, interestingly enough, this accessibility checker doesn't check for the use of headings or styles per se. It is identifying however missing all text and the lack of a header row for a table. So I'm going to go back to that picture. Alright, so if I right click, and again, depending on what which version, you know, of words you're using or if you're using it like online in a cloud, you may find these items in different locations. If you can't find them, then do what I did, which is tell me what you want to do and I put an accessibility checker and it, you know, popped it right in for me. So if you go down to format picture, you click on this little funny thing, layout and properties, you can put in your alt text. Okay. And this is new for me. I had never really thought about a title for alt text. And so I hover over the information button. And it says a title can be read to a person with a disability and it's used to determine whether they wish to hear the description of the content. Similar to any title that you use for, you know, a paper, similar to the function of an abstract, similar to what is being listed in a content or table of contents. So, you know, if you are not really providing robust titles for like your chapters, for example, or explanatory titles, and people don't know even what you're going to be talking about, they may just skip right over it. So here, I'm just going to put in the title of, and I could just use the label or the caption, examples of sight disabilities. Terry, there was a question earlier, it relates to this, could the figure or table captions below the figure or table be substituted for alt text? I'm sorry, could you repeat that? Sure. The question was, where would it go? Could the table or figure captions be substituted for alt text? We've had this question, we've talked about this, like, for example, within our Ohio Link, you know, group. And really, alt text is meant to convey the purpose or action, right? Like why are you using this image? So, if you do describe the reason instead of just the content, then yes, you could use that. But again, like, go ahead. It may depend on the minimum digital accessibility standards of your school. There are schools in Ohio that feel that if it's all being described within the text, they let it go. Our university disagrees with that. They feel that you need to explain something that the text is not saying about that picture. I often try to ask people to pretend that they're on the phone with their grandma who can't see the picture and describe it that way. But you have to say the purpose or the action that's happening in your alt text. And we have a few slides on that coming up here too. And I say what the answer in chat I gave was similar to that is that the caption is telling you why it's here or at least why you're using it in terms of your text. And I used to say that now I say the alt text is describing it as to what it is, just to say, like you said, describe what you're seeing on the page versus why you're including it in your text. So there's a lot of conversation to go around there. Yes. So, you know, and there are, and there are, you know, options to just let, you know, let an automated alt text, you know, take place. And don't recommend that either, you know, especially the more complex or the more information rich your images. So, and also, if you have any writing, any text inside the image, you need to, you know, so if it was a, Oh, what are those? So we'll actually show that when we get to a slide. Yeah. Text on the image. Yeah. This is not a good alt text. I'm just going to tell you that right now, right, three stick figures. Okay, I'm done. So that's not really good. But one of the little tricky things is that, you know, a student may put in something like that, or they may allow it to be auto alt text, and, and it will say underneath auto, alt text auto generated. And they'll just leave it be. But that is something that the student has to do. You know, they're the ones that know the meaning. They're the ones that know the why. And so that is a heavier lift. And Kim will be talking about that. So, so you can see I put alt text in, and now there's just one picture left, right. And if we go to no header row specified, we go to the table. Okay. This would be the header row. I also want to comment just briefly on the idea of making tables. Readable, even just just to the naked eye, right. And so if I'm looking at this, it looks very cramped cluttered. Everything is bolded. You have, you know, things centered, or not necessarily like it's hard. When we see numbers, for example, we can better appreciate the differences. If they are right justified. Right. It's easier because of how we read numbers. Right. Whereas how we read text. Now that doesn't look. It's harder. It's harder for us to focus on, you know, the ABC, etc. So, if something is centered, and everything is consistently the same number of characters, that could be okay. Right. That could be okay. But if, if the information varies right in number of characters, then you're not going to want to center it because I mean look at this right if we center it. Ah, okay. And everything's, everything's bold. And it's all in Times New Broman. So, when we talk about accessible, it's, it's more than just do we have a header row, you know, identified. It is also just for the, just for the ability to easily read and comprehend the information. Right. So think about how much better. This looks if we just use Calibri. Right. And if we pay attention to how we read. Okay, I can see now a right it's easier. I can't tell how many zeros off we are. So, now I can see anything that extends over, it's a larger number. Right. So, these are just like really minor things that aren't necessarily related to a technical aspect of accessibility per se. But they're easy to give guidance on. They're easy to teach. Also word and has, you know, you can create tables. And so we've had students trying to create their own tables by like putting boxes together, like text boxes. I mean, it's, you'll, you'll find everything, you'll find everything. So, again, I want to identify this as a header row. I just, I went to table tools. Design. And again, this may look slightly different depending on which version of what you're using. And I just checked header row. Okay. So, Well, no, I shouldn't say boom, I should have to probably look at it again. Okay. Well, it's still showing. So that's just one of the weird quirks. I don't know what to tell you about that. So, let me stop share that. Now I'm going to share the PDF version of that. Well, actually, no, I'm not. I'm going to go to my other sample. Same document looks very similar. Right. Just, just to look at it and a lot of a lot of students, a lot of people actually, you know, they are trying to mimic the format or the look of of an article or, you know, a book or whatever. So, or even a template that's out there. And so they're just, they're adjusting things, they're, you know, tabbing or they're entering spaces and to get it to move it to where it needs to be. Look, we have page numbers in the actual footer that's an actual page number. I was able to insert a table of contents because I used the styles and the headings. And so, so for example, I could update the table. Let's say I changed something and I wanted just to update the page numbers only I could do that. Everything's still the same. You notice how in the first version, everything was left, you know, left justified. And this goes a step further. Not only is it a heading level, but it's also indented so that you can easily and immediately see the hierarchy. Okay. So instead of using endless enter, enter, enter, enter to push something to push something to another page, just did a page break. Okay. So you can insert a page break after every section after every page if you need to. Okay, just like that. Enter page break. Okay. So we have a list of tables and figures. And this was tricky for me because the tool of inserting captions is not quite as intuitive as it looks. There's a bit of kind of, you know, changing the font style and color, etc. But once you get it where you need it, then you can create a list of tables and of figures. Okay. Now, section break. So a section break we use when we're changing our pagination or any other feature in the document structure from one to another. So this is all prefatory material, which at Utilito is paginated with lowercase roman numerals. But starting with chapter one, it's page one. Okay. So if you don't have that section break, then it will just continue numbering, you know, like this. So then we have our first chapter, which starts with page one and his number continuously thereafter. So we can use a page break after every chapter. So that again ensures that, you know, everything starts on its on its own page. As you can see. Let's open back to home. Right. These are all headed appropriately. This was heading one. This was a heading two. So it's heading three. If you have lists, you can also apply and so there's other styles like it's a caption. It's a list paragraph. And so, you know, instead of just listing things, but still it's it's looked at as normal like a normal paragraph but you want to emphasize that what is following as a list. Well then you can designate it as a list paragraph you can use bullets. Or just like things that will help once you convert it to a PDF to make it readable. All right. So, and as you can if I run an accessibility check. No accessibility issues found. Okay, people with disabilities should not have difficulty reading this document. That being said, this accessibility checker isn't necessarily alerting you to things like color contrast or, you know, reading order. And so there are still things that could not translate well wants to save as a PDF. And one of those I want to point out. Let me turn off the formatting. Sorry. Okay. One of the things I changed right was the look of the table. So, not only does it have, you know, the header row identified, but I've also bolded the column headings, and I've also put just a very minimal light shade behind it. And I think structurally it's easier to read. And it's, it's, you know, there's plenty of white space. I mean, it's just, it's easy to look at to read. Not to mention, obviously, you know, being with the document or with the table header row and other other things defined. You can also put a table or you can put all all text on tables or summaries as well. And I did that with this one. I went to table properties. This little thing popped up. Right. So you can, you know, you can format, you know, the, the cell contents and, you know, specify your height and width of rows and columns and, and all that. Then there's all text. So this was taken from disability dot, no, not disability.org. It's through a site through Cornell University. Okay. And they provided the output of this database search in three different ways. So that's another thing to consider is, is there only one way to access this information. They presented a written summary. They also had a map of, because this is, you know, this table is much longer. Obviously it had all the states on it. But they presented it as a map that was interactive and they also presented it as a table. And so, again, I took their written description and used it as alt text or table summary. And that is helpful. Right. Because it's really talking about what you want to focus on. Like what are you, what is the point of putting all this data? What do you want the reader to take from that? And using an alt text or a table summary can help. Okay. Small things like, like hyperlinks. Okay. So we have, at Utilito, you know, all text must be in black or automatic. And links, hyperlinks should not be in color. They should be in black. Well, if you do that and you don't underline it, nobody's going to know necessarily that it's a link. So, you know, one of the things you can do, and it's a, again, it's a small lift is just make sure that all links are underlined. They're helpful also for people, especially if it's in color. Okay. Because it's underlined, it's a cue for someone who may have low vision that that is a link, you know. So, again, I, my goal with this was to hopefully share some takeaways. You know, if you could take one thing back to your school that you can start using or use better or pay attention to, you know, using, you know, the software and so forth, the tools that are available to you, then this will be a success. So I am going to close out of this. I keep moving my stop share button. Sorry about that. Back to the workshop. All right. So that was my spiel about word. I hope people have been commenting or there's questions. I'd like to make sure that Kim has enough time to do the heavier lift with the PDF. But just keep them coming. I'm going to move on now to reviewed, right. So my part was more on how can we design to, you know, remediate in advance right to prevent the need for excessive remediation. How do we check find and fix non accessible components of an ETD. So, you know, Kim is going to take over and talk about, you know, what most of our schools are using as the final document format. How to use accessibility checker, what you can and can't do. And so I am not calling Kim a house off. Okay. But yes, I went on to corny Adobe jokes and there is an actual site for that. So I was very gratified. So Kim, I don't know if you want to kind of take it over from here and then share the PDFs that I sent you. Yes. Okay. You need to stop sharing. Yes. Okay. I just didn't know if you wanted to. Oh, you already have this as well. Okay. Yes. Okay. Because I sent it in the timely fashion of like 839. So, stop share. No, I actually I think it was 939. All right. Stop share. There we go. And I will mute myself and let our expert house elf take over. Okay. So, So everyone see the refined screen. Great. We're going to talk a little bit about the technology, the training and the teamwork involved in making one of these documents accessible. One of the first things that I wanted to go over is just talking about alt text and how alt text works. I have taken this information from the Social Security Administration's handbook and have found it very helpful when I'm teaching students about making their thesis or dissertation accessible. So here is a picture, obviously a figure and the text below it would be like what it says in your document. But giving you a moment to read that I'll go on to the next slide to talk about what the alt text should be. So in this case, the alt text should be pastel leading her handler who holds the harness in his left hand. That guide dog and man really isn't the best alt text is this picture displays an action with the dog guiding the human. The second choice provides a very static description and therefore the first choice would be the best example for alternate text. Here I'm showing a bar graph that you can look over for a moment. And then we'll talk about the alt text for this bar graph. So the first one is the best alt text because first off it starts off and says bar chart. More than likely in the information that's in the document about this particular figure someone isn't going to say this is a bar chart about blah blah blah or this is a scatter plot, or this is a line graph right pie graph. The first thing you want to say is the type of chart that it is, or graph that it is. And then you want to go into figures for a head pads. Here scratches and kisses climb steadily during the week from a few on Monday to around five or six on Thursday there's a rapid decline comparable to Mondays and Fridays levels so it is explaining the trend in the chart that it goes up here and then it drops. The second choice doesn't tell us the trend or the main purpose of the chart. The third choice doesn't tell you anything it just says chart. The fourth choice gives data, but the purpose of a chart is not to display data. It is to convey the meaning found in the data tables are just for displaying data. So I'll say that again. The purpose of this bar chart is not to display the data. It is to convey the meaning found in the data. And then the fifth choice gives additional information that's not actually shown in this chart. It's talking about a total of 32 weeks and goes on a little further and that information is not here notice these numbers going up to 17. I only go up to eight on the chart. So you don't want to give more than what's already there. My next example here. This is a picture that has words on top of the picture the screen reader cannot read these words. Okay, it just knows there's a figure. So first off, a good rule to follow on alternate text is about 160 characters. So it's a few sentences. And secondly, you're going to want to quote in this particular case, what the words say in the picture. So the good old text says pastel is looking up attendively so it lets you see the action of what the dog is doing or hear the action of what the dog is doing. And it quote unquote says this is me pretending to be interested. And then she yawns. That's the dog by the way pastel. And this is me not pretending. Okay. The second choice the second choice here elmets the humor of the yawn. Even though it's talking about text and the third choice here, while it tells you about looking up in the yawn, it is not verbatim. And if you have words on top of a picture like that, you need to quote it verbatim what it says. And also here in this example I should say I used pictures for the bullets, and that's a huge no no, because then you've got to start explaining each bullet green check mark red accent, why you don't want to have to do that if you have your students using the Microsoft word, the bullets that are involved in word are automatically set to be accessible, even when they come to a PDF and if you do have some reason that you personally are doing something like I am today, where you're going to have bullet points, you can say bullet for the alt text. But it's also here in this picture is pastel signature and so many of us have I a cook or IRB letters and maybe there's a signature involved in our PDF. You don't have to say what the signature is, you just say signature for the alt text. Okay. And then, if you have logos. So we have the bgsu logo for example that's on and I a cook letter and IRB letter. If you have logos involved in your PDF, you just have to say logo for the alt text. If you choose to say bgsu logo or, you know, University of Florida logo or wherever you're at that's your choice but you're going to be repeating that over and over, and what is required is to say signature for signatures and logo for logos. Another example I wanted to give you is about equations. Now if a screen reader when an equation is made in word. If the screen reader can read it like regular text and it's text paragraph when it's tagged and I'll show you that in a minute from PDF version what I mean, then you don't need alt text. If they are including it as a picture. In the document their equation. Maybe they couldn't get word to do what they needed with the superscripts and the subscripts and whatever else was going on in that equation. And they inserted as a picture you definitely need to give it full alt text. The choice up above is a very obvious thing it's the Pythagorean theorem. So you, because it's a known equation, you could just say Pythagorean theorem as your alt text. You could also have the a squared notice that squared is spelled out the plus sign is spelled out B squared equals the spelled out C squared so that your screen reader reads it across if needed. I gave another one with the foil method here, an alternate description for this. I wanted to use this because it's the number two, but it's open parentheses. So you have to can't just say parentheses you have to open the parentheses you have to close the parentheses. So to open parentheses for why plus spelled out one close parentheses equals three y in this particular case. I don't want those of you who are using late tech to freak out about the constant equations you're going to see, because generally those equations can be read by the text editor when it comes into PDF. However, there are certain characters that just don't work adobe doesn't work in play well with other programs. I'm sorry to tell you they just don't. So sometimes that plus or minus sign it just cannot read that character. And there are some other examples that I can try to come up with. So I'm going to share some PDFs here. So this is a PDF that Terry was working with in word. And I thought I would take you through the steps if you have full acrobat. So reader doesn't allow you to do this you do need access to full acrobat to run an accessibility checker. You may not have the accessibility checker set up like I do, as one of the common tools that I use. So I'm going to show you how to get to the tools up here in the top whether you're on a Mac or PC you have this home and tools and go to tools. And you need to scroll down to accessibility. Click on that. And you'll have a new menu on the right. You want to click the accessibility check. There's a check mark next to it. And you should get this pop up for accessibility checker options. Now, depending on the minimum digital accessibility standards at your school for what you would have flagged here are school flags them all. So I'm going to go with that. Tell it to start checking. And over here on the left. It pops up. The problems are bolded. If you click the little carrot. It's on the left. You can get a drop down under each section for what might be an issue. And this particular document the logical reading order has a question mark. It is required that you fix things with the red X. It is strongly recommended to fix things with the blue question mark. But again, minimum digital accessibility standards at your school can determine whether or not you need to do this. Okay. You can, if you're mildly OCD like me, tell it that it passed. If you're trying to get it off the screen. The color contrast again is something you would manually check and isn't going to run through it for you. However, with this title that failed. You can right click and tell it to fix if the title is in the document properties. But you can see that it's not. What am I referring to, if you go up to file and properties. You'll see, and we at BGSU require our students to fill in their title, their subject, and a minimum of three keywords. So the title here is establishing digital. And we have Terry's name here. And the subject will say is something that's brief. And to the point I mean it can be multiple words but the point in the keywords is making it so that somebody can Google for your document it's like tagging your document. The subject wouldn't necessarily be repeated in the keywords. So I'm saying technology. The example I always use when I'm teaching this to our grad students is I'll I usually do something I play trumpet. And so I talk about my great dissertation about Louis Armstrong's trumpet playing style. So, when I get to the subject, I could say that the subject is music. That's pretty broad. I can get a little more detailed and say jazz music, and that would help rain in my subject a bit. The trumpet playing style is really what I'm talking about but then again I'm probably going to be using trumpet and other things in the keywords which is going to make it a searchable document. I'm hoping that that is making sense for everyone here. So, notice that I'm using a semi colon in between the keywords semi colon reads as a hard break for HTML coding so you don't use commas commas are like a run on, you do use semi colons. If you wanted to use something like I teach in business and we talk about a swats drinks weaknesses opportunities threats, you could use the abbreviation and then explain it. So, once that's filled in. Now when I tell it to fix it it automatically fixes it because it can find that title. The next example it's talking about is an alternate text issue for figures. If I click on this, I can tell it to fix, and it will take me to the first image. Now this is something you should be showing your students how to do because they're the best person to describe the alternate text of your figure. And then you would just keep going with explaining it represents, you know, and you could say they have a hat on or whatever you need to do to get it described but that's cataracts and then I would say the one on the right is a distracted driver and shows a person in front of a steering wheel. I have a question and shadow I'm not sure if Terry meant it for everyone or you directly. But the question was, if the PDF is full text searchable why would you put it in put in keywords, because this is what allows the document to be searched by Google, or in wherever the story is the main terms. If I'm looking for somebody's thesis about chemical sciences. If I put in the term photo chemical sciences, hopefully it'll come up it makes it it makes it searchable makes it discoverable. While Google call scholar may have crawled the document. It's not necessarily pulling that. I don't know if I'm explaining that real well here. In our school we require it. How's that. It makes the document more discoverable easier to find. So, we gave alt text on this particular figure, and I hit the arrow, and now I have alt text for the next figure, and you would go through the same thing to describe and type in the alt text. And keep going if there were more images, and when you're done you say save and close, and it auto fixes it for you. Now of course on that second one, I didn't give the best alt text. I mean let's be real. If I just type something in quickly. So if I click on over here on the right, the reading order I get a new pop up that allows me to get in here and view. It's different, hopefully it's tagged correctly. Yep, it's going to argue with me because it says text paragraph. Let me save the document and then maybe it should work. This is the kind of thing I deal with every day here we go. And you can see here what they've typed when you scroll through it if I even close this, I can hover over it to see what they've typed but the problem is is that is not good legit alternate text. So everybody agree. You can see when something is auto generated. While it may pass. It's probably not the rest, the best alt text, necessarily. And it's good to check for this to see if they just did auto generated I've seen things that's like a picture of a bunch of balloons going up in the air and it said it was a fruit basket. I did auto generated text. So make sure your students are describing their objects. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to let you know that the, the PDF that you have open right now was based on my, the first word. Yes. Okay. I'm curious to see what actually made it through versus what's still being a thorn in our sides. And something else that I should explain is that if you have to auto tag a document. And if we have enough time, I'll share some other documents so they can show you what it mean by auto tagging if you're to auto tag a document. That someone has done in word is going to go away. So if you auto tag a document you lose all the alt text for the figures all the table summaries, things like that. Ask your students to keep both the original word or original late tech and original PDF. And we use over leaf and it outputs as a PDF for our students so they have to do all the work from PDF in the first place if they've started in late tech. But keeping a list of those alternate text so they can just copy and paste them back in is super important. We'll also tell you, especially because I know Larry does a lot of late tech here. And if you auto tag a late tech document, and it has several equations, often it can add these gigantic parentheses in the equation in a place that it doesn't belong like through the middle of a number. And there's no way to just use the edit tool and get it out. So you don't always want to, you know, have them, if they auto tag it and it causes more problems, make sure they have a previous version saved so that they don't turn in the one that's worse sometimes auto tagging fixes things sometimes it doesn't. So it's kind of a crap shoot. And again if we have some time at the end I'll try to show some other examples of what I'm talking about and how it can make things worse. I'll give you a note for that as well. There's about 15 minutes left in the time period for just make it. If you have time for questions what you need. Thank you. So I just wanted to go over tables quickly. Over here it's telling me we have a table error, and we're going to click on the element and bring up the reading order. So it says the table header failed. If I right click in here and go to the table header, I can click on each individual cell and change the cell properties. So here I am making this a header cell. I have to click on each one to fix that. Everything that is pink is a header cell. Everything that is gray is a data cell. So I don't have to go in and fix these because it auto fixed them as I was changing it across the top. The next thing it's telling me that's a problem is the summary. I go back to here and say edit table summary. Fortunately the screen reader will read everything that's in this table. So all we're trying to do is set up the framework of the table so that someone who's listening can understand what's going to happen here. So we've got one, two, three, four, five columns, one, two, three, four, five rows, pretty easy. So we're going to tell it five columns, five rows, including the header row. Now if you choose to add other information about this table here, like say it's a large table and you have consistent recurring number or you want to talk about the mean or the median or something else, that's fine. But the absolute bare minimum in a table summary is how many columns and how many rows because the screen reader is going to go across and read each one and the person will be able to picture this table in their head from that basic framework. That you've told them for the table. If a table is on multiple pages, please have your students remembered to repeat the header row on each page. And it will make them say how many rows and how many columns for that table on the page so they can say table continued how many rows how many columns including the header row. Again, and quickly I wanted to share another version that Terry shared with me of this document. This is the version that she had made accessible in Word. So again, I'm going to go to tools and accessibility and tell it to start that check. Kim not then drop too much but we had a question in chat might be interesting this point that can you change justification in the table like was that was done in word and it'll be I suppose. You can use the edit tool to do a lot of that yes. I can show you because it's going to take me back down to that table so Terry what I just wanted to tell you is except for the alternate text coming through notice that the title still failed, because it's not in the properties. Well it is so you can fix it. The table header says it's still failed. And so while it says that it thinks everything's a header cell for some reason so I would have to go back through and do all of these cells hit the wrong thing sorry. And I know that I don't want to waste your time and show you that I'm doing this over and over again, but just to say that you would need to do this on every single cell coming across and make them gray before this is going to go away. It also says summary failed. So we'd again have to tell it five columns five rows, including the header row. In this case. So the one thing that came through on her version was the alternate text consistently stayed. I know there's a lot of questions and if people want to stay after I'm happy to share some other examples here of things that you might be seeing. I'm not sure whether PDFs prepared if people want to stay on a little longer, I'm happy to try to do that but I'm not sure if somebody else is at noon so anybody have any questions. There was a question from earlier that I wasn't sure who was directed to if it was somebody in chat or to presenters, but it was. What was it now. Do you teach your students to modify styles or do you provide templates with pre formatted styles. Our particular case. We have our first level headings are done a certain way and we have that set in our template. Because certain colleges may follow APA and other colleges here may follow MLA or Chicago we also get ACS ASA, and then we just get people that are kind of combining things and not really following a style guide. So we look for consistency are all the second levels done the same or all the thirds done the same that kind of thing. But we set our first level headings there are in all capital letters, they're centered, and it is their choice if they bold them, but we show them how to set that in the screen and word. I wanted to return back to the presentation. I think we're going to skip over a couple of the last slides in order to give Allison her wrap up time as well. But as as Kim stated, I am also more than happy to stay on and answer questions and dig into things we do have an hour break that's already been scheduled. So, you know, if you're able to and you want to. I'd love to hang out with you all. So, let me just return back to the presentation. If I can find it. Yes, I can. Okay. Alright, so we kind of, I think we leapfrogged over a couple things but that's okay. I think something that we also already know from our various, you know, focus groups and things like that is that Adobe is really it's very challenging to use for a variety of reasons. And the least of which is it's inaccessibility to students because of cost availability. You know, etc. So, a lot of the checking and guiding and doing that work on the, on the backside of things does fall on the practitioner, which as someone noted in the, in the chat is just extremely time consuming. So, so really, you know, when we're talking about refining. You know, we need to think about where do we go from here. I'm going to. Let's think about technology. What's new. What's obsolete, right. You can't, you can't play a beta max tape on a CD player. Okay. It doesn't have backwards compatibility. I'm using one version, you know, of Microsoft Word and then there's newer stuff and, you know, things are not necessarily in the same places and it can take longer. It's an early adopter. Right. Do you have your eye on the horizon to see what's coming training. Right. I recommend go straight to the source. Right. If you need to know about how to work with with Microsoft Word, go to. Oh, I forgot to put word in there. Go to Microsoft. Go to Adobe. Go to the government. Their, their tutorials and information are surprisingly accessible, readable. It kind of gives me a little bit of hope. So, but also avail yourself if your institution offers LinkedIn learning, they have wonderful, you know, training modules. They have schools, IT, maybe the office of disability. If you have an online learning division, a center for teaching, so explore these other campus partners who may be already working on a similar issue and see if you can't join forces and everybody benefit from one another. And I'll conclude by talking about teamwork. Right. So, I think, first and foremost, we have the USDDA has user groups now for formatting for community engagement. And there are state and library consortiums. There are designer groups. There's user experience testing. There's also third party vendors. And also who can provide solutions workshops conferences in your professional organizations. Again, this is gaining speed so, you know, everybody is ever it's everybody's job. And so you may not always get invited. So invite yourself to the, to the table. I will see you here. Okay. All right. I'm going to stop sharing and then let Allison go ahead and share the remainder of her, her screen or her. Thank you. I've just got a couple and I will try to be brief because I do want to at least be cognizant of a couple of questions but like others said, I am available as well to hang out after if there is any interest. So, can somebody confirm you can see my screen. So we talked a lot about at the beginning about kind of defining this problem what's happening in the marketplace what are institutions doing with this challenge around providing the most accessible content as possible. And at ProQuest, we really want to partner, we want to be able to provide support and resources. Similar to what you've been given here in this workshop we want to provide you with the tools you need to do this work that you know you needed to be doing yesterday right. And so the first, the first step in understanding what what we should consider looking forward how we can provide resources and solutions is, is talking to you all so partnering with some thought leaders. Some people that are doing great work on on the forefront of this initiative. Some of the people on this call are part of this community so we had 12 individual participants cross functionally so library graduate studies with experience in various facets of digital accessibility from from doing the work at a really detailed level to implementing student led kind of policy change and roll out. So a lot of different views from 11 institutions diverse in institutional type geographic region and student population size. We have so far met three times had really, really great working sessions really robust conversations to establish some best practices and sort of find a north star determine where we want to go. And we've established a quarterly meeting cadence to continue the discussion as things change and and the topic of accessibility advances. But we did come up with a sort of a best practices document. So, some some standards that are really, really detailed right so what what, where do we want to go as Terry said there's never going to be 100% accessible document. But what can we kind of run through as a checklist and say okay, if a document has these features and their quality features. You know, that we're doing pretty good. So, so establishing that sort of standard. And then looking ahead so where do we want to offer a solution where can we be of service. As we've talked about on this call accessibility should be happening throughout the ETD process right prior to writing your student education, there's templating during the writing process. But what we're considering at the moment is pro quest being able to be of service at this point, sort of to the right of this dash line, right so future consideration includes integrating an accessibility checker in ETD admin, our submission tool so something that's sort of an existing workflow for an administrator, a tool that's easy to use that that can inform and really help simplify and expedite this work. And to hear more about that. We do have a session tomorrow afternoon with a roadmap review so if you want to learn more about that feature and others. So we're going to attend and post submission right we accessibility is a relatively new thing. And we're sitting on these, these large back files and PDFs where accessibility wasn't even a consideration. And so right now a service that we do offer a paid services that we do remediate back file for institutions so we're approached by institutions that want their back file remediated and we can do that on a project basis. That's something that there's an appetite for at your institution, happy to talk more about that. And finally I just want you all to, I want to invite you to join the conversation, we are always learning at pro quest, there's always more to hear about and if you're thinking about best practices where to start implementation at your institution, I would love to chat with you about that. Likewise, if you would like to help inform future solutions if you have thoughts about this accessibility checker or you think, I know what pro quest could do that would really really help us. Those are discussions I would welcome, and I'd love to hear from you. So, I do have my contact information included here. I believe it's in Terry's deck that was sent out as well. And so I will wrap up. I'm sorry, we have a minute for questions, but thank you so much. Thank you everybody. And if you have to get going here at noon, we are going to stick around for a little bit to answer any other extra questions we have but this will be recorded and shared. Wonderful presentation. I guess going back really quickly there's one question I saw that somebody asked Megan asked in chat. You're doing a format check for a student you're only running the checker or are you reading the alt text emissions make sure it doesn't say chart. And as a secondary part of that I question earlier about, has anybody who's instituted some of the or implemented these these sort of accessibility checks and processes and changes to that to have you've done a turnaround sort of analysis to say how much has the process increased in time, or how much more labor have you had to put forth, comparing to what it was prior to having accessibility integrated into your checks. So in our particular case, with adding the accessibility checks, I would say, we don't read our theses and dissertations word for word, we check the headings to make sure they're spelled correctly and that they match the page numbers and so forth and tables and figure headings and their page numbers. And that includes the entire document to check other requirements that we have. I would say a 200 page dissertation that includes figures tables, schemes, equations, yada yada, that's at least at least three hours. And then that's us listing everything wrong with it not just accessibility, writing up a letter sending it back to the student and putting it back on the student to fix it. So we've done a good tutorial and videos and have workshops, multiple times each semester to try to help our students learn how to do this. There are of course the students who don't bother to check any of that or do any of that. And of course they're in that one and done situation right. Boom, I'm good. And they didn't realize the rest of this was required so we are now really pushing with our vice provost and Dean of the graduate college, how our grad coordinators and our committee chairs really need to know. This is how it's done and this is what they need to do. Too many faculty are currently saying this is how I had to do it. Yeah, but they went to a totally different institution and that was 20 years ago. So it's a whole other ballgame now. And so, yeah, There's some of the questions there for I guess how many ETDs on average do you review each semester. And do you also charge a fee for dissertation support, or in general, do you charge a fee? I have myself and a 10 hour grad assistant and a 20 hour grad assistant that helped me with this work. At UToledo, we, Kim's laughing because we're on our like fifth interim acting Dean and as little as three years, but anyway, I digress. But our numbers have gone down just slightly, just, you know, loss of enrollment and so forth, but on average, about 100 to 120 get reviewed every semester. Not that's not all that upload, but they're going to definitely take our time, you know, when they are clearly not ready to graduate, but that's another whole story. And we don't, of course, charge a fee. It is now again, a party of one, a shop of one, because I had a 20 hour week GA, and our last budget cuts took everything away. So I'm trying to figure out how to enact the roles of my, or enact the responsibilities of my position and enact a new, you know, help shepherd in a new policy, and then educate everyone. You know, and that's, that's a, that's almost a heavier lift is educating the people surrounding the student, right, you know, who are guiding them through the writing. You know, it would be wonderful if faculty would take that role on, you know, and help at least help in the design and writing, you know, of it, initially, and pay attention to those issues but yeah, anyway, so. I was going to say, oh, we had a question I read that before I say anything. I'm curious about institutional repository submissions and checking documents at that stage we're small undergrad college or thesis capstones are done chat don't scroll on me are done by most students. I'm thinking I need to help pay LibGuy page on this topic or at least get the information out there any suggestions on what to include. I'm happy to share our website in the chat. I'm sure other people have websites that are pretty robust. I shared pits as well. I mean, again, probably looking for different programs and see if they do provide that support information in trying to assess what might work for your particular needs. Because again it could be scaled up to a certain level or down depending on what you can facilitate. That's a hard thing to to to give a one one one answer covers everything because it depends on what you're working with and I have to say that working. We do about 600 to 700. It's a decentralized process but it does about that many per year. And I've seen students get pushed back from their defense committees and their advisors to not use templates early on because or they don't like what the templates doing per se. And it causes this this this sort of rush at the end to get everything formatted and a headache for the students who are told by once one party with the institution do it this way and another do it this way. And trying to figure out where it's the middle ground there to say we need this for this reason. What can we do to make this easier. And sometimes that's a hard conversation to have if you have many many different schools and colleges and in your university. And many different disciplines because again engineering is totally different than music and slowly different in medicine is totally different. What have you. So it can be difficult to have that but setting some standards and giving tutorials and giving guides will help alleviate some of that pain of my experience as well. And I think I just want to add on to that because I've seen some questions about, you know, what what, like, is it the grad school does this as a library does this is regardless of who is it's being centralized with is to tap into your campus partners, because they're probably still doing that similar work. They probably have more credibility than your grad school, you know, or your library or your particular department does. And so if as a larger unit, like an office of accessibility or diversity or, you know, if they're doing that work. You know, you can gain momentum and credibility, you know, to take it where it needs to go. And I'm putting in a shameless plug for our 2pm session on the local implementation for Ohio link, because we will be talking a lot about what has this process. What does it look like at our individual schools, and it's still not necessarily representative of all schools or anything like that. But one thing someone was asking about undergrad institution, small and so you know you may want to reach out to overland college in Ohio. Their minimum accessibility standards document is one that you Toledo is modeling, even though they're undergrad, they just have it, you know, well written and fleshed out and so I would say, you know, we're lucky. We're very lucky in Ohio. I'll just say that we're very, very lucky that we have this consortial environment. But it also changes. For example, we no longer put anything on an institutional repository. It lives in Ohio link, you know, but other schools may do both. Some schools may just use pro quest right and go directly through their administrator, whereas in Ohio pro quest harvest our stuff so it's just it is it's really complex and it varies and and I think take away is to find your partners, find your partners in crime, stick to the very basics. You know, ensure that you're looking at it through compliance and usability, you know, to kind of get a grasp on it. And remember it all goes back to people, right. How do you educate them how do you motivate them how do you bring them along. And so that can probably help inform individual practices I think at each institution based on your own structure and who's doing what and who you know. So, yeah. John, was there any other kind of questions or anything that you think people wanted have answered stress. I know I saw somebody give a comment about the higher proof readers, Kathy and Chad said that to do that but then they asked if they can maybe do the accessibility review process I would say it's probably not going to be feasible for the proof readers, because that's a different skill set. For the most part they're looking more about the context or the content if you will rather than the formatting and accessibility so it would be a different higher. If you're if you're doing a third party for that so that might be interesting. And somebody asked me if we're using a prince we're shifting to haiku for consortia. Quite soon, but yeah, other than that I'm just trying to scroll back there's a lot of talk that happened a lot once there. Does anyone have the grad schools doing formatting or accessibility reviews. I think again as you Mr. Terry was just saying that it's could be different depending on what institution you're at what you do height what your solution is. As I've said Pitt does a decentralized where each grad school has a representative that does the formatting for that and then they submit it to the IR and then I approve or help with that to make sure everything's going on there. But it could just be one office could be something outside of the graduate schools, could be the library. What have you so it's everybody's different. I guess your IT department at your school definitely should be a good resource about accessibility. They're already doing it for any of the web work that they're doing so they're definitely going to have some things that they can recommend to you. Well thank you all for yeah for for the wonderful workshop. The questions are starting to die down so if there's any past this workshop of a free to email any of us, and we can try and share it with the group as best we can, and go from there but. And I also want to emphasize that, you know, in addition to this chat. There are also, you know, certain websites and resources that we're assembling that will be added to the presentation in the conference proceedings. And I shouldn't say we, I was not fully prepared to, you know, and there wouldn't have really been time anyway so my goal is to add to the current takeaways and at least provide soft places for people to land on their journey, you know. And again, thank you everybody for for your time this morning I know for some of you it's quite early. Still, I haven't even finished my coffee. So, yeah, so enjoy the break and I guess, you know, feel free. Our information is going to be made available. So, I think the list of conference attendees was sent out earlier. So, again, I'm Terry Green, we have Kim fleshman and Allison Thompson, and so our in our contact information should be there. Please do not hesitate I'll speak for me, do not hesitate to reach out and, you know, ask me questions and I'm open to suggestions for improvement too. So, yeah, so thank you everybody. And thank you Kim and Allison so much and john for being an awesome moderator. Thank you everybody. Thanks guys. Have a good day. See you next session. Thank you. Thank you everyone.