 Welcome to the poster presentation web accessibility for etds with Terry Robinson and Laura three from Mississippi State University Libraries. As always, you know, if you have any questions or anything like that, just please post them in the chat and I will turn it over to Terry and Laura. Hey everybody, can you hear me okay. Yes, yes, great, great, great. So I'm Larry three and today we're going to kind of go over the processes that we took to make our these these in dissertations web accessible over the past year and a half. So we were first approached by a library admin admin in June of 2019. And they basically came to us and said, Hey, the university wants everything web accessible and that includes your thesis and dissertations because we dropped them directly into our institutional repository. So anything that's created and put on to the MSU website has to be accessible. So let's see, so we had a bunch of questions when it came to that was it our responsibility to make sure that they were accessible was it the students responsibility to make it accessible or was it even their major professor or their committee. So and we also needed to know what all needs to be added what makes a document acceptable or accessible. And then finally, we had very little direction when it came to this this was kind of a top bottom mandate. So we didn't really know what we were doing, and we were just told that it needed to happen. So we took that on and we began the research. So we met with campus IT and the National Research and Training Center on blindness and low vision to better understand what makes a website that makes a document accessible and what would be acceptable when it came to accessibility. One of the issues that we came into contact with was when you're making your document accessible. It's one thing to do it in Microsoft Word it's a completely different beast to do it in Adobe PDF. And since our submissions had to go in the hour as a PDF, we needed them to be accessible and PDF as well. But MSU does not offer PDF to the students for free is not a free program that we offer so what were we going to do about that. So we started reviewing best practices with WCAG 2.0, which is web content accessibility guidelines, and also W3C, which is the worldwide web consortium. WC3 is actually an international community that developed the standards that WCAG uses. And that's a lot of acronyms. That's what we have it written down all nice and pretty for y'all. And then finally we benchmarked against peer and peer plus institutions. Who was doing this? What were they doing? Did they have any instructions already laid out to where we weren't completely reinventing the wheel? So that's the left side our problem in our research and then in the middle you can see our timeline of events. So you can see from the moment we were contacted all the way through the first time that we rolled out these guidelines. And we do want to note that even though we didn't put it in there in between each of these meetings we were going straight into research mode, benchmarking, and then we were also creating instructional materials as we went so we wouldn't have to create all of them all at the end. And that way we kind of knew where we started and where we're moving. So now I'm going to let Ms. Terry take over and she's going to talk about the solutions and future research. So after all of our research we determined that there were going to be certain responsibilities that the students had to take care of and others at our office would do on the back end for them. So we have all of our students add their alternative text to their figures and equations. We make sure that the hetero information for their tables and their continued table portions is added and we make them check the color contrast before they submit to our office. And then our responsibilities are to of course impart the information to the students so we we've added web accessibility processes to the workshops that we teach. We have a handout that we give all the students when they get ready to submit, whether they attend a workshop, whether they have contacted us to let us know they're ready to start submitting their document. During their graduating semester we give them this information and then once the student has completed all of their responsibilities, we then go in to the to the final PDF and make sure that things like the tab order the language, all of the metadata. We make sure that the document has a has a title and an author. So we did the final PDF accessibility checks. We were very thankful that we've had very little pushback from students and faculty alike. They all seem to understand that this is not just something our office decided to do on on a whim that we were actually directed by our campus administration to make this make this happen. However, despite everything that we've been able to implement in the short amount of time, we do still have a lot of needs. Lots of students use math type, especially the math and chemistry students when they're writing out their equations. They definitely prefer to use that that programming language in their documents and it's not accessible. So we're having to come up with workarounds for that. We also are in talks with faculty on campus who know much more about latex than we do to see what we can do to update latex templates that we offer to students so that they're also accessible because as of this moment, we don't have a way to do that. We also have an issue with with tables and the fact that lots of students prefer their cells to be merged. And when you do an accessibility check, if you've ever done that, you'll notice that merge cells do not pass and they go against the standards, but because journals expect the cells to be merged, we're kind of at an impasse as to how we can go about trying to get students to do that when the journals are wanting to submit to and their departments want them to have these nice pretty tables with merged cells. And then some of the bigger issues we've come across is that different accessibility checkers find different things. If you download a checker from a website, it might find something different than the word accessibility check or the Adobe accessibility check. And so we're constantly trying to figure out what's going to be best. Also, different screen readers pick up different things. Certain ones will read math type and certain ones will not. So we're still trying to find what's going to be best to make everything most accessible for everyone. But we think in the short amount of time that we've had, we've put together a good faith effort for all of our students and our faculty so that we can make this a possibility for students. Thank you so much, Terri and Laura.