 All right, can everybody hear me? Okay, this is great We're really excited to be here to talk about our journey toward accessible ETVs and Yes, this was an Ohio link Mandate that we had to put forth, but it's also something we've been working on for a long time So I I'm actually sending for a stop I think I show up as Cynthia and the program but I prefer Cindy and I am the Ohio link ETD administrator for Kent State, but that's just one of the hats that I wear I am actually the Copyright in scholarly communications. So this is just one of the tasks that I do and I have with me today Virginia dresser our digital projects librarian and Allison Haynes our IT compliance coordinator So I will Don't know if you guys want to introduce yourselves a little bit more Okay. All right. That's all right. Okay Accessibility is part of DEI and this has been an eye-opening thing over the last few years With the DEI we've added a onto the end of that at Kent State. So we have DEI a Because accessibility is an integral part of DEI There's a quote from the Reverend Jesse Jackson, which I thought was really good inclusion is not a matter of political correctness It's the key to growth and I think we've had a lot of conversations amongst ourselves And the essential thing is to bring everybody on board. So we have all the brainpower that we need We don't want to leave anybody behind because that leaves us all behind So this is an important value for me within the libraries the university libraries we've had a digital accessibility University Libraries Committee that was initiated in 2019 and I can't say that it was exactly well received at first We sort of had to push it a little right because people didn't really see the value of digital accessibility right away So this is something that's been mostly Jenny that's been fighting for it But within the university Our first enterprise level focus was on full website redesign in 2014 So it does go back a little ways the first hires of accessibility specialist place in 2018 And the digital accessibility compliance coordinator position moved to the division of information technology in 2020 So we have Allison here. So these are all key positions within this so Accessibility as part of DEI We have services documentation and education standard printed materials scan documents born digital documents and This is all central to our standard operations I think that it's really key when you have something that we're scanning It seems like a more upheld battle. Whereas when you're giving birth Quote-unquote to a digital document you have the opportunities there to incorporate accessibility as you go along So there's a little mix of both in our operation So we have been doing some retrospective thesis and distribution scanning and remediation Since 2017 my unit the digital projects unit has been digitizing TV requests on demand from interlibrary loan So today that's just a little over a hundred thirty requests Probably mid 2017. I didn't keep track of dates when we picked it up to this month We did have the hiccup in You know spring and summer of 2020 when it in my very long wasn't Processing any physical requests But outside of that we've been doing these just as they come through the ILL queue Previously print titles were snail nails patrons So I just need a really small note that I feel like this also supports green initiatives in libraries reducing the missions Do not have to snail nail content and the shout out to Ben Goldman and Penn State who did a really amazing greenhouse gas emission report from their university library system, which is incredible came out last year Next slide So her copies are scanned to our benchmarks for preservation scanning we send an access copy to the Patron these are heavily compressed and OCR Then we take the full resolution scans. We prepare these for our ILL link to their specs with the PDF a 1b we disquew and cropped the Individual tip images redact the signatures and then we run this through remediation using acrobat pro using the accessibility check tool Current hiccups in our workflow tables are hard And we also had some musical scores that we have some interesting issues with as well Okay, thank you Ginny so within Ohio link the Ohio link accessibility statement came out in March of 2021 And there's a link to that and you can read it. It's a lot longer than these three statements But it just reaffirms Ohio links commitment to ongoing improvement of Inclusivity and accessibility with the shared collections. So this isn't just with ATVs. It's with vendors as well But Ohio Lake is in Columbus. I'm not sure how many of you know this Ohio Lake is in Columbus and Ohio State is in Columbus. So administratively Ohio link is under Ohio State for some things and accessibility is one of those things So Ohio State has a minimum digital accessibility standards policy and we're Using the procedures and workflows that OSU provides. So this kind of comes down from that And also Of course, the central office continues to work with the vendor platforms and hopefully we'll get there at some point Okay, so ETDs at Kent State University are under the Graduate College and we have our Dean Manfred Vandolman. He's not just the Dean of the Graduate College. He's also an associate provost He wears a lot of hats too But what we started was an initiative How are we gonna meet with the Ohio link standards? How are we gonna get there because that deadline is January 23rd? So I had talked with Manfred and he said you have all my support whatever you want to do So I originally put out a call to a lot of people around campus and I said do you want to be involved with this? Allison was the only one who responded and I thought well Yeah But I'm very happy she did Because what we did actually was leverage The assistant that was already in place and you can put the next And those are the gatekeepers Kent State has a lot of Colleges and a lot of regional campuses seven or eight I forget the number now but seems to change But the college gatekeepers or ETD contacts are the ones that review the ETDs for the college So they're the ones that have in their hands the style guides. They know the style of the university They know the requirements So they review and approve the ETD's I'm the ETD administrator So I really don't get called unless a student has a mistake and they contact me and I refer them along Or if something technical goes wrong and I'm able to solve a lot of the technical issues that are in the Some of them I have to contact Emily Flynn at Ohio link for but usually I can rescue whatever the situation is And save everybody from panic But what we decided to do Alice and I was work with students and there well The gatekeepers work with students and advisors in the individual colleges So we thought rather than getting a bunch of other people under this committee Let's work with what's already in place. So we've got these gatekeepers It's been smooth running for now for since 2014. I didn't invent the gatekeepers This was something that was put in place when the ETD came about in the mid 2000s so a little bit of background though on numbers. We have a total of 4,645 this is of yesterday Can't state ETDs from the very start of the Ohio link ETD center in the mid 2000s We average about 620 per year now I will say that it was more like 650 to 675 But COVID put a little bit of damper and it's dragging those stats down, but this is the average over the last 10 years So this is what we're looking at among our gatekeepers one of our favorites who is the gatekeeper for the College of Education and human and humans there's a longer name, but it's really the College of Education And she's been a gatekeeper for a very long time She's a real perfectionist a very hard worker very detail-oriented and she raised her hand and volunteered and said I'll be the test college because we thought before the January 2023 deadline. We'd better test this out So how are we going to do this? Well, EHHS is actually really a complex college with 25 master's degrees 14 doctoral programs and they range in topics So there's everything from hospital hospitality to physical education to educational administration Just a lot of different topics So our gatekeeper provided 20 example theses and dissertations with different research methodologies So these look different have different illustrations have different tables You know our favorite thing tables and have images in them for a variety of presentation of data both Qualitative and quantitative. She really tried to give us a good overview of what's in there so our test college has E education health and human services has approximately 15 ETDs per semester and most of them are doctoral But we do have some theses in there too so we met with the gatekeeper the assistant dean and We're going to be meeting with the services Back in the olden days like my mother-in-law used to be a typist for college of Worcester and should get out the ruler and measure the margins Well now we've got editing people and group work processing and proofreading people So we're going to bring them into the loop too as well as the graduate students were involved With graduating this semester and this is going to be a voluntary thing We're not going to have them required to make their ETD accessible But we're hoping to test out our training materials and all those things on this group of students So we met on Tuesday Just the other day to talk about training within the college What we'll have and actually Allison will be talking a lot more about this But we're going to have written instructions video instructions and some face-to-face assistance too We'll evaluate this in december as fast as we can And then we need to launch it to the entire campus in 2023 So I actually think what we're going to start doing is this in october It's it's not going to be something we can wait on doing. We have to get the information out to the other day keepers Knowing that we're going to find out some things that we don't know yet And we will communicate to them for the next year for 2023 So I think this is where yeah, I can take over for all times So i'm learning just from the little bit of time of being here today that um These workflows are coming from many different places on campus for all of us. There's connections with different offices and in divisions We do have the the luxury of A couple of full-time employees at the digital accessibility team And then a few students So we are not engaged in active remediation We are engaged in actively teaching people how to do the stuff they need to do And so we have a huge digital footprint for kent state 300 000 web pages massive lms we brought over 150 000 courses into our new lms this year and so As i'm working my way through then To kind of ensure that each group that has accessibility needs is kind of advancing the level of their accessibility working with the library then has been Absolutely great. In fact, I think they've been one of our our strongest partners across campus And there is no single unit that we connect with So we're working on Moving for the accessibility of all the electronic resources platforms with one group and Digital projects with another and then um now i'm much more aware of the etd world So I didn't put on the slide, but my first step then was what Cindy mentioned, which was to take a look at The sample theses try to get a feeling for what we were looking at Because I've got in my head what I consider accessible Ohio link is is actually giving us quite a bit of grace on what they're saying We need to consider accessibility to be So we are choosing not to take a hard line with this but to take an educational line in one that Really touts the professional benefits for each of these students learning how to do this So as we scanned through those I realized the wonderful part, which is that All of their they were being trained to make their figure descriptions Even more descriptive than alt text would have been So that's become a central part of our messaging Aligning with Ohio link and then now kind of determining what we're going to say our etd standards are So what we're trying to do then is create self sufficiency at at each level because we do not want anyone to feel like This is kind of landing on them So that's that's been a big part of kind of our motivation In making decisions by reviewing those theses and dissertations and determining You know what the biggest holes might be from accessibility standpoint And then determining how what we're going to expect of students What's logical and realistic with the short time frame? But then also what what's scalable how long you know if we're going to be keeping at this for five years You know, we've kind of collectively made the decision that you know if we're thinking about the next five years We'd rather put in significant focus time now and and do plenty of quality control and plenty of conversations with people And and figure it out now and do it well and then see if it can sustain largely sustain itself then Throughout so what we're doing is You know your very education focused kind of concept here So we're going to we're going to do multi modal which is such a huge part of accessibility anyway We need the 24 7 aspect nature of it For some reason Graduate students don't seem to always work between 8 and 5 So we need them to have access to this information at all times This is one of the parts of the world where in our worlds where a printed tip sheet actually still has value As the students are coming into the office and we're handing it out to them Or the gatekeepers would be at least in each college And then so my team and I have narrowed down what we want to focus on that the three things or so that we want to Focus on for the students So all of that content is going to go into these three places slightly different presentation of content in each one But we're going to make sure that it is as clear as possible so Please do not mistake this presentation as us saying to you we have been hugely successful with this process for 10 years And we're here to report all of our victories. This is all just happening. I mean literally I finished this Yesterday the first one that we're going to start rolling out. So we're going to see where it goes, but My position when when they moved it over to it was very focused on Being someone who inspires people towards greater accessibility as opposed to the punitive aspect of we're doing this to escape a lawsuit Which is what my predecessors position had been more focused at So we're choosing to do things That really helped the student feel like and helped the gatekeeper feel like they're part of something cool and bigger than they are So I don't know if you can read that but we're saying things. Thank you graduate student for your efforts to upload accessible etds You are joining thousands of other students across ohio. I have no idea how many actually we're just putting thousands Down working to comply with state and federal standards for academic resources therefore ensuring equal access To the results of your hard work and academic discipline for all future readers below are the steps So we're really trying to make this not sound academic We're trying to connect with them as humans as opposed to incredibly smart people If we want them to really buy into this as a person instead of buying into it as Mandatory academic duty kind of thing We're going to make it look like kent state stuff if you can't tell from the upper right hand corner We've got our same coloring same fonts this kind of thing And then we're doing plenty of things you can if you can see Number six and seven in the screenshot above we're doing plenty of things to make the different parts of it stand out That's really important for People with cognitive disabilities to be able to figure out what it is They're looking at and what they're supposed to do So all of the italicized and slightly bolded stuff is actually what you click inward and what you click in In adobe and those types of things and then the really bold stuff are the steps you need to follow Instead of worrying about listing I think the reason the way we get into these huge long documents academically is we we try to think of absolutely Everything that any one person might need to know and then we end up with a 15 page paper So we're it had the luxury of kind of focusing more that an it approach Which is we're going to we're going to speak to and we're going to address the the main flow And then we're going to give them a way to connect to people if they have questions So that's where the qr code comes in with who you're then going to Who you're then going to talk to so that's kind of what we're looking at as you can tell We're just in the very baby stages of all of this but um And there's nothing streamlined about it. It's been you know hour long conversations in which we just kind of Bounce ideas off each other with the deans with the three of us. What makes sense and just hugely Are influenced by kind of the strategy each of us employ personally And the standards that we have for our own work and then how we're going to bring that to this so yeah, that's that's where we're at So we can take any questions and we may have answers And from Ohio link Really great There Yeah, sure, so we all know in here accessibility is never a boolean kind of thing it's never on off or you know Light dark this type of thing And my approach is very highly Tailored I teach people to curate their content. I teach them to triage their needs and the kind of volume that we all have focusing on I feel like it's the best use of of our limited time and resources to focus on the big picture So that means I'm going to get in and I'm going to really focus on Putting together the Ohio link requirements with what I think the first level of of teaching students would be And so my digital accessibility specialist and I have gone through and then compiled The biggest chunks like the biggest red flags that we think are going to come through in an etd So for us we're starting by and this is like the last minute push for students Not the ones who are ongoing. We'll teach them to do some stuff with headings and we'll teach them some other things But what I noticed in most of the theses is that there are clickable table of contents So those often will have the headings already built into them a little bit So i'm going to kind of lean on that for a little bit since we're doing a Minimum viable products kind of thing at this point. So we're teaching them to Review if they're completed document make sure that their figures are accurately explained either right under as a caption or in the surrounding paragraphs So we're skipping the whole wording about if we're going to have Massive reading of formulas and tables and just trusting that it's it's a teaching them to pull it together in there We're teaching them to export With the the accessibility box checked and all the specifics of how that could look in windows and mac Then when they come into adobe, we've literally gone through and done screenshot by screenshot Pulling those highest level Ohio links standards and making those be the ones that we check We're not getting into tagged pdfs yet. We cannot That is too huge of an undertaking with too high of a level of expertise and frankly Too much of an ask of these students and gatekeepers who are already completely inundated with information Specificity of everything under the sun. So we're starting with some of those higher level concepts And we're moving from there I chose early in my tenure to not lose sleep over every single wakai detail But to approach it from an educational standpoint How can I make sure that whatever I'm choosing to focus on is going to have the largest impact? And and for that then we're we're looking at the alt text. We're looking at Some of the other key things making sure they get a title on the language is set some of the other stuff like this. So it's um I take full responsibility of my team and I for the decisions we've made and now we'll just roll it out and see how it goes Do So any questions that they can be repeated sure and then we have One question in the chat I'm surely so she wants to know if you can make those training materials accessible so that we can see slash Yeah, so that's what we're going to do We um, I was just in the process of looking for where I saved the pdf Not that any of you have inappropriate naming conventions or anything, but I was looking for it online Um, and I'm going to load that up and kind of show you what we're starting with Any other questions while I'm kind of pulling that up? You may need to repeat that question So You mentioned the key Pieces you're worrying about all texts and then I don't know if I drill out or Or if you just kind of like know what what about all of the pieces parts? What are the ones that you feel are the most important thing about? For immediately So I guess I can answer part of this. I'm not the technical person really But I will say that ohiolink standards are very um Basic at the moment and what they're telling us is that you need to have h1 prayer headings And then any kind of all texts for images um one thing and Alice this is probably Allison's line, but We found in reading the sample uh these these dissertations that Students have actually described what's in their images really well within the text itself So whatever alt text is needed may already be there and that's a good sign Um, did I do that right? You did. All right. You did and legally with mckag. That's what the situation is Is that you you need to have sufficient alt text or you need to have an aria label if You are not sufficiently explaining so the screen reader is going to come through and it's going to read all the text That is ocr on there and as long as you've covered things well, then it's probably going To definitely meet alt text standards Right, so we're not going to worry about tagging yet because frankly when you get into tagging Some of these specific things we're teaching them to do an acrobat It wipes the slate clean whenever you come in and do tags So we're going to start with things simply because ohiolink is only asking for an h1, which is a title So we have no onus at this point to teach headings coming down into the twos and threes So you can see on the screen now. We're asking them to Export it as a pdf and check the one box. You can see in number three We're using visuals to say okay. You're starting in word and you're going to go from word to adobe by exporting And this is exactly what it's going to say Um, you know windows or mac we've done a lot of quality control this week And then this is what you're going to want to do in in the adobe and my partner and I know that program inside and out And so we have thought through all of this What's going to be the most honestly palatable for the students and still get us the strongest results So we are teaching them to open the accessibility checker that is part of the plug-in with pro To run the accessibility check and then we have literally told them to choose the options here That are appropriate for the ohio link standards and we've gone through and checked with those ours We can't have image only pdf We have to have the text language We have to have the document title and then that accessibility permission flag is what's set when it's coming out of word So if you if you understand accessibility at all, you know that these are really bare minimum standards and that's a relief because I I got to think about the entire campus. There is no group except I can think of like one or two groups that things are at a technical level where i'm teaching headings At the for for a significant pdf kind of thing like this Yeah, and so when we when we're sure that it's Not going to cause us trouble with real people. We're going to share this with ohio link and then hopefully to you as well You can do this Once we find out if they work So give us the pilot group first and let us modify and then we'll have some real data to see if if it's going to be effective Then we'll modify as necessary So the second question And it's to repeat this for Erica. Are you planning on it for the formal all tests at a later time? So the question is are we planning on adding in formal all text requirements at a later time That depends on what I see from the sample theses and dissertations that come in from the other colleges The first thing I noticed was that there was already solid figure descriptions being made I looked into their style guide to see if that was part of the style guide It was not which means we've gotten lucky with the supervising Chairs in which they're teaching them to do the figure stuff correctly. I kind of doubt our luck is going to hold But we still think it's more effective to teach the solid figure descriptions in this context You know, we're creating social media Or we're throwing an image onto a web page We'll that teaching a simple all text is going to be a lot easier in this situation We might as well kill two birds with one stone by making sure that they're doing descriptive figures And then we meet all the requirements The question is how we're providing access to acrobat pro for all of our students so We are in The process of becoming an adobe campus. That's my answer So that means we my division is in negotiations with adobe right now on on standardizing pricing this type of thing And before too long, we will make that available for them. Now We didn't think that was going to be the case when we started brainstorming with this So we were thinking our way around several things number one Making sure that each of the gatekeepers had access to it having them put pressure on their budget people to say Give me just give me a subscription. It's not going to be that much, you know, hundred bucks. Give me a subscription or moving towards a concentrated week that we focused on Accessibility with the completed documents and having all the students do that seven day free trial with adobe In which they just run it through then and then they pull back out So that's something that we've talked about um And I think we're going to squeak through With kind of being able to avoid though. What if you don't have adobe kind of thing? I don't think it There you go It's $15 for the continuing four week the next four weeks So there's five five weeks for 15 bucks, which has to be one of their lower expenses for their theses and dissertations anyway, but it's been very important to us to not Mentally take on all of the responsibility of this on ourselves to be thinking from the get-go The student is the one who's applying for the degree The student has the illness of making the document correct The student has the illness of purchasing the technology that they need to purchase in order to do this But dog on it. We're going to be with you every step of the way. We'll teach you how to do it We'll be there for you that kind of thing Sorry, you want some? I'm sorry Um Okay, so I'll send you to the ohio link you'll just need to google ohio link Accessibility etd is something one of those lines and you'll get to their chunk of pages. There is another recommendation there I'm not remembering it off the top of my head There are You know the entire microsoft suite has solid accessibility Checkers reminders all of these types of things there are things you can do in there However, because we're so deep into this field my team and I have thought about the the strengths and weaknesses of both adobe and word In light of what a student's going to have the mental bandwidth to be able to do So yes for our ongoing students We will teach them as they're writing to confirm that all of those figure descriptions are accurate and Confirm all of these things as they're using word But if we have them put in because they are two different Companies adobe and microsoft if we do have them put in too much accessibility and word Then we've got to be incredibly detailed in the way that we teach them to open it and scan it in adobe because it can Wipe all of that as it tries to re tag things So we've decided that that's an unnecessary Use of time and use of teaching for the students and we've just said we're going to narrow this down to our top guys So what we're saying is enable it when you export it as a pdf and enable the accessibility features That's all you got to worry about word We'll teach you to do a couple of key things in acrobat and then just get on with your life So you're saying Okay, so this is all conditional Okay, so I've arrived at that decision after several qualifying things up here and my qualifying things up here Included the fact that for the foreseeable future Ohio League is only going to want h1s from us and when you say h1s it shouldn't even be plural There should be one h1 on a page anyway, and that's literally the title So we are giving our preserves permission to Not have that be and not have heading the teaching of headings be in scope as the final phase for students now I'm sorry Now next semester once we get to some workable workflow with this Then I'm going to create a second one pager That's for ongoing students and we'll loop the ongoing students into our training as well with that I'm going to also kind of dodge the bullet in the same way that we're teaching solid figure descriptions to pass for alt text I'm also going to start by teaching them something that a lot of them are doing already Which is a clickable table of contents When they have that clickable table of contents built in then I can teach them Much more easily than tagging and everything else to just make sure that those styles are assigned to the correct heading types Because that's how I teach headings. Anyway, it's thinking about an old school outline You know, how would I separate? What's going to be capital A? What's going to be lowercase, you know a and those types of things? So that'll be our second phase teaching them to do it ongoing Um, but until Ohio League upset we're not going to have standards farther than that and frankly when I look about It's tempting to say well, they should just know how to do it. That should be part of my world But frankly, I have a lot more things as a part of our digital footprint that are likely to wave red flags to the public than accessible ETDs That might be accessed by a person In the future So that's how I'm just kind of triaging at resources and scope and that kind of thing But whoever if you guys are still willing to You know Entertain all those questions. We'll just keep going on. I'll just remind you to repeat at least for some rise part of the question in case our virtual audience Thank you And you all have done a fantastic job talking about 10 I'll just put out a brief poll for the user group meeting Which if you're going to protest ours around the same time so you can catch a recording of mine later Or vice versa We can talk about this more later, especially what we're requiring We've left it open to the schools to customize their own to allow for a tiered approach And it's always are you showing effort? And so for ETDs, we've tried to make it really simple now for our other content on the platform We're going with the osu.k But that's for other content that we purchase so ETDs we're kind of customizing it because it comes from our schools And they want that to jump in and out, but we can talk about this more at the next Session event in the month to do that, but so for those of you online that was Emily Flynn with Ohio Link who was explaining that What we're doing works, but we're not giving the whole picture So please listen to her for the full picture I hardly agree and there will be a users group very soon that's going to talk through that We will adapt as we need to adapt but frankly This is the approach that's happening at the federal level as well If you were to get a knock on the door from DOJ or office of civil rights One of the things they're going to be asking you before anything else is what is your plan to Advance the accessibility of each of these different types of digital content and we can Raise our hands that show them the website show them the page and talk to them about the boot camps and show good faith and good effort and an effort to improve as each semester continues and That's going to be music to their ears Can we hire you? So I do agree with you about the autotagging because man You teach me to do it all the words in autotagging All the autotags are going to be all the way at the top of the basics and you're Started on that. Yeah, okay, great The next thing I want to say though is really the lair here You're in every single of the latex when you autotag the document it makes these crazy gigantic parentheses In the middle of the equation That Yeah, so that was a discussion for those of you online about how through her experience of bull and green it makes more sense to uh, stay in adobe for your basic teaching and that how latex is is doing things to Math and scientific equations that are not that great and again, I would go back to the triage concept Which is what we we focus on quite a bit and we look at scope and use We have to go through like five different conditional things like Is there uh, so in order to access this one etd and say whether it's accessible or not You've got to have other people out here studying that exact same niche thing It's got to show up in other journals to be, you know triggered as something you should look at Then it has to be a student with a disability and for our students with disabilities We are under eight percent of students who have who are hard of hearing or visual impairment So then you get down to them needing to be in one of the eight percent of each of those other ones And then you get into them actually being a screen reader user which not originally impaired students are So what I can say from going through those conditions are not that that meeting the needs of a screen reader user are unimportant But that it might be a good use of my resources to put Information in there about how you could access like let us know if you need a big accessible one And we will convert that one very quickly for you That's probably a better use of our resources than going through and and remediating everything I just realized we missed the remediating part of the question I'm forward-looking they have to think about what's in the repository because it's like not mine So if you guys want to talk about remediating and going backwards at all I think going backwards is more of a challenge than Baking it correctly in the first place is what I'm going to say And I think that's been our experience, but of course there's the scale involved with the students who have And so one thing we talked about on the IR interface is having a way for people to request remediation to the item So having this kind of pop up either in the footer or a bigger page So it's easy for that person to communicate to us what they need when they need it And it's something we've been trying to make You know these benchmarks and house of adding an accessibility for our new projects But we definitely it's a skill set, you know, this biggest challenge to myself since I've been Working in the academic since 2008 to learn these new skills around remediation But that's something I felt very important and crucial to the work that we've done too I think this might be a good time to wrap up what people go with You know, there's food and drink down there. There's the better fare and thank you so much