 Okay. Okay. So just some background on our project. So in our library, accessibility has largely been focused on web and technology access, but not as much on the content. We don't have a library or university policy regarding the accessibility of content in our institutional repository, which is called ScholarWorks. And the majority of the items in ScholarWorks are graduate theses. So when people add items, including theses to ScholarWorks, we do have them sign a distribution license that includes a statement of compliance of 508 accessibility standards. However, there are no guidelines or instructions on helping students actually remediate their work to be accessible. And we firmly believe that the library does have a responsibility to make our materials 508 compliant and accessible. And for anyone in this session who's not familiar with 508 compliance, it's shorthand for a law that requires websites to be safe and accessible to people with disabilities. For us, our work is heavily focused on making our content accessible to people who use screen readers. So a little bit about this project. The project began as a response to address 600 previously digitized theses. At least our project manager received a quick training on PDF remediation from our IT department, from their accessibility tech coordinator. We hired and onboarded a work study student assistant in February of 2020 who would be focused just on this project. So that was about a month before our campus closed. When the library closed and we moved to a remote workplace, this seemed like a project that could work well remotely. And because we had trained a student assistant, we knew it was possible for our student employees to do this work. So here at Sacramento State, we're a regional campus of a public university system, California State University, and we serve lots of non-traditional first generation and parenting students. So it was really important that our student employees could continue working and being paid during the pandemic. 47% of Sac State students struggle with food insecurity and almost 13% experience homelessness at least once during college. So we really, really wanted to advocate for keeping our students employed. By converting this project to a telecommuting project, we were able to keep all of our library student assistants employed who wanted to be. So not just the original student. This included student assistants from nearly every department in the library, not just collection management services were Elyse and I are based. And of course, this new work project was very different for our student assistants who had worked in circulation or shelving before. We also have a staff member who moved to doing full transcripts from 1950s these days. And this was to supplement her job tasks that didn't move well to a remote environment. So now with that background, Elyse is going to tell us how this all worked. So our general approach to remediation has been to focus on basic remediation of our PDF documents in the repository only. This basic remediation primarily focuses on evaluating the existing accessibility of documents. You know, these are some Adobe terms, but running the Adobe Action Wizard or Autotag functions to automatically enhance viability, then manually ensuring that documents contain the appropriate heading structures and that figures, tables and lists were either tagged sufficiently by the Adobe software or by updating the content types and structures, as well as verifying the logical reading order using the reading order view only. Alternate text was supplied for figures and the use of figures generally was applied liberally as an easy and basic way to address complex content, including tables that were not autotagged appropriately. Our learning management system Canvas has a tool called Ally that we use to assess the accessibility of completed documents and those that pass a threshold of approximately 85% for born digital PDFs and 67% for scanned PDFs are considered to be passing. The reason for taking this basic approach is due to the incredibly quick transition and rapid scaling of this project. As students needed to be immediately onboarded, there was no efficient way to conduct any assessment of the student's proficiency in working in a more technical environment and software and hardware capabilities and access were unknown. Focusing on basic remediation allowed for the quick onboarding of students and ease of the review process for staff who were additionally assigned to this project. The training process was almost entirely asynchronous. The existing training manual that we produced for our one student assistant was enhanced to include significantly more examples as well as short video tutorials for specific steps and functions. A comprehensive training video that demonstrated the entire workflow and process was distributed to students along with the training manual and confirmation was requested once training materials were reviewed. Students were then able to request one-on-one meetings to review any questions they had. Our staff reviewers received live training and basic remediation to be able to assist with student questions and fix basic issues during review. There's no quota required for students to complete on a weekly basis. Our documents range inside of length and complexity making it impossible to require a weekly completion rate. Staff reviewers additionally review documents on whatever schedule works within their other assigned duties and priorities. Next slide, please. So students have been working on two projects, theses digitized as PDFs retrospectively by the library and ETDs that are submitted directly to the repository by our students. The initial workflow focused on remediating the library scanned content. We've primarily been using SharePoint as our platform for sharing documents. Students working on digitized theses were able to access their assigned documents in their SharePoint folders. Students who worked on ETD submissions download the PDFs from our D-space repository and then upload the in progress or completed file to their SharePoint folder at the end of their shift. Assigned documents are tracked in individual spreadsheets in their folders that are derived from a master list in our staff files. Communication channels, including a dedicated Slack channel and a distribution email list that included all staff reviewers were created to ensure that students' questions and issues could be answered and resolved in a timely manner. The Slack channel proved to be exceptionally helpful as students provided peer support during off hours and weekends. Our staff reviewers then rely on the students' spreadsheet to determine which records are ready for review. PDF surfers downloaded and uploaded into Canvas to determine basic accessibility score. Staff can connect their Adobe Acrobat software to the SharePoint document library which helps to facilitate review since documents can be checked out and edited directly in Adobe. Once review is complete, the reviewer adds a cover page to the document which indicates that the PDF has undergone 508 compliance review and provides contact information for any enhancement requests that are needed. For scan theses, we had previously been replacing the file in the dSpace record including a metadata note in the file description that 508 compliance review had been performed. However, since we are currently migrating to a new institutional repository, completed PDFs are currently being stored in staff files. We anticipate adding the remediated ETD files to the students' records rather than replacing them as we do want to retain the original submission for preservation purposes. Our reviewers then as a final step just record the accessibility score in the students' spreadsheet and note any outstanding issues that were unable to be resolved. Next slide, please. So the greatest challenges to the smooth running of this project have definitely been communication or rather breakdowns in communication and technology issues. As mentioned, there were a few dedicated lines of communication set up to ensure that students' questions could be answered in a timely fashion. However, as a result of having staff reviewers who are juggling many other responsibilities and are themselves not accessible content specialists, the vast majority of the questions are still directed to myself as the project manager, which can at times require a lot of attention and diversion from other responsibilities. In addition, students are like the rest of us transitioning to entirely email-based communication, which means that there have been, at times, important broadcast emails sent to student assistants regarding workflow or other updates that have been lost in the shuffle. Thankfully, in very, very, very few cases, we've had to deal with any students that have just simply been unresponsive. Technology certainly for many of us has posed the biggest challenge to this remote telework transition. Students have had varying levels of reliable technology or internet access. Onboarding students to both SharePoint and Adobe Acrobat proved to be challenging and poses ongoing issues. For example, the university expanded Adobe licenses for students in the wake of the COVID shutdown. This extension expired in July, so in order to continue their ability to access Adobe Acrobat to do the remediation, as only reader is part of the standard student suite, our campus IT department created provisional student accounts. An unknown side effect of our single sign-on authentication system is that when students started back to school in the fall, if they logged into their student email, Canvas, or any other university application using the same browser that they had been accessing their SharePoint folders for the 508 compliance project, the authentication automatically logged them out of their provisional accounts and into their student accounts. Students were then unknowingly checking out documents that they could not then check in since their student accounts weren't authorized or they began receiving error messages that their access had been denied. The concluding resolution was that SharePoint needed to be accessed in a different browser than what they were using for their primary school work and access. However, this issue itself caused weeks of back and forth with our library systems department in campus IT to resolve the issue, impeding students' abilities to complete their work and it still poses ongoing challenges for the students to be able to access their documents. And next slide. So, Elise, I do wanna say that we have about four minutes left for your presentation and the questions. Okay, I'll try to be quick. So just some reflections in next steps. Of course, our initial response was really reactionary. In March, we like many institutions had short notice. We'd close and spring term would continue virtually. So we do feel that we've responded well, but we're now in a place to assess and improve. Our university system has already announced that spring term will be remote and so we want to improve moving forward. So with that in mind, we moved to more training for our students and we had synchronous trainings over Zoom this month and a revised training manual. So now the big need is more trained staff to manage our students and increase that staff expertise. We have an unbalanced workload where our amazing students are remediating far faster than we can review. So we'd like to decrease the time spent by our project manager. Some next steps. We want to revise our deposit guidelines for theses. We wanna see more of our theses arrive to us and not need remediation. So we're hoping to work with office of grad studies on that. We're also having conversations with our student research center on training undergrads to make accessible research posters. We're really hoping to see a cultural shift on our campus to where accessible documents are the norm. See, we currently have 28 students working with us so that I guess that's the next step is they're still with us and those we lost were to graduation. So for a positive reason. And so even though this project came from very particular circumstances, we think it can be a useful model to other libraries. This is a task you can train your students to do. And it's a task that can be performed remotely and by people in different departments. Whatever reason you might want to explore that not just during a pandemic. So we have a link to some information about this. At least can drop it in the chat and those are emails. I'm sorry, we don't have a lot of times for questions with the tech difficulties. So I do think we have time for maybe one or two questions if you want to pop them in the chat or if you want to unmute yourself. Hi, this is Emily Flynn from OhioLink. Thank you so much for presenting on this topic. As Terry Green mentioned, OhioLink is thinking about digital accessibility for our ETDs as well. I'm wondering about alt text. Do you offer students guidance on what they put in for alt text or do they decide themselves? Because it seems like some of that could be a matter of opinion. A difference between what the author intended or what I might choose versus you might choose. I'm just wondering about alt text. Thank you. Yeah, that's a great question. And we definitely do provide guidance and the link that we've shared here has our documentation that you're free to use or reuse for your own purposes. So our approach to alternate text, as you mentioned, it's really hard for us on this end to interpret what the author is attending, especially when you get into incredibly disciplined, specific figures or we're not generally dealing with just like a picture of a flower, something that could be easily described. So our kind of recommendation and guidance for our students is that thankfully most of the, anything that we're tagging as a figure that would need alt text does usually have pretty substantial caption information. So we prefer tagging using like a figure caption tag structure that way that that information is conveyed and we're not misrepresenting the figure itself. So yeah, so just kind of relying on that caption as the alternate text, unless it is something that you really feel comfortable and confident that you could adequately describe, following the etiquette of providing alternate text, which is all included in our training manual that I've shared with you here. Elise and I are happy to stay if during the five minute break if people do have other questions. And you can also feel free to reach them by email or then if you think of questions in the next few minutes and hours, I'm sure they'll still be on the call and you can reach out to them again too. So thank you both so much for your presentation today.