 Hi everyone. This is Emily with OhioLink. We're just four o'clock, but I think I'll get started because we don't need to go the full hour if we don't need to, but if we want it we can take it. So I'm going to share my slides. Let's do the entire screen. It'll look goofy for a minute, but we will switch over. There we go. All right. So this is the OhioLink ETD Center users group meeting, but given that accessibility has been such a hot topic, we might have others interested as well, and this will be recorded. So anyone even from Ohio who's watching the ProQuest users group live, they can come back later and watch this one virtually. Here we go. So the agenda today is to give a very brief OhioLink ETD Center update. I always love showing numbers and talking about the overview. Then we'll go through the digital accessibility release that's coming up, and I will show screenshots and do a future overview of what's to come. Then we'll also talk about resources for putting ETD digital accessibility into local practice. And this is really, we have this release coming, but how do you make it work? That's the part we'll talk about. And then we'll open it up for Q&A. And again, we can take questions from anyone, whether you're an OhioLink member or not, I'll field whatever comes up. All right. OhioLink ETD Center update. This is one of my favorite things to show off our cool pie chart. We're now at over 100,000. And the biggest piece of that pie chart is the Ohio State University. They added retrospective PhDs a few years ago, which bumps their numbers up even more. So they have a bigger piece of the pie. But we have 36 contributing institutions we're currently over. I know it's not the Michigan blue, though. It's a paler. But I will have to ask the developers if we can hard code OSU Scarlet in there for you. That is a fair point. I don't know why the system fix blue is the biggest, but we'll work in that. We have over 100,000 now. And even though it's not last summer, last summer we celebrated 20 years. So the ETD Center now has been around 21 years. It's always amazes me. We have nearly 120 million downloads to date and 12 million plus from last fiscal year alone. A lot of this has to do with being incorporated to Google Scholar. But part of it is just being online and being really findable. And our documents are open access. And nearly all of them are full text submissions. And very few actually have embargoes or the embargoes will fall off. And so really everything is available. And these numbers will probably grow a bit more, too. We also have full text searching of the OCR PDF documents that was added last summer as well. So we'll see if that also helps bring more interest into the ETD Center and making more things findable, searchable, and get used even more. But that's always exciting download numbers to see. And in Google Scholar, it links back to our perm link in the ETD Center. So even if they find it there, if they go look at the page or to download the file, that's coming into these statistics. And we capture that. So that's still through our platform. So we had a question in the room of do we know how those numbers compare to other repositories that have ETDs? Not offhand, that's not something that I have looked at. Yeah, we can certainly look at the downloads by our institutions. But if you're thinking about other repositories, I think it depends. Yeah, the individual IRs that institutions set up usually have really good statistics and tracking. And then for anyone who uses ProQuest, you can compare with other institutions or levels. But that's because they're within their system. So it's still system by system. But that's a fair point. And I could potentially be a research interest, right? I'm sure people post these download numbers, maybe, or if you did a survey, you could ask people for it. But yeah, I'm not sure where it stacks up to me. It always sounds like a lot. So in January 2023, we have the Digital Accessibility ETD 3.2 release coming. And that's mostly what we're going to talk about today. So we'll go on to the Digital Accessibility Release and Feature Overview. So the Digital Accessibility Release 3.2, we're scheduling the update for January 2023. I don't have a firm date yet, but that will be coming for the Ohio Link members in the room. We will set a date and it'll go out to the listserv. This will be affecting ETD admin, which is our back end site where the submissions actually happen. And what we call ETD search, which is the public ETD center that most people think about when you want to go see a published one or what other institutions might know as the ETD center. That's the public facing ETD search, as we call it. Right now we're just starting the phase of user testing. I sent out an email to the Ohio Link ETD listserv a couple weeks ago asking for interest at a lot of pinbacks, which is excellent. So once we're back from the conference, I'll be next week hopefully sending out information of where to go, how to log in, making sure everyone has accounts who wants to test it. Because this is the exciting part and the place where we can do some feedback from all of our admins, any staff that you want in there to help test and make any final tweaks or adjustments or catch any bugs if we can before the January release. So that is why the user testing is exciting and very important. So now I'll go through the features of it and the things that are changing. For ETD admin, the submission side of things, for digital accessibility, we'll have, and I will show screenshots after this. There's agreement page wording that's going to be new for the student level or the submission form that the students will see. There's an option to upload a digital accessibility report. Again, option. This is not mandatory at this time. So if you want to put one in or your students are asked to put one in based on your requirements, that'll be possible. The review page has been updated to show any digital accessibility report file that's uploaded as well. The final step of publishing will include an acknowledgement that all local minimal digital accessibility standards, so MDAS, are met in the uploaded ETD PDF. So that's the part on the reviewer side as you go to publish. We'll have one more pop-up that'll need to be acknowledged for publishing. And then the system itself will indicate if there's a report or not attached. So that is not going to be selectable, but the system will know to do it if one's there as part of the submission. We've also updated the preview page for ETD, which is available to students to see before they fully submit their document, or as reviewers to kind of give a double check and also to show. So I'm glad we're able to update the preview as well. That was a new feature last summer that I was really excited about. I hope other people use it and enjoy it too. I just thought it was a great way to give everyone an advanced look at what the metadata is going to be like if they put in their embargo request or not, and that kind of stuff. We also have a column option added to the status reports. So you can easily go into the different categories of statuses and select to see the report file, and it'll say yes or no if a digital accessibility report is uploaded. So we're going to start tracking that as well to help people, especially any schools that want to require it, to easily look to see if their submitted ETDs have one or not. So I think that'll be important tracking in the future. So I'm going to walk through the slides. I did highlight the text that is being added or the things that are changing. So it's highlighted for the presentation benefit. This won't be highlighted in the system itself. No, this is unfortunately just my screenshot that I have. Is it pretty small on screens? So I'm going to read it out loud, and my slides will be available for later download. I like to take bigger shots to show more of the screen, but you're right, I probably should have done a zoomed in one for the phrasing. So the highlighted part says, you acknowledge and agree that you have used best efforts to comply with your institution's acceptable accessibility standards for ETDs. And that is just one of a list of things that says do not continue unless, and that's going to be the new one that's added as students go through. So we're not changing the publication agreement, which is just below it. This is just part of the make sure you've done this to the students. And again, the your institution will apply to each member institution that's using it. So the Ohio State universities is going to be different from University of Toledo is going to be different from OU. And so we use that phrase your institution so you can all customize it. This is the document upload page. We've added a new file type. So that's that first highlight on the screen. It says document type, and then a dropdown for choosing either thesis, dissertation, supplemental file, or the highlighted one is now the new digital accessibility report. So it is going to be called out specifically as a type on its own instead of just uploading it as a supplemental file and worrying about knowing it or finding it later. So the question was, do we anticipate students using an uploading reports? I don't know. We are allowing it at the student the document upload level, which students or staff can do so that it's possible no matter what you decide you want requirements to be. If you want students to generate these and upload them, it's possible. If you want the staff to do it, if you don't want to do it, but it's there and it's tracked separately. So we tried to make it easy and thinking about how it's going to display in the system and also just keeping track of these things if they're ever needed in the future, if you need to see what has something or doesn't. So as you can see in the bottom half, we have the uploaded documents. We have the thesis document. We have a supplemental file, which is a JPEG. And then we have the document type accessibility report, which is the second highlighting lower down on the page. A lot of talking today. Excuse me. So the thing to note here in this example, I uploaded an HTML version of a report. It came up in other presentations about what software to use and if you don't have access to proprietary software, what else can you use? There are other things that will generate accessibility reports or we wanted it to be flexible to be able to capture the wide variety of possible formats and to make it acceptable to what your local workflows might cover or what you're able to do. So we don't just require an Adobe report type that might be a PDF. We've allowed say this HTML page in case you can generate a report that way or any other type of file that you need that you're able to use if you want to do reports. Again, this is optional, but we've put in the ability and we've made it any file type just to be broad and customizable since there isn't one standard way of doing everything at least not yet. This is that review page that I talked about. It shows an overview of the metadata that was entered, the publication choices that were made about copyright and all that. The mailing address is the Ohio link office and so it shows that student information if it was for an actual student and then the files down below including the digital accessibility reports. So that comes through to the review page as well. For publishing though, now we're away from the student view and we're thinking about the reviewer or the local ETD admin. If they're the ones that publish when you click either ready to publish ETD, which is now a cue feature in the new release last summer and it'll hold it ready to publish and you know you've reviewed it already, or if you click publish ETD and it immediately publishes, you will see this either way because what you're doing right now is saying it's ready to go. I don't need to look at this document again. So this is where we need to capture this regardless of if you're going to publish right away or release them all later. As we can see the second option is checked and it that's the digital accessibility report is attached to the submission. So the system checked that for me already because this example has one but it's this top check box. I won't read the entire agreement but we can go over that if we want I suppose if that would be helpful. So we do I will read the top check box. So we have the agreement that says you did everything to the best of your ability and to local MDAS and then it says to publish this submission please confirm that you have completed the following steps and the first check box under that is the MDAS or applicable accessibility standards have been satisfied to the fullest extent possible and then it says required. So because that is not selected I can't click okay and publish this ETD. So I selected that option the system knows there's a report already so it's auto selected that one and now I can click okay and publish the ETD. This is the same thing except this example didn't have a report so that second one isn't auto checked I'm still not able to click okay. On the next one I've clicked the first one to say I've done the accessibility to the fullest extent possible and now the okay box is available. So report is optional and whether you have one or not you're still able to publish but your reviewers or you will need to click I have satisfied to the fullest extent possible and that'll be starting in January for all new ETDs being published. Yes please. I think if it works I can just re-ask a question so unless you have significant comments we can have you come up and maybe that's easier than trying to turn on yet another mic and rue the technology in the room potentially so do you want to come up and I can I can share this one over here Tim if you want to come join me up top how about that pull it over here for a minute. So my question was on the so basically what we have is thank you so basically what we have is so our students for this autumn are going to be some major documents in a couple months basically and I don't think they're going to be it's not going to be ready we're not ready and so kind of for us playing forward if the document was uploaded you know before you guys go live with the new system when we go to publish I assume they'll still they'll be in the new system at that point if you'd have to check that box that makes sense yeah that makes sense so anything that hasn't been published even if it's submitted before january we'll still see that box in january okay yeah right so it's whenever the whenever it's actually published when I would publish them six to eight weeks or six weeks after their degrees have been conferred I will say that we've met the accessibility standards so the question was so if you have a lot of those from fall that don't actually get published until after in the january part are they still going to be held to the accessibility standards um yes they will still see this message now I mean if it's helpful and maybe someone in if someone's asking in chat is it worth reading because maybe I should read the agreement because we built in well we have to the fullest extent possible so um but it's also your local standards so as we get further into the presentation we'll talk about customizing it for local use um because we we refer to it as the local standards your your institutions minimal accessibility digital digital accessibility standards mdas or if there's no established institutional mdas the most recent industry standard so we built some wording in there but really you're going to need to write you're going to want to write something and we can talk about what that becomes later on but they will see it and you know it's right now it's to the best of everyone's ability and getting started we know there's going to be that you know that time where everyone's ramping up or doing what they can and maybe building to stuff later it will see the the uh checkbox if you you publish later but um you know that's going to be um officially it'll it'll be there but if if um those ones aren't under what you're putting out for the accessibility standards they might not have gone through that yet so yeah I understand there's going to be like that weird overlap um and for those ones you if you didn't have a standard in place yet I mean you're doing what you're working to it and so you'll still need to check it but you know to the fullest extent possible if you didn't have it in place yet it wasn't possible yet you know I mean it's kind of tricky but I think for that starting out there might be that circumstance but you know we'll we'll just have to work through that for for the time if that makes sense yes we got a hard week to put that end of December mark we're going to have 60 to 80 so understanding your point and that comes along into that like ratio theory where we are in some public prior to this requirement yeah we've published that because we have so many if they don't need that requirement is that what's going to be a problem for us or no because we're in that great state of heritage and so I guess that's why we start preparing to do this right now a fall soon yeah that's the so the the question is when should you do it especially if your fall students are really going to be published in january because that's their really when it's going to go but they're working on them now say yeah it's it's I think the startup is going to be a tricky time to capture I mean whatever you can do as soon as it makes sense I think is always good if you can start sooner and you can do stuff I don't know if you caught the Kent session before but if you listen to them and how they're putting in digital accessibility standards they're trying to start with something simple that they know they're already meeting you know if a lot of students are doing clickable um table of contents that kind of already plays with headings in some ways and it's an easier discussion with students about making sure headings are set up properly because they're already kind of making use and seeing the the the effect of having that in there um and that's um as we'll get into the to the setting your your local mdas that's the the important thing of us keeping it customizable so you can start where you need to start and then if you want to add more and build up to it but that's a fair point and um you know at some point we have to pick a date unfortunately and it's not going to be it's never going to be perfect and to get everyone up and running and even though there are some accessibility there's some legislation about accessibility and certain requirements as far as the detailed submissions of PDFs you know that's still really um there's nothing necessarily formalized that we can have everyone follow so we're trying to figure that out as we go and of course as institutions you're trying to figure out what you can fit in as you go to so you know that's it's as long as we're showing that we're working towards stuff and doing that good faith effort you have a plan for the future ones and and that's coming I think if there is some overlap um that's certainly going to be a time period that will probably keep in mind as you know policies went into place but this first batch some of these might not have hit the requirements because they came sooner so yeah we're going to have to start requiring it in January but maybe at that point you know if you didn't have something officially in place that you were working with students they're obviously not going to catch it but that's going to just be due to a timing issue of coordinating these things and that's the hard part trying to to pick a date but then setting it far out enough and telling people you've got to start working on it but there's also not a checklist we can give people and that's the the hard part of digital accessibility the challenge yes kent's just starting now to we are in a position to now reach out and say I can say partly we do have a template for the students to use it we have to look at it and it's about 75-80 percent accessible it's not very strange so I mean some students are going to do that but for us I think they do need to be able to use the checklist right yeah it's that idea of us putting you know putting that out or when I know it isn't you know I know it isn't accessible and so that the box is the it's a tricky thing I think but you know I'll say you know for what I've of course we look at it in a different way too but it's whole that you know because it is a university function type thing right if you're acting in good faith and you're even you know what the university would expect so to speak right at the university's responsibility right it's not a personal responsibility but again it's going to be tough in this situation for us to check that box knowing that this is not accessible it's not just so the the discussion in the room the discussion in the room is about concerns for especially that first batch of students that are going to hit up against the reviewers have to check this box and maybe things aren't in place because they're doing their stuff right now so it's hard to catch them in media res in time for for the January when this checkbox is going to be there a lot of especially with pdf certain things tend to come with it sometimes and so they might be accessible to a certain extent can't found that you know a lot of their figure descriptions worked in ways that were really similar to alt text and so if you have people that are putting in super descriptive figure descriptions figure text I mean that might serve in a similar function you know and so whether you do alt text right away or the submissions come in with that you know that might be part of it at least to start I mean they're not it's it's also a gradient of of just how accessible and in what ways right so it's not a yes no is it accessible or not it's in what ways is it accessible and to who and to how much like to what extent so it's also tricky to sometimes talk about digital accessibility and then think about where it lives everywhere no it's it's not a point to alternate text you're right but right it wouldn't serve as alt text but if it's descriptive in its own way then I guess well I you can watch the Kent one they make better arguments than I do but they're starting off with what they're able to do and what they've been finding in ETDs already that's the thing everyone needs to do something of their own so I'm going to walk through the screenshots and then we're kind of talking about the resources stuff and building local policy just kind of naturally like how to put it into place so I'm going to progress through this and then we can get to that point and I can pull up some websites and resources and we can look at that a bit this is the preview page before something gets published that a student can look at or the reviewer or admin can look at it's watermarked but this is what it would look like if it were published at the moment the digital accessibility report is going to be part of the files get shown so that's what we've set up right now and then it shows them what other information is is going to look like just as a preview of the e-plished ETD to come if there's an embargo all the files get the same thing including the digital accessibility report so this just kind of shows you none of that will be available until the embargo falls off if you have any of those for the status reports we now have this column that you can add and it'll say yes or no if it has a report and then you'd you could go into it to get the actual file or you could view it on the public site and see the file there if you needed the report in the future and then just for ETD search this one's pretty simple it's just the display of the report I showed you the preview but this is a live published ETD in our test system this one has a example file again so the report is there and this one's embargoed so again it's not showing up because the file all of the files that were uploaded are embargoed so we've gotten into this discussion again because it just naturally happens but we'll talk about resources for putting ETD digital accessibility into local practice this came up in the Kent one as well the Ohio Inc recommended minimum requirements this is meant to be a potential starting point for writing your own institutions local ETD digital accessibility policy and requirements I've also had feedback that policy can be a more official term on some campuses so if it's the MDAS that you need to call it we can also that's what we refer to is the institution's MDAS so that can also be another option you think it would be helpful if I show this so they should still be showing up and drop hop in now we weren't going to post on Ohio link but I can share it to the list serve if that would be helpful all right for Ohio link members the slides will go out to the ETD list serve after the conference and then for other conference attendees you can get it through hop in and then when they make the the conference proceedings available I have submitted my slides as well so you can get it too so we have a page and we give the purpose the recommended practice and we strongly urge every member institution to adapt local MDAS for your institution and that's what we refer to in that checkbox so whatever it ends up being and maybe you need a one for when it goes live in January then maybe you say for anything submitted but published in January this is the local MDAS that we're going to hold it to and maybe there's not too much there and then maybe you have another statement that says for everything else that's submitted after this date this is what you're going to be held to as the MDAS so maybe it's that iterative to catch it again it's your local MDAS and that's why I highly recommend writing one because that's what we're going to refer to and then then you can make it your own but because we needed to start somewhere and give people a potential checklist or things to think about where you begin locally we do have this recommended minimum for PDFs which the PDF includes full text and that's already you know everything is submitted as a PDF and everything has a text like that is the point of your PDF documents right is to be the text so you already need that we also recommended that the PDF accessibility permission tag is checked which is an option you can set when you're creating your PDF the text language in the PDF is specified so if it's written in English you check to make sure that it says English language in the PDF settings we do recommend that figures and images include alt text because that is as Kim was discussing with us in the room it is very important figure descriptions alone aren't a good start or a good replacement but we do recommend alt text be in there especially for figures and images and then that the PDF includes a title so that first header level is usually the title level so those are recommended they're not they are bare they're a bare minimum because it's somewhere to start you can go beyond this you really should tailor it to whatever you find important we don't talk about color contrast or some of the other things you could go into that you might want to some institutions have gone way beyond this some institutions are starting with a couple things so please write if you're not a link member please write your own local mdas to use that means what you need because that's part of it everyone's local workflow is different and their staffing levels are different and so most of our policies in the Ohio link et center are up to you all where the submission platform we take the document but you control the policies you control the publishing of the submission itself saying if it's ready or not if it needs more work if it needs more formatting that's all up to you so we've set this up the same way everyone has a different embargo policy some allow it some require a form some don't allow it some require it for a certain amount of time before it gets released and this is going to work in the same way so you're going to want a local mdas of some sort and you could always revise and add to it as as a belator if you want so the resource list is another page that we have this has information but it also links out to useful tutorials websites with digital accessibility some other institutions and departments already do some great things and have some great student resources so we don't want anyone to recreate if you don't need to if you need to make your own that's fine but you know we want to make sure we can aggregate certain things that people can use what's already there so again we have a purpose and this page is intended for admins and reviewers so we're not trying to help you train the students on this page it's to help you check these things so for our minimum you know we have resources about digital accessibility and montana state university of alabama penn state university of toronto mississippi state university and michigan state university all had great websites or information available um this one's a youtube channel that already discusses digital accessibility in various ways and for different topics so we've linked to all of those we have resources for creating accessible accessible etd files so things about word things for google docs grackle docs tools for checking pdf accessibility this came up at the the kent presentation too of what do you use if you can't have or afford adobe uh acrobat there's another checker a tington checker if i'm saying that right the acro pc 2021 is a free tool as well um there's also some uh websites to help check for accessibility too and then this goes into um the detail looking at the um adobe acrobat pro and how to check all the ohio link minimum so that list that we had of four or five items um that you can customize for your own local mdas but for those ones that we list here's a start on how to look at it and do it so that's been all linked as well so this is hopefully a resource to get everyone started and how to check some of these and then send you out to other places where they've already done above and beyond just these but also other things to look at and they link out or provide resources to um work with the students on how they can do it so the last uh well we have a couple more points the last website that i'll jump out to though is the decisions and considerations guide this is really points to think through when planning local implementation of etd digital accessibility policy and workflows i put this together for our members but i suppose anyone could really pick it up and look at it so i will take you to it it was my attempt to think through the various pathways someone might think about this so it's a little i'll jump down to like workflows so for the submissions so one question i have do students submit their own etds or are they submitted on behalf of the student by a local administrator or reviewer we have two two ways that etds get into the center and it might not be the students so you might just be training your staff for when they upload the document doing these things in the review process what happens if you require some of these things and they're not done do you send it back to the student or are you a campus that edits the etds yourself and so you would just make that change yourself and re upload the document do you have local existing instructions for you or your staff or your submitters that might be updated to create any local documentation um so just kind of daughter questions from different topics just to get people thinking i won't go through everything but that's what this document is it's it's try to begin to cover things that you might want to think through based on your circumstances and what apply because that local mdas is going to be important but it's also making sure it's dual and you can put it into action and where that responsibility lives with the student with the staff um and how you're going to work that so again we're trying to make it customizable like our other policies to fit into your workflows because you know that best and staffing is different at every member institution for the etd center we also have community meetings so we have an upcoming q and a session on october 3rd we might have a little mini presentation as part of that but we're going to leave a lot of time for q and a so we can have an open discussion and talk some more about these questions because this has been great from the room too and hopefully we'll have some online um questions if they come into that we can address but that session is also coming up because i know everyone's not here at us etd a and so and we can't say this enough to people right it's it's something that we can continue talking about and it's beneficial whether people are here or not today so that's another opportunity um to discuss um etd with accessibility with uh ohio link coming soon and that will it's been going out on the listserv we'll also send it again as a reminder getting closer also on the ohio link website we have recordings available in our webinar section everything's transcribed they're posted so if you want to catch a previous etd community meeting we've been discussing this for at least a couple years so i think the march 21 meeting as well as march 22 uh capture that um capture digital they both talk about digital accessibility um as their main topics i think those are just the two main ones that are up there but all of our etd community meetings are are posted and available third one will also be recorded and be posted about a week or two later as well to be reviewed later too if people need so now i'm going to open it up for any more q and a yes environment if our mdas was three things the accessibility report of course the other things that aren't going to be addressed does that kind of raise any red flags or you know either or any other entities like how to be so a question in the room was so if you upload a digital accessibility report it's going to show certain things that it ran in the report but if your local mdas has only a few of those as required how do we reconcile the two because the the digital accessibility report if it's attached it will be up and a view available to the public a viewable file that is also why we made it any file format so if you want to customize something you can use any report report that you want and so maybe that looks like a text document or something or generate your own pdf that says this has these requirements were met and if it's a if it's a i'm just i'm just brainstorming this new as i am talking um but you could maybe do a template right if you need all the etds to match your local mdas and it's three four thing if it's four things you could have a template that says this etd matches these minimal digital accessibility standards it has been checked and verified and maybe you just save that and if that's going to be if you want the report attached you could generate that in any format you want um and then you could post that up with every etd and it almost becomes like a type of cover sheet then right like a report that you just stick it's it's we verified that has to meet all these because that's our local mdas and that's what we require we made sure it did and now we also want a report to say that it does we're going to put that in upload it and then you have that and if it's the same for each and every one and they have to meet it you could potentially do something like that where you always just attach that same file or maybe it has the title and the author name on it too right or something to um identify it as as distinct well it depends so it's an optional step yeah so the the point was made about if it's a leitech file you might not be able to meet and maybe you have a different document that you upload for that or maybe you don't upload a report for that i i mean maybe or maybe you have one that says this document is in leitech to the best of our ability we tried to meet these standards but at this time leitech does not allow for that and then they do it so so we've left the report optional the question is if you generate the report in adobe acrobat but for like a leitech file you need to like stipulate some things if that's what you want to do then you'd have to do that separate and then upload it it's an optional it's an optional file right now we left it customizable to file format too because we don't know what to expect we don't know if we're going to need to attach these things if we want them or what format or what style adobe does some good reports that it'll auto generate but you're right there's certain things that don't get covered or that might not be um applicable to that etd that can't be possible um that might look odd in a report that says it failed this but you know there's context needed so and we're not requiring the report but we're making it possible in case that's a value and it it's something that wants to be added um it seemed like a interesting thing to put in and because it's coming with the standard we thought if we're going to do something like that it makes sense to make it as part of this release and make it available but yeah it's the as people begin to work through this i think that's also going to affect um the use of the system and again if there's an official pdf standard that comes out or best practices or something maybe that also affects what you generate for a report or the standards people follow but right now everyone seems to be working towards this and it's good we're doing what we can in ways that we can um before there's anything any mandates or anything more official in place exactly relevant to this these documents so it's we're still in that uh digital accessibility uh is is pretty nebulous in that in that way and so we talk about it as a topic but there's a lot of components to it and you know fully accessible is is hard to achieve i think even if you meet all the accessibility report requirements because there's always another way it could probably be more accessible right and there might be ways we think about in the future too so it's also kind of a snapshot at this time to what we're setting up at the moment but that might change down the road and then we might have to look at things differently or account for something else so we're also trying to build that flexibility into the system while making it customizable for you all but these are really great points yeah it's a it's a challenge to try to put something into place that is so new but it seems a value and everyone wants to talk about it and want to do things for it because you know making things accessible benefits everyone even if it's for certain populations who might it it might be really crucial for so that's also an interesting idea too so i mean so i'm i'm gonna say it depends to answer you now and i'm gonna repeat what i can for the the chat um or for the online participants so the question um was who has the authority to create the local mdas um and where does that live and does the grad school have have a say in the matter or could they um i'm gonna say it depends on the campus unfortunately as with all policies or if a local mdas could be um not necessarily treated as an official policy but you could do it in a different way i mean that that's going to be up to what is possible on your campus and how things work and what the culture is and how things are set up um if anyone was at the Kent session um there was a great question asked about you know Ohio link follows wickeg double a 2.0 you're following that for etds that's so um incredible how are you doing that and the the the distinction is um Ohio link will follow that for certain purchases for new content because that's what osu is doing so there are fiscal agent i didn't i realized i launched into this assuming you know what ohio link is everyone and we're uh so i'll step back a second or an academic library consortium we have about a hundred members for um from institutions throughout the state so two years independent uh universities public institutions um community colleges we have a cleveland clinic is is a member and the state library of Ohio so um we're a central office that helps all those members of those about a hundred members we have 36 that submit to the etd center and so all of their etds are together in kind of a consortium repository that's open access built by our own developers so it's a homegrown system which means i can work with developers to get this stuff in and to make tweaks and we can do user testing that that matters to the system because i'm working with the developers on our system so so as osu is our fiscal agent and for new purchases they need things to require the wickeg 2.0 guidelines and for everything else they're moderating things so for our library director deans and directors group decided that accessibility is something that ohio link needs to focus on it's a priority for them and part of that was they called out um etds in specific to make sure that content because as a content provider our institutions are submitting to the etd center and we're providing that as ohio link so they want the content to be accessible because we have influence and control over what what goes in there so that's why these requirements came about for the local mdas that'll just kind of depend on your institution and what you're able to pull off and who needs to be involved i mean certainly the people publishing and the local admins should have a role somewhere in that and um just where else it needs to go will kind of depend on local circumstances um just because everyone's kind of different but it it would make sense that it would probably either come from or start with something from the the people who are um approving the the etds so the local administrators and then whatever staff is also involved because it's going to be you all putting it in your workflows and also training your your students that are submitting however they get trained and anyone else affected so it is going to be a bit of a ripple um to make sure people are are meeting what you decide so i know it's not the best answer because of course people like specific things but that's unfortunately i think kind of the it just is going to depend does that kind of get after yes so if you have a local ADA person or if there's a council that you need to pass things by that'll just kind of depend so we have students submit by what we call end of semester they actually have to carry three states to use documents so they definitely finish that when they graduate in spring um of course they'll be publishing their documents in spring as well but they would not be finishing your January 6th so if you might have affected any um it would be nice to do the transition after that I don't know if anybody else has that lines that might yes yeah so there's a comment in the room about how there's certain january dates potentially for for students and end of the term and and when people graduate exactly um we can certainly talk about an exact date in january when this would go live and when you start seeing that acknowledgement and pop-up come again we haven't settled on a date yet so I mean we can certainly maybe it's time to do another survey out to the list there to ask about deadlines but also maybe do you have anything in january that would be good to work around if we can easily avoid some of this for those at least that starting submission so um yeah it sounds like it should probably get a list uh survey out yeah so when we talk about the ETD MDAS we do refer to it as as such because I think it is different and unique content um so I I think it's probably valuable to have a a specific ETD one no matter what your um if you even have a local MDAS already but maybe there needs to be an ETD version that's probably going to be beneficial because these are very specific things and so having a specific one might make sense um there was also interest in in um my idea of having the um the two MDASs that maybe you have them dated so things before this date apply this thing and this one applies for things going forward um I I think that's a interesting idea that people could think about too especially if you're going to have this kind of in between gap of we're going to start having this stuff go up and you're going to see it but those students weren't incorporated into whatever the requirements are no no I'm just just looking for any other questions um room chatter is fine I just don't want to miss a question so do we have any other questions in the room so okay so And then it really applies more to what it's like. And probably enough, we just got an email today that I'm going to start working on. I was like, this is crazy. Does BGSEE people access email? Talking about the e-mail phone, it's good. And it says, it's talking about making our content accessible to people to have a see-how, can be presented from the e-mail or from social services. And it says, it's also the law in BGSEE policy. Well, really, I think we have a law. And there are many things that are talking about some of the services. It has a link for web accessibility. And then it goes down to the top. And that's definitely the guidelines that I'm going to answer this time. So, Kim, I'm going to give a brief recap. And then I looked at my watch. And we are at 5 o'clock. We have filled the hour. Kim did a recording from BGSU. But it sounds like it's not branded. So it's not branded. And she will share it to the ETD listserv. Could you do that? Send it out. And then OhioLink members can have it. And so you can have Kim's walkthrough of the MDAS that she set up and how to meet those standards for those students. And so you could see an example or think about using something similar. This has been a really great session. If we have any online questions or nothing was coming in, OK. You can always email me. I'm Evelyn at OhioLink.edu. We also have a Twitter. And we also have a Twitter for our ETDs. I probably should put that up there, because all of our ETDs get tweeted out. But you can contact us at OhioLink if you need. Or if you want to chat more, I'd love to talk. And if you're an OhioLink member, come to the October 3 Q&A that we have going on to talk more about digital accessibility. Thank you, everyone.