 Hello, everyone, and welcome to panel discussion, Ohio Link Accessibility Local Implementation. Sharing this information with you is Kim Fleschman from Bowling Green State University, Terry Green from the University of Toledo, Tim Watson from the Ohio State University, Cindy Kristoff from Kent State University, Natalie Cohen from Case Western Reserve University, and myself. My name is Emily Flynn. I'm with Ohio Link, and I will be your moderator for the next 50 minutes or so. A quick reminder before we begin. During the presentation portion, please keep your audio and video muted and turned off unless you are presenting or you're asked to participate by the moderator. You may use the chat tab to ask questions which will be addressed during the Q&A portion. Thank you for joining us and we'll get started with this panel. I'm also going to post that in the chat. Here we go. Ohio Schools and Accessibility. Policies, implementations, issues, exceptions, and our community of schools. So I'm going to first give a brief overview of the Ohio Link ETD Center. Ohio Link is a consortium of academic libraries and the State Library of Ohio. We have about 117 member libraries and 36 of which participate in the Ohio Link ETD Center. It is a shared open access consortial submission platform and repository. So we have a back end for submission and a front end website that shows the published ones where people can search and download and use the ETDs. We have nearly 120,000 ETDs currently and there's the link on the slides. These are available in the US ETDA webpage or will be shortly after the conference. It is a locally developed platform and digital accessibility has been incorporated into it within the last couple of years. The digital accessibility became a consortial priority in addition to meeting compliance. They also we developed local policies and had lots of discussions with the Ohio Link ETD Council. There are advisory committee between our ETD community members and our Ohio Link office. It took about two years of planning and preparation and that included community presentations and feedback. Originally we had a year deadline but that got shifted a couple of times so it was about two years out from when we initially started talking about digital accessibility and incorporating that into the process. The Ohio Link ETD Center had a major revision 3.0 release in the summer of 2022 and because of that we also had some additional local compliance to make our content digitally accessible which is where this also stemmed from. So submission requirements for ETD PDFs uploaded to the platform began after January 31st 2023 and our ETD Center is highly customizable and so each institution sets their own local policies and workflows like with any other field or piece of information that they have their students submit. So now we're going to hear from each of our panelists for their school policies and then after that on the consecutive slides we have some general topics and lots of points to share. So a few of our panelists will speak to each to pull out their key pieces of advice or stories and then we'll try to save lots of time at the end for questions and also opening the discussion with all of you. So without further ado, Kim, do you want to start off with BGSU's policy? Yes, I have hyperlinked the policies on the PDF version of this that people can download from the USETDA. Our policy is dense and extremely long so I certainly don't want to read it out loud to anyone. But we also have a several stakeholders that were involved in developing it, our accessibility services office, our IT department, general council, and student affairs was also involved in creating this policy. Do you want me to just point out a few of the things that we're saying we have to do? I mean, we have a whole list on our website and I couldn't, when I stopped sharing I could include that into the chat because our minimum digital accessibility standards are slightly stronger than what Ohio Link was requiring of us so being at its a longer list I'll just include a link in the chat. Sounds good. Natalie, if you're on, do you want to talk about Case Western's policy? Good afternoon everyone. We are just the opposite than what Kim just described. We went with the bare minimum. When we posted this information, this new policy out to our students and faculty, we received quite a bit of pushback. So we kind of wanted to slow walk this process. So again, our minimum standards are actually minimum standards as we are required to have by Ohio Link. We only have really only five points, mainly making sure that students can include their alt text with all of their figures and images. But the majority of our standards are pretty minimum. The ability for our students to ensure that they meet these policies that process is very simple for them. And we wanted to do that, like I said, because we got a ton of pushback from our faculty and students when we first put out that this was a policy that was going to be coming forward. We are requirements are that students must, their file needs to include full text, the accessibility permission flag must be checked, and their language must be specified as well. And they need to have titles and headings for all of the major sections of their documents. So like I said, we kept it real simple. Natalie? Cindy, do you want to talk about Kent State's policy? Yeah, so at Kent State, we did just like Natalie did and unlike what Kim did, and we kept it to the bare minimum, too. We figured this would be a good way to ease into it. Kent State does have its policy and its policy register. So when you see that hyperlink that says Kent State policy, that links to our legalese, which, you know, is, you can go and read it, it's great. But it's not something that I was personally involved in. This was really between the University Council and IT. And so IT had a hand in that they work this out. And then the the ETD portion came later, maybe about a year or two later. So the link to libraries that's on there is actually the page that we give to students. And I'm the ETD administrator for Ohio Link, but I don't have the most contact with students. What we had to do is kind of get the what we call gatekeepers comfortable with this. So we have a gatekeeper. It doesn't sound like a bad gatekeeper. It doesn't. It's not bad. It's an ETD contact for each college within Kent State University. So one person is assigned. That person is part of the dean's office of that college. And they're charged with, well, among other things like ETT is just a side job to them. They've got a lot of other duties there too. But they work with the students getting their paperwork and students want to graduate. They handle applications. They're in charge of distributing the style guides for the different colleges. And then they're charged with checking over the ETDs to make sure that they meet those standards. So what we had to do at Kent State was get those folks comfortable with the idea of accessibility and how are we going to do this. So we had to put a lot of people involved there. And I would say all the gatekeepers are distinct personalities. They all do things a little bit differently. The colleges do things differently. A couple of colleges don't even have their own style guide. So it's a bit of a mixed bag. So what I tried to do was meet with the gatekeepers and get them introduced to this idea. So I worked with Allison Haynes, who is in IT and in charge of compliance and her staff on putting together a tip sheet. So their staff put together a tip sheet with the screenshots that you can just kind of look at and go through. And then I built a tutorial video in my voice and it's on there and it just kind of brings the tip sheet to video format so people can look at that and follow along and it seems to have worked. And the information technology link that's on there is just a huge introduction to everything that we've done for accessibility. And we have a general DEIA endeavor at Kent State that's pretty strong. We have a university council for it. I'm serving on that this year. So it's been an emphasis at Kent State University, the idea of inclusion, accessibility, diversity. So that's been the good part. So one thing I noticed with students is when they had questions about accessibility, they had questions that kind of went almost the other direction like we've got those minimum standards, and a lot of students wanted to make it more than that which I think is kind of a good sign for when we do increase the standard so we do intend to do that at some point. So yeah that's the basic story at Kent State. Tim, would you talk about OSU's policy? Yes, thanks Emily. Hi everybody. Glad to be here. At OSU we really went to the direction of developing our own ETD policy outside of what the Ohio State MDAS is and so forth based on that. But felt the need to really develop our own ETD policy for accessibility. And this really focused on one I'll say is some of the others here that kind of the minimum standards that we felt that would get us off to a good start. And really what I did is I looked at the formatting or had a personal look at our formatting template and I said what does this do well in terms of accessibility. And so I modeled what we were going to suggest that students do based on our formatting template already did pretty well. So that was a pretty good start. But really what the policy that we developed focused on on a couple things which is a theme that I think we keep hearing right. One I'll give Lily a shout out from Iowa State she said this at a meeting one time and I thought this was was very pertinent that the key to this right now where we're at is education. We need to get the word out to the campus and with our volume, you know to lay this on to students to say, hey you're graduating in a semester but you know what you're going to have to apply accessibility to this whole thing. You've got 175 figures that need all text. Good luck. I think we were not in a, you know, position to do that we needed to we need to roll this out over a period of time. So the education is important and then the, again, the getting the assistance right getting stakeholders in this. It's been slow going here. We would think at a place like OSU that it would not necessarily be that hard but at the same time there's you know people have their own areas right and. So we've had a hard time kind of developing stakeholders and you know it's just a real continual process here with this. And so that's kind of where we're at with this policy that's why I wrote it so that it really focused on those two things and that over the next couple years. You know this is what we're focusing on. We made a declaration that that no student would not be allowed to graduate because they could not meet accessibility. We're asking them to do the best that they can at this point with the available resources that are out there. So that's really the focus that we had and you know we're going to keep on that path and eventually we will get to a point certainly where we'll start requiring more and that people will need to have this in order to graduate. I will say one thing and this probably will come up as a hurdle I want to go too deep here but you know we have basically by the dissertation deadline dissertation and thesis deadline we have three days three working days after that to get the graduation list set. Ohio State gives out live diplomas at commencement so people have to be graduated. So we have very little time to go back and check these documents. This is a real hurdle that we will have to get through. But anyway, I'll leave it off there and I'm sure we'll talk more about all that later. Thanks, Tim. And Terry, you want to talk about UT's policy. Yes, you'll notice there is no hyperlink that is because we do not have a formal developed MDAS yet. So our approach is to follow what the Ohio link EDD minimum standards are I think there's five of them. But our challenge in even creating a policy is it trying to get the stakeholders to even stay in their position. And that's what we have to support the process. As an example, our acting dean and interim VP for academic affairs was just promoted to interim provost. And so that was about four days ago. You know, I've reached out to other campus partners, especially for example, Office of accessibility and disability resources. And so our director and chief compliance officer has been instrumental in helping to craft the policy. And even when we were ready to move forward, our acting dean at the time said, well, maybe we should run this by grad council first, because they're going to be reviewing existing policies. And, and so here we are, right, just kind of spinning and spinning. So we have done other things, even though it's not a formalized stated policy in terms of trying to provide tools and support for students to at least be able to begin the process of checking and fixing their own work. We've also, you know, integrated accessibility into our word templates. But again, as someone else mentioned, it's a lot of it is just educating, right. And so, in a way, developing the policy for us right now is kind of putting the cart before the horse. So we want to make sure that when the policy is enacted that the students will be educated, and we'll have access to the tools that they need to carry out those minimum standards. So that's all I kind of want to say on that at this point. So, learn from, I don't know, work somewhere where people stay in their jobs longer than six months, that's my suggestion. For moving through a bureaucratic system. So thanks, Terry. Yep. So now we're going to roll into our topical slides. We're going to start first with implementation. And we have lots of bullets. The two main ones are the tools and software used as well as workflows and procedures. So I'm going to open this up to any panelists that wants to share a piece of information or advice or any stories for this one. I think I just want to start off and talk about acrobat and just the general expense of it. And I think that we were hoping Allison and I, Allison from IT compliance, and I were hoping that they would pay for an enterprise wide license so everybody could just have it and that would be lovely. But we didn't have that we can get it as staff if needed, but we have to justify that we need Adobe acrobat pro students can get it for a discounted price and that license I think lasts for a year. And it's not bad. I think the trouble is $100 can be a lot for some students. I think that's what it is now. Yes, they can get the free one but if they get the trial and they don't keep the trial long enough and then they have to make some corrections that require them to go back and use Adobe again that's problematic. So I really, I mean this is a universal problem it's not just a Kent State problem but it was a big sticking point for me and I had to try to make sure that students knew what their options were. I'll just add to that. You know one thing that OSU does have I talked about you know identifying stakeholders and having you know that's been kind of a slow, slow process. But one good thing we do have is acrobat pro is free to all students and staff at Ohio State. So that is fantastic. So we have put together a guide that addresses the guidelines the accessibility guidelines that we have. And that doesn't walk them part of the way through that in terms of how to get the acrobat pro from university and then use that for the accessibility checker and the report and so forth. So that's a big plus I know that Cindy said I know that's a real hurdle for a lot of people. And so that that's one where area that that actually where we have a little bit of an advantage I would say. Yes here at BGSU actually the CEO of Adobe went to school here and we don't even get that deal. So, we do have acrobat available on university machines and in our open labs, we only have, we have several labs for class purposes we only have to always kind of open labs ones in the library ones in our own union. So, but if a student is trying to do this from a distance, they're probably in our case going to get stuck with the 1999 per month. But generally students only have to pay for one month and our university has taken the opinion that that is the cheapest textbook they will buy. So, we put that back on the student. And I wanted to add that at Toledo in exploring, because they changed, we used to all have access we had enterprise license and then several years ago that went away. And then it was still available to staff and faculty, and then several years later, that went away and you pretty much have to justify with every fiber of your being, why you need access, you know why you need a user license for acrobat pro. And so, we don't offer it in our virtual labs we don't offer it in our libraries we don't offer it in our writing center. And so, I went ahead and we scrounged up several desktops and we purchased local licenses for those desktops and we are converting our office into a mini writing studio if you will, and so students can come in, hop right on and they will have access to acrobat pro. And so that's in its infancy. But again, these are just one of the measures, you know that we're taking to try and offer the right tools, you know, for the job. So, yeah, that's what we're doing. And here at case, ironically, we offered it free to students at one point and then at the end of 2022 they took that away, just in time for us to implement this new policy. So, I'm pretty sure that's one of the major reasons why we got so much pushback from our students because they're like, now we have to pay this fee for a program that we once had for free. And now we have this lovely requirement that we're faced with. Somehow, some way our students have kind of found a way around it. They have, I know students that have gotten together as a group and they've scheduled a time to just sit down and they do their seven day free trial and they all go through their accessibility process together. And then everybody submits their ETD at the same time. It's, it was a huge hurdle in the beginning, but somehow some way our students have they've they found a way to get over that. We as staff have also had to submit a rationale as to why we need to use Acrobat Pro, which was another headache as well but I mean we we just did what we had to do to make sure we were able to service our students. I primarily work with students that are in engineering and science programs, so they use latex a lot. And the accessibility process through Acrobat was it was it was better for them than using any other program so when we implemented our process and this policy, we strongly advise that they use that process to go through their accessibility checker. But unfortunately, we steal, you know, we have those students that still complain about having to pay that fee or they're scared to go through a seven day trial because they know that they're going to forget and they're going to get charged so it's it's been a hurdle but we've we've done our best to try to find a workaround. Thank you Natalie. Let's move on to the next topic we have some more implementation. This one is about training and we broke it out into ourselves and our students. We've touched upon this just a little bit already but if anyone has anything else to add quickly, and then we can move on to the next section. Thank you. I'll just say real quick and kind of ties into the first slide there to the, the format reviews by the staff, right. That has been, you know, I have a great staff that they have come to me and said, you know, that this accessibility stuff is really added, you know, quite a bit to the format review process, not only just in in doing the accessibility but relaying this back to the student and then the student writing us, you know, with questions. You know, we're not accessibility coordinators. So, you know, and we're still learning so we're kind of limited but it definitely is a, you know, going to impact the time related to these format reviews. So we're trying to, you know, figure out a way to do this a little bit more efficiently but that certainly is one, you know, one factor. I'll jump in and just say one thing that we like to emphasize when we're training our students is that if they know how to make a document accessible that's a valuable addition to their next work place. And it could add salary dollars to their salary. And so, yeah, students have taken to it pretty well, which I'm really grateful for. I just want to add that I know certain schools will fix things for the student and other schools put it all back on the student here at BGSU depending on the number of fixes and how much time it would take us to do it versus explaining everything that's wrong and having them do it is a deciding factor that we weigh out before we choose to fix something. Of course, when we're talking about fixes we're talking about accessibility and not a something that would affect the written portion of the document it's not going to change their content in that kind of way, it's just making it easier for the public to view. Great point. Thank you, Kim. Let's move on to the next slide. And can everyone make sure they're muted if they're not presenting. Thank you. So we'll move on to issues. And here we have not enough resources, which is a major one with lots of little sub bullets, and then documents that cannot be made 100% accessible. And I know Cindy has a great way to talk about this so maybe she can jump in on that one. And then we also called out relative short timeline to get policy and procedures established. A couple people have brought this up and then, as Terry said, they've started at UT but the policy isn't quite there yet but she's working on it with the students already. Okay, Emily, I will jump in. And again, say not enough resources. Yeah, we don't have enough resources because we don't have what Tim has in Ohio State with the adobe agribat I'm really envious and it's doing a little bit right here I got to tell you. Okay, but with regard to the fact that documents cannot be made 100% accessible. I almost think about it in a metaphysical way. In my talks with Allison, which we had plenty. We talked about the fact that you can't make a document 100% accessible because you can't make a document have site for a student that has site issues. For example, you can't make somebody hear music that cannot hear so it only goes so far. And even if it could go farther, it would involve this. I'm getting very metaphysical here this dramatic change and you know the way like almost like a cochlear implant would be. So, you know, but an accessible document cannot do that. So what we try is our best effort. And we are very, very willing to help anybody along that has any difficulties with any of our documents with remediation. We're ready to take that on and to help whoever comes along. I believe you have anything to add. Sure. We were very surprised when we first implemented this policy of the lack of resources available to our students on campus. We had conversations with our, our technology office as well as our libraries we found that they had the same issue we did and it was just they didn't have the manpower to really put out to the students that they were an available resource for them, going through this process, which initially, it was a bit of a headache starting out. We expected to kind of be welcomed with open arms and it was the exact opposite. After many conversations with those offices we 100% understood that the amount of graduate students that we have, compared to the amount of staff that they had. It was a bad ratio. And so, while they did offer some assistance to our students, when they saw that word was getting out, and more students were then leaning on their offices, they circle back to us like we got to find a way around this how, how can we assure that the students are meeting this policy that the university is providing them with the necessary resources to adhere to this policy, and that we all don't walk away from our jobs because it's just entirely too much. I work in the graduate office so myself and one other individual assists with the formatting reviews. And so trying to walk a student through how to make their document accessible was very lengthy, very time consuming. We did have some chances where we met with a group of faculty where we tried to walk them through what best practices would be. We were able to disseminate that information to their students and so over the course of a couple months, we kind of started seeing students being able to do this on their own. And now that we're almost halfway year in it. The load has lightened quite a bit. So I guess my, my suggestion to anybody that's still trying to work through this process is you just got to give it time where it will spread that game and telephone will happen. And the students will start leaning on one another opposite leaning on us, hopefully. So yeah, luckily we, we are above water at this point. Thanks Natalie, that's great to hear and I love that the students are coming together and helping each other out. I remember that at grad school to we would put on like little talks that we did ourselves and people would come to our lounge and you know be more comfortable with with helping each other. So we'll move on to the second slide with issues. This time we have clarity and agreement on accessibility standards. Time, of course, various needs. And do students not graduate if a document is not accessible and Tim already addressed this for OSU and he said no at this point. They won't hold people back because of that. So if anyone else from the panel wants to jump in on these topics, we'd love to hear more. Oh, go ahead. Sorry. I've been jumping in a lot. I'd like to say that if you go to section 508.gov's website, you'll find a couple of exceptions that are allowed for why something is not accessible and BG issue has chosen because of our scores for music and many issues that happen with latex documentation to come up with wording that we put on our copy on the copyright page of the students PDF as to why it may not be meeting our minimum digital accessibility standards. For those who are geeking out it's e 202.6 and e 202.7 that we use to get out of those two issues. So, if you if your care, the one says this content is unable to be made fully accessible because it would result in a fundamental of the document and the other one says this content is unable to be made fully accessible due to the music notation in the score conformance to the minimum accessibility standards could not be achieved due to the non availability of technology that fully conforms to the standards. So, and that's taking that right off of their website. Kim, I'm wondering what, what prompted you to you institute or implement this, you know, wording in their document I mean did someone complain or or or was there fear of being held legally liable. Well, first it started with the legality. And then it became there is no way I can take a music score and put every single treble clef and bass clef and quarter note and eighth note and colon or you know repeat and all of that. Every time you. Yeah, there's unless you unless you read music to understand that the number of things every time there's a forte or a crescendo it's just insane. And it is making thousands of things come up in character encoding as a problem. So that's when you when you get a chance. Can you drop that page into chat. Sure, I will do that for those references to the exceptions. Thank you. Cindy, did you want to talk about this topic as well. Well, Kim did a great job, but I guess I'll answer the question to students not graduate if the document is not accessible. And the answer to that is that they make their best effort to make that document accessible and a good faith effort I think goes a long way. We do let them graduate. And if there's remediation that we've got to do, then we'll handle that task when it comes along. But most students have been able to do this with. I've been really happy about that. It's gone pretty well. And that's the same for case we will not hold back a student's graduation. Due to this new policy. The same we will continue to work with them as best as possible to get it to the minimum standards that we've set for the school. But no, we will not hold back a student's graduation for this. I'd like to weigh in on this as well. Prior to accessibility standards, of course, we had formatting standards and the last day for students to submit is the last day of the term. And so we have up to 30 days to clear everyone for graduation. So the only thing really that we would ever hold back on is the actual public release of their document. We would never hold up on graduation. And we would not, when we get accessibility standards implemented, it will be regarded the same as formatting where they will still have an opportunity to remediate or make additional improvements to their document and they still get to graduate. It's just literally going to affect, you know, how fast we can publicly release a document if they don't already have it embargoed. Yes, we don't give out live diplomas like OSU does. So we have, we tell students it takes five to six weeks to get them cleared. They get an email that lets them know when it is proved and clear. Generally, we try to do that before our deadline and our deadline is usually about four weeks before graduation, but not with the number that we can get in a spring or summer semester. It takes that extra time. Thanks, everyone. Let's go on to the next slide. Yeah, just to say, you know, again, this is where the education comes in, right? You know, we're still in this, as I mentioned earlier, you know, we're still kind of, you know, in the area where we're notifying students, you know, I send the students and when they apply to graduate, you know, in the last few semesters, I've sent them to the specific notice about accessibility. And, you know, what the expectations were, you know, we're still in this, as I mentioned earlier, you know, we're still kind of, you know, in the area where we're notifying students, you know, I send the students and when they apply to graduate, you know, in the last few semesters, I've sent them a specific notice about accessibility. And, you know, what the expectations were. But at the same time, you know, this is something that needs to be worked in. And it has to start really from when the students began on campus. And I made a mention in the chat that we're thinking about adding accessibility training to students when they are admitted to the university. That this will be on their checklist, that they will have to complete. And, you know, it's a good way, you know, we keep it short, of course, and so forth, but at the same time, it introduces to these students right off that this is important. And this is something that they're going to have to will have to complete and you know it's a good way you know we keep it short of course and so forth but at the same time it introduces to these students right off that this is important and this is something that they're going to have to pay attention to and incorporate into their work and getting this as much like the formatting you know I see you can't don't expect to do the formatting the night before you need to turn your document in you need to work it in and certainly the same with accessibility so yeah so we just need to you know get that as change says changing the culture right this needs to become a standard that 10 years from now we won't even be talking about this as much of a dispute just like formatting always was right it's just it's just it just is yeah I think we've had those discussions too where you know remember when board processing was new and now we all do it and it's not a big deal most of us do basic spreadsheets you know I expect that it's it's gonna get to that point it's gonna be part of the culture part of what everybody does I hope to see it go there I too agree and I saw something about this in the chat actually and when I was thinking as I like the idea of it being up front for the grad students most of our graduate students end up teaching assistants anyways and so they should know how to remediate a word document a PowerPoint and a PDF if they're gonna put it up in Blackboard Canvas or whatever your you know learning management system is because students of their class are gonna need that excellent thank you so we also have some additional exceptions for latex and musical scores which we've touched on due to their formatting they're particularly tough and tricky sometimes to make digitally accessible non-traditional ETDs and supplemental files right now Ohio link is only requiring the PDF document of the ETD the text itself any supplemental files are still as is for now and then we have community so sharing resources meeting with other schools via zoom I know there's also other ways to talk or on the phone people have been very helpful and also on sessions already today saying that they'll be available as people need keeping in mind that we are all learning together and trying to use that core knowledge together looking for groups so US ETDA our own Ohio link ETD advisory council Ohio link accessibility task force and working group which is another group we have and then there's also the US ETD formatting users group dynamic documents and guide from Ohio link I can share some resources here in the chat and then any other divisions within your own school so if any of the panelists would like to give any further advice or information please jump in I say lean on one another in the beginning of this process both Kim and Tim were a huge resource for us at case I believe we met with Kim via zoom myself and a couple staff members in our office and she is a world of information over there I don't I don't want to put it out there so everybody goes and runs to the two of them but my suggestion lean on one another because you'd be surprised the level of information that one of your colleagues has as it relates to this process because that the individuals on this panel have been good have been great I pulled some great information from them throughout this almost this past year so I say lean on one another so I'm going to say that to the Kim I've studied your work like a creepy stalker and I admire everything you've done so that's been a huge help although I did not beat with you get that all very quiet did my but there's another thing I wanted to point out that we do locally it can't state we have what's called an equal access academy so that covers like a lot of back aspects of DEI a and this is a schedule of our events and it's everything from like what is neurodiversity to you know making your document accessible it goes through all these different sorts of aspects of DEI a and I'm really proud that can't state has done this we have a big emphasis on belonging we have a big sign on our library that says you belong here and I read that every morning and I'm like yeah I belong here about 15 minutes ago I realize I'm running late but no I really the the emphasis on belonging I think has become part of our culture where we welcome people and we want to make it a good experience for them and I think that is a little bit contagious I mean not to be too Polly Anna but I think it's it's done a good job for us and I'll just you know put props out there for Terry Green because she is fantastic with Microsoft Word and a lot of that can hold into the PDF as long as you don't auto tag it to if you're going from word to PDF you know your alt text should be there and things like that your headings should be there and it helps just make it go a lot faster to go to check it in the end if your student already has that in the template I'd like to just first thank you Kim for the kudos I appreciate that I think you know as we've gone through these slides you know there's been a little bit of not inventing but just like hey these are the challenges or these are you know the stumbling blocks but it's been really great to hear about when things are unexpectedly better than we had anticipated and I think that having a passion for this work and having a passion for your students I think moving forward you know if someone has had something go really well right like like this equal access website or whatever it is you know that we can be sharing that kind of as a template you know to follow and yeah so that maybe because I think when you're starting out and you're trying to figure out policy and and who does what even even hearing from other schools or looking into what they're doing it doesn't necessarily give you a clear roadmap I think at times you feel like you're still just gathering information and cobbling things together so I would like to see our communities of practice also be really you know forthright in in sharing kind of the easiest path forward or the most successful if that makes sense I'm just kind of speaking off the cuff here but that was just you know a couple slides back you know we talked about a culture change right and so I think we can all contribute to changing the culture so I'm really proud to be associated with this group by the way thank you everyone thanks Terry that rolls into goals quite nicely I think so the goals we have listed here and these are just a few I'm sure there are more but what our group came up with was making ETDs accessible as a standard so this becomes the norm evaluation of policy and available resources and then you adjust as needed staff training for understanding of terminology and expectations keeping in mind that this is not a static short term endeavor so that long goal in mind over time the magnitude of the initiative in the short term and then the student understanding and acceptance if anyone wants to jump in otherwise we can move on to questions I think everything that came up in chat has already been directly addressed by someone and then the rest have just been comments if you want to type in some more questions or unmute at this time as attendees feel free to ask questions that way too or you know we're also willing to have a bigger discussion if people also want to jump in and share their own local experiences yes Tim yeah just want to say kind of what Natalie mentioned earlier about the students learning from each other you know one thing we've been pretty good at I know Natalie said they had some pushback but we've really not had much pushback and you think about you know again our volume the faculty have not know if they know what's going on or not because we've not heard from them at all but the students you know I think I've been pretty impressed with their desire to want to do this and you know how they do kind of help each other I think a little bit and we've even had students that you know we are not requiring them to submit the accessibility checker you know that it's clean when they do their Ohio link submission to us but we've had students that have done that they've attached it as a as a supplemental file so I think that's really a good sign you know that I think that the students are you know really trying to to incorporate this and and again given our numbers we've had really no pushback whatsoever nobody's has come to me and said why are we doing this kind of thing so so I think it's you know great that the you know we gotta gotta remember that maybe the students will will take to this a little bit you know better than we might initially think is you know just given all the issues so I'm gonna emphasize that to the Kent State even the person who came to me in tears because they were so freaked out about their dissertation she was like well I see the importance of doing accessibility I'm just really I'm hoping that this doesn't prevent me from graduating you know she even said that I didn't prompt her she said it so I think everybody realizes the importance and that's really good I think probably the people with the biggest pushback may have been the gatekeepers but it wasn't a pushback of why are we doing this it was more of a pushback of fear am I capable of learning this and I promise we'll get you through it you know we had a lot of trainings and meetings and in support there for everybody so I'm happy it's worked out the way it has so anybody have any questions well while we're waiting for some to come in we have two more minutes left to our session oh Kim you want to leave the contact information up we have our email addresses feel free to reach out to any of us as as desired also just a plug for the next session we have a little bit of a break and then at 315 is session four highlighting an asynchronous ETD precheck serving off campus in the time poor thank you for the thanks in the chat everyone I just want to thank each of you that were willing to participate in this panel you guys are great to work with and I really appreciate it