 Hello everyone and welcome to Rallying Ally Stakeholders, a digital accessibility project planning. Sharing this information with you are Lily Compton and Kristen Terrell from Iowa State University's Graduate College. My name is GW Swycord and I'll be your moderator for the next 45 minutes. A quick reminder before we begin, during the presentation portion, please keep your audio and video muted unless you're presenting or you are asked to participate by the moderator or speaker. You may use the chat to ask questions, which will be addressed during the Q&A portion. Please also note that sessions will be recorded and available from USCTDA's private servers shortly after the conference. The videos will be edited and posted for public availability on the USCTDA YouTube channel by the end of December 2023. Thank you all for joining us and now I'll turn it over to Lily and Kristen. Thank you GW. So as Kristen is pulling up our PowerPoint, let me start by introducing myself. I am Lily Compton and I am the Assistant Director for Programming at the Center for Communication Excellence, and we are housed in the Graduate College. So after our first workshop session today, I'm sure that many of you have some level of introduction to accessibility, digital accessibility, and how it impacts ETDs, electronic thesis and dissertation. So following that session today, what we're going to look at is how we go about rallying our stakeholders in dealing with the issue of digital accessibility when it comes to ETDs. In the past few conference that I've attended at the USCTDA, I have seen how different we are in terms of whether we are an office of one or an office of many, or we are located in the library as opposed to the IT or the grad college and other units. So the question becomes, who is in charge of this issue of digital accessibility? To give a bit of background at Iowa State, the thesis and dissertation review falls under the Graduate College, and what's done through the ETDA admin through ProQuest, we utilize the platform and when once it's approved and delivered to ProQuest, it is then delivered to the library, to the institutional repository. So that's where we are at Iowa State. Now, when it comes to digital accessibility, we were told in 2022 that by July 2026, we would have to implement fully the digital accessibility mandate. When I saw that in 2022, I'm like, what the heck are we going to do with all our ETDs? We have been reviewing for formatting and so forth, but this is a complete new thing on the agenda. None of us are trained. Where do we even begin? So that became a huge concern. Last year, when we were at the US ETDA, we started talking about digital accessibility, and I realized that some of us have more resources than others. So as Kristin and I started working on our project at Iowa State, we said, okay, what if we started planning to track our journey so that everyone can utilize this open educational resource that we prepare so the information is there to assist anyone who wants to take on this project, however small or big, whether it's a required mandate or just an improvement. So this is where we are coming in. So to move on, I'm going to let Kristin introduce herself and begin the first few slides of the PowerPoint. Thanks, Lily. Lily, can you say yes if you can hear me just fine? Yep. You can. Great. Well, it's nice to meet everybody. This interface is a little bit odd, so I actually can't see the presentation or the chat right now, so I'm going to be relying on Lily to jump in if there's a question that I need to address. But like Lily was saying, this presentation is all about what we at Iowa State are going to be doing relative to digital accessibility and our electronic theses and dissertations, and hopefully ways that we can document that so that others can see what we're doing and share those ideas, and that's what we're trying to source with our presentation today. So I hope that most of the people listening right now went to the session this morning, which was so incredible to have so many people learning about implementing digital accessibility features in Microsoft Word and Adobe. And ultimately, that is what these digital accessibility mandates do is they necessitate that we get new knowledge, they necessitate that we implement new policies and establish procedures as electronic theses and dissertation administrators. So our policy at Iowa State University links to a law called Section 508, which is a portion of the Americans with Disabilities Act. So State University is obviously in the United States, and so we need to comply with the U.S. laws, and that's where the Section 508 comes from. Section 508 says that any federally funded electronic technology has to be accessible according to the standard of WCAG, that WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. So those are the standards and the law is Section 508. And then another abbreviation that I used here in the title and in the title of this slide is this A11Y, which is a numeronym. You've heard of acronyms and you probably don't like those because they're hard to understand if you're not familiar with them. We'll now get ready for numeronyms, which are acronyms with numbers in them. So the A11Y numeronym, the 11 stands for the 11 letters between the A and the Y in accessibility and it's sometimes pronounced ally. So that evokes the idea of being an ally for people with disabilities and users with disabilities. So that is a really common numeronym, especially if you're online. If you wanna learn more about digital accessibility on Twitter or LinkedIn, that A11Y numeronym is gonna be a great place to start from, so you might wanna take note of that. And then again, getting back to Lily's point about what we're doing at Iowa State University, the need to develop new knowledge policies and procedures has provided us with a rationale to develop an open educational resource for electronic thesis and dissertation administrators who are adopting digital accessibility. And if you're not familiar with open educational resources, they are these wonderful things because they're free and they're created by educators with purpose of educating and they're very easy to get a hold of. So the idea is that we're gonna create this e-book that will be freely available. The target audience is electronic thesis and dissertation administrators who are adopting digital accessibility and our goal is to essentially put into a more permanent space resources like the presentation this morning so that ETD administrators can easily go back and say, oh my gosh, I remember there was something in this demonstration about using Microsoft Word to create tagged headings in my document, how do I do that or how do I teach a student to do that? Hopefully this OER is gonna be a wonderful resource for those kinds of needs. So the title of our OER is addressing the digital accessibility mandate for dissertations, feces and creative components tracking our journey. So we are actively implementing digital accessibility in our ETD program. And so we're hoping that we can have this OER ready and accessible for everybody by December 2024. So that's next December. We're being ambitious here to put together a book but it's something that we're gonna be doing anyway. So the idea is we're just gonna put it into a book so that we can remember what we did and you guys can all see what we did. Some of the content that this book is going to contain is digital accessibility policy, how to meet digital accessibility standards in these dissertations and creative components. And then I noticed in the chat during the earlier session some people were saying, you know, we're getting a lot of pushback from students, from faculty. Why do we need to do these format requirements? We're gonna include an FAQ for all of these stakeholders in our open educational resources. So one for faculty, one for students, one for administrators. So if they're asking you, why do I have to do alt text? You can refer them to our FAQ. And with the open educational resources, another cool thing about them is that they're creative commons licensed, which means that not only is it free for you to read the book, but you can actually take content out of it and put it onto your own website. You can also change it. So it's a little bit of a looser copyright with the creative commons license. And so we're really hoping that this tool becomes something that you can make it work for your needs at your institution. We're also gonna talk about conducting an audit, essentially just taking stock of who your stakeholders are, what kind of software you might have, what kind of templates are gonna be affected and in just other things that go on with your program that you need to consider when you're doing digital accessibility. And then also a checklist for ETD administrators. Why are we doing our round table related to this? It is partly to just let you know that it's gonna be out there, but we also want your input on what's going into this OER so that it can be more useful for you. So the purpose of today's presentation is to understand broader perspectives by listening input from you and to get a sense of what's going on in your various institutions. The outcome of today's session is that your input, we are going to review it and synthesize it to inform the content of our OER and our aim is to make it more relevant to you so that you're not just reading about what Iowa State University did and thinking, okay, good for you, that's not gonna work at my institution because it's a totally different kind of space. We understand that and we don't want it to be a limited OER that's only good for Iowa State University. We want it to be useful beyond. So we're hoping that your input today can help us get that visibility and make our OER more useful. I just wanna note that we're gonna be collecting information today and we do want to acknowledge contributors in the OER. So if you provide this information, we will attribute your full name, your title and your institutional affiliation in the OER. We won't list your email address. If you wish not to be acknowledged as a contributor, please do note that. So we're gonna be using a padlet to collect input from you today and there's one section of the padlet is called acknowledgement and follow-up. And when you write your information, you can add the note that says follow-up only. And so that way we'll have your email address and when we're ready to distribute this open educational resource, we will notify you and then you can access it but your name won't be in it. So our goal is basically we wanna give you credit but we don't wanna get you in trouble. So if you don't want your name in the book, just let us know by using that follow-up only note on your attribution. The agenda for this round table is I'm going to give you a couple of more slides. Each one has a prompt and a link to our input webpage which is called padlet. For each prompt, I'm gonna give you three to four minutes so that you can write your thoughts in the padlet and then after all three sessions, we are actually gonna come back together so that we can discuss synchronously, collectively. We can have more of a back and forth talk about what people are entering into that padlet. So let's go ahead and get started and I'm gonna hand the virtual microphone back over to my colleague, Lily. Great, thank you. And before we begin this next part, I see a question from GW. Have you thought of doing a workflow survey to look for systems different to yours but used by multiple other institution? Yes. And so this is not something that we've begun doing but then we are trying to identify our internal workflow, right? Who we work with, who is responsible because is it the IR's responsibility or is it the grad college, right? Those are all conversations we are planning and we will track all of those information in our OER. But we also want today's session to be a collective discussion amongst everybody and what Kristen was saying, we're gonna be using this platform called the Padlet and I'm going to give everybody a chance to type in row by row, right? So we're gonna look at resources, then we're gonna look at auditing and then we're gonna look at stakeholders. For each of these sections, there are a few prompts already on Padlet and I will give everybody a chance to type where they think they want to respond to and in about like three minutes time, I will say, okay, we're coming down to the end of the time for this prompt we're gonna move on. So we're gonna do some collective writing for the next 10 minutes or so and the final part of this discussion panel or this round table will be that we will review everything together on this Padlet and then open it up to more talk about what was written, more concerns, more questions, more elaborations and so forth. So if you want to go ahead and open up, Kristen, can you copy the tiny URL into the chat box so that people can just click on it? So once the link is there, you can click on the link and go to Padlet and you will see the first row of prompts are under the header resources. So the first question is, what resources do you need for the four areas? And then you would just type your comment at the bottom. If you have a Padlet account, you can sign in and it would list your names. If not, you might just be listed as anonymous. That's okay. Or you can type your name first and enter your comment, right? The second prompt there is, what resources do students need? One of the things from the first session today was like, okay, if we're using Adobe to remediate our files, that means we need the Adobe Pro, right? So does your university provide that to your students? Okay, what others? So what might be the cost of resources covered? So at your institution, what do you know? What do we need to say to our administrators if we say, I need somebody to check digital accessibility for ETDs? What do I need? What is the cost? What are the direct costs? What are the indirect costs? Have you thought about that? And then the last question, the last prompt for each section is always like, what else would you explore? So without much ado, I hand this all to you all for the next three minutes, would you take a look at the first four prompts under resources and go ahead and type your comments? And if you have any questions about any of the prompts, you can type it in the chat here or just type it directly into the tablet and say, you know, I'm not sure about this or do you mean this? Or I think, you know, this and that, right? I'll give everyone 30 more seconds to finish up and I can see already there's a theme going on and it's, you know, it's really common questions and issues that we have. So please keep going, keep adding to it. I will note that buy-in is definitely an important issue. And then also manpower, like how do you get more money to pay for all these things in the first session, we talked about some places that have copy editors. Well, can the copy editor do digital accessibility? No, because it's different skill sets. So do you hire somebody to fulfill that? How many files do you do? How much will it cost? And so forth, right? And then you talk about software and you talk about training resources. Sure, training resources are excellent. Who is going to be the one creating those training materials? Who is going to do the actual outreach and so forth? So those are all very important issues. Christine, could you move on to the next slide? We will now move on to the next question and it also obviously, oh, yeah. Sorry, it should have been auditing something. Okay, yeah. So auditing, can you share how you would start today? Right? Some of you have already started, some of you have not. Some of you are just one person in an office and you're in your own world. You don't really know who you answer to. You don't really know who would be in charge of this. How would you start in that case? Or in our case, where we have some responsibility for compliance, but we have to talk to the dean. We have to talk to the library. How would we start this? So this is our way of figuring out where we go from our journey. Where would you go, right? And then what other stuff you already have on your campus? So auditing. Give everyone 30 more seconds to just kind of put in more ideas and we'll leave this panel up too. So later we can go back here to add in after, or while we're doing the round table discussion. But let's move on to the next slide, which is stakeholders, right? And I think there are more commonalities here. So who are the stakeholders on your campus? Who has the final say in the compliance? What resources are available? And who controls the resource and core funding? Last 30 seconds. And then those who have finished a stakeholder, if you would like to proceed to the next section where I don't think we have a slide for that, but it's like additional questions or suggestions, please go ahead and put it right there. We want your ideas, we want your questions. These are the things that we will try to incorporate into our OER so that it's useful for everybody here and whoever takes on this position in the future and gets thrown into this concept called digital accessibility, we want this to be a helpful resource. And then obviously the last section is, please add your name if you want to be listed in our OER as a contributor. All these great responses, we're going to synthesize it and we're gonna pose questions in our OER, like a list of things that you guys have shared, right? So then hopefully you can bring this OER to your administrator and says, hey, take a look at this FAQ here. That's why we need money, right? Or this is not just me saying it, look at all the people who have mentioned all the challenges we are feeling. It's not just me, it's everybody on campus who's going to be impacted. So thank you very much for all your contributions and we will continue to look at this even after today's session. So we will leave this up if you have more input, please continue to put your responses in. Now, we have the last 15 minutes that we want to open up to the round table discussions and I think here's how we're gonna do this, right? I think if we open it up to the audience to speak, we may have many people trying to speak at the same time. So let's go question by question, what you would like to see more of what you see in the Padlet as a theme that's coming up or if you have a question for us, you can put it in the chat here, G.W., Kristen and myself will try to look and moderate the chat and maybe call on specific people who has responded in Padlet to elaborate. Will that work, G.W.? It works for me. Okay, so let's take a look at the resources. Let's look thematically and what jumps out at you in terms of similarities of concerns, challenges. I can see faculty buying is very important, right? So how can we convince faculty that this is necessary? At Iowa State, when we have a mandate in 2026, they have no choice, right? But at the same time, we also don't want the faculty to be responsible for both content and formatting of their students' thesis and dissertation. So how do we provide them with consideration so that they have a buy-in, right? Do we have a workflow to train their students? How do we communicate to the faculty? They need to reach out to specific units on campus who are in charge of assisting their students to learn what digital accessibility requirements are. What resources do you need? I think one of the important things also is templates, right? And I remember about two or three years ago at the US ETDA, we were talking about formatting and somebody said, our dean does not believe in formatting guidelines. As long as they have done their work, we just push that through. That's great. At that point, it wasn't an issue, but for us, we've always had this template to kind of standardize what it looks like to kind of preserve some professionalism there. It really helps to have a template that we can continue to work on. So what is your situation at your university? Do you have a template already? If you don't, are you going to start from scratch? Or would you like to come to this OER and look at all the different institutions who have some kind of template? John was showing links to his template. We also have links. I'm sure a lot of you have templates. If you have those templates, please add that to the padlet as well, and we will integrate that so that the OER is not just about Iowa State. It's going to be a resource repository. I'm going to start talking. Anyone here would like to type in more of the findings from this padlet on their resources. Thematically, type that in. What's the one keyword you see that goes across multiple responses? More training. Okay, somebody was asking, who is stakeholders? So by stakeholders, we are referring to who gets impacted by something called digital accessibility. So I think in terms of Iowa State, we believe that the stakeholders are the students themselves who produce the ETDs. We believe that our grad college is a stakeholders because we review the final formatting and approve it. We believe that the library is a stakeholders because they are the final resting place of this digital thesis and dissertation. So anything past the approval stage like remediation and so forth, they are in charge of. We believe that faculty would be key stakeholders because they are the ones who need to understand during the writing phase, that the students have to deal with this as well as the content. So that was a question about turnaround time, right? We need more turnaround. Workflow, looking at workflow like GW says, what is the workflow? At this point, I think was it Kim Motary who said, it takes about three hours before the digital accessibility for one file. And if the final process is two weeks before the deadline, how are we going to deal with all those accessibility issues where we have to return the files and they have to fix the files, but they don't know how to fix the files and so forth. So that's also a stakeholder. Who else on campus? And I see stakeholders are also maybe somebody like the provost, right? Because we need money and money is a big theme here. Money, how do we pay for it? How do we staff it? Who do we go to for money? We can't keep going to the grad college dean here at our place and saying, we need one more staff. But we do, right? Because just to look at one file is three hours and Iowa State looks at 650 files per year and we're not even considering the 160 or creative components that will be also required to be accessible. So somebody was saying, yes, hire a digital ETDA accessibility coordinator. Great idea. Who pays for it, right? Who do we convince that we need this person? The dean, the provost, the library, the grad college, the faculty, the colleges, those are all questions that we have to navigate. And we can't just say, you're responsible. So I think that's where the question about stakeholders come in. Who do we contact? Who do we bring to the table to talk about this? And everybody's tight on budget, right? Where do we find this money? Iowa State's been cut on budget by the border regions every year for the last, I don't know, 10 years. So everything's been cut. Now we have this federal mandate. Let's take a look again at what all the other things on, in chat, oh, I like Larry's one. How do we keep students from revolting against any extra work or responsibility for these functions? Yes. How do we pass that responsibility to them? We can't just give them the full burden, right? We still have to give them resources. So for example, Adobe Acrobat Pro is one of the biggest thing. We give them licenses now. Some universities may not have that opportunity. So I feel like one of the solution is Kim, who says Adobe Acrobat Pro has a seven day trial. I've heard this perfect solution. You try to help the students go through this last week, sign up for the trial, help them through this digital accessibility check and deal with that during that one week. Otherwise then they have to bear the cost of $19.99 per month. I have also heard of solutions where the library or the grad college could open up a couple of computer labs, computer desktops that has those licenses. So students can come in and work on those documents at any given time when the computers are available. So that's another solution. What other thoughts do you have about auditing? How would you start? If we were to say today, your dean or your provost said to you, okay, we need to make our ATDs digitally accessible. And now, since you're the reviewer, you're in charge for figuring out what we need to do. So where would you begin? Obviously for us, we started looking at our templates. We started looking at all our instructional materials that we have created. How are we going to work on updating those to meet the accessibility templates? And it takes a lot of time to recreate all the instructional materials that we have. What's your timeline? We have up till 2026, but we started working on this issue last year and we are going to move forward with hopefully launching a soft launch of a new digital template next year and giving ourselves a one-year grace period to address all the kinks and the transitions between those students using the old template and the new template. We need time to train our grad student consultants and Kristen is educating herself. It takes time. It takes professional development funding at your institution. Do you know who you can go to for help? Can we decide, can we provide you information on who you can start checking up with? Larry was asking, who set the 2026 deadline? I think it was just the university administrators. And then a policy came out and we do have a digital accessibility office that started putting information out for everybody. So we have one year kind of like to audit all the stuff. A lot of those things deal with WCAG stuff, right? A lot of website stuff and so forth. But when I saw that, I was thinking to myself, well, sure, it's all good. WCAG is not my concern. It's going to be somebody else who's dealing with the grad college website that needs to learn what digital accessibility means. But then I said, hang on, I am the ETD compliance person. So that falls on my lap to make sure that our ETDs are ready, right? So I would challenge you to say, this is going to be somebody else who's going to tell me what to do when it comes. But it doesn't work like that. We can't, if I wait until 2026 for somebody to say, hey, why is your ETD process not looking at digital accessibility? We are three years behind getting ready for it, right? So take a look on your campus. Do you have a policy? If not, you can start small, right? Like what Terry was saying, if you even just have one takeaway from this morning's workshop, what can you do? Maybe it is a matter of looking at all our templates or the institutions that have templates and then adopting it and asking like, hey, can we use your template, right? That's a start. Four minutes left. Let's take a look at the stakeholders. Thank you, GW. So again, the stakeholders, I think we've identified a lot of common people, the grad college, the library, the provosts. Yeah, I see the Board of Regents, yes. Office of Accessibility. Do I see any other ones? General Counsel, yes, Kim. General Counsel is important. Legal Affairs or Digital Innovation, dissertation writer, workshops is something that we want to implement. So I think that when it comes to stakeholders, we have a clear sense of who the stakeholders are. And definitely we have to address those and make a case for asking for funding, asking for, hey, I don't want to be caught off guard. Some institutions have this mandate already. Our institution does not, but we may need to start looking into this to prepare for the future or is our institution going to go in the same direction? So those are all the things that are on our minds. And we really want to thank you for your input here today. Again, like I said, our panel is going to be kept up for a little bit longer. So if you want to keep asking your questions, add your suggestions, provide us with resources that we can add to the OER, we would really appreciate it. And we will definitely follow up along the way. Thank you. GW over to you. Is GW here to close the session? Or shall I just close this? I think we leave it open for people who want to loiter and discuss. Okay. We will be here, Kristin and I. So feel free to ask your questions in the chat still. There's a question about automating thesis deposit system. And I think that was kind of what Allison was talking about this morning. ProQuest is looking at integrating that as a service. I think it would be a subscribed service. If you don't have the capacity to do so, then perhaps your institution would just pay a subscription cost to have their checks done through ProQuest or whatever automated system you can have in your institution. So I was thinking somebody was talking about the Canvas being able to do that. We have a later presentation today talking about Canvas as a and a synchronous check. So tune into that one as well. So I could see that as a possibility of a first round of digital accessibility checking. Thank you everyone for your appreciation and we really are excited to share our OER with you so that we can at least help some of you with a starting point. And also it really helps us in five years and 10 years from now, somebody who comes and say, who gave you authority? The pushbacks from faculty obviously is not something surprising. So who gave you authority to change this? And so we can look at this OER and say, this was the process that we went through. This was why we went through it. This was who we asked for input. It's not just other as Iowa State, it's this USETDA who comprised of all key stakeholders across the United States and beyond who are interested and vested in this issue. We have a question. Other than ProQuest, Adobe and Windows, are there any commercially available programs that will look at digital accessibility? I do not know of any. At Iowa State, we deal with ProQuest and we have templates in Word and LAPAC to go over leaf. So those are our primary technological software but I opened this up to everyone else who may have ideas. I know John maybe was talking about another software somebody was using instead of OER leaf. So I know of one and I can't remember the name of it but it's a free download and all it does is check. It doesn't fix but it's more comprehensive than the Adobe Acrobat Accessibility Checker. And then Kim just typed in the chat, FOXIT which is something I haven't heard of. So Kim maybe you can tell us what that does. We don't use it here at BGSU. I just know there are some schools in Ohio that use FOXIT. So it does check your PDF. I do know that if you're paying companies to look at these it's $5 a page to remediate a PDF. It's pretty pricey. And I will add that it is a common finding that remediation at the level of the repository is going to be way more expensive than trying to help your students. The authors prepare most of these files ahead of time so that the remediation cost is lowered. And I think for me anyway, I think that is a big motivation to get stakeholders on board, right? We go to the library and say, hey, the ultimate place our ETDs appear on is the institutional repository. How can we reduce the cost of remediation? Can you help us with the process or the workflow of helping students prepare compliant files before they are approved by the grad college and delivered to the institutional repository?