 All right, everyone, it is 310, and so we're very happy to welcome you to Web Accessibility for EDD Submission, Implementing a New Standard, and I'd like you to welcome Teri Robinson. She is from the Mississippi State University Libraries, and Laura Threat, who is from Mississippi State University College of Education. I would just remind you to please leave your video and audio off, and please enter any questions you have in the Q&A for this session, and we will address them after the presentation. So without further ado, I will turn it over to Teri and Laura. Thank you. I'm Laura, and so today we're going to talk about Web Accessibility for EDDs and creating those standards. So the first thing we're going to look at is a university background that we're going to talk about our accessibility directive, setting standards, and then looking forward. So a little bit about Mississippi State. We are a land grant institution. We are made up of eight colleges with 45 departments that require a thesis or a dissertation. There are seven interdisciplinary programs with four research and extension centers Our enrollments for fall and 2020 total enrollment was almost 23,000, and then our graduate students we had just over 3800. So a little bit about our office. We are actually located in our university's library, so we're not located in the graduate school. We do have one full-time faculty person, which is Ms. Teri over here. We have one full-time professional and then we have a part-time student worker in our office. We are in charge of formatting, approval, and preservation of theses and dissertations. We do offer an average of 10 workshops per semester. Those vary between base to base and online workshops. We also do one-on-one consults, and we can also do departmental workshops as requested. So our submissions for fall 2020 were kind of low. We only had 47 dissertations with 36 theses. We kind of figured that this was because of COVID and that was hindering a lot of research productivity. So we do expect to see our numbers to continue to increase as the pandemic eases out. So talking about actually getting into our accessibility standards that we set for our university. So like a lot of things, we were told just to make it work, had a meeting. They said this is what we need to do, we need to move forward with this. We're going to let you decide how to do it. So we did have one guideline that the university did want to match the AA level of WCNG 2.0 standards. So that at least gave us a starting off point. So our first step was we had a training session with our campus information technology services. They actually began offering accessibility training workshops about the same time that we got that directive. So we attended one of their workshops and this is where we learned about accessibility checkers. Those in Word and PDF is where we learned about alt text or images, what a defined header was for our tables and some implications of using inline images. Once we kind of absorbed that information, we are very fortunate that we have an office that's dedicated to helping people with blindness or low vision. So we met with a specialist from the National Research and Training Center on blindness and low vision. They are actually the nation's only federally funded center focused on employment outcomes for people who are blind or have low vision and they produce field leading research and provide training to professionals ranging from direct service practitioners to administrators of state agencies and federal programs. So like I said, we're very glad to have them. These people are absolute experts. So we had a meeting with one of their specialists and she was very sure to make sure that we understood the importance of using styles and headers, which was something we were already doing in our template. So that was something we didn't have to worry about. The biggest thing that we didn't really think about was avoiding blank space lines and simplifying tables. So when you're using the technology to read the screen, if you have a blank space in there, it's going to say blank line or it's going to say line or paragraph that kind of varies from technology to technology. So that was something we hadn't even thought of before. We also spoke with legal counsel. There were some things that we weren't sure exactly which way we needed to go. Information is very conflicting when it comes to ADA web accessibility. Even at the government level sites, some will say do this, some will say do that. So to make sure that all of our bases were covered, we did consult legal counsel on those issues to make sure that we were providing the most accessible documents possible. So once we had all of those discussions with all of those people across campus, we were a little overloaded with information. It took us a little while to digest that information and process it down to what we needed it to do. So our next step was we started looking at other colleges and universities. What were they doing? How were they handling the situation? And there were three main ones that we decided to benchmark our processes against. And that was Penn State, California State, San Marcos and Michigan State University. When we looked at all of their information and their documents that they provided to students and the health that they provided to students, we decided that they would be the easiest to implement. And when I say easy to implement, it doesn't mean that their seniors relaxed. They had very high standards for what they wanted to achieve with ADA accessibility. But it was easier to implement in that our students and faculty were going to be more willing to accept these changes in the future. So next we're going to talk about our student requirements. So what do we require of our students in regards to ADA web accessibility? We're going to talk about some of the changes we made to our templates and then our responsibilities. So some of the things that we have to handle in the office. So that would be PDF conversion and an accessibility check. Okay. So the first thing I guess we're going to talk about is updated that this page wasn't what I was expecting. Are we going to come back to that? No, I'll come back to that. Okay. Okay. So we skipped a slide. Sorry. Technical difficulties of the day. So let's talk about student requirements. So the main ADA accessible areas that we harp on are our tables, our color contrast, alternative text with our images and then our equations. Those are the things that we see most often our students using. So that's what we created standards for. So when we were developing these standards, we needed something that was going to meet requirements, but something that wasn't so difficult or so time consuming that our students were going to complain because when they complain, they complain to faculty and then our faculty come back and complain to us. So we had to find a nice middle ground of accessibility and not overloading the student with changes. So our first step was looking at tables. We knew from our meetings that this was going to be one of our easier tasks that we could adapt around. So in our templates, we have a situation where our tables populate. And so we adjusted the template tools to make the process a little bit easier for our students when it comes to titles and making sure that they're centered on the page and making sure that we have what's called a header row on that very initial table. This is the top row of the column with the titles and descriptions where they're found. So if a table crosses over the page, we were already requiring that that table be split. We have to read those or our students have to read those header rows. And what this does is it allows the user who's using a screen reader, they can go back and check those header rows if they get lost and where they're at with the information is telling them. And they don't have to go all the way back to the very beginning of the table at the previous page. It's already there on that page. The biggest issue that we had to navigate through was merge sales. So merge sales for a reader, it can cause issues in the way that it processes, okay, I've read this cell, now I need to move to this cell. So the ideal thing is to remove all merge sales. We had to discuss a lot with various departments on campus. And we found out that a lot of journals require a merge sale to show data in a very specific way. So we couldn't ask students to completely change their data cell, their table, their data in their tables just to be accessible for us because that would be a complete rework. And that would be a lot of work for them. So what we decided to do is that we have a good faith effort statement on our webpage that allows anybody who may need any additional help, if you need help, send us a form and we'll go through and we'll make sure that this document is even more accessible. Our next thing that we had to set a standard around was color contrast. So color contrast, we don't set anything where we have very specific color codes that you have to use. Instead we provide examples of this is a good contrast, this is a poor contrast. Our underlining guide here is we convert the image to black and white. If you can tell the difference in the colors in black and white, your contrast is good. If you don't, you need to go back and reconsider your color choices. Again, we have some students that their research uses electromagnetic imaging and all sorts of things and there's no way to adjust that contrast. That's what the machine is set up to do. So again, we have that good faith effort statement to kind of combat that issue as well. So our next thing was alternative text for our images. This was very difficult because you could write a paragraph about what your image is about and the goal is to make it as simple as possible. So not only were we facing that, but we were also facing student backlash about it. They didn't fully understand why they needed to do this process again because it's describing their thesis or the dissertation, why did they need to do it again? So our compromise was we had a two sentence maximum, just to give a brief description. And then after that, we say we know that you've discussed this further in detail. So put the page number where you discussed this in detail. And then that way the reader knows, hey, I can go back and look at this page and I can get more information about this image. The last thing was equations. Equations were tricky because some readers will naturally read the math languages that are built into Word. Some of them won't. And the ones that do, it doesn't guarantee that they read all of them. And if there's just a bunch of variation between readers, nothing is standardized. So we were having to work around a non-standard legal requirement, which it can be very difficult. So we tried a couple of different things for our equations. Originally we had a control box where our equation was placed and then it gave a number. So all of our equations are numbered. But at that point, we're relying on the screen reader to read that math language. So we thought about replacing just the text with an image. Well, to get the image replaced and put it on there, it causes formatting issues or cross the page. It moves the number. They happen to add alternative text. That was a lot of steps that our students weren't willing to deal with. So then we thought about an invisible table with an image that removed the problem of formatting across the page, making the image too large. But it came with its own set of problems because then, especially in very long proofs, it was causing problems with our formatting requirements for the numbers. So our final solution was to keep the invisible table and they would just copy and paste their equation just as they normally did into that table. But then you have to add alternative text to that table. So again, like all of their images and their data, they've discussed this in detail throughout their document. So we have a boilerplate statement for our equations for our students to use. And all they have to do is populate the page number. And it's basically this equation is discussed further on this page. If you have any questions, you can contact the author. And we do have a request form set up. If somebody needs to contact an author, we can go through channels and try to make that work. So next, I think Ms. Terry is going to take over. There we go. All right. So as Lara said, once we identified our standards, we started to update all of our materials. So we started with our templates, made sure that our new form for equations was entered in there, added information concerning the tables and images so that students knew what they were supposed to do throughout the process. We also updated our workshops to make sure we spent plenty of time going over how to add alternative text, what they needed to do with tables and equations, checking for color contrast and things like that. And then make sure we had plenty of time built into the workshops to answer those specific questions. We knew that because our workshops are generally about an hour to an hour and a half, that that's a lot of information for the students to get at one period of time. So we then created a web accessibility handout that we could give students. When they come to a workshop, we have it in a printed and a PDF format. So depending upon if they're in a in-person or a virtual workshop, they have the ability to get that information. And these handouts provide step-by-step instructions for how to add accessibility to their documents. And they include screenshots, both in words so that the students know exactly what they're looking for. We had also created instructional videos. So we had a few already, but we went ahead and expanded these. So now there are specific ones for web accessibility that we make available for students so that they can again walk through step-by-step and show them exactly what they're needing to do. So now we're going to switch gears a little bit and talk about what our responsibility is for each of the documents once we receive them and what we do with the formatting checks, PDF conversion, and then the accessibility checks in PDF. So because our templates already use styles, the document navigation was something that already existed for us. So we just continued to make sure that students connect everything to proper subheadings so that it shows up in the navigation for the document. And so when you click on a specific section in the navigation or in our table of contents, it'll take you to that point in the document. And then that when we convert it to a PDF, that navigation stays with the document. For tables, as Lara mentioned, we made sure that any portion of the table, whatever page it's on, if it's a longer table that splits multiple pages, that the header row information is properly checked for each of those pages. Because you do have the ability to just go in and randomly check any row as a header row. So we do have to make sure that those are properly labeled. We also go in and look at color contrast, as she said. So here's an example of, on the top row, what looks like decent color variations on both sides. But as you can see, once you've moved it to grayscale, the top right one, it becomes too similar when it's changed to grayscale. So nobody, if you have any type of color blindness, you're not going to be able to see the exact variations as well as you can with the tables on the left. We also go through and individually check each of the documents for their, the alternative text that's added to their images, equations and schemes. This does take us a little bit more time, because we do have to make sure the students have included page numbers on each of these, that the statements are correct. I mean, that their alternative text for their images does not match what's exactly in their figure table or captioning. So when we convert the document for the students, we do this for students. It's not something that we allow them to do. We do this for a couple of reasons. The first is that our university does not provide Adobe Pro for students. And so we can't expect our distance students to be able to access this. While it's on our computers here on campus, if you're a distant student, you don't have access to it. So that's an unfair advantage if you're a distant student. And also it just creates a much more efficient review. We can go through and know that everything is converted properly and check the accessibility, because we would have to do that anyway after we received the final PDF from the student. So we just found that it was much easier for our office to do that last step. We then use the PDF accessibility checker. The main errors that we normally find are concerning tab order and sometimes with image conversion. So as you can see here are some summaries of different errors that we found. We all hope to get a document that says that the checker found no problems. But usually what we see is with the tab order and that's a very easy fix under page properties and PDF, so long as you have Adobe Pro. But sometimes we have issues with images. So let's say there's an image that's made up of multiple parts, or the student used a specific program to create it. And so their graph is each line is technically its own image. That while the word accessibility checker did not have any problems with it when it was converted to a PDF, each of those little parts can become a problem. And so then we would have to send the document back to the student. We would request them to usually just take a screenshot of the image and then reinsert that into their document. That way each little part of the image is being read as a whole as opposed to multiple parts. So some of the issues we run into, as Lara mentioned earlier, is with screen readers. Because each screen reader technology is different, there's just no standard with it. So usually screen readers can be a browser plug-in or its own standalone software, and each of them do their own thing. So sometimes math languages work, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they can read right through equations or they skip over them all together. And so again this is really just a best faith effort on our part to do everything we can to provide accessibility for these documents. Another issue we have is with latex documents. Currently we do not know how to make them accessible. As you can see in this example here, a student tried to add navigation to his document and it did not work. And so that is, it's not something that we could use. So we asked him to remove that code from his document and we are currently working with faculty across campus to see what kind of codes we can add to our latex template to make that happen. But as of right now we don't have that capability. And so what's next for us? As I said, we're going to continue to work with campus faculty and see what we can do to create accessibility for latex. We're going to continue to monitor government accessibility standards and publishing standards in hopes that the two can finally meet. Hope that there's more clarification from the government as to how things can be done and hopefully publishing standards as more and more publishing companies move towards accessibility standards of their own since a lot of their documents and their journals are now online. They're going to have to start adding web accessibility as well. And so we know things like tables with merged cells and color contrast are going to become more and more of an issue for them as well. So we're just going to continue to monitor all of that. So that is the end of our presentation. Justin, we should have time for questions. Great. Thank you so much. And we do have questions flooding into the Q&A. So some of them may repeat some of the information you already talked about. Jonah asks, for images, do you require a descriptive caption in addition to the alt text? He says, I believe you said there is description in the text. Okay. So I'm going to pull up a sample document real quick and navigate to one of our figures. All right. So this is just an example. So we do have the image and then we have a figure title. And if they want a note below it, which we do require, because whatever is listed as the title actually shows up in our list of figures. But then whatever they list for their alternative text would need to be different from this as well as provide the page number where they actually discuss the image further in the document. So I have a question. I saw on the document that you just had up, you know, the figure number and the title of the figure. Is it a requirement or a common practice to put the caption, if you will? Yes, all of our figures have to have those captions. Because that's what, when we, the document creates the navigation for it to appear in the list of figures up here, it links to that title. And so that's how, so if I were to use control, click on it. That takes me to that spot of the document. And so the captioning has to be there for all tables and figures so that we can navigate through the document. Okay. I guess, you know, for something that is possibly more, you know, scientific like pharmacy or something like that, we often see, you know, expansive descriptions, you know, as part of the label. And we, to some extent, if like the student has like a note like this that is, like what I'm describing as a caption, if it's rather extensive, we can ask them to condense that some and make that the alternative text. Okay. And then they would probably refer to that exact same page and say that it's a detailed description that's in the captioning. Okay. The next question from GW, can you apply alt text to a non-image formula? Yep. Okay, hold on. A non-image formula. No. So if you just type out the equation, you're independent on the screen reader to actually read that math language. Alternative text can only be applied to images and tables. Everything else. There's no way to apply it. So here's kind of a sample of how we have equations in our document. So you can kind of see this table outline around the equation. So for our standards, our equations are always centered on the page and the number, however, its number is going to be right aligned. And so students can just copy and paste their equations into these tables and then they can go into the table properties and add alternative text. You know, it did work. GW, did I answer your question? You can either type or turn on your video if you need more clarification. Bye-bye. Okay. I don't see a response, so I'll just keep going. I had a question myself, but it was about latex. So moving on, I also had a second question and that was our open source PDF converters adequate for accessibility. Since you mentioned, you know, students do not have access to Adobe Pro, and I think that's pretty common across universities. We haven't done a lot of research into those. The ones that we did look at seem, when we were trying to find one, the ones that we found, they would allow you to convert so many documents before it became a paid for version, and we didn't want to have students pay for something. And so since we know we have access to Adobe Pro from the university, it's just it's been easier for us to make that conversion so that we can do those final checks in the PDF document. The reason why you have to have the Pro is for adjusting the accessibility for making, to fixing any issues that the PDF might pick up in their accessibility. You can't do that in the open source of the unpaid versions as of our last research. Now, somebody might have said, you know, I see that this is moving forward. We need to be able to offer this. But as of now, we haven't been able to find anything. Okay, thank you. So moving on, Deborah asks, what do you do if a student is unable to meet your accessibility standards? We haven't run into that issue. We started this spring 2020, which is a wonderful semester to start anything new. And so we have had students who have had trouble understanding, but were able to set up like a one-on-one consultation with them, either in person or virtually, and explain what's needed. And they've been able to take care of the requirements. Okay. Stephanie asks, what's the average amount of time it takes for you to review for accessibility and convert the document to the PDF? The longer we do it, the less time it takes. Usually, I would say it adds about 15 to 20 minutes per document. But that would be a very heavy image-intensive document. Right. You could probably do it from start to finish the way that we traditionally formatted documents. You could probably do it in 10 minutes. And that's you fixing some of the harder things in Adobe. So it's not terrible. It's just a couple of extra things to check. And we normally only deal with about 120 students per semester. And so I don't know what other institutions, what your load is like. So it could be, for us, that is manageable. But for another institution who may have more submissions, that might not, yeah. Or who have like only one staff person or I have five staff person doing that. Yeah. Okay. It's nice when you have someone you can split the load with. Okay. So the next question says, so are you not letting students use the auto-numbering feature for equations? So how are templates are set up? We are using the auto-numbering feature. It's just a more complicated way of getting it done. Especially when we get into some of our more technical templates where you've got your chapter number and then the number of the equation in that chapter. We are using that. It's just a backwards way of getting it to work, the way we need it to work. And that's just how we have our, how we have everything set up. So for our equations, our tables and our figures, we have it set up to where they just type in a little phrase and hit F3 and it does everything for them. And all they have to do is just populate their information. So it does do that for them. We just have a little bit of a complicated way of getting it done because we offer those other benefits along with the shortcut. Yeah. Our templates and our templates because they're automated, we created quick parts for students to easily be able to add those things. So it's more work for us to keep the templates up to date that then the students are able to automatically create things. Thank you. So the last question we have is you might have already kind of answered it, but for clarification, do you actually fix the accessibility issues in the PDF or do you instruct the student how to do it in their Word document? Because most of the issues we come across are tag order or tab order, it's something you can only fix with Adobe Pro. We do make those corrections, but if we come across an instance where there's missing alternative text or it's something that needs student input because it's content related, we will send it back to the student to have them corrected. Okay. So I don't see any more questions and we have about six or seven minutes left. So do you either of you have any sort of maybe tips for creating this type of program at our own institutions or pitfalls? It's going to be complicated. I'm not going to lie to you about that. It's going to be complicated. And the more universities you look at, the more government sites that you look at, the worse it's going to be. So find a few that their standards, their traditional standards kind of look similar to your own universities or your own colleges and look at what they've done with their accessibility and see if you can mimic that fairly easy. Because there's a lot of information and a lot of it's conflicting and a lot of it doesn't apply to everything, if that makes sense. Even in Word and Adobe, when we do the accessibility checks, I can run it on my computer and I will get a set of errors. Terry can run it on her computer and she's going to get a completely different set of errors sometimes. So that's how insane it really is. So you just kind of have to set your bar at this is what we're willing to accept. Have a good faith effort statement on your repository and have a form. If anybody needs to request, they can request it. But yeah, you've got to set your own bar and you've got to say this is where we draw the line because it can take up a lot of your time very, very quickly, especially when you get into the checking the documents side of it. Because like he said, some people only have one person and you've got to do 200 documents. It can very well very much take over your life very quickly if you don't set that bar. Thank you. We did have a couple more questions. Lily asked if we can have a link to your handout, but I believe the handouts are going to be available in the conference proceedings and all of our sessions are being recorded. So they will be accessible as well. So hopefully that answers your question, Lily. We think that if I remember correctly that handout is also available on the website on our website, so he can download it from there as well. Or he could email us and we're happy to share information. Yes, yes. That's the only way we made through it was looking at other people's things. Oh, oh, Lily actually meant your accessibility standard that you give to your students. She could email us and we would be happy to share that. Okay, great. Thank you. And in the last four minutes we have another question. Was it harder figuring out the word templates or learning how to read slash use the Adobe Pro accessibility tools? For me it was Adobe Pro. Well, it depends on what she means by the templates. Creating the templates took more time for me, but the accessibility part of it in word is pretty user friendly. It's a button and it pops up for you and it'll walk you through it. Adobe is a little trickier, so. Okay, wonderful. Well, that's all the questions that I see in the chat unless anybody has any follow-up or, you know, any parting words of encouragement. We're all open to that. And I just want to thank you both for this amazing information and for, you know, taking one for the whole team and turning the board into this fray. I think we're all very conscious of, you know, increasing accessibility standards and that has a lot of legal, you know, implications. So, you know, treading into kind of some unknown waters. It's comforting in a way to find out that, you know, some of the stuff you have to learn on your own, you know, or be the one to take charge. Well, if anybody has any questions moving forward, if you have any worries about any of it, you can feel free to email us and we can walk you through what our thought processes were. And instead of recreating the will for everybody, y'all are more than welcome to do that. All right. Well, I think this leaves us a couple extra minutes for, you know, the next break or the next, I think the next session, actually in two minutes is going to be the poster presentation. And I'm going to go moderate that. There you go. All right. Thank y'all. Thank you, everyone.