ETD Community Meeting, October 3, 2022

 

Emily Flynn Good morning, everyone. This is the OhioLINK ETD Center Digital Accessibility Q&A. It's one of our community meetings. And we're glad to have everyone with us. We will be doing a recording and posting this later as well, so it will be viewable again on our webinars page on the OhioLINK website. Our agenda today. I will cover an OhioLINK ETD Center Digital Accessibility Update. Hand it over to Judy Cobb for a brief context, and then we'll get some local implementation examples from Cindi Kristof at Kent State University and Connie Song at Mount Saint Mary's Seminary and School of Theology. We'll then leave lots of time for questions and discussions as well. For the OhioLINK ETD Center Digital Accessibility Update I'll be covering that. I'm Emily Flynn, the Metadata and ETD Coordinator here at OhioLINK. So we've been talking about digital accessibility and ETDs for at least a couple of years now, and we finally got something together for ETD release 3.2. We have a tentative date right now of January 17th, 2023. We're currently working to confirm this with the developers. So when we do get it set as the final date, it will go out on the listserv. So you're going to be getting a sneak peek right now. If you have any issues with January 17th certainly reach out and let us know. It seemed to be a good date for everyone and shouldn't have any submissions, at least as far as I know, for the deadlines that I've been keeping track of. As far as the digital accessibility requirements, the change is really going to be with the uploaded ETD pdf, which we're asking to be now made digitally accessible. And we highly recommend writing your local minimum digital accessibility standards because that's what's going to be referenced in the new acknowledgment statement. And then we can. Sorry, chat was coming up. So we have we recommend you to do your own local one, the acknowledgment, when you publish will now talk about either your local or industry standards. So that's the best way to customize this update for yourself. We do have. We do have a user testing going on right now. And so if you want to take a new look at the system, I sent out an email to the listserv and that is ongoing right now. So we can certainly get you in for some of that. I'm going to go through the slides quickly and then will take questions and comments at the end because I think that'll be a good time to get to everything. So if you have something just jot it down quick and keep it in mind. The resources are available on the OhioLINK website. We have some OhioLINK texts that could help someone get started with writing their own minimal digital accessibility standards. We also have a web page that describes how to check these scenarios and for those minimums that OhioLINK has set as one possible minimum, and you can certainly customize that based on what you prioritize locally. We also have links out to other departments and institutions that have done a lot of their own digital accessibility web pages and resources as well for students. And there's some other things that we've put up as well. So certainly check that out. We also have a decisions and considerations guide as well, if you're not sure where to start either. And all that has also been sent out to the listserv, but it is available on the using the ETD Center OhioLINK web page. All these community meetings have been recorded for the previous ones that we've done. And I also did a recent U.S.E.T.D.A. 2022 conference session, which will be posted on YouTube in the future as well. And a lot of that user meeting talked about digital accessibility. So now I'm going to hand it over to my colleague, Judy Cobb, the Associate Director of Operations and Platforms at OhioLINK to give some brief context.

 

Judy Cobb Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. I just want to take a few minutes to really briefly walk. Walk us through the context for why we want to include digital accessibility in the ETC Center. So I'm kind of going to go from high level to local level as I walk through this. So it all starts with Title three of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability. The ADA was enacted primarily to focus on obstacles that physical locations we're probably unfamiliar with that. But it's starting to be applied more and more to websites and digital content as well. There's also Title two of the ADA, which applies to state and local governments and agencies that receive federal funding. The one thing we've been seeing is that the Justice Department at the federal level has been has become more interested in this. They've just released guidance on website compliance with for digital accessibility. It looks like they're taking sort of a more proactive interest in this particular topic. More locally, however, the OhioLINK ETD Center falls under the Ohio State University's Policy and procedures for digital accessibility. That's because OhioLINK is administratively reports up to OSU. So based on the based on that policy and procedures, both the user interface and the content in the ETD Center needs to be made digitally, digitally accessible. To get even more local. The OhioLINK Library Advisory Council last spring voted on an action item stating that ETD Center participants will make every effort, that their documents that are submitted to the ETD Center meet a minimum standard of digital accessibility. So because of all of that, we did have of course, some meetings with counsel and they advised us that we need to sort of set a date and begin taking measures to ensure that the ETDs that are submitted to the ETD Center are becoming more accessible. So accessibility in theETD Center is sort of two pronged, right? So OhioLINK hosts the platform and that needs to be accessible. But we all, all of you create or your students create the content, the actual ETD. So the ETD ends up being sort of a shared platform and therefore we have a shared responsibility for accessibility. So because of that, we really want to work with all of you to think about how to implement your own plan that will help you work toward making your ETDs more accessible. We really want to remind you and stress that your plan is your plan and they don't have it doesn't have to be like anybody else's plan. You can decide how you want to do this work. We're just asking you to have something in writing saying this is what we're going to do and this is how we're going to do it based on your own workflows and standards that are going to work for you. Emily. I think that's all I have. I'll turn it back over to you.

 

Emily Flynn Thank you Judy. So to help with a couple examples thinking about different sizes of our institutions and the different types that also contribute to the ETD Center, we have local implementation examples from Cindy and Connie. We're going to start with Cindy Kristof first from Kent State University, and I'm going to stop sharing my screen and hand it over to Cindy.

 

Cindy Kristof Thank you, Emily, and thank you, Judy. I'm just going to share real quick. And hopefully you see this.

 

Judy Cobb We do.

 

Cindy Kristof Okay. Didn't have it at the beginning there, but I do now. All right. So two colleagues and I gave a presentation at the U.S.E.T.D.A. a couple of weeks ago. I guess that was a couple of weeks ago now. Ginny Dressler, who is Kent State's Digital Projects Librarian, and Allison Haines, who is the I.T. Compliance Coordinator for Kent State, which means she's responsible for overseeing accessibility at the university. I'm Head of Copyright and Scholarly Communication and just one of the hats I wear as ETD Administrator. So we started off and I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time this with this, but accessibility we see as part of DEI. We've added DEI-A to the end of it. We have a new committee within the libraries now called IDEA and IDEAL rather, and that stands for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility at the Libraries. And it's one of those committees that's responsible for programing and for doing other things to, you know, make sure the university libraries is an accessible place to be. So within our libraries, we had a Digital Accessibility Libraries Committee which reported to the Web Committee that was initiated in 2019. So we've been thinking about this for a little while. Within the university, it goes even further back. We looked at web redesign circa 2014, and the first hires of any accessibility specialists were in 2018. And then finally we had the Alison moved into place in 2020. So she's relatively new. Let's see. So as part of DEI and A we want, we have a goal of services, documentation and education. So we want to have standards for printed documents, standards for scanned documents. It's a little easier to do that with born digital documents. If anybody is scanned from print and we consider this central to our standard operations. We had done some retrospective thesis and dissertation scanning and remediation beginning in 2017, and we've been slowly adding those to the OhioLINK ETD Center. And what we discovered was how difficult this kind of scanning could be, because you're working from an old printed document and some of them go back really, really far. So we tried to make those accessible. We ran those through remediation in Acrobat Pro using the accessibility check tool. And there are hiccups in the process because old tables are really hard to remediate and make accessible. Alison has pointed out that nobody is really at 100% accessibility and that might be an impossible goal, but you can come close. So that's what we've attempted to do with this project. Within OhioLINK of course, you've got the OhioLINK Accessibility Standard Accessibility statement, rather, from March of last year and all of the details that go with that. So what we wanted to do was start out with a college here at Kent State, and I don't know if Lucy Weimer is still on this call, but she volunteered to be our test college for ETDs at Kent State University. And I had originally thought, well, we'll get a committee together filled with people from the graduate college. Our Dean Manford Van Dallman said, I will support whatever you want to do, you know, pull it all together. I talked to graduate council and send out a call for volunteers. And what I got back was just Allison, she said, I'll volunteer. And what we decided was that we would work within the structure we've had at Kent State for a long time, which is a series of college gatekeepers or ETD contacts. The contacts work with the students. They send out style guides and other graduation paperwork from their different colleges. They review and approve ETDs to make sure that they align with the style guides and they work with students and advisors on the individual requirements. So this is an established conduit for communication at our university. Our numbers are we've had a total of 4645 Kent State ETDs from the very beginning, with an average of 620 per year over the last ten years. And of course COVID slowed that down a little bit. So the College of EHHS, which is Education, Health and Human Services, so it encompasses a lot of different topics. It's not just education, it's audiology, it's tourism, it's sports, it's recreation, you know, and it's also people who are going into educational administration. So there are 25 master's programs and 14 doctoral programs. It's got like a kind of a little bit of a wide spread in terms of subject subjects. But the gatekeeper, Lucy Weimmer, provided us with 20 example theses and dissertations with different research methodologies and presentation of data that were qualitative and quantitative. So we would have a really good idea of what we were, what we could be dealing with in terms of technical bumps and making things accessible. Okay. So, like I said, Lucy's our test college. She's a wonderful gatekeeper. Ideal. Well, what do you get when you do a great job? You get more work. So EHHS has approximately 15 ETDs per semester, at least they have for the last three or so years. And COVID did slow this down a little bit. Lucy's our gatekeeper. We met with the assistant dean last it was two weeks ago, now September 20th and the, you know, we also, I think, need to keep our editing word processing and proofreading services informed of whatever we do, which I reached out to one of them and, you know, told them this is happening. So there are a lot of people to communicate with, including graduate students. The proofreading and editing word processing services are (my mother in law used to do this. She would type up dissertations and get out a ruler and measure the margins to make sure that they aligned with the style guides.) But now, of course, that's all done in word processing. Okay. So the test college and the timeline, we met to talk about communication to the college. What kind of training are the students and the gatekeepers going to need? Well, we're going to have written instructions. We're also going to have some face to face or other real time assistance. We want to have some initial meetings where we talk about these various steps and we divided it into two: people who are already through with their dissertation and people are just getting started. But we wanted to have written instructions and then we will record our sessions that we have with the students so that they'll have video help too. We want to be able to appeal to all types of learning styles and then just have this real time assistance. If you need help with your dissertation, bring it. We're there. We're on standby. We will help you get it to be accessible. And then we'll evaluate this in December 2022 or sooner, and then launch the plan for the entire campus in January of 2023. So we're really beginning to have to work very quickly on this. The plan messaging for gatekeepers and for our students aligns with the OhioLINK standards and Kent State University's standards, which have been determined during this process. So this really isn't a fully baked plan. This is like raw batter that we've just poured into cake pans maybe we need to bake it so we may backtrack and some of us will probably learn from this process and our failures. But what we want to create is self-sufficiency at each level. We don't want to overburden the gatekeepers. Me, I'm the ETD administrator or the accessibility specialist. We want to put it on the students and try to make it as simple as possible so that we can go forward. Alison has never hesitated to mention that accessibility, putting a document through accessible format, is a skill that comes with extra pay for our graduates. So this is good practice and a good skill for our students to have. It will make them marketable. So the planned messaging, again for gatekeepers and students will be multimodal: a printed tip sheet with an accessible digital version, accompanied web page with screenshots so people can follow along if that's how they learn. And 60 minute trainings, half tutorial and half hands on these will be both recorded. We'll record some of them and then have some live ones. This is a sample of the tip sheet which is not ready for print. Actually, it probably is ready for prime time now. Allison sent us a finished version last week, which I have not had the chance to look at, but this is how it looks on the top of it. We want to make it approachable, inclusive and encouraging. We want to emphasize opportunity rather than duty. Oh, this drudgery has to be done. This is an opportunity for students to learn about a real skill that they can take into the workplace. This will indicate which departments are involved using brand fonts and colors so that it looks familiar to the student. It's customized to Kent State University. These are all our Pantone colors and our specialized fonts, etc.. So we want to make it look like everything else. Again, this is the sample at the bottom of the tip sheet. The final step has a positive, personalized language for encouragement, and we want to make it not seem too burdensome. So upload your ETD making sure to also upload the accessibility reports. That's it. So we want to make it very, very personalized and accessible, both in terms of accessibility and psychologically. We want to make it friendly. The main medium will be print, so the contact information is represented with a QR code. They could just scan the QR code and get to our web help and our videos. Space saving was a priority for this document. So we're sending users to the web page to find their college's ETD gatekeeper and facilitator, which both reduces text and emphasize the the facilitator as the first point of contact. And so that's how we're going with it and we'll be able to tell you more after we're actually through the process. The only way past it is through it, and hopefully we'll get there very, very soon and we'll learn a lot more then. So that's what I've got. I don't know if we'll be taking questions later or if what the rest of this will be. But I am going to actually quit sharing my video.

 

Emily Flynn Thank you, Cindy. I will resume the PowerPoint and yeah, will handle questions at the end. Thank you so much. Everyone already uses the ETD Center with your own workflows and policies, and this is to show that digital accessibility will be treated in the same way. So we're going to have a second different example from Connie Song, who I believe is on the webinar, and she's going to go through their example and talk through. Connie, I'm going to pull up the top part of your PDF and then the rest of it is on the next slide. So let me know when you want me to proceed. Thank you so much.

 

Connie Song Okay. Can you hear me?

 

Emily Flynn Yes.

 

Connie Song All right. Hello, everybody. My name is Connie Song. I'm the library director at Mount Saint Mary's Seminary and School of Theology in Cincinnati, Ohio. On the ETD page, you'll find us under Athenaeum of Ohio. So just a little bit about the seminary we have we're a graduate school only. We're a very small school, less than 200 FTE, and we only put out a handful of master's thesis, master's level only theses every year. So what you saw before with Cindy and Kent State, we are probably the 180 degree opposite of that. We don't have any special software. We don't have any committees. We don't have any specialists. We don't have tutorials. It was basically me figuring out the process and writing it up because we only do a handful a year and I don't want to revisit this every year or go through lots of committee work. So our thesis process here, I created a Microsoft Word template that the students use, and that template already includes styles. So I teach them about styles. And why that's important is because then it has heading level information already built in. So we've been doing that for a long time, for several years. So but we've only started in the ETD in 2015 and since 2015 we've averaged 0 to 3 theses per year. Master's level theses. We don't put all our theses on the ETD, only the ones with the highest grade. That's just the way they decided to do it here. So again, only a handful, only 14 in there right now. When I heard about this new accessibility requirement for the ETD taking off in January, I just had to figure out a way to get it done because like, like I'm the only one who does this and I only do a handful a year. So I didn't have time to watch the videos or participate in community meetings. This is actually my first ETD meeting that I've been to. So I just read the information on the website and created a workflow that worked for us. So our entire ETD process workflow is four pages and we do it so the students, we don't make the students do it. If a student's master's thesis has received a high grade, I contact the student asking them for permission to put their master's thesis in the ETD, as well as asking them to designate which copyright level they want. And then from there, I take their Word document that they send to me and just look it over to make sure it looks okay, formatting wise. And then from there we take over the entire submission process so they don't log in to the ETD at all. So after logging in, then we we take care of the rest process. So I said it's a four page document. I added the procedure for the ETD part, the accessibility part. That's one page of this document and that is what is on the screen right now. Half of that one page on we have two, two screenshots here of our one page accessibility process. So basically at the top, we put the minimum requirements for ETD PDFs that I got from the OhioLINK ETD website. All the PDF files already include full text. All the others of parts are taken care of in this process. The last point PDF includes a title and use of at least one setting level in the text of the document that's taken care of already by the MS Word template that we require the students to use. So then under local procedures, this is where we can make sure we meet those minimum requirements we tip to the students already that I've been telling them for years already is don't hit, enter, enter, enter, but use styles, indent and spacing options in the paragraphs options. Sometimes I have to correct their papers if they still have this information lots of enter, enter, enter. We don't have a writing center here. The library acts as the writing center. We help students with their writing and working with the template. So after we receive the thesis in Word and that's that's what we consider depositing with the library, they just send us an email with their Word document completed and with their approval from their advisors. We run the accessibility checker, which is inside Word itself under file, check for issues, check accessibility and then fix any possible issues. And I tested this with two of our two of our theses from last year and it worked just fine. There really weren't any issues that I had to fix. The only things that popped up that were real that that were real issues were very easy to fix. And then I saved the Word as a as a, the Word document as a PDF. Can you go to the next screen, please. And then this is. This is what covers some of the accessibility is when we save as as a PDF, we add the author name, the title and the subtitle, and then we check to make sure two options are check-marked the document structure tags as well as the create bookmarks using headings. So as long as all that is tagged and entered, it is considered accessible. And how we tested is running it through the Tingtun checker and then we run the Tingtun results page as a PDF at just one page and then save it as a shown there. And that's really our process. That's it. Most of our theses are text based, so we don't we won't have to do the tricky tables making those accessible. There may be a few. I think we've had one or two in the past that had quite a few illustrations, but those are really rare. So I've just added a note here that if we do need to do something with illustrations and tables, we will have to look a little further into into making those parts of the theses accessible. But otherwise, since most of our theses are text based, since we only have a handful of years, I just whipped up this document without really consulting anyone else. Since we're so small and my ad hoc library committee would have been like, Yeah, that sounds good, just go with that. So, so that's the how we came up with the process. I don't I won't look at this again until I have to add ETD or theses next year, probably in May or June, but I just wanted to get it all taken care of so we were in compliance with the requirements coming up this January. And also I just wanted to make sure the my my Word document template was compatible with this and it is. So we're not really changing anything. We're just adding a few steps, namely check-marking those things when we save as a PDF and running it through the Tingtun checker. That's basically the additional steps we're doing to make them accessible. But for a small institution like us, I mean, that's what works and that's it for me.

 

Emily Flynn Thank you so much, Connie, I really appreciate it. And this is a great counterpoint to show your way of of getting this together and also that the other checker is there in case someone doesn't have Adobe. So it's great to know that you're able to successfully use that and make it work for you. As you noted in your PDF, you may or may not have to attach the digital accessibility report that comes out of there. The Tingtun checker does it as well as Adobe. And right now, our OhioLINK requirement is just leaving that optional. So you'll see a new upload document type for digital accessibility report so that we can keep these separate and we can track them. But that is something available to you as institutions. But it is not mandatory. It is a required thing right now. So I'm going to move on to questions and discussions. I think this is our last main slide, so I'm just going to leave this one up and we can start. It have. I'm going to call out comments that came through. If I can chat again. It was from Cynthia Tindogan who asked, please move the date, the end of the month. I'm guessing January, as some of us will be publishing fall documents before and after that date. Is that true for others as well? Would the end of the January date, work better. Certainly let us know either in chat or feel free to open up your mute mute at this time and and talk. And I see we have a comment from the hand raised from Kim Go ahead Kim.

 

Kim Fleshman Well first off, yes, the end of the month would be better because our December people takes us 5 to 6 weeks or so after graduation and get them all done before they get published. So they may not get done before January the 17th. So I agree with Cindy on that, or Cynthia. I do have a question about the minimal digital accessibility standards. So what if our MDAS needs to be different for latex documents or music scores or things of that nature? I have a hard time putting up on our website. These are the accessibility standards which ours happened to surpass yours. Right. If I put up yours, then people are going to think they don't have to do what we require. And if I put up ours in the case of, say, a music score where I can't get all those characters encoded. I'm going to let it go anyways. You get where I'm going with that. Same with latex. I'm going to have the same problem with character encoding and some of the links that come up in latex and so forth.

 

Emily Flynn So I think that's a that's a very astute point. And you know, this also gets that digital accessibility is difficult and it's not binary. It's not yes or no. Did you do it or didn't you? It's how much, to what extent. And this is tricky for the different types of documents. And so you might have to have multiples for the different formats or types of entries that you receive.

 

Kim Fleshman Can we just say that we reserve the right to allow, I mean, does that make sense if you do that? We reserve. I'm trying to think of better wording than that.

 

Emily Flynn But I mean, you could say,  this is required for all documents except where not possible, such as latex or something. Or you could do a specific I don't know. I, Judy and I are learning this as much as you all are. We are not professionals in digital accessibility, and that is also why we're trying to make it and encourage local policies, because this needs to be customizable. Even our OhioLINK minimum standards might not work for everyone. Or like you said, Kim, at BGSU you're going beyond it and that's fantastic. That's great that you can do that. So we want to have something there as a starting point, but certainly take it and make it your own, like Cindy and Connie and you as well. Kim. Go ahead and jump in Cindy

 

Cindy Kristof Um. Yeah, so I just wanted to jump in here and say, you know, we're really learning to we're having to learn very rapidly. I don't know what we're going to do with musical scores or what accessibility means for musical scores. What we're going to try to do, though, is follow whatever the standards are. We're going to look out, you know, not just to OhioLINK, but also to some other resources. You know, how do you do this and make it as accessible as we can. You know, accessibility is not going to be 100% and there are going to be cases that I think where, you know, yes, it'll be accessible to these standards, but it still not be able might not be able to may not be useful for somebody who has a special needs. So I think we are going to end up doing some remediation upon request well into the future. I just don't see that anything can be 100% off and on. I don't know if that's helpful or not, but I guess what I'm trying to convey is that, you know, we do have a good faith effort attitude towards this. We want to do the best that we can with the resources that we have. And hopefully we can try to meet the needs of whoever we, you know, need to help. That was awkward but.

 

Emily Flynn Thank you, Cindy. And I think that seems to be kind of what we're getting at it, too, is you need to have something and we need to be working towards it. Right. And trying to do what we can, that good faith effort, because that's really important, even though it's some extra stuff that we need to add in. This also benefits everyone by making sure these documents are more accessible in the various ways. Oh, yes, Cindy.

 

Cindy Kristof Okay. One more thing. This is something I really wanted to say earlier, but I was thinking and I think I said this at U.S.E.T.D.A. a couple weeks ago, but there are a lot of standards for ETDs already at our university, and Lucy and EHHS really follows those to the T. So we're talking about style guides. We're talking about APA style. And I really believe that compared to the details that are in the APA style guide, the accessibility standards are less than that. So I think if everybody can handle APA, then I think they can handle this at the the MDAS as it is now. I hope that's helpful to.

 

Judy Cobb I just want to interrupt and make sure that we're clear that OhioLINK has published a recommended minimum standard. And that's all it is, is a recommendation. We had some of you reach out, kind of not knowing where to start. And so we put together that recommendation. But you are as we've heard, you are welcome to change that. You don't have to. Kim, I think you mentioned you were going to link to it or something. You do not need to do that. Your local practice is really what matters here.

 

Emily Flynn Yes. Thank you, Judy, for reiterating that. That is true with a lot of things in the ETD Center we're the platform and we need to make sure that it is accessible and our content's accessible. But you are the ones who are looking at and approving these. And so just like your embargo policy, just like who submits, and the workflows you use, this is a similar case, but we wanted to give you something to start from if you want. Judy, did we want to cover what's in the chat? I think you were talking to people in the chat as I was speaking. So if any of that wants to be covered in the recording for people to hear, go ahead and and go through that.

 

Judy Cobb Maggie Davidson asked if the Tingtun is as efficient as Acrobat Pro because they were discussing if they need to spend the money to get a Pro license. And she asked, Does anyone know if it's limited to use? And I don't believe Tingtun has any usage limits. I've not seen that on there. The only limit that it does have is it's limited to a file size of ten megabytes. So if you've got a really large PDF, it won't work for that. But from what I've seen, the report that it generates is very, very similar to the one that Pro generates. So I think it's a fine tool to use if you don't want to buy a Pro license. And then Emily, we had a couple agreements with moving to the end of January.

 

Emily Flynn Okay. So maybe we'll look at it looks like January 30th is a Monday and the 31st is a Tuesday. So maybe we'll take a look at those two dates with the developers and I'll make sure that that doesn't coincide with anyone's submission date that I have on file and will let you know about end of January then, if that sounds good, Judy.

 

Judy Cobb Yes.

 

Emily Flynn Perfect. Well, we're almost at 10:45, so we have 15 more minutes. If you have any additional questions or anything else you want to discuss about digital accessibility and the ETDs. As we work through this, we will continue to send out emails with updates and a final date to the OhioLINK Center listserv. So make sure you're on the listserv. If you're doing any user testing for us in UAT right now of the new release. Thank you. And if you're interested, let us know. Judy and I are always available to talk some more if you want to after this if questions come up or if you want to do a separate meeting about your institution, please let us know. And we'd be happy to do that as well. Is there anything else we want to cover this morning. Judy. Anything I've left out that we should tell people?

 

Judy Cobb Not that I can think of, just a thank you to all of you who are thinking about this and finding the best path forward. We appreciate the work that you're putting into this.

 

Emily Flynn I will show our contact information for a couple of minutes and we'll stick around. But otherwise. We've wrapped up. So unless there's any lingering questions, we'll stay here for a couple of minutes. But otherwise, thank you for attending.