OhioLINK ETD Center Community Meeting

Emily Flynn Welcome to the ETD Center Community Meeting. For today's agenda, we will be going through an OhioLINK ETD center update from myself, Emily Flynn, Metadata Coordinator at OhioLINK. Then we'll have a digital accessibility and ETD center overview from Judy Cobb, our Associate Director of Operations and Platforms. I'll then show some mockups and a brief walkthrough of what we're expecting the system to look like. It's all still in development, but we're going to give you a little sneak peek this morning. And then Judy will cover the next steps for OhioLINK and local institutions. As long as we get through all of that, though, will certainly be time for questions this morning. There's a lot to get through. If you think of something while we're speaking, please feel free to type something into the chat itself. Or we will. We currently have everyone muted, but at that time you can certainly unmute and just ask your question too if that's easier. Like I said, this is being recorded and usually we get them up about a week or so after word to the website and we'll send that out to the ETD listserv. I'm just double checking it's recording - it looks like it's in progress. All right. So we're going to jump right in. For the ETD center update, just wanted to let everyone know. Last summer we had the major release followed by a minor update and both went well and everyone seems to be enjoying the system. Just a quick reminder, there's a new workflow for generating MARC records from the ETD Center. It uses the OAI-PMH feed and the free cataloging software called MarcEdit, which has a harvester feature. We have documentation and some video demos up on our OhioLINK O-staff website for anyone who wants to check those out. And the big news is we have a new date for the digital accessibility requirements for the ETD center. It is now January 2023, and that is the bulk of what we'll be talking about today, what that's going to mean for everyone. The next release, we're going to add the digital accessibility updates and then we've also come across a few bugs that we will be fixing as well. Just to let you guys know in case you've come across these, for the time being. They're display issues with ampersands in the department names. So when you browse by ETD departments, if you're not seeing something, we can certainly work with you to fix it in admin to get it to display with the ampersand in the meantime. There's also HTML code being used for ampersands displaying in the search results. It's a little more minor, but it does have the code instead of the ampersand itself. Also any deleted ETDs from the system are still showing up in the search results page. It's just the metadata though, and when you click the link, the ETD is not actually there. But we will certainly get that cleaned up. And then we want to better address re-use of a password when setting a new one. There's a new way we're doing passwords and there's a big list of requirements. But it can sometimes be hard to see given how many there are. And for admins and reviewers who are in the system for a long duration, usually, and have had to reset their password several times, they may not realize you're using one. So we just want to make that clear on that page, since password setting works differently now. It's just a brief overview and now I'm going to hand it over to Judy to talk about digital accessibility and the ETD Center.

 

Judy Cobb Thanks, Emily. Just let me get my screens in order here. Okay. Good morning, everybody. As Emily said, I'm Judy Cobb from the associate director operations and platforms at OhioLINK. I want to walk everyone through sort of some context for all of this digital accessibility work, and especially when I'm doing a brief chat about the federal law, about accessibility - just the standard disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, I'm a librarian. If you need information about how specific laws affect your organization, need to talk to your legal department. Okay. My disclaimers done. Emily. Next slide, please. So I want to very briefly highlight just a couple of the legal requirements for the federal level. To give you the context of why we're doing this. So where we start is the ADA law and in specific title.

 

Emily Flynn Sorry, are people seeing slides? I just saw a chart that said, we're not seeing slides.

 

Judy Cobb Oh. Okay.

 

Emily Flynn All right. Nope. It seems like some people are seeing them. I don't know. Maybe you want to jump out and try to rejoin the meeting again and see if it shows up. Okay. If that doesn't work, let me know and I can look into it more. But it seems that the majority are. Okay. Sorry to keep going down that.

 

Judy Cobb That's good. So Title three of the Americans with Disabilities Act specifically prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in the activities of public accommodations. So the law was enacted primarily to focus on obstacles at physical locations, but it's now also being applied to websites. In Title two of the ADA specifically does apply to state and local government, federal agencies, government contractors, and this is the one that matters: programs that receive federal funding are also subject to Section 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. That's been amended to address specifically online resources. And interestingly, just two weeks ago, the Justice Department released specific guidance on website digital accessibility. So it looks like, at least under this administration, they're taking more of an interest in this kind of a requirement. So basically, all of that to say that if you're getting federal funding or if you're a state institution, this does apply to you. And there's lots of resources online where you can go and learn more about that. Next slide, Emily. So locally, OhioLINK falls under the Ohio State University for our administrative work. So although organizationally we were established and we report up to the Ohio Department of Higher Education; administratively, we do sort of report to OSU. We follow their rules. So next slide, please. So basically that means that we have to apply the OSU digital accessibility policy to our resources and we have to follow their workflows and processes and guidelines. Next slide. In a nutshell, there's lots of stuff that OSU requires, but in a nutshell, OSU requires that the ETD center meet accessibility standards. So the websites- the platform itself has to meet those standards and also the content in the platform should meet those standards. So this gets tricky because, Emily, you're ahead a slide, I think. Sorry. So this gets tricky because there are over 100,000 ETDs in there and millions of pages of PDF. So our tactic is that we're not going to try to go back and remediate all the existing content, but that we need to start making efforts toward accessibility of the PDFs going forward. Okay. Next slide. So then you take this sort of policy explanation down to another level. Last spring, the OhioLINK Library Advisory Council adopted the consortia accessibility statement. It's on our website if you want to read the whole thing. But the one thing that I want to point out today is this last item, which I made larger on the next slide. This item states that OhioLINK members, which is all of us, have a shared responsibility in the accessibility and remediation of OhioLINK shared resources. So that does include all the content that's in the ETD center. So essentially what this means is we're all in this together. The central office is not solely accessible, solely responsible for accessibility, that we as a consortia share that responsibility of creating accessible resources and remediating non accessible resources. Next slide, please. So given all of that context, we, of course, called our lawyer, who advised us that we needed to set a date by which new content that is added to the ETD Center is made accessible. And further, the Library Advisory Council agreed that OhioLINK institutions that participate in the center will make every effort to ensure that the documents meet minimum digital accessibility standards. I have not had enough coffee, everyone. I am so sorry. I am stumbling over my words. So all of this to say that this is the reason that we're doing what we're doing, because all of us fall under these laws and guidelines and policies and that we need to work together to get there. Next slide, please. So the final element of this is that your institution may have its own local digital accessibility policy and it is probably different from OSU's. And so we have to take all of that context into account when we're talking about how to make the ETD center more accessible. Another complicating factor is that many institutions that do have a digital accessibility policy and program will specifically require that student work is not/does not have to be made accessible. So we're in an interesting situation where ETDs are student work, but they're also published on the ETD platform. So we're trying to find sort of a way to implement accessibility for these PDF files in some sort of reasonable way so that it's that it's not too, too much of a heavy lift on you and on your students, but that we are making an effort. So I'm going to stop there and just ask if there are any questions.

 

Cynthia (OU) I have a question. This is Cynthia from Ohio university. And this might be premature. I'm fine if you just, yeah, set me aside and say wait till later. Normally, our students at Ohio University save the final word document and a PDF, and then they add it to OhioLINK after we've approved it. Sometimes I'll find a little error and I'll I'll stick that in the word document and then I will convert the document to a PDF. They don't even know this. They don't. It's no big deal. But now when I'm doing that, I'm seeing an option to make the PDF accessible.

 

Judy Cobb Mm hmm.

 

Cynthia (OU) And I haven't started doing that yet because I'm just really swamped with deadlines. But I imagine that I'm going to be telling students that they have to do that at that step. When they convert that, as according to our protocols, when they convert their word document to a PDF, they're not going to need to click that and make their document accessible. Is that right?

 

Judy Cobb That is mostly right, yes. So one of the things I would say to you, though, is doing the accessibility work in Microsoft Word is a lot easier and most of that work will transfer to the PDF file. So instead of fussing with accessibility in the PDF file, you can actually do it in word before you then create the PDF. But yeah, you're right.

 

Cynthia (OU) So you will know how to do that in word and how to instruct students to do that in word.

 

Judy Cobb Yep. We'll talk later about resources and sort of what what our sort of minimum requirements are. Kim go ahead.

 

Kim You know, I've been doing this since January 2021, and I'll tell you what, it does not hold between Microsoft and Acrobat. If you end up auto tagging your document in Acrobat, you lose everything you do in word. So you have to redo all of your alternate text for your figures. You have to redo your table summaries, things like that.

 

Judy Cobb Okay. Thanks, Kim. Kim is our Kim is our feet on the ground person who's doing this work and I'm always happy that she's here. So, Kim, you and I will probably be talking a lot in the next few months about how to provide the best resources and help for people as they as they implement this. Anything else? Okay. Emily, I think you're up next.

 

Emily Flynn Thanks Judy. Right. So like I said, this is all in development and certainly feedback is welcome. So if you have anything during this presentation or if you think of something later, let us know as we are actively working on this. There will be changes on both the submitter side as well as the admin and reviewer. For submitters, we're going to add an additional text about to the agreement and then also have a place where they can upload an accessibility report. So that on the first page of the submission form, the agreement would also include something about "by submitting an electronic theses or dissertations to the Ohio EPD Center, you acknowledge and agree that you have used best efforts to comply with your institution's applicable accessibility standards for ETDs." Then on the uploads page of the submission form, there will be a spot to include an accessibility report as part of the submission. Then for the reviewers and administrators, there will be a pop up box to acknowledge accessibility requirements when publishing the ETD and that will be on that last page of the submission form the review. To give you an idea of what this will look like. Again, this is a mock up. It is not lined up well. This is just what I've thrown together as a as an example to work with right now. So the yellow highlighted text is that line about you acknowledge and agree "to use best efforts to comply." That will be added to the agreement on that first page for the submitters. On the upload page, there will be an additional dropdown option for Digital Accessibility Report. Again, this is just a mockup. We will also edit the wording on that page as well because at the time of initial implementing, we're going to make the report optional, at least for now, with the knowledge that maybe someday we'll make it mandatory. But at least starting off with, we're going to give you all the option as we begin to implement this. It will then show up on the review page as a document itself. So usually you see the theses PDF. Any supplemental documents will also be listed. And then if they've uploaded a report or if you've uploaded a report on their behalf, that will also show as one of the documents for the submission itself. I'm going to walk through this text a little bit. It's a lot to get through. But like Judy said, we talk to legal and with their counsel, we've worked out this wording, at least for now, for the reviewers and administrators to agree to. It goes through having the minimum digital accessibility standards either at your institution or if there are none. The most recent industry standard which will link out to, and then by clicking through and acknowledging this, you agree that you've used your best efforts to comply to the fullest extent possible with either your local MDAS or the applicable accessibility standards. There will be two checkboxes. The first is for the accessibility report. To confirm that you've attached one or that there is one attached. That will be, like I said, optional for now. The second checkbox is going to be mandatory, and that's the one that says the MDAS or applicable accessibility standards have been satisfied to the fullest extent possible. So, when you or your reviewers click publish, you'll need to at least check that second one to agree to that and then whether or not you've attached a report or the submitter did. That's the other checkbox that you could check at that time. Again, this is a mockup, so it is not perfect and it may not look exactly like this since we're still developing these. But the intent is when you click either the ready to publish ETD, which will then queue it up in the ready to publish section of the ETD Center or when you hit publish ETD, which immediately publishes it. You or your reviewer will be presented with this pop-up for each ETD. And you'll have the option of saying I've included a report and I agree that I've applied standards as necessary. And then you click okay and if this second one isn't checked, you cannot proceed. So that's going to be the new requirement that we put in. So just some additional information. Like I said, it'll be the pop up will be triggered for publishing, whether it's immediately published or if you use the ready to publish option. That way it's done when you look at it. And if you do the ready to publish option, all of those are able to be queued and then published as a batch later on when you're ready and you don't have to go through that process at that time. The uploading of the Digital Accessibility Report is going to start off as optional but may become required in the future. The main thing is each institution decides if digital accessibility check and any report upload happens at the student level or at the library graduate office level. Everyone wants their ETD center a little bit differently, so we want to offer you- as with most things in the center- as much flexibility. Some people review student work in the office and make edits and changes and upload them and then other institutions have all the students do that work and then upload them directly themselves, and the office doesn't touch the ETD at all. So no matter where it lives, that's something for you all to decide who does the work. And then we'd. We'd also like to be able to include a way to search if it's attached to the ETD. In the admin status report, this is something we're looking into as a possible column that you could use and then easily see in the submissions who has a report and who's doesn't.

 

Rebecca (Findlay) Emily. This is Rebecca at Shafer library.  When you say uploading digital accessibility report currently optional. So that. That's going to start in the January 2023.

 

Emily Flynn Yes.

 

Rebecca (Findlay) Where it's going to be optional. And if you say then it may be required, do we have to retrospectively go back and upload those? So would we then - if it's optional January 2023, do we- If you start requiring that they that it becomes a requirement that anything uploaded or that we have to provide that, do we then have to go back to that January 2023 if we... Do you understand what I mean?

 

Emily Flynn Yeah, I understand what you mean for anyone who doesn't start uploading those reports right away. I don't know if we've talked about that situation specifically, Judy.

 

Judy Cobb We would not we would not ask you to go back and do that.

 

Emily Flynn It would just be the one's going forward when we make it required.

 

Judy Cobb Yeah.

 

Emily Flynn Yeah.

 

Judy Cobb We're trying to rule this out sort of one step at a time. And as we do that, no, you're never going to have to go back. The only time we would ever go back and work on a preexisting ETD is if we had a request to remediate the file. Does that make sense?

 

Rebecca (Findlay) Yes.

 

Judy Cobb Okay.

 

Emily Flynn All right. I'm also going to grab a couple of things in chat because I saw some stuff come in. So we had a question. What is MDAS? Sorry, that kind of probably got skipped over its minimum digital accessibility standards. Which Judy also put into the chat. MDAS. And then we had a question of how do you create digital accessibility report? And we will get to that in a quick demo from Judy. It is separate from the document itself, so you can apply all your digital accessibility checks, add your alt text and everything, and then there's a way to generate a report which we decided we wanted kept separate from the ETD itself as a separate item instead of attached to it. And that'll just tell people the digital accessibility status. So it's just an additional document that then you don't have to go into the ETD yourself and go through and run the checker. There's already the report there to give it status. I'm going to keep going for a second and we will get to the additional questions. I think they get into a little more of what we're going to start to cover. So if that sounds good, Judy, or if you I will switch over to you to talk about next steps for OhioLINK and local institutions and if you want to grab those chat questions now, feel free. Otherwise...

 

Judy Cobb Yeah, perfect. Okay. So I am going to talk about sort of next steps and how we get to January 2023. I can't believe it's 2023. Every time I said I can't believe it. Next slide, please. So within all of the context I talked about earlier- legal, policy, all that stuff. The first thing this has to be is doable. So when I started doing research for this, I found this nifty checklist. It has 42 things that you should check and a PDF to make sure it's accessible. That's not doable for us right now. Maybe someday it will be. But right now, no. So what we decided to do and this we decided this in concert with some of the ETD council members, is that OhioLINK is going to publish sort of a recommended minimum practice for making for PDF accessibility. So Emily, you can go to the next slide. And I'm going to talk about that specifically in a few minutes. We haven't we haven't codified it. It's still in a draft, but we'll walk through it. So that means that we're going to publish that minimum standard for what you should meet to make an ETD minimally accessible. We're also going to give you supporting resources. So if you don't know how to do all of these things, we're going to help you. If you want us to come to any internal meetings you have, we've already done that with one school. We'd be happy to do that for you if we need some more help. And then of course, we're also going to do the usual development and testing of the platform. So your institution, there are some steps that you should start taking. You're going to need to adopt an accessibility standard for your ETDs. You can use our minimum. That's why we're drafting it. You might want to use something that's much more robust. That's perfectly fine to. You should also see if you have access or can get access to Adobe Acrobat Pro. If you can't, there are some other tools that will accessibility check a PDF and we'll get those resources out to you in the next few months. You're going to want to think about your new workflows. If you use an ETD template that you give to your students to use as they're writing their ETD, you might want to think about if you can add accessibility into that template. And then you might also start thinking about local resources you may have that could offer you and your student some help. So maybe you have a writing lab, or the graduate schools that you need to reach out to, your local accessibility office on campus. Anything, you know, any place where you can reach out, reach out where you can get some help as we move forward. Next slide. So I've talked about a couple of the things on this slide. But one of the things I want to point out - and Emily already mentioned this, I think - one of the key questions you're going to have to think about is sort of who's responsible for what. So are you going to train your students to create those accessible PDFs? If you are, how are you going to do that? What resources will they need? Or are your reviewers and approvers going to do that work in the ETD? Further, are your reviewers and approvers going to return the ETD to the student if it doesn't meet your standard? Or are you going to make edits yourselves? And then so lots of things for you to think about that are specific to your local workflow and your you'll all have different answers and that's perfectly fine. Again. If you need some help walking through this, we'd be happy to help you out. Next slide, please. So this is an, it should say draft written all over this. This is not a finished product. This is our current thinking about what are sort of recommended minimum standard for an ETD PDF should be. So the accessibility permission flags should be set. I actually haven't done a lot of research on this. I came across it in some reading and it seems like a good idea, so I've got to do some more studying about this. But my understanding is that in a PDF file, there is a way to sort of turn off some of the accessibility features for parts or all of the PDF file. And if you set this accessibility flag, it means that those features have not been turned off so that it is an accessible PDF, so to speak. So I'm going to do some more research about that. The PDFs must include full text. Most PDFs that are generated now contain full text because they're being created from a word doc or a word processing document. So that that is not a hard lift. The images must include alternative text. That's text that describes an image within the document so that a reader who can't view the image is able to understand what that image is trying to convey. The pdf should specify heading level one, which is basically the title of the pdf. You're welcome to use more headings in heading level one, but heading level one is the one that that I think is a minimum standard will be one for us. And finally, you need to make sure that the language of the of the ETD has been tagged in the PDF file. So this is obviously not a checklist of 42 things. This is a truly bare, bare minimum. But it does sort of take us a step forward to making sure that all these PDFs are are more accessible. So I'm actually going to do a quick sort of demo in Adobe Acrobat here in a minute. But before I do that, are there any questions? I noticed in the chat, there was a question of "Are we using Acrobat Pro?" We are. There are, like I said, some other resources that you can use online. And Terry asked, Will the accessibility report be visible to the public? Emily Have we decided on that?

 

Emily Flynn We're going to go see what Dev can do. I think it would be a good idea if we're able to, but I think it's going to be one of those. If we run out of development time with them, it might be not made available to the public, but we'll have it in the system and know it's there. But I don't think it would hurt. And if we do at it, it will be as a separate little section that's labeled Accessibility Report. Similar to right now, we have thesis dissertation, supplemental files and then on the left hand side, we'd also have accessibility report if we get it put in. Whatever we end up working through and how it's going to work in the future, we will let you guys know on the listserv as we work on development this fall and into the winter. So look for updates there. But it's something we're discussing at this time. If you guys have opinions about that, certainly let us know. But we're we're certainly still working through it.

 

Judy Cobb Terry asked, is alt text to be applied to tables and charts and graphs? So not per our current draft of these minimums. But you're welcome to do that and establish your own local policy. Ideally I think they would be. But again, we're trying to shoot for a lowest minimum standard here. But Allison says we'd prefer to use pro and teach students to use it to employ the minimum, but all students don't have access to it. Has OhioLINK or another consortia worked to negotiate pricing for the purpose of greater accessibility? OhioLINK has not done that. I think that will have to be a local or a local conversation that you have. Kim has a question about first level headings. Go ahead, Kim.

 

Kim Yes. And about that question about Adobe. You can get it free for one week and then it's $14.99 a month after that. Just a heads up for your students. So I think different institutions are defining a level one heading differently. So I know you're saying title, title page is level one. But a lot of institutions, depending if you're APA, Chicago style, are looking at abstract acknowledgments, chapters, references, works cited -- using appendices and other front manner as level one.

 

Judy Cobb Mm hmm.

 

Kim So, are you guys just saying the title?

 

Judy Cobb Yes.

 

Kim Oh, wow.

 

Judy Cobb That was that was an executive decision that I made right this very moment, by the way. There is there's a lot there's conversation about this. Like, should the title be the heading level one or should those, you know, chapters and all those things heading level ones? And so from my point of view, the title is a minimum. You're welcome to to do more than that.

 

Emily Flynn Well, and it sounds like maybe if there's a discrepancy between language, maybe we need to be careful how we label this. In case level one locally to you guys means the chapter levels and title is a different level.

 

Kim So heading level one when you're APA seven means one thing versus Chicago or MLA or ASA or...

 

Emily Flynn Even among those different citation manuals, they're doing it differently?

 

Kim Yeah.

 

Emily Flynn Okay. thank you.

 

Kim Sure.

 

Judy Cobb Kim, we're going to need to talk about that. I'm just making it up.

 

Emily Flynn And that's the kind of stuff that we want to know, because whatever minimum we we put together, we want it to be versatile for everyone and understandable. But certainly any local standards you want to go by further is more than welcome.

 

Judy Cobb Yeah, absolutely. All right. I'm going to - Emily.,I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to go into Acrobat Pro.

 

Emily Flynn All right, go ahead. I stopped sharing.

 

Judy Cobb Maybe make this a little bigger. Get rid of that window. Can everybody see my screen? Okay. So this is a PDF I actually just pulled out of the ETD center. It's an older one from 2017. And I wanted to just sort of walk you through what meeting these very minimum standards would look like in Adobe Acrobat in Adobe Pro. So when you go into pro and you go to the menu on the left, there are accessibility tools built in that you don't necessarily see by default. The Accessibility Report is one of those things. That's where you would create that accessibility report that will be optional beginning in January. But I want to walk first through the accessibility check. So here we have options to configure what Adobe is checking for within the PDF file. These settings, adobe remembers them, which is good to know because we need to tweak them a little to meet our minimum standard. So I want to start by bringing your attention to this category thing. There are different categories of option checker options that you need to go through. So for our document, we want to meet our minimum standard. We want to say that the accessibility flag is set. That the document is not an image only pdf that means its full text that the text language is specified. And document is showing title and title bar. That's kind of that heading one thing. The rest of these you can track. But to meet our minimum standard, you don't need to or draft minimum standard. For page content, our draft standard isn't requiring any of these, so I unchecked all of them. For forms, tables and lists, same applies right now; the draft doesn't require any of this to be checked. And finally, alt text and headings. We're requiring that figures require alt text. Depending on how you're doing your headings and your local practice, you might want to check this one too. So once you have this set up, all you do is say, start checking. And Adobe will go through and it will check the document for all of the things that we just asked it to check. So you can see it skipped a lot of this stuff. That's because we're using that sort of draft minimum standard. So the title failed. It's going to tell you when something fails. Alt text has failed. It looks like everything else was okay. So I'm not going to walk through how you fix these things today will have. I will give you more resources about those things. But I wanted to show you that Adobe will do a lot of this really basic, basic checking for you and that it doesn't have to be a huge, heavy lift. And I'll also run The Accessibility Report. So this is what the report looks like. Over here on the left side. And all these are hyperlinked. Oh, it's opening in a browser, so it'll give you more information. About about that specific aspect of accessibility. So you can take this report and Adobe will actually save it as a separate PDF file, and that is the report that we'd be asking you optionally to upload with the PDF right now. Okay. So again, it's a really minimum basic standard, but we hope that it's a first step toward toward making progress, toward making all of these files more accessible. So I'm going to stop sharing. And open it up to questions.

 

Emily Flynn Back to the slides. So we have the quick demo and now Will. Any questions?

 

Kim I would say that our acrobat looks different. And I I'm literally Googling how to do that because I don't at all see it like you do.

 

Judy Cobb Really?

 

Emily Flynn Oh, that's good to know. We'll have talk about versions then too.

 

Judy Cobb I have to add it to the right sidebar. Okay.

 

Kim So like if I go to tools and accessibility, I have a full check. And of course, everything's already checked because I do, but it doesn't automatically give you an accessibility report. When I click on Accessibility Report. Okay. Yeah, I got it. So it's a little different. Sorry.

 

Judy Cobb It's okay.

 

Kim Its just a different version.

 

Judy Cobb Yep.

 

Emily Flynn All right. I think we had a hand raised, so. Yep. Please jump in.

 

Morris Levy (OSU) This is Morris Levy at the Ohio State University. We had discussed sort of a retrospective project of loading some older digitized files and having a cut off date. Have we, by the nature of pushing everything to January 2023, have we also pushed back the date for when that project could end? Or do you still want us to meet the September date?

 

Judy Cobb Morris I think since our date has changed to January, probably yours has to? We may need to talk to figure out the specifics, though.

 

Morris Levy (OSU) I'd love to talk! So send me a meeting note so we can chat.

 

Judy Cobb Okay. I will do that.

 

Judy Cobb So our specific next steps are going to be the first thing we'll need to do is work with the ETD council to sort of finalize this bare minimum recommended standard. Once that's done, we'll make sure that you're aware of that and it's posted on the OhioLINK website. We do highly recommend that if you don't have your own standard, that you take a look at ours and adapt it as you need to and then sort of adopt it locally. Adopt it may just mean that within your office you sort of officially make that your standard. After that, we'll be working on resources and we're going to try to get those out to out to the Web probably late summer, maybe earlier, to help you with implementation. And again, we're also I'm happy to to meet with you and talk through all of this. If Kim has some spare time, I'm I can't volunteer her. But Kim is very knowledgeable about PDF accessibility and she'd be a great resource if you have any questions. We do have an ETD listserv and that would be a good place maybe to ask those specific questions.

 

Emily Flynn Someone else have their hand raised and want to jump in. Any other questions as we. We have a little bit of time left or any feedback on any of the wording or stuff you saw. Go ahead, Terry. You want to jump in?

 

Terri Yes, Judy, you had mentioned that your team actually met with a school to discuss things. I was just curious, like, what kind of questions or what kind of discussion was that and what should we anticipate at our own institutions?

 

Judy Cobb So we met with sort of a group of people. It included digital accessibility from the Accessibility Office, the library, the graduate school. I think that was everyone represented and it was basically a conversation about how and how to implement this and how that was going to happen. And it was, I think, helpful for all of us because the accessibility team at the school agreed that sort of having a minimum standard is just fine because of the complication that this school in particular does not require student work to be fully accessible. So there were it was just a lot of back and forth of clarifying sort of what the requirements are and agreeing that perhaps that the graduate school office adopt a minimum standard. Does that help answer your question?

 

Terri Yes, actually, it does. Thank you.

 

Judy Cobb Okay, good.

 

Emily Flynn Part of it was also, where does this work live and who needs to be trained on what and do er have the appropriate resources available to train people? Who exactly... So it's that, does it live at the student level or the office level? That is whether that be the graduate office or the library who's approving these things. And then if it is the student level like we've discussed a little bit, do you have Adobe Pro? Can they get it? If not, what needs to happen? So sort of that local talk as well, which was still interesting to to hear because there's a lot to consider.

 

Judy Cobb Yeah.

 

Emily Flynn And it seems like, unfortunately, there's not one perfect resource because digital accessibility, you know, there's a lot of it's more of how accessible is something and not a black and white, yes or no, unfortunately. So it's a little bit more complicated, but that also lets schools be more tailored in their approach as well.

 

Judy Cobb Kim just chatted in case you hadn't seen it, that she has a deadline this Friday, but she'd be happy to meet with anybody after that deadline to talk about accessibility.

 

Emily Flynn Thank you, Kim. Any final questions or thoughts? There are a few minutes left, but we don't have to go the full hour.

 

Terri I actually do have one other question. This is Terri, thanks. So when the reviewer or admin is, you know, checking that, you know, that the document is- I can't remember exactly... In other words, are we expected to check that if they've included an accessibility report or are we expected to run our own accessibility report? Like, what are we citing, you know how much culpability, I guess.

 

Emily Flynn The the report, since it starts out as optional, will be up to whatever you decide locally. We recommend creating a policy for digital accessibility and what that means to you and and who's responsible. But the the second checkbox would be mandatory. And that says I comply with my local standards and have made sure this ETD meets them to the best of our abilities. That part you will need to check.

 

Terri And so however we determine what that is...

 

Emily Flynn Right, which is why we'll have the minimum standard. And if you want to take that and start there, if like Terry or Kim, you've done a bit more work and you have other things you also want to include that is feel free as well. It'll fall back to whatever your local is, which is why we recommend you have one, because otherwise it'll be the the industry standards. So you do want to put together something.

 

Terri Okay.

 

Emily Flynn But you'll need to figure that out. And we're trying to leave that flexible because we know every office works differently. Right? Everyone is staffed differently. Some students do more of the work and some offices take on some more of the editing and fixing and and posting. So I whether you do the report, whether someone else does the report, okay. Whether you generate one at all at this point, those are what we've left up to local decisions. Okay. Thank you. And there was a question answered in chat Adobe Pro. Acrobat Pro and Adobe Pro, Judy was using them interchangeably, but the full name is Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. That. That's the one that Judy showed. And then I think someone else had their hand raised. So go ahead and jump in.

 

Speaker 5 Yes, that was me. I kind of wanted to piggyback a little bit off of Terry's question again, also kind of regarding some, you know, just kind of making sure nothing slips through the cracks and things. And so I was wondering, is OhioLINK going to do any sort of accessibility screening of ETDs that are submitted as well or, you know, just kind of multilayered checks and balances sort of scenarios or anything like that.

 

Emily Flynn That is a great question. I'll start and then, Judy, if you want to jump in. It's something that we're certainly looking at because as we implement this, we'll need to do at least some sort of spot checking or occasional checking. Our usual rule with ETDs is you are all responsible. We will help with the technical parts and what you upload and approve is what you decide to do, but clearly, this is a group responsibility when it comes to accessibility. So that will be something that will need to do as an office to check. Judy, are there any other specifics you want to add at this time?

 

Judy Cobb No, not right now. I think we're still working out that end of it, also. Yeah. I don't have anything to add, sorry.

 

Speaker 5 Thank you both.

 

Judy Cobb You know, the reality is we can't look at every one of them.

 

Emily Flynn But neither can the system, unfortunately. It's not something we can make. We looked into it. I would love to have my system tell me if it's accessible upon upload, but that's at this point that doesn't quite exist. So who knows about, you know, further down the road if accessibility remains something that everyone is vigilant about. But it's going to be a manual process. And we're looking to you all as your institutions, as you do normally review and approve your your content. It does come from you. But, you know, they'll they'll be a little something more. And we'll certainly keep the listserv up to date as we do the development as decisions are more firmed up and as we get closer to the next release. So if you're not already on the ETD listserv, let me know. I think you have to have an O staff to view the mailing lists. So if you don't have an O staff account, if that doesn't mean anything to you, just shoot me an email and I'll get you added to the ETD listserv. If it's more about maintenance and it's a place to ask fellow members in the ETD center community questions, but it's not not a very heavy listserv as far as notifications go. So it's good to be on it, but it's pretty minimal. So it shouldn't be too taxing on your email if you do get on added to it.

 

Judy Cobb Just to follow up, there is server side software that will do accessibility checking of PDFs. I think we're going to look into that at some point. I have no idea how much it costs. I don't really know much about it other than it exists. So. Maybe someday we'll get to a point where we can do some checking on our end, but it's still TBD. Alison made a really good comment in the chat that calling something accessible is a moving target. And absolutely it is. You know, this is it's this is an iterative thing that we improve on over time. And technically speaking, a PDF file is really never perfectly accessible. There are files that are much more, much more easily easier to make accessible. So, you know, we're just trying to make improvements as we go. So thanks for mentioning that. I think that was a really good point.

 

Emily Flynn All right. Well, thank you, everyone, for attending and chatting with Judy and I this morning. This has been some great questions and feedback. If there's anything else, certainly let us know if you find any further bugs in the current systems. Put a support ticket in. I'm going to grab Lisa quick before we sign off. Go ahead, Lisa.

 

Speaker 5 That was actually accidental.

 

Emily Flynn Accidental hand raising. All right. Let's talk about that. No worries. Just wanted to make sure we get everything dressed. Otherwise, just let us know and we'll keep the listserve up to date. Thank you, everyone, for your time this morning. Have a good rest of your week.