May 2019 WAPL Transcript

Nate Evans: Hey everybody, Nate Evans of the new Digital Experience team, that's DigitalX. We're the same team just a new name. Wrapping up WAPL number 43 back in May and special thanks to John, Alex and Tony for hosting us from the College of Osteopathic medicine. Really, really appreciate you guys talking about your digital accessibility program. They focus on some of the work that they're doing course side as well as the work they're doing on closed captioning, so thanks for sharing your experience there.

Nate Evans: We also hosted Sarah Swierenga from Usability, Accessibility Research and Consulting. If you haven't checked out their resources and their consulting services, definitely check them out online, Google UARC and MSU, you can find them there.

Nate Evans: Then the last thing we talked about, this Year 3 Self-Review, which is coming up on deadline June 30, 2019, and I can't over emphasize this enough, I'd really, really encourage you, get as many people at the table., get a diverse audience at the table for these conversations about your annual self-reviews for your digital accessibility program. Get an administrator, get a few faculty member, academic specialist, get a communicator, get an IT staffer or web developer from your college or department. It's really, really important for that to be well represented in order to talk about some of the great work that's going on in your college department around web accessibility and digital accessibility, but also maybe where some of the gaps are. Where do you need to improve over or so?

Nate Evans: I definitely encourage you to check out Web Access. There's a new bit of content around annual self-reviews in a downloadable form. It's going to look very similar to the previous year. If you have questions, reach out to us at WebAccess@msu.edu, and that's it! Enjoy the episode.

Speaker 2: All right, good morning! How's everybody? [crosstalk 00:01:44] All right.

Alexander: Graduation.

Nate Evans: Graduation! You made it! One more semester. Way to go. Welcome to WAPL meeting number 43. May 3rd, 2019. Here's our agenda for today, special thanks to Tony for getting us the space today and everybody else from Osteopathic. We're excited to hear a little bit about your digital accessibility program work been going on in the college. Sarah Swierenga from UARC is with us, talk a little bit about the UARC services that are happening in their space. I want to talk one more time about IT Next. Brooke has a quick update on the report in accessible content form, and then the last thing, we're going to spend the bulk of our time talking about Year 3 plans and submitting your self-reviews. So, talk through the instructions on that and answer any questions as they come up. Sound good?

Nate Evans: Okay, with that, who am I turning the microphone over to, to start?

Alexander: Hi! I'm Alexander, I'm from the College of Osteopathic Medicine. I actually work in the department, or division of medical education, so I help out with the core curriculum for all the DO students. Kind of as a background, all the students, we have about 300 that go through the program, starting in their first year, and they all go basically through the same chunk of courses. So that's helped us, kind of, have a really good focus on what to work in terms of our course material. The challenge is that each of those courses can have up to 30 faculty, making content in the courses, so you'll have it ranging from somebody who teaches in multiple courses to somebody who's a clinical faculty member that maybe teaches one lecture in a year. So kind of wrangling all of those, making sure it's all accessible has been the challenge that we've been trying to work on.

Nate Evans: Just some successful things that we've had, we've offered some trainings to faculty. We try to offer those multiple times a year. DCAT's helped us with this. They've done some training with us last summer and then John and I have developed a flip classroom, sort of, training session, so we give them training materials from Web Aim to actually do an assignment ahead of time, and then we have an hour long, or an hour and a half long, training session where they come in, and we go over that assignment and try to answer questions as best as we can. Because many of these people have been working with Word and PowerPoint for years, so it kind of gives them a chance to learn it on their own and then answer some questions that are more specific to how they work in those training sessions.

Nate Evans: Another successful thing that helped is we've had one faculty member that very graciously decided to do a pilot in her course where she, along with some consultation with John and I, did a huge remediation project of all of her course content in the course that she works on. She's been a really important person in terms of working with other faculty and showing them how she's done it from kind of a faculty perspective and not necessarily from the perspective of me, as a staff, working on that.

Nate Evans: So those are kind of the successful things. Things that we are working on, because we have so many faculty in courses, we're still trying to improve the way that we're tracking and inventorying all the material that's out there. So that's something that we're definitely trying to kind of hone in and get a way that works with all the different, diverse people that we're trying to work with.

Nate Evans: Is there any questions about that?

Speaker 4: Do you do materials for just Year 1 and Year 2 students, or three and four too?

Alexander: So, right now I'm personally focused on years one and two. Oh, sorry. You asked are we focused on Year 1 and Year 2, or all four years? I'm personally focused on just the first two years, but we are trying to take what we're learning those first two years and apply it. There's some other challenges in the years three and four, because all of students are out in hospitals all throughout the state. So that's a different kind of problem that we'll be trying to tackle.

Speaker 4: I only ask because I have a student.

Alexander: So, anything else? That's a good question.

Speaker 5: Hi, so I have a question about the homework assignments from Web Aim. Do you just kind of pick out something from their site and say, "Hey, try to do your syllabus," or what is that like?

Alexander: The training we offer is on Word and PowerPoint. So, we direct them to for Word documents, there's an introduction to all the principles of accessibility and then it also has a nice breakdown of different versions of Word. So we tell them to read the introduction and then the specifics on their version of Word, and then we provide them with... it's actually a JPEG file, so that they don't cheat and take the PDF and convert it to Word, which has happened. I ask them to basically recreate that. Sometimes they'll submit back to me and I'll check it ahead of time. Other times, we'll just go over it during the session, but it focuses on heading tags, tables and images, which is the big things in the material we use.

Speaker 5: Thank you.

Alexander: If nothing else, I'll hand it over. I don't know if you have anything you would like to talk about John, or?

John McDaniel: So I'm John McDaniel, and I'm from Osteopathic Medicine as well as IT, and the division of Medical Education and the Office of Academic Programs. My focus is on multimedia and we've been making sure all of our multimedia is closed captioned, both the prerecorded modules that faculty produce and the live lectures that we keep recreating every year, are all closed captioned before they're made available to the students.

John McDaniel: Once upon a time, the media site live lectures were posted sometimes five minutes after the lecture ended and students were basically DVR'ing lectures and not attending. That changed two years ago when suddenly no one got access to them until they were closed captioned, which caused a minor uproar amongst the students, but they got used to it. Suddenly the byproduct is, attendance is way up at the live lecture, imagine that. Because if you don't attend, chances are you may not get it for up to 48 hours. A lot of the turnaround times are eight hours or less, but when you get into instructors with accents, heavy course material, pharmacology and micromolecular biology and stuff that is pretty hard to decipher, sometimes it takes 48 hours or maybe a few hours more to get it closed captioned and back.

John McDaniel: The big thing I'm working on right now is Year 3 and Year 4, we have a lot of multimedia. In fact, we have 1,700 minutes of multimedia that we are responsible for in our Year 3 and Year 4 courses, and those are all scheduled to be captioned and made available starting this summer. We've been tracking along with captioning based on a student who came in right at the end of Year 1 of our five year plan who needed the closed captioning for everything. So we've been staying ahead of that person, and he's about to go out into Year 3 and so everything in the Year 3 and the Year 4 courses will be closed captioned starting this July.

John McDaniel: They've been inventoried, just re-inventoried to make sure that what is going to be used, reused, what's going to be updated, set a deadline knowing that some content creators have a hard time making deadlines. The deadline is June 1st, even though the courses don't really go live until August, just so I can reign in the stragglers and get their updated content and get it all captioned and in place for the students.

John McDaniel: Other than that, Institute of Global Health is standing up a totally on online master's program, I think it's starting this fall. We've had conversations about accessibility, making documents and multimedia accessible. I've pointed them at different vendors that out there because since it is a Global Health Master's Program, they may need to have something other than English closed captions. There's a big interface at the moment with Egypt, and that's where a big footprint for this program is, and so that's looming out there, that'll be something new.

John McDaniel: Other than that, semester's ending but unless you're an instructor it really doesn't matter does it?

Nate Evans: Awesome. Thank John.

John McDaniel: Any questions?

Speaker 7: Do you use a service like rev.com for your captions or do you have someone on staff that does that?

John McDaniel: We initially started with cielo24, well initially we did Rev, because we had a short time period to get ready for this incoming student, and so that first summer our students start in June, that semester one we used Rev, while we were working with purchasing to go through the whole process of identifying someone who potentially could interface with the media site system, and make files go from us to them and back auto-magically, without having to do uploading and all this other stuff.

John McDaniel: We stuck with them through fall of '17, they couldn't meet the terms of the contract, meaning 85 percent of the time they had stuff back in 48 hours or less, and their accuracy was not meeting the 99.9% it was supposed to be, so we terminated that contract and went to Rev. A little bit more touching involved, but it's cheaper and they've been great. They did have kind of a bottleneck at the beginning of fall semester, probably because they had turnover or they had more clients, I don't know, but we've been using Rev ever since. They've been great.

John McDaniel: On rare occasions, we will do them ourselves. Like this morning, I have a two and a half minute thing on how to add an instructor to your course in iClicker Cloud, and so I just did the machine captioning. There were three words that were wrong, and I had to put in all the capitalization, punctuation. Other than that, it was easy peasy and I saved the college $2.30, 50 cents, yeah, because it was half a minute.

Nate Evans: Thanks John. Yeah, in terms of turning captioning into a program and captioning all the content, John's done more volume than anyone else I know on campus. So if you have questions, buy him a coffee, hang out. If that's something you want to set up, I'm sure he'd be willing to chat about it and provide some feedback on that, so thanks. Thanks guys.

Nate Evans: All right, moving ahead, Sarah Swierenga.

Sarah Swierenga: Good morning, I'm Sarah Swierenga, Director of Usability, Accessibility Research and Consulting or UARC as it were more affectionately known and Graham Pierce is our Assistant Director. I sent out an email maybe a week or two back, just letting all of you know that we have resources available within UARC to assist you with doing some independent checking, either at a high level or at a more in depth level. We offer this as a fee-for-service, but it's available to all of you. We've worked with many departments around campus along with external, we've got libraries and yeah, I'm sure IT, but also departments, and on particular grant projects or whatever because all of these things need to be accessible.

Sarah Swierenga So we've had the opportunity to work on many kinds of materials for corporate clients, multinational Fortune 500s to government, federal, state, local, township, yeah, and also non-profits, so we kind of run the gamut. We're within University Outreach and Engagement, so we are externally focused, but we also turn our attentions and are very supportive of all the initiatives internally to make accessible course materials, so we are available for consulting. As you are finishing up your third year or thinking about what are we going to do in our fourth year? Graham, as always will have brochures and we've got our braille alphabet thing which is kind of popular as something to hand out.

Sarah Swierenga So, do you have any questions? If not, we are available for follow up.

Speaker 9: UARC@msu.edu?

Sarah Swierenga: Sorry, yes. UARC@msu.edu is our website. We have a contact form there as well as information about our backgrounds, and the types of work we've done, projects, clients, et cetera. Thank you.

Nate Evans: I highly recommend UARC's services. Been a great partner for us over the last few years, and the MSU Evaluation Protocol that we recommend was something we purchased from UARC. So especially as you look ahead to Year 4 and are thinking ahead for plans I encourage you to reach out.

Nate Evans: All right, moving ahead with the agenda today, one other thing that I want to mention, IT Next registration closes on Monday the 13th, so we encourage you, just by a show of hands how many have signed up or are planning on coming? Fantastic. Awesome. There are still spots available. Sorry?

Speaker 10: So I went to register, and it said it was full.

Nate Evans: Really?

Speaker 10: Yeah. So, maybe there aren't still spots available?

Nate Evans: As of yesterday there were still many spots, so let me double check on that.

Speaker 10: Okay.

Nate Evans: I know that the reception after is wait-listed, but currently, as of yesterday.

Speaker 10: That could be what happened, because I clicked both, so it wait-listed me.

Nate Evans: Okay. Oh, okay.

Alexander: So if you still need to register, don't go to the reception.

Nate Evans: Yes. Don't select that option at this point, but there's still space available at the actual afternoon, which is going to be on Thursday, May 16th, from 1:00 to 4:00. We're going to be looking at accessibility here locally at MSU past, present and future. So really, really excited about that.

Nate Evans: I should have had a slide in here for Brooke, so I'm going to had it over to Brooke for a moment to talk about the inaccessible content form.

Brooke Knapp: Hi everyone, I'm Brooke. If you were here last month, then this is just kind of a reminder, but if you weren't last month I talked about our inaccessible content report form. It's located on our home page of webaccess.msu.edu. It's in our side navigation, it's just called Report a Problem.

Brooke Knapp: If you have a faculty or a staff, or even yourself who maybe have a concern or question about inaccessible content, whether it has to do with a course or website, we just encourage you to use that form. It gets sent right to us through email and we are able to designate that work for either myself, or Bender, or Jim White, depending on what the issue is. However, last month when we talked about this, we got a lot of really good requests from faculty and staff with good questions in their courses regarding inaccessible or how to make their content accessible. We also got really good requests related to websites that or other issues that we might have missed. So once again, I just want to encourage you to use that form, because it's been a really good resource for us for anything that we may have missed.

Nate Evans: Awesome. Thanks Brooke. Any questions about the inaccessible content report form? Okay.

Nate Evans: Now, I'd like to spend a little bit of time to talk about submitting your annual, third annual self-review. Actually, I'm going to go just straight to the browser to kind of show this. There will be a message going out to the Web Access list today, from Aislinn Sapp, our ADA Coordinator and myself to just provide an update on that this is all happening, and when the due dates are. The good news is, this should very familiar if you participated in the annual self-review last year. In fact, it should feel identical to the self-review from last year.

Nate Evans: I'm going to just spend a few minutes walking through what the self-review is intended for, and what sort of things you should start to think about. The bulk of the information is going to be available, is available now on Web Access, if you have your mobile devices or laptops you can follow along there if you'd like. If you just go to webaccess.msu.edu and then under Policy & Guidelines look for the Annual Self-Review page.

Nate Evans: At the start of the page it provides an overview with some language about our commitment to providing accessible experiences to everyone, and the opening statement says, "At Michigan State University, we're committed to providing accessible experiences to persons with disabilities. To continue in this commitment since 2016, the university has requested that each major administrative unit submits an annual self-review to measure improvements in their accessibility of programs services and activities within their digital accessibility program."

Nate Evans: I'm going to scroll down a little bit. The point of these are to allow us to begin as an institution to self-assess our institutional progress and offer you an opportunity to report changes in terms of resource commitments, strategies those sorts of things. So if you remember back, we all submitted five-year plans through each of our colleges. These annual self-reviews are intended for you to have an opportunity to report changes to those five-year plans over time. Again, we talked about those as plans, not promises. Things change over time. Technology, the students that are in your program, or faculty or staff. There could be many number of different things, right? So, this allows you the chance to kind of provide updates on the progress that you're seeing within your unit.

Nate Evans: Just as a reminder too, we would expect to see submissions at the MAU level, not necessarily the department level. So, it's okay within your unit, you want to have those conversations and do those more granularly, but in terms of a final submission, back in for this process here, we'd like you to submit one per MAU.

Nate Evans: So in terms of the action needed, the deadline is the same as last year, by June 30th 2019. Please update and send your Year 3 Digital Accessibility Self-Evaluation, and then the other thing we're asking for is for you to update who represents your MAU in terms of your web accessibility policy liaison. That can change over time. One of the things that we are looking for, specifically, is that each college and department name a lead liaison for your college or department. So that's another thing that's really helpful to us as well. In terms of updating your liaison, just email us at webaccess@msu.edu. Jim takes care of those and makes sure that they're added to the liaison list, which is also on this website as well.

Nate Evans: One of the things that we're recommending for this year that you would have gotten in the feedback from last year as well, it's the same bit of feedback, that is these liaisons, we'd like you to have multiple representatives as liaisons for your MAU. Recommendations for that is have someone from kind of the academic space, whether it's a faculty or academic specialist, have someone from the communications office within your college, have a web developer, or IT staff, and then also have someone who may be a leader or administrator within your college or department. Having those different perspectives, means that you're going to have a more holistic approach to your self-review, and so we think that's really, really important.

Nate Evans: Again, each MAU needs to identify a lead liaison if you haven't already, and one thing I'll show really quick, the liaison page is under Help & Resources. We're indicating the lead liaison by marking them with an asterisks before the start of their name. So that way you know who is listed as the lead liaison. If there is no asterisks, you probably don't have one identified yet, or you may be the only one, it might be that too.

Nate Evans: Okay, so scrolling down a little bit, how to submit your Year 3 Accessibility Self-Review, just as last year, you can download a copy of the form in advance to review with the other liaisons or administrators, faculty, whoever you'd like to share that with in advance. To do that, you'll click on the Year 3 Digital Accessibility Compliance Self-Review sheet, and what it's going to do, I have it down in my footer already, this is going to download the form. This is just a Word version, it's not the version you submit. Again, it's just to circulate and get a sense for the questions that are going to be asked.

Nate Evans: This is going to look 100% identical, with the exception of one question. Does anybody have a guess, which question that is? We have pulled, and the cheat sheet's up at the top, we have pulled the question about training communication, in terms of percentage of staff that have been trained for web accessibility within your unit. That's a question we just removed this year. We had a lot of really helpful feedback related to that and, it was a decision that the Accessibility Review Committee decided to remove for this year.

Nate Evans: Otherwise, everything else is going to look identical. The sections represented are still training and communications, courses and educational offerings, websites and web applications, procured systems and content. Then at the very end, it ask you to describe any allocations and investments that you're making in terms of your program, any future needs that you see as a need. Besides this, this is really, really helpful to us in understanding if we can hear, "Hey, it would be helpful to have this, it would be helpful to have this." If we could keep hearing that same thing, that's something we can advocate for centrally to provide as a resource.

Nate Evans: Then the last question is around deprioritized systems and content. Again, this is getting to the point where, things can change, right? Over time. You may decide that there's something that's a higher priority for you to work on in the next year. That's something we'd like to hear about in that last section. So again, that's just for circulation and conversation purposes within your college.

Nate Evans: In terms of actually submitting the annual self-review, you'll do that via Qualtrics, just like last year. When you click on the form it will open a Year 3 Accessibility Compliance Self-Review, and it should look identical to the Word version that you've downloaded. You can answer it and kind of go through it that way. I've heard from a few MAUs that it was helpful to kind of fill it out in the Word version in advance and then they could move the content and respond in the final version that gets submitted here through Qualtrics.

Nate Evans: One of the other things we got really, really great feedback about during our retrospectives in early 2019, through this group actually, was to get some feedback on having additional information about, what is it you're reviewing specifically when you submit these plans, and what kind of standard or rubric are you using for that review? So we wanted to provide more clarity about what that looked like, and this time we're putting it on our website, so you can review in advance.

Nate Evans: First of all, what areas are we actually looking at? Well these are the main sections of the self-review itself, and so these sections are culture, training, web, courses and procurement. These are the five core digital accessibility benchmark areas that we're looking at. So when we review your plans, this is the lens that we're looking at them through. I'd like to just kind of go through each of these briefly.

Nate Evans: Under culture, what we mean by that, is that MSU recognizes the right of individuals with disabilities, and is committed to providing equal access to the university mission. So one of the things we'd like to see is connection from your own local mission and vision in how you're creating a culture of access and inclusion in your own college.

Nate Evans: The second area is training, and this is defined as MSU's committed to making training available on creating and providing accessible digital content and services with reasonable accommodation in mind. These resources are designed to provide employees with tools and new skills to make their content more accessible. So again this ongoing development, whether it's faculty, staff or even the students that work in your units, we want to hear about what training you're providing in terms of digital access and inclusion.

Nate Evans: The third area is web, and this is defined as MSU seeks to provide accessible digital experiences. Websites are oftentimes the way that individuals gain access to university programs and services and activities as well. So keeping in mind, I've talked about this in terms of your web presence is your digital front door, right? In a lot of ways this is the first place that students are going to come to, to interact with your programs and services, and making sure that it's a place that they can interact with is really, really important.

Nate Evans: In terms of courses, this is the fourth benchmark area. MSU seeks to proactively implement universally designed accessible digital experiences, such as captioned videos and to understand their obligations related to disability and reasonable accommodation policy. So we're looking for the work that you're doing in terms of making your courses more accessible, if that applies to your unit.

Nate Evans: Then the last section, procurement. Those at MSU involved in purchasing electronic information technology, called EIT, for the university should consider the accessibility of such products and services. Units should understand the impact that EIT and purchasing have on decision-making on individuals with disabilities inside and outside the institution. That's a really, really important thing to make a distinction on.

Nate Evans: We should partner with university services when purchasing digital content when possible. We did add a link to the university services web page. You may recall late last year, Kristen Good came and visited and talked about the refresh to the process, and the change to the electronic EIT purchase process is that security, accessibility, PCI, HIPAA, FERPA, all the things that are important for us to check to protect our students, faculty and staff, those all get checked simultaneously now at the same time.

Nate Evans: The way you kick off that process is to fill out something that they call the EIT Readiness Worksheet. So more information is available on what that worksheet is, but it's gathering the information once, which was feedback we were getting a lot throughout the process. "Hey, you asked me for this and then this person asked me for the same thing, and then this person asked me for..." That's frustrating. We get that. So this is an attempt buy Purchasing to align that process and streamline it a little bit.

Jim: And there are several versions of that worksheet too. PDF, I think there's a Qualtrics and there's a Word.

Nate Evans: Correct. Yeah, so Jim just mentioned there are three different versions of that. Yeah?

Alexander: Quick question on that. I was just wondering, as far as like third-party services, third-party softwares for example, recently an instructor approached me about using Padlet. I know that's on the MSU website is a tool that a lot of people... so I'm assuming is already being used here. Is there a list of things that have already been approved for accessibility and we can locate that easily so we can steer faculty towards those tools, rather than go through the process each time?

Nate Evans: Yeah, so that's something we don't have right now but that's something we've heard some feedback on, something we're having conversations about to put together, for sure.

Nate Evans: Any other questions on the five core benchmarks areas before I move on to the rubrics? Yeah, Sarah?

Sarah Swierenga: I am still pretty curious about how the other liaisons are handling the training component. Are you basically saying, "Here's the website, and here you can sign up for DQ classes?" Or is it more structured? Organizationally how is this being handled? I could really use some insight for that for a very large unit.

Nate Evans: Can I say one thing really fast? So in terms of IT, we're going to be talking about that at IT Next, on the 16th. So that's something that we're looking at ahead, but.

Sarah Swierenga: Thank you.

Speaker 14: In the libraries we have an accessibility group, that identifies training priorities, and we especially try to reach out to staff about what they need or what they want. But if we don't get a ton of those requests we also just rely on the expertise within our accessibility group. We provide some of our own trainings, we outsource trainings to different campus accessibility stakeholders. We also do a combination on webinars and offering through library associations that are having accessibility webinars and stuff like that. I'll let Kelly chime in.

Kelly: Everything she said is absolutely true, but also in the web services unit, I have just pointed people to the DQ and have had one, my main developer, signed up for like, the entire swath of training.

Sarah Swierenga: Yes. Yeah, we've kind of promoted the, "Hey, you know there's DQ training out there," and we've had, DCAT came and gave a couple trainings a year ago on Word and PDF. The web developments side is really the easier side to tackle, because there's a few of them, typically, as opposed to the hundreds of people creating content as we speak.

Speaker 14: One more thing to add, that the library's doing that might be applicable to a lot of you who have student accessibility employees or interns, is we really try to rely on our students to provide some staff training. It's a good opportunity for them to really increase their skills in a specific accessibility area, and then great presentation opportunities and practice for them as well.

Sarah Swierenga: So do you have a training strategy that others might be able to use to model from? That's what I was hoping we might find from Web Access by the end of Year 3 here?

Speaker 14: So by strategy do you mean some kind of written document that outlines how we're going to?

Sarah Swierenga: Yeah.

Speaker 14: No. Like is said, those decisions are made primarily verbally in our library accessibility working group. We have some minutes from those meetings, but it's not. Of course, we outline kind of our plan for training in our five year plan and reviews, but.

Sarah Swierenga: Okay. Yeah. I'm interested in have any of the other liaisons or their teams, done some packaging or tracking like, "Hey, take this for the overall awareness and then take this, and then take that, and you'll get a badge?" Or, you know something fun for taking on this extra work or something you can put on your yearly productivity when you report to your managers?

Nate Evans: I was just making eye contact with Heidi, because she mentioned Steven Thomas. That might be a cool, future conversation because Steven I know has done some great work in that side. I don't want to put you on the spot, Jesse, is that something you've worked with Steven on, on that side? Okay.

Nate Evans: Yeah?

Jerry Fust: Jerry from Human Resources. One of the things that we identified as a lot of communications from our own staff goes through our communications team. In which case, most of that stuff was assessed. Although what happens sometimes is there's a presentation at a meeting, the PowerPoint is provided, it is sent out as a PDF and not necessarily mediated. The notes, kind of provide an accessible alternative, but that's not really sufficient in my mind.

Jerry Fust: So what we're heading towards is our own in house training where anybody, on our staff, or anyone within the university is communicating though HR, any kind of HR medium, we'll be providing the training to them. How to make their PowerPoints, their Word, even Excel spreadsheets have been going out through our department, and do that in-house training. It's going to be across all the different media we use, for all the different elements we care about, that we typically see tables, headings, lists, those kinds of things, links.

Jerry Fust: Hopefully becoming a requirement that if anyone's communicating outside the walls of the Nisbet Building, they will have this training and will be providing that stuff to our communications staff, ready to go, so it'll be less work for the communications staff to work with that. Or just be able to rely more on those materials, then having to rewrite everything in note format. That's the next step. We're not there yet, but we are building the courses now.

Nate Evans: I want to make sure we get through the next section, so I'm going to keep moving forward.

Nate Evans: The next section is called Target For Progress, and this is where the rubrics are identified. I'm going to blow this up, just a little bit. Again, these are on Web Access right now under the Annual Self-Review page, if you want to look them up.

Nate Evans: Last year, again, if you participated in the Annual Self-Review for Year 2, you would have gotten feedback related to these targets for progress as well. This year we wanted to identify them and document them on Web Access, so they're more clear, and you have a good sense for what does it mean when we say that we basically give a grade to certain section of your plan, and we say, "This is above expectations." Or, "This is meeting expectations." Or, "Below expectations." This is what we mean by that, so I want to go through these. There's basically three different levels, like I just articulated.

Nate Evans: Again, you're going to get a rating in each of the baseline areas that we talked about before, so courses, web procurement, and so on and so forth. These rubrics apply to every single baseline area, so the first section rubric that we'll look at, are self-review baseline areas that are considered exceptional fall into these categories and will look like this.

Nate Evans: The values of access and inclusion are aligned with your MAU's mission and vision with clear steps that support this claim. There is a clear prioritization methodology that's stated and established with clear steps to show how progress is being measured, it's clear, and there is clear and ongoing reporting happening. Future intent and direction are outlined with internal resources to support the effort from multiple roles and perspectives. Again, that's what we were talking about with having multiple liaisons at the table from different perspectives is going to be really, really helpful. Administrative, communications, academic, web developer and IT, that's what we're looking for.

Nate Evans: Understands the impacts of purchasing on individuals with disabilities and partners with the university services when purchasing digital content when possible. There may be some exceptions to that, depending whether you have your own purchasing group in your college but that's kind of the gist of that.

Nate Evans: Proactively reviews products for accessibility and provides EEAAPs as needed. EEAAPs, is anybody familiar with the term? Okay, so we should define that better on our documentation, we will do that. EEAAPs are equally effective alternative access plants. We love our acronyms don't we? So that's why we put that there. Essentially we know that when you buy a product, it may not be perfectly accessible, in the majority of cases, this happens a lot, right? Having a plan of action to say, if we get an accommodation, this is how we play to handle it and provide alternative access for that service or software. That's something that we'd like you to document as you purchase. If you go through the central purchasing process, that's something that they're recommending as well, so you may have seen that through that method as well.

Nate Evans: Then, the last one here is reviewing and validating top priority digital experiences for accessibility on a regular cadence. I use that word digital experiences because it could be web-based websites, it could be mobile experiences, it could be learning experiences that look at a number of different ways. So we're defining that fairly broadly but the things that you say are top priority, we're looking for you to on a cadence of at least 90 days using a standard review methodology, like the MSU Evaluation Protocol that was provided by UARC. It may not have to be that, but some kind of standard process that you're documenting and showing, here's the standards by which we're evaluating.

Nate Evans: I'm going to go to the next category for the rubric for self-reviews that meet expectations. The values of access and inclusion are somewhat aligned with the MAU mission and vision, but may not be totally clear. The second one, using prioritization to direct resources but the methodology for prioritization may not be documented or completely clear. There are attempts being made to show how progress is measured and/or some reporting is happening. The future intent is becoming clear and/or internal resources are allocated to support digital accessibility program efforts. Understands the impacts of purchasing on individuals with disabilities and partners with university services when purchasing digital content when possible.

Nate Evans: Then, the last one here, reviews top priority digital experiences for accessibility by request and/or attempts to complete reviews on a regular cadence making attempts to use standard review and validation processes.

Nate Evans: Then, going down, this is the rubric for self-review benchmark areas that we think need improvement. The first is, there's no statement on accessibility related to mission or vision. There's not priority method defined, there's little or not progress being measured and progress is not being reported. The future intent of the MAU as it relates to access and inclusion is unclear. The MAU is not providing enough internal resources to support the accessibility effort. Does not typically consider the impacts of electronic and information technology purchasing and decision-making and on individuals with disabilities. Then the last one is does not typically review digital experiences to ensure that they are accessible.

Nate Evans: Hopefully that's helpful. Especially since we'll be using these rubrics in the evaluation process again this year, just like we did last year. I should say that it will become more clear when the memo comes out later today, from Aislinn and I but these benchmark areas as well as the rubrics were vetted and approved by Aislinn. These are things that she thought were important, we've done some tweaking on them based on some of the feedback from last year. Hopefully it provides a little bit more clarity this year.

Nate Evans: We do have a few minutes left. That was what I wanted to get through and I also wanted to leave some time at the ends for questions related to the process, related to benchmarks, targets, those sorts of things. Anything come to mind or things you'd like to discuss?

Jim: Just add a tiny bit more clarity to what Nate said is nobody is going to fall every bullet in one of these things, we're kind of weight it on the preponderance of what group you're in. It's not like somebody is typically going to fall off the face the of earth and have none of the stuff that falls under the needs improvement. They may have some good stuff that falls into the middle category, so you're going to get kind of based on the preponderance of your evidence, not just whether you fall exactly into one category or not.

Nate Evans: We'll definitely be providing feedback, just like we did last year, based on the rating, so it can provide some clarity. I know I took over a half dozen different individual meetings with MAUs that had questions after the fact too. So once the rating comes through if there are questions we can set up a time to discuss.

Nate Evans: Any other questions about the process? When are they do?

Speaker 17: June 30.

Speaker 7: It's a Sunday.

Nate Evans: June 30, awesome. Okay. It is a Sunday. Oh, I was trying to be consistent.

Speaker 7: No worries.

Nate Evans: Yeah?

Alexander: Different question, not related to.

Nate Evans: Sure, yeah.

Alexander: All right, so this not related to that process but, I just want to throw it out to the group and see if anybody has experience with content being created by students. If students are creating videos, if students are creating podcasts, those types of things, what are the requirements? I mean, we've encouraged faculty to teach students about accessibility and about the ability to auto caption, and that kind of stuff, when it's very easy for them just to hit the auto caption button. I guess I just wanted to see if anybody else has run into that and what they've done?

Speaker 18: We make a lot of, well intermittently we make patient videos, like procedures or what to do, or if you haven't been here before. What we do is we manipulate the captions, or they manipulate the captions in YouTube because they're almost always on one of the division YouTube channels. That seems to have worked for now but I have a feeling that's not going to be the case in the next year. That's what we've done for now and it seemed to work. Anyone else?

Speaker 19: Not direct experience but I do know that Kate Sonka, in CAL, is heading up an organization that is focused on not just teaching accessibly, but teaching the concepts of accessibility into all across curriculums and stuff. It may be useful to either contact her or have her come in and talk about what she is advocating for and what she's seen.

Nate Evans: All right, well if there are no other questions, thanks for coming out everybody. Have a great weekend and we will see you next month.