Athol Gow: Hello and welcome to proper Technology's Webinar supporting students. A panel Discussion on the Challenges of making course content accessible. My name is Katrina Fox and i'm the demand generation manager for proper technologies. Before I introduce the team, I do want to take care of some housekeeping.
Athol Gow: You were all muted, But if you do have any questions throughout the today's discussion, uh, please use your question or chat box in the control panel. We do want to make this uh as an interactive uh discussion as much as possible. So please uh put in your questions throughout. Um, that way. We're not taking all of the attendees questions at the end. Um! But if there are any at the end that you do have, we will take those in as well.
Katrina Fox: Um. Also, this is being recorded, and will be sent out to all who registered so you can re-watch it or send it on to your colleagues. So, without further ado, let me introduce today's presenters. So clen if you'll move to the next slide.
Katrina Fox: We have Glenn Gross Accessibility center of excellence. Glenn has several decades of experience working with organizations to help their technical business challenges for software solutions, services and training. He is a founding partner of site sky technologies which offer document accessibility solutions and services
Katrina Fox: in two thousand and eighteen site sky was acquired by open access technologies, and in October the twentieth twenty, one Crawford technologies acquired open access as part of that acquisition, Glen joined Crawford's accessibility center of excellence, and in this role Len's primary focus is to help higher education. Institutions identify and song their document. Accessibility challenges
Katrina Fox: Moon, Jen Golden, Gdp. Accessibility, compliance, support manager. Since two thousand and four she has been working in the field of document accessibility and worked for the government of Canada before joining proper technologies. She holds a master's degree in linguistics from the University of Ottawa, and is certified Rail Transcriber, and perfor.
Katrina Fox: Now, on our panelists, we have a thal gal who is the manager of library accessibility services at the University of Wealth in Ontario, Canada. He has worked in the area of student alternate format text and accessibility
Katrina Fox: technology support for over two decades. Athol has provided document accessibility, training for the campus staff as well as serving on a number of internal and exterior external aoda compliance Groups and co-chairing the University of wealth, Accessibility conference, organizing Committee
Katrina Fox: with Karin Schwab is the technology accessibility Coordinator at Swathmore College, Karen looks at accessibility from a proactive lens and on the institutional level.
Katrina Fox: Her work includes encouraging knowledge and adoption of accessibility practices across many areas and departments. In addition to advising faculty and staff on how to provide accessible electronic materials, she reviews software website and other tools, faculty and staff may be thinking of using as part of their department's, goals, and interactions with students and other members of the organizations,
Katrina Fox: and we have Nancy Waite coordinator for the Access Library Accessibility services at Mcmaster University. She is a twenty four veteran of the library initially started as a student assistant, and then moved part-time staff member, and then well, you know how it goes.
Katrina Fox: She wanted to work for a time and go to school part time, but didn't know that she would be there until retirement. She just graduated with honors, with her honor's degree in June with distinction, and starts her masters this fall, and just a couple of decades later than expected.
Katrina Fox: In the meantime, though she had two beautiful daughters, she lives with three dogs, two cats, a rabbit, and her girls most days her house and life is the zoo.
Katrina Fox: Um. But I do apologize to everybody. It looks like the um powerpoint closed, captioning isn't, captioning everything that i'm saying um so just to make sure that it captions all of our panelists um, including myself. I'm going to turn on the zoom close, captioning to apologize
Katrina Fox: so, but with that I will turn that on. But I then pass it over to Jen, so you can tell us the agenda for today.
Jen Goulden: Great, Thank you, Katrina, and just listening to that, I think. Wow! I want to go and hang out at Nancy's house. It sounds like it sounds like a lot of fun, all right. So we really want to get to the panel discussions. We'll just really quickly highlight the kinds of things we're going to cover. We've already done the introductions. We're going to
Jen Goulden: talk about common student accommodation challenges. We'll share programs um sort of successful programs and solutions that have been implemented. We're also going to talk about how requests for alternate formats are addressed. And also we're going to look at challenges with stem content. Science?
Jen Goulden: Oh, I'm going to science, technology, engineering and mathematics make sure I got it all and just content along those lines we're going to look at and discuss in house versus outsourcing of document accessibility.
Jen Goulden: And we'll also talk about the tools and services that that different colleges and universities are using. So that's just an overview. With that we're going to go on to the first question. And what we're going to do is that I will read the question, and then each time i'm just going to sort of randomly select one of our panelists to kick off the discussion, but all three of them will have a chance to answer the question, and then we'll move on to the next question, and I will just be kind of monitoring and keeping
Jen Goulden: an eye on the time, and thankfully, I've also got Katrina to help keep me in line. So that's great.
All right. So without further ado, and if you notice, i'm kind of turned off to the side. It's because I have a hard copy forail version of the questions that i'm
Jen Goulden: that i'm reading. So that's kind of why i'm not always looking into the camera.
Nancy Waite: Okay, Question number one. When are you doing to accommodate students that need their course documents and content in accessible formats and let's Nancy. Let's start with you.
Nancy Waite: Um, Thank you for the question. Um. So we provide um alternate format texts. Um! So we convert that most of those in-house um we convert uh class readings. Um mainly for line of visually impaired students. Um! We will do mostly those in word format
Nancy Waite: um. We provide alternate format library material. Um. So we'll provide those in in whatever format the student requires. We also caption supplementary videos that the instructors use it. Um. And we also have an at lending library, so the student requires equipment to use the um alternate format um material. We also help with that as well.
Nancy Waite: Great, Thank you. Asphal or krin.
Corrine Schoeb: Oh, I think you muted
Athol Gow: so. You didn't hear my chivalrous take it away.
Athol Gow: But the salt was there.
Athol Gow: Um! Our Our services are very similar to to Nancy's actually, and like Nancy Um, longer accessibility services, is located in the library. We work very closely with our with student accessibility Services and students are referred to us for assistive technology support
Athol Gow: as well as alternate format tech support. So
Athol Gow: um! And again, we we we do many of the same. Ah, the same sort of services. So we provide students with or ah altering format copies of their textbooks. Most of our our student users have cognitive disabilities, So that's It's mostly providing textbooks
Athol Gow: that they can use with the text readback software that we have licensing for Kurzweil three thousand. And again, in addition to that, we also provide video capturing support for,
Athol Gow: and we'll sort of provide alternative format copies of material from our library collection, or also,
Athol Gow: and also for for for courses as Well,
Athol Gow: um!
Athol Gow: Just thinking that it's nice that we have some allies in this in this kind of work. Our Electronic Reserve Department, for instance, has
Athol Gow: it ensures that any of the material that they have to scan from a print original is Ocr, and that that Ocr is corrected with that Pdf. And they also provide some basic structure in it for students to use. And most recently the library has
Athol Gow: ah hired when we hired a a digital accessibility coordinator last spring, and to finally have a place where the buck stops, and ensuring that the material, the training material that the different library departments produce is accessible from the get go,
Athol Gow: and that we're ensuring that our kind of online material, the documents and so on, are as accessible as we can make them.
Athol Gow: And that's yeah. So that's a good overview. I think of our service.
Not so.
Jen Goulden: Okay. So. Um.
Katrina Fox: Oh, I was just gonna ask uh before you moved on to the next question. We've got a question from the audience. What are you doing to accommodate employees at the documents and content and accessible
Athol Gow: current? Do you want to? Because I know you have another chance to answer yet. So do you want to answer? And then, if if anybody wants to answer that question after after cringe Answer. Then just jump right in.
Corrine Schoeb: So our school is a very small school. We have about one thousand five hundred students, and we work very closely with our student disability Services office and our provost.
Corrine Schoeb: Part of what we do is we look at
specifically how
Corrine Schoeb: what's the best format that still that all students could could access. In addition to what a particular student may.
Corrine Schoeb: So part of what we're trying to do is be proactive. We have thousands and thousands of Pdf. Documents that are not accessible.
Corrine Schoeb: That were, you know, scanned fifteen years ago before people really understood about Ocr. So we are constantly playing catch up, and one of the things that we're trying to do is get a bit more proactive about it.
Corrine Schoeb: So um! I think part of what we do is we ah transform most of our documents into html, particularly stem materials, because we find that that's the easiest way to get formula and
Corrine Schoeb: math across for students. Um And then the other thing that we do is we have as much as we. Can. We purchase campus-wide software so that anyone coming in can have access to that kind of software. And the other thing is,
Corrine Schoeb: I work very closely with a variety of departments. And so, for example, our library is actively reviewing their reserve system to see what else we can do to make sure that any material that's added there, or even
Corrine Schoeb: thinking about adding material that it might not traditionally be in a reserve system, be added to that system in an accessible format.
Jen Goulden: Great, Thank you.
Jen Goulden: Does somebody want to jump in and answer the one of you about what is done for employees.
Athol Gow: I'd like to answer that I it's our radar,
Athol Gow: we, I mean, if if that document was something that was a resource that was in the library. We would we would produce that in an accessible format for for that staff member. But it was interesting that you raised that because that was
Athol Gow: my one of my contacts from the Diversity and Human Rights Office had a question about this issue, and and I think
Athol Gow: we didn't have a Ah, you know a very good answer sort of across campus. So it's certainly something that's on their radar to ensure that departments know that it's their you know it's their responsibility to ensure that any any ah staff member that they hire is appropriately supported with the
Athol Gow: the formats that they require.
Corrine Schoeb: And if I could add to that, one of the things that we do is we use site, improve, and side-improve has a pdf. So we use that tool. In addition to that, we're a pretty small school, and most people
Corrine Schoeb: know me so they'll reach out to me if they have a question,
Corrine Schoeb: and when possible. I encourage folks not to put things in Pdf. Format, but to use the website as their means of communicating information as long as it's not sensitive information that seems to work quite well.
Jen Goulden: Excellent!
All right, let's move to the second question.
Jen Goulden: So our instructors expected to provide accessible coursework. If so, How has this worked out
Jen Goulden: current? You want to? Do you want to start us off this time? Sure, We do not expect instructors to
Corrine Schoeb: create accessible material, and they don't really have the knowledge that is needed for some of the different formats. Um. We do teach them how to recognize when a document is not accessible.
Corrine Schoeb: Um! So they do have a little bit of power, and
Corrine Schoeb: in just knowing that something may not be accessible, The other thing that we've done is, We work very closely with our library, and we have an electronics
Corrine Schoeb: material librarian, and we encourage
Corrine Schoeb: faculty to submit their syllabi to us. And we also just take a look at the reading list um, and try to research whether or not our library can obtain the material in an accessible format and provide that permalink on their syllabus instead.
Jen Goulden: Great
Jen Goulden: anyone else like to respond.
Athol Gow: I I think we we're in the same boat in some ways that it, I think, is suggested to to instructors that they should produce accessible material, and we, you know, we We point to best practices on our website Best practice documents, but we don't
Athol Gow: have a policy around this, and I'm. I'm thinking that a lot of confusion could be cleared up if we did. And in fact, I think that
Athol Gow: moving towards a policy like that is, you know, is is kind of inevitable in the sense that i'm noticing that you,
Athol Gow: The Aoda Post Secondary Standards Development Committee is is, you know, identifying that it has a lot of time identifying how university instructors need to to ensure that the material that they produce is successful, so I think I think
Athol Gow: you know. Eventually we need to get there. But I understand. You know that our faculty members extremely busy, and this It just seems like one more thing, one more ball to juggle, but and it's interesting because I think
Athol Gow: the way the current legislation is set up where we're in accessible content that was provided on request, you know. Often, I think, because of the power differential between faculty and students. You know you don't really have a lot of students requesting,
Athol Gow: you know, sort of accessible documents from from their from their prof. They may not, you know. They may be a little bit touch and go on actually reading, you know, trying to read them all the material in the first place. And so
Athol Gow: ah! You know all the but being a student being busy. But I think the issue is that you know faculty Members Aren't hearing about it from students, and therefore i'm not sure that they're seeing this as ah as a as a top to our issue. But
Athol Gow: but yeah, I think you know, we we need to move towards a policy around this, that that really accessibility has to start with the the documents being created by by the faculty member.
Corrine Schoeb: I will say that that we also actively try to educate our faculty on on how to create an accessible syllabi, for example.
Corrine Schoeb: So how how can they, if they're creating material? What are some of the things that they need to do to make sure that that document is as successful as they can make it.
Jen Goulden: Yeah, that's great, and I know i'm not a panelist, but I just want to jump in here as a somebody who was a university student in the One thousand nine hundred and Ninetys before We had a lot of the technology that we have now. And
Jen Goulden: you know, I think there's There's a certain level that it may be reasonable to expect of instructors. But when you have students, you know I was a rail reader, you know I I don't. I don't think it's necessarily reasonable to expect instructors to, you know, to be able to produce braille right? It's it's not, you know, so it kind of depends on what the student needs, and I think and this is a whole other conversation, so I will get into it. But I think there's a good discussion to be had on making sure students know how to advocate for themselves, because
Jen Goulden: I know that I would University would have been way more challenging for me if I wasn't somebody who could advocate for myself, so I will rain myself in on that one now, just because we don't have time. But that's a discussion i'd love to have at some point.
Athol Gow: I I think your point. You know that you're right. You can't ask an instructor to,
Athol Gow: but I think we'd like them to make good choices like you know in terms of the materials that they do create, or, you know, add to their courses, so that they don't inadvertently create problems. But when people have to take that and
Athol Gow: absolutely think about accessibility from the beginning. It's always a good idea,
Nancy Waite: all right. Oh, sorry. What do you want to say something?
Athol Gow: Yeah, I was just. I wanted to um address the question. Um, So I think um for us. We find that most of our instructors are pretty good about creating accessible um syllabi um, and for the most part um our um we call it um a two l. They're pretty good about creating accessible pdfs when they upload The content
Nancy Waite: where we struggle is when we ask for like advanced access to Ah, the Powerpoint, or um like those sorts of content. Um! And I think that's that's really understandable, as you you both mentioned. You know the instructors are really busy, and this just kind of adds one more thing to their their um agenda if the instructors were able to.
Nancy Waite: You know, somehow, you know, convert that that Powerpoint to a Pdf. I think that would solve a lot of a lot of issues that we find. But um it, it's just kind of, you know. One more,
Nancy Waite: you know, tasked in their their their weeks. Um! But it has been a challenge for us to to get that content from the instructors, and and it's you know something that we're willing to do that extra work for. But um, it's. Ah, yeah, that has been a challenge. Um, I think there's there's
Nancy Waite: pros and cons to having um a department on campus that that does this kind of work. In that the instructors don't learn how to create accessible documents. They can have somebody else to do it for them. And then there are other instructors that really do want to understand how to create accessible content. And have, you know, Of course, everything is is, you know, done in a thought of this change.
Nancy Waite: So I feel like we're pretty much in the same boat as everybody else.
Jen Goulden: Ah, something
Jen Goulden: okay. Sorry if I could just just.
Corrine Schoeb: Yes. One of the other areas that we we try to pay attention to is is the textbook textbook choices. So we're We're starting to really pay attention to those publishers that are able to provide us with. We have fully accessible ah version of a textbook,
Athol Gow: and push you back quite a bit on on publishers that are. Say that they're providing that to us. But it really is not very successful,
Athol Gow: particularly in this step. I know you wanted to push on, Jen. But I I just have an interesting issue with that that, you know, as textbooks are increasingly moving on to to being provided. You know through publishers online platforms. I'm: almost wondering if, having
Athol Gow: too many online platforms poses an accessibility issue in that. You know, we're asking, you know, students to to to learn how to. You know, navigate sort of four different interfaces potentially for their courses and things that they may individually be accessible. But But we're kind of contributing to kind of a cognitive overload. But
Athol Gow: and that may not just be an accessibility. I think I think a lot of people maybe, would find that an issue?
Athol Gow: Oh, yeah,
Athol Gow: or even just the the idea that it's only available online. The number of students that we've had requesting a print version because they can access the or like. It's just not accessible, or they have a Tbi, and the only version that that works for them is a print copy has has dramatically increased in the last few years.
Jen Goulden: Thanks, you guys, this is great discussion, and I wish we had. I wish we had more time as well. But let's move on to talking about, and we're kind of
Jen Goulden: it's beg weighing into this, I think, too. But
Jen Goulden: who does the work of of creating accessible documents, staff? Or is it outsourced, or is it a combination? And just if you could allude a bit to the services and tools, maybe that you use to whatever extent you can, you know.
Jen Goulden: So,
Nancy, let's start with you.
Nancy Waite: Um! So we have a combination. Um! So we're in the province of Ontario we have a a service called Arrow. Um! So anything I would say, techie um. We try to outsource to them if we have time. So we're documents. Um braille. We try to outsource the arrow if we can.
Nancy Waite: They will only do textbooks. So any of the class material we can't ask them to do so we do those In-house as well as any Pdfs. Mp. Three's. Anything else that we are requested and as far as tools
Nancy Waite: we use. Sorry i'm just trying to think we use Adobe Abbey census access, Kurzweil.
Nancy Waite: I'm trying to think what else to be is that that that's kind of what comes to mind right the moment.
Jen Goulden: Excellent.
Athol Gow: I also go ahead. Okay? Well, once again, just you know, picking up on Nancy's cocktails there. Same deal for us. We're also in Ontario. We also
Athol Gow: outsource or or send our Ah! The majority of our all format tests text requests through arrow, which I think is like the accessible resource, accessible education, resource, Ontario.
Jen Goulden: I I I believe so. Yes,
Athol Gow: yeah,
Athol Gow: which is essentially a provincially run kind of consortium to connect to to private publishers. So,
Athol Gow: as I said, most of the material we request are Pdf. Copies of textbooks that are provided to us through the publishers via Arrow; but, like Nancy, we also send our more complicated or
Athol Gow: formats, you know, such as braille or word documents with math Ml. Sort of to through arrow as well.
Athol Gow: Internally, We do the same sorts of things, and that's usually a blend of of staff and students that are that are doing that work in terms of
Athol Gow: creating, you know, accessible or alternate formats of of you know course notes, or or, of course, documents and things
Athol Gow: we're also using, you know, in terms of the tools that come up most. We're using Microsoft Word and the equation editor in there, which we've found quite good
Athol Gow: sort of math of Ocr Tool, which I thought works surprisingly well the
Athol Gow: if I was going to share one pet peeve about the tools we use. I wish somehow that that a company could produce a a Pdf. Accessibility, checker and editor that it wasn't sort of
Athol Gow: you know the one i'm seeing in a doping professional is also the one i'm seeing and fox it, and and and other sort of in other tools that have the Pdf. Editing tools that have a Pdf. Accessibility checker built into them. I wish somebody would really redesign that from the get-go I find it very frustrating to use
Jen Goulden: It's good to know
Jen Goulden: excellence
Jen Goulden: How about you, Karin? Is there anything you wanted to add
Corrine Schoeb: just similar. We were doing all of our work in-house, but we couldn't keep up with the load, so we reached out to a few organizations proper tech being one of them, and Crawford was sort of our guinea pig.
Corrine Schoeb: Ah! For the lack of a better description for us starting that process, and it's worked out quite well, I think. Last semester we figured we have reprocessed and touched
Corrine Schoeb: both internally and externally about seventeen thousand documents, which is a huge loan, and at the time we only had one person doing that.
Corrine Schoeb: So we've also increased staff to help with that, and we even lie at the moment pretty heavily on a handful of vendors
Athol Gow: to help support us as far as tools and services. We use the same tools, Abby word, and I couldn't agree more with the Pdf. Checker. It's part of the reason we decided not to work with Pdf. When we can avoid it,
Corrine Schoeb: because we don't have the confidence that it's that they're done. Well,
Corrine Schoeb: I think the other thing that we've done is we have a program that both faculty and staff have signed up for where we're using to queue
Corrine Schoeb: some training options there. Their document accessibility course, is one of the courses that we're offering to a pretty small number at the moment, but it's a pilot. So we have about twenty seven people who are participating in that.
Corrine Schoeb: And then the other thing is, we are starting a process where we're going to take a handful of courses and just start fresh from A to A to Z, and just figure out what it would take to make a a course that it's fully accessible.
Corrine Schoeb: So that's going to be an interesting
Jen Goulden: Yeah, no doubt.
Jen Goulden: So I think what i'm going to do in the interest of time is that I think the next two questions really kind of. There'll probably be a lot of overlap in these ones. I'm going to read
Jen Goulden: question for, and then i'm going to Glen if you could then go to question five, and i'm just going to kind of let have you all answer them sort of together, and you'll you'll understand, you know. Once I read the question. So
Jen Goulden: yeah, we do that I did want to let you know we do have two uh questions from the audience, and I'm. I'm happy to read off now, or
Katrina Fox: it's
Jen Goulden: sure, because you know what they might end up
Jen Goulden: being able to be answered under these next two questions as well. So how about you? Go ahead? And
Jen Goulden: so the first one is how our library databases being addressed, such as canopy, which we found does not offer audio description, and is not easily remediated,
Katrina Fox: and then I can go into the next one. How do you prevent the accommodations request that usually arrive on the first day of Class Um, and the work that it is so causing the entire class schedule to be derailed because you weren't allowed to provide non-accessible content to students that Don't have a combination of before you provide access to the students that they don't. Have.
Jen Goulden: Oh, yes, go ahead.
Jen Goulden: So what? I'm going to suggest the library. If If if anyone wants to answer that question now, that would be great, and then we'll go into the next two questions, because we're going to be talking about challenges. And so I think that's going to be something that we'll we'll be able to answer the second question in that. If that makes sense,
Jen Goulden: i'll just ask whichever one of you wants to answer the question of what the library database.
I'll go ahead. I I think
Nancy Waite: it's very difficult to get a once you've chosen a vendor that is not providing um a interface. That's accessible. It's very difficult to get them to change
Corrine Schoeb: the structure of their software. So part of what we've tried to do is just proactively look at software before we make that purchase and accessibility is part of that review process, and we really try hard to think through exactly
Corrine Schoeb: who our user base might be and how they might interact with that software.
Corrine Schoeb: So I feel your pain, and I don't have a good solution other than you know. One One thing that we've talked about for years is banding together
Corrine Schoeb: when many of the colleges and universities use the same software, and if we could figure out how to band together and push back on a vendor that would be extremely powerful.
Corrine Schoeb: And i'd actually get some changes pushed through.
Jen Goulden: That's great. Yeah,
Athol Gow: you know. Can I just this there. Yeah, go ahead, I think in some ways, for us, Canopy is probably a glass half-fold story, because in the sense that you know before we had ah sort of streaming video providers access to streaming for video providers. I mean,
Athol Gow: you know, we were in this world where we were trying to to approach individual sort of video rights holders to to try and get permission to capture catching content. Often we couldn't find them, or we would get refused. However, canopy at the least has has capturing our most of their videos, I think, if not all so, I mean in in a lot of ways That was a step a step forward for us.
Athol Gow: And yes, I agree, though, that having material and being able to create video audio description and transcript from it is a challenge. But in a way we're better than we were before.
Nancy Waite: And so did you want to add something? Oh, yeah, yeah, thanks. Um. So one thing that we're doing uh at Mac is um creating a database for students, so that they can actually see what um accessibility features the databases do have. Um. So it's part of the search engine. It's something that we're hoping to get up and running, not something that is going to remediate the the content, but just giving students, you know, advanced warning that hey? This this database does not contain
Nancy Waite: um. Captions are um it doesn't contain accessible Ps. That sort of thing. Um, but one thing that I have done. Um, I haven't contacted them for audio description, but I have contacted them for captions, for for one of their videos. They are pretty good. They're not. They're not fast by any stretch. They imagination, but they are pretty responsible as far as um adding captions to videos that don't contain them. Um! So that might be one solution is just contacting them and saying, Hey, can you either give us the video
Nancy Waite: raw materials so that we can go out and add a description to it, or um, you know. Would you add audio description to that video for us?
Jen Goulden: That sounds like a great resource.
Jen Goulden: All right. So the next question and I think again, these are going to tie in together. So question four is, what are some key student coursework accommodation challenges you face, and so I think that that does tie into our next question, which i'm going to read now. So just bear that one in mind, and also
Jen Goulden: bearing in mind the question we received about those first day of class requests as well. So the next question question five: How do you deal with specific content, like stem, music, languages, etc. And just bearing in mind again the challenges and all those other good things. So, asphal, Would you like to start us off.
Athol Gow: Um! So for for whoops I'll just take this off my screen here.
Athol Gow: How do we deal with a specific content like Stem
Athol Gow: and I was going to. So again. If a textbook requires really, we need to make
Athol Gow: sort of, you know, math rail, or or we need to incorporate mathml into it. You know we usually send those texts through to Arrow for good transcription, and I was going to sort of plug you sooner. But for courses that you, you know again where the generated where you have midterms, and then so on
Athol Gow: New York, to sure that ensure that that that material is transcribed correctly. We we've We've used Crawford technology to to have that to um. Those sort of tests converted for us into into math. So um. So that's been great, I mean, you know you've been able to give us a very good turnaround.
Jen Goulden: Excellent! Well, thanks.
Nancy Waite: I didn't. I didn't prompt Ethel to do that. By the way,
Athol Gow: I had no idea that was going to happen.
Jen Goulden: It was fun to work on those projects.
Corrine Schoeb: I can just say that I completely relate to the challenge of getting notified the day of or day before start of classes. And we have also, in addition to that, we have a two week
Corrine Schoeb: drop ad period where students can drop horses and pick up other courses and so and they can do it multiple times, so that in itself it's a
Corrine Schoeb: my mind. It's a an institutional
Corrine Schoeb: challenge barrier
Corrine Schoeb: that we need to really think about how to overcome that. In the meantime, you just we just have to scramble, it's, it's it's
Corrine Schoeb: not easy. We get it done, but it's it's in my opinion it's not a very sustainable process,
Glenn Gross: and I can attest to that because one time Karen sent me a request that was due yesterday.
Nancy Waite: Yeah, I've been kind of lots of those. But
Jen Goulden: how about you, Nancy?
Nancy Waite: Um. So we get most of our requests actually after the first year of class. Um, So far we've had eleven students register out of the usual forty, nine or fifty or so students. Um. Most of them will come in between now and and the end of drop an ad um, So I I totally relate to that that drop in ad deadline. That's usually when we get that that spike of students um as far as stem courses. Um, we we do try to send as many out as as many across to to,
Nancy Waite: but we have had to convert a fair number of um lecture slides. Um, you know, textbooks that sort of thing. We use a program called Infidy Editor, which does like an Ocr on like the math Content, and that works
Nancy Waite: reasonably well. There's not a lot of editing, and then we convert it into um mathematical, and then use some mammoth grail within like as we're converting into braille.
Nancy Waite: Um, so we have, I would say, a fair amount of experience converting into like Mass braille mass word documents. Um, we don't have any like um, I say institutional experience converting into like music or a second language. There was actually a conversation with um a braille reader that wanted to take a Russian force a few years back, and there wasn't the capacity to convert into Russia,
Nancy Waite: so she wasn't able to take her course. Unfortunately, so that that's uh that.
Athol Gow: Well, there is. Now that it happens again. That is amazing, because I really felt bad for that student. She was working on a master's program, and that was actually one of the components for her program.
Nancy Waite: So yeah, that that was really unfortunate. So that's fabulous that i'm really happy to hear that
Jen Goulden: actually almost any language that that a student requests. There is a way to produce it now.
Nancy Waite: That's really fabulous.
Nancy Waite: And now that this happened like years ago, probably about eight or nine years ago. Um! So she's gone, graduated, done her whole thing. But that's really great to hear, because we're getting more grad students in every year
Glenn Gross: in music. Also
Jen Goulden: some yeah music for sure.
Jen Goulden: Well, i'm one of the
Jen Goulden: sorry. This is another question. Yeah, we've got a lot of questions coming in, so I just wanna make sure we get them all. Okay, How about we? Just? We've only got a couple of questions left that that we put together. So how would we go for those really quickly, and then we'll just get to the questions that people are asking, and maybe some of them will get answered before before we're done. I was just going to say that it sounds like one of the big challenges really is.
Jen Goulden: Besides, sort of the input of the documents and what condition they're in time.
Jen Goulden: So it seems to be such a challenge in this setting, because, of course, students need things quickly. There. There is definitely a time component to that. So?
Jen Goulden: All right, Question Number Six. And again, you guys probably have talked about this a little bit. Um. Do you provide options for html or epub to better handle stem equations or to be rendered on the students device of choice. And again, I I think we kind of have touched on this a bit. So if anybody wants to just jump in,
Nancy Waite: we we definitely do. And and I just want to say something that as painful as this process is In my view, it's the institution's issue, and the institution needs to solve it. So
Corrine Schoeb: we're trying to to find the places where we can proactively work on this kind of things, so that we don't have the same crunch
Corrine Schoeb: all the time, and we are, I think, generally getting better. We're able to respond a little bit faster, and we, you know,
Corrine Schoeb: probably one of the big challenges is is just getting faculty to put materials up in time, sometimes even a week, into a class. We sometimes don't have material from the faculty member, and that makes it
Corrine Schoeb: challenging. Um,
Corrine Schoeb: uh, we do uh we are pretty active uh
Corrine Schoeb: are proactive about getting books well in advances of the starting semester. So when we have book information, we can get that process regardless, or we can can work with the publisher just to provide something that is already accessible where we don't have to farm it out some place.
Jen Goulden: Okay, i'm not sure that I answered that question.
Jen Goulden: That is all. I I think you I think you probably did. I'm just going to um. The next question is about how um requests for alternate formats, such as braille, large print, audio and video captioning are handled. And what i'm hearing is that those kinds of things are generally outsourced. Would that be an accurate,
Jen Goulden: And again, I'm only sort of partially answering this, so we can get to uh the attendee questions. But if if that's if somebody wants to add to that, if that's not quite complete answer, feel free. I just want to get to the last question. Then
Nancy Waite: we we do those things in house. Oh, you, too. We actually bought a braille boss or a few years back. We do both like you.
Nancy Waite: Standard braille and tactile braille. We do large prints. We don't do a lot of audio or video captioning in-house, but we do definitely outsource we'll do short videos like under like five minutes in house if it's like urgent. But for the most part we just open source those things.
Nancy Waite: I am all right.
Jen Goulden: Ok, i'm going to ask the last question, because I think this would be really helpful, and then we'll take the questions that you have Katrina and we'll go from there?
Jen Goulden: So
Jen Goulden: is there any coordinated organization-wide effort towards digital accessibility and student accommodations. The
Corrine Schoeb: so if I could jump in swap more definitely has that That's that's what my job is,
Nancy Waite: and I I think it's becoming more common to have someone who is the point person, but it's still pretty rare. You have someone who's looking at it from an institutional point of view
Corrine Schoeb: I think it's needed.
Jen Goulden: Yeah. Because if these institutions are
Jen Goulden: even smaller ones are really big. And when you, when you think about it, So Yeah, I'm: sorry. And just a lot of colleges, you know.
Corrine Schoeb: Diversity, equity, and inclusion is Ah is one of those ah tag and phrases, and we need to take that seriously, and accessibility needs to be included in that.
Corrine Schoeb: That. So you know. I'm pushed for that all the time in Dei discussions.
Jen Goulden: All right, awful or Nancy
Athol Gow: I I'll just pop in and and just say that I think this can be very challenging, because anyone who works in in a university sort of setting realizes how how kind of silo the players are to a large degree.
Athol Gow: You know everyone is responsible for. You know different aspects of the overall university experience. And so sometimes it's hard to.
Athol Gow: You know. I think, I said in our last meeting, that we have a student who we're supporting, who is blind, and has found that taking dee courses can be really effective for him, because there's no delay in getting his
Athol Gow: sort of notes, because, even though They're built into the into, the the course, interface, and so on.
Athol Gow: And you, you know it would probably be a good idea for us to to. You know, share what his program looks like with with sort of our folk and and open education to make sure that they, you know, if they had a a sort of a
Athol Gow: a a roadmap of, you know, for them to think about ensuring that the content in the courses that you know the student is going to take it this year next year, and so on, that they can go through and and and make sure that that content that the math is presented to. You know, uh using something that's successful, that you know the images are properly tagged, and things like that, just to to make it better for um, and I haven't, and and you know part of it is just because, uh, some of those formal linkages are there.
Athol Gow: But maybe, after having said that in a public forum like this.
Athol Gow: It sounds like it's really bad. I don't know what to spur you on.
Athol Gow: I think the other thing is again is just,
Athol Gow: you know. Sometimes it.
Athol Gow: Some of these issues are hard, because things will. Will. You know we'll bump up against You know other cultures in the university. You know I was, I think, mentioned before that that you know
Athol Gow: we, Of course it was essentially where the instructor was to be announced right up until I think, last week, and it happened to be a second year Stats course that a student who's visually impaired is planning to take,
Athol Gow: and you know that that makes it very difficult for us to plan, and it seems like, you know, a very straightforward issue for us to sort of say you've got to stop. You've got to make these decisions sooner, or you go to just mandate what the textbook is, so that we know what it is, and we can get going on it. But
Athol Gow: from the perspective of somebody who's teaching the course. That's you know, a fundamental part of their
Athol Gow: other really academic freedom, you know, to be able to design the course, choose the textbook, and so on. And so I mean, we have these these cultural kind of tug of wars. I think that go on sort of at university. That can be that can be challenging for these things.
Athol Gow: So not so much sort of, I guess. I'm not really provided solution. So i'm sort of stating some of the issues that
Jen Goulden: right? No, that's that's fair enough. I'm going to give Nancy a quick second to respond, and then we'll go on. We'll take just a few minutes to answer some of the participant participate questions.
Nancy Waite: So we do have um at our student Accessibility Services Department that handles student accommodations. Um, though they they kind of face all of those challenges that apple just mentioned. Um, I think. Um, it's, you know they they do the best that they can. But you know, as you mentioned, we have a lot of courses. Um, as most. You know. Large institutions do that the instructors aren't hired until the first day. Um, But they do. You know, contact
Nancy Waite: The various departments ensuring that students um that live in the residents are well accommodated. You know students that have
Nancy Waite: food um. Allergies are accommodated in hospitality services, or you know that need alternate format textbooks um are referred to library accessibility services. Um. So in that sense they they coordinate all of the different accommodations across campus as far as digital accessibility. We've actually created this community of practice. Um, that's trying to reduce those silos across campus and connect all the people
Nancy Waite: that are doing various accessibility related jobs across campus, and we just started it earlier this year, and we've had a couple of meetings. So we're hoping to bridge those asylums and and gaps, and connect people so that we can. Um, hopefully, I don't know. Reduce the the duplication, but also, you know, communicate and connect people
Nancy Waite: across campus.
Jen Goulden: Great? Okay, Katrina, do you want us? And Jen, can I just add some? I want to. I wanted to add for this question part of what um I was thinking is that there's a lot of web masters folks in marketing communications at at the schools
Glenn Gross: that are operating over here, and then disability services who are doing student accommodations or
Glenn Gross: not really coordinated, and I was wondering if
Glenn Gross: those two groups are being connected at the schools.
Nancy Waite: That's exactly what this community of practice is trying to do is connect all of those people that do something with with with accessibility. So our Sas office is connecting with people in like the Science Department or um, as you mentioned web like the it department, and all of the like anybody related to accessibility. We're trying to get them together in like I want to say one room, but one virtual room, essentially
Athol Gow: awesome. Thank you. But that's an interesting issue that you just pointed to Glenn, because I think in some ways, you know there are people on campus, that student accessibility services we're concerned about with accommodation. But there are other groups of on campus are concerned with document and media accessibility, and and you know they don't.
Athol Gow: They don't talk as much as you think they should. There they, because the form that connects the linkages aren't there.
Jen Goulden: Right?
Jen Goulden: Awesome. Thanks. Guys. Okay. So what I'm going to do with we have like, just maybe five minutes before I hand things over to Glen. What i'm going to do. Maybe Katrina, with the questions is, if you read them out. If just maybe one of you could volunteer to answer each question just in the again in the interests of time. So
Jen Goulden: go ahead. Kiss me now.
Jen Goulden: Yeah, thank you. Is Aer-o available to individuals outside of Canada
Athol Gow: in the ending.
Athol Gow: So let's go for it. This is Ontario, isn't it
Athol Gow: in the area. Arrow is limited to citizens of Ontario. Yes, I was going to say that there are other organizations that you might want to look into just in North America wide. I'm thinking about the access text network or the or co-chair.
Jen Goulden: It's it's a
Jen Goulden: all right, Nancy. Can you repeat the name of the service you use to convert things like lecture slides?
Nancy Waite: I think you might be referring to Arrow, but we also use Abbey and Infinity Editor. That's the one.
Nancy Waite: Okay, i'm not sure What's the second one.
Athol Gow: It's right in the second infinity. It's I. N. F. T. Y. Editor, and it does a really great job with math.
Jen Goulden: Yeah, I think that's the one they were probably asking about.
Corrine Schoeb: Yeah, I was curious.
Jen Goulden: Thanks. All right. Next one.
Katrina Fox: Yeah. Uh, this one's more just a a comment. Uh, but they are the assistive tech person for their college now. Uh, but was a student at one point, and would just like to fairly point out that it is every bit as comfortable and challenging to be on the other side, wanting the material not having to access, not having access to it. Um! They were often made to feel like uh was sabotaging everybody else.
Jen Goulden: Thanks for Thanks for that. I I've I've been on the student side and definitely can can relate to that. So
Katrina Fox: someone is asking, what is the way to convert Russian.
Jen Goulden: Basically The way that I would recommend is that the Duxbury Rail translator has It's got over one hundred, almost one hundred and sixty languages. I think so it would be, you know you would get the textbook in. Probably. Pdf you'd go to word you'd abort it into Duxbury, and you would use the Russian templates.
Jen Goulden: That's kind of the short answer. I could certainly provide more detail off offline. But the Duxbury Braille translator has a brushing capability,
Jen Goulden: and I'm, assuming that's the same. For what is the way to produce non-english languages? Yes, yes, absolutely.
Katrina Fox: And as the community of practice only with people in Canada,
Nancy Waite: it's actually something that we have just within the our university. Um, but it'd be interesting to see if we could create something. You know
Nancy Waite: It's it right
Athol Gow: across Canada. That would be kind of interesting, or there's a couple of lists that exist, and I don't know adults. You Are you on some of them? I?
Athol Gow: Yeah. Good point. Actually, that's a that's a great. We should really talk about that nayot. And now I've said it. I'm trying It's the it's sort of the Ontario assist. Okay,
Athol Gow: We We can definitely get this information to you if you, if you have to look it up after we can. It's actually the the network of assistive technologists.
Athol Gow: So so if you look up in a period of grade a period T period, or just look up network of assistant technologist that should bring up the resources Anyone can join. It's a great community, and there's lots of assistive tech chat going on there,
Athol Gow: and it
Athol Gow: sorry. The last meeting that I went to. There were people from all over North America at that meeting.
Nancy Waite: Great, and I would just plug. I don't know if folks in Canada are members of education, but edge to cause has an it Access Group that's pretty robust,
Corrine Schoeb: and then accessing higher ground is a conference that happens in Denver almost every November, and
Corrine Schoeb: that's a really great conference to go to. It's. I think, one of the best in the country. Um!
Corrine Schoeb: So if you have a chance, if you can only choose one, I would go to that one. Um.
Jen Goulden: So I think, Katrina, do. We still have a few questions left?
Glenn Gross: Yeah, just kind of comments at this point. But, Karen, you're somebody else was right on with you, they said. Look into the edge of cause it Accessibility group. So that's great to see if somebody else's.
Jen Goulden: I looked into that um, and then just adding on to the the person who was on the student side was that they don't think anyone was trying to make it that way.
Jen Goulden: It's it's It's great.
Jen Goulden: Okay, Well, I want to hand things over to Glen so he can talk about um remediation and testing type things, and I just want to thank all the panelists. It's been a great discussion. I think we could all kind of have this this discussion for a much longer period of time. But the Webinar is coming to a close, so I will hand it back to Glenn.
Corrine Schoeb: Thank you. So i'll just spend about three minutes, and I wanted to give an overview that Crawford technologies.
Glenn Gross: We've been addressing document accessibility challenges like the ones we've talked about today for well over a decade, and we've developed an entire suite of document accessibility, solutions, services, and training. Our accessibility now platform was designed to help organizations find test and then fix your online as well as your student class documents. And when you can't do it yourselves, we have a large team of remediators. That will do it for you
at very competitive rates,
Glenn Gross: and we work with many colleges and universities, making their marketing communications, website documents. We've gotten campus maps and even their commencement programs and made them accessible.
Glenn Gross: We help with student accommodations as a backup to your staff, and sometimes we're even asked to make an entire semester of a student's class word accessible, and yes, we get them
Glenn Gross: very late. Often
Glenn Gross: we get the course schedule usually to deliver chapters as needed throughout the semester, and we'll get requests for the
Glenn Gross: we're taking math or physics pdfs and converting them to html, as as Corinne said earlier that handles the equations better, and it often works better on the students device of choice.
Glenn Gross: So we're excited to share a special document, accessibility bundle that we created just for higher A.
Glenn Gross: Our doc and D tool will crawl websites monthly or every other month,
Glenn Gross: find all of the documents, and then run a validation test
Glenn Gross: through our own validation tool that we created. This becomes a valuable part of your digital accessibility strategy because it helps track progress from month to month,
Glenn Gross: and with that validator which is the tool, you simply drop and drag one, or you could drop one hundred files into it at once, and a comprehensive accessibility report will be run on each file,
Glenn Gross: and then we have a remediate solution, which is, it was developed just for Pdfs, and it's a great tool to fix inaccessible Pdfs. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically detect
Glenn Gross: and apply the correct tags, then it's significantly faster and easier than adobe dc pro if you're doing any kind of pdf remediation in-house, and then we have a tool called transactional which will completely automate those structured communications like admission letters transcripts,
Glenn Gross: forums, or other documents to make them accessible. And so i'd ask you, please share this bundle with others in your organization that are concerned with keeping your documents accessible, and we'd be happy to provide a demonstration, and even call your website beforehand to show your actual results.
Glenn Gross: I also mentioned training. We offer extensive accessibility training through the proper tech academy. Our silver gold and and platinum courses over here offer how to short-term short-form videos
Glenn Gross: to full custom on-site training to help our customers use the products they own from us. For example, maybe you forgot how to merge table cells in that remediate tool. They view a short video and in minutes the merging cells, and then over here on the left side of the screen,
Glenn Gross: our accessibility Academy provides access to over one hundred and forty instructor-led accessibility, training sessions throughout the year. And there are, there are approximately twenty five separate topics, accessibility topics, ranging from web accessibility, Pdf. Word in design,
Glenn Gross: lifecycle designer, accessible forms creating accessible audios, videos, html, and more
Glenn Gross: So we offer comprehensive document, accessibility, solutions, services, and training, including webinars that we do regularly like the one you're on today with the goal of being a trusted advisor or partner to you for whatever document accessibility needs a rise.
Glenn Gross: So again, thank you for joining us today. I appreciate the panel, and Katrina. Did any other questions come up?
Katrina Fox: No, no other questions came up. Yes, thank you for everybody uh joining today's Webinar um, including all of our panelists. Your uh insight was very helpful. Um! So with that. Uh, as we said at the beginning, this Webinar has been recorded, and we we will get that out to everyone who registered. We want to thank everybody for attending today's Webinar, and we hope that you have a great cost to your day,
Katrina Fox: and with that we will conclude the Webinar
Jen Goulden: Thanks, Everyone.