Shannon Pritting: Alright, so it looks like we're good.
Shannon Pritting: And then, if you don't mind if you're not speaking or or want to interject just mute yourself just you know kind of keep the background noise off.
Shannon Pritting: So today we are going to talk about the Sunni library accessibility cohort there's a variety of speakers that i'm going to let.
Shannon Pritting: Introduce themselves.
Shannon Pritting: And i'm Shannon the director of Sunni library services we're going to do an overview of what we've done and what we intend to do on the city library accessibility cohort.
Shannon Pritting: And then give an overview of the system wide activities and on February 11 we have a follow up webinar which will be focused on the campuses and individuals from the campuses with more of a panel presentation, so do register for that February 11 webinars well if you're interested.
Shannon Pritting: i'll turn it over to natalie to talk about the overview of the system wide aspects of EA T compliance um and then we'll get into talking about the cohort.
Nazely Kurkjian: Thanks Shannon hi everyone, my name is natalie kurkjian pronoun she heard, I am the coordinator of disability and non traditional student services.
Nazely Kurkjian: And Sunni systems, he it accessibility officer he it stands for electronic and information technology as Shannon said i'm going to.
Nazely Kurkjian: provide a kind of a big picture overview of what what our vision is at suny and what the goal of the policy and the plans are so.
Nazely Kurkjian: If if you have not seen this before you know this really reflects the concept of inclusion accessibility and accommodations most of you are probably very familiar with the accommodations framework.
Nazely Kurkjian: In a higher education, setting so accessibility and inclusion minimizes barriers for everyone and for our students and patrons to truly feel like they belong and their learning needs are attended to.
Nazely Kurkjian: They need to have a supportive interactions and informed responsive professors and professional staff and cultivating an inclusive campus environment.
Nazely Kurkjian: reduces the work of being a disabled student or person on campus and reduce the stigma accessibility.
Nazely Kurkjian: Which is in the name of our policy is a proactive approach that is welcoming.
Nazely Kurkjian: to students and and people with different disabilities, it requires intentional designs and development decisions.
Nazely Kurkjian: And again lessens the need for students or other other individuals to ask for accommodations so that they can focus on their schoolwork or work work seamlessly accommodations are not the same as accessibility.
Nazely Kurkjian: Where accessible systems are designed to be usable by as many people as possible, regardless of their disability or assistive technology.
Nazely Kurkjian: accommodations are in, by their very nature reactive and may not effectively address everyone's access requirements.
Nazely Kurkjian: And, of course, you know, even when environments, are designed with accessibility in mind, there may still be need for accommodations and remediation.
Nazely Kurkjian: But accommodations are applied retroactively to mitigate the barriers in our environments and systems and so when students and others.
Nazely Kurkjian: Face barriers in their living and learning environments, they should feel empowered to request accommodations This is why, having a web page regarding library accessibility, whether it's physical accessibility or electronic accessibility.
Nazely Kurkjian: openly available is critically important so that a these individuals have the pertinent information necessary to request accommodations whenever proactive accessibility isn't addressed.
Nazely Kurkjian: Shannon if you could go to the next slide.
Nazely Kurkjian: Our policy was created to really manage risk in digital environments and promote promote equal access so it's like a proactive and reactive approach.
Nazely Kurkjian: Given the 24 seven nature of technology, we need to be proactive, because our students and others are visiting our websites and and.
Nazely Kurkjian: databases and all these things at all times of the day and week, and so we need to be really intentional in our approach.
Nazely Kurkjian: Not everything we buy or create will be fully accessible, and so the policy outlines a framework for proactively and reactive Lee addressing.
Nazely Kurkjian: Digital accessibility, including five standards that specify what should be prioritized and these benchmarks are indicated by.
Nazely Kurkjian: required versus strongly recommended, so the EIC policy requires that each campus and system have an officer and accessibility plan and to utilize the standards that we've created, many of which are.
Nazely Kurkjian: rooted in federal law or international technical standards or best practices that we've seen across the United States and other.
Nazely Kurkjian: institutions of higher learning these standards are available on the Sunni website and the implementation guidance for each of these standards, I stored in Sunni blue and that resources provided on a future slide.
Nazely Kurkjian: If you can shift one up So these are what's outline on this slide are the core elements for devising a comprehensive accessibility plan or Program.
Nazely Kurkjian: I really don't like the word plan we went back and forth on what word should be used because it's really is a living plan, and I see this more as a digital accessibility program than a plan for the purposes of the policy you know these elements, you know designating authority and responsibility.
Nazely Kurkjian: Raising awareness, because not everybody knows why accessibility is important, or how to how to do it in their day to day work.
Nazely Kurkjian: And a design on to ingrained accessibility into the creation of web and technology resources procurement has been a huge part of.
Nazely Kurkjian: The accessibility policy, and you know, a huge reason of why we're here today, having a means of monitoring compliance of the things that we buy or create and our.
Nazely Kurkjian: websites and all of these things and, of course, training, because you know, a policy such as this could not really work without effective training.
Nazely Kurkjian: And all but six campuses have submitted a final plan so we're actually in very good shape and on the next few slides i'll share some common themes and best practices so i'm campuses were required to submit.
Nazely Kurkjian: Their plans back in June.
Nazely Kurkjian: And there was some flexibility because of the pandemic and so some did not submit them until this past December, but overall we saw a lot of.
Nazely Kurkjian: themes like a lot of campuses are using policies to drive compliance or you know require training or things like that a lot of unique liaison models.
Nazely Kurkjian: You know champions and various departments, who are you know, taking the lead in in participating and trainings and then doing train the trainer kind of things um you know dividing the plan templates to address multiple areas that were not initially.
Nazely Kurkjian: You know, included in the IT policy so like i'm a student affairs or or separating.
Nazely Kurkjian: You know, digital content into instructional content and communicative content, presumably from a communications and marketing standpoint.
Nazely Kurkjian: If you could go forward one and, lastly, you know the best practices, I really do think you know, the emphasis on shared responsibility.
Nazely Kurkjian: Is is the most critical best practice accessibility is is something that to some extent, everyone is responsible for.
Nazely Kurkjian: As we're all creating and disseminating electronic information and having a really strong governance model in place to.
Nazely Kurkjian: have some authority, and you know disseminate some tasks across different departments and divisions is critical, I mentioned training before and I have on the slide here some examples of folks who really should be trained, they are not the only people that should be trained but.
Nazely Kurkjian: You know, having having all kinds of people.
Nazely Kurkjian: You know, participate in that, and a lot of campuses also included accessibility really to duties in various job descriptions so building it in.
Nazely Kurkjian: will hopefully shift our culture of care and inclusion over time.
Shannon Pritting: Right uh.
Shannon Pritting: So I I became involved.
Shannon Pritting: about six or seven months ago.
Shannon Pritting: As the E it implementation.
Shannon Pritting: And the and the policy became more known across the system and a lot of the SLC meetings and presentations people were saying you need to do something about the pats.
Shannon Pritting: So I started to kind of unpack that question a little bit, and you know learning more Michelle from the sls team has also been involved in.
Shannon Pritting: Some of the implementation guidance, so we were tracking on this and then just trying to figure out.
Shannon Pritting: What would be our best next steps so as we do with pretty much anything else, that would be a major initiative we go and benchmark and see what other console media or groups are doing.
Shannon Pritting: Many, many people say said to us, you should do at cuny doing so, we dove into what cuny was doing and what cuny did was that they grabbed all of the V pats and put them on on the live guide.
Shannon Pritting: So we we knew what they were doing, and then we also looked at the big 10 academic alliance and the library accessibility alliance and had a couple of calls with them to figure out what they were doing.
Shannon Pritting: And what cuny was doing and then what the big 10 Alliance was doing we didn't think was far enough for where our campuses work currently or at least a big portion of.
Shannon Pritting: Where our campuses work currently or would be in the next couple of years, because the big 10 alliance what they were doing is outsourcing with two different vendors to do.
Shannon Pritting: Top Level testing and a review of the V pat for a small portion of the commonly held resources or the resources that they were procuring and.
Shannon Pritting: We reached out to many of the sunni's and then started to dig into where they were with their Ai te processes and found that many were already requiring much more than what the cuny or the big 10 slash library accessibility alliance model would provide us so.
Shannon Pritting: What we found was, and you can go on to the next slide Michelle is that that many were requiring the pats already or had already required V paths which are a forum that ask the vendor to say this is how their resource is or is not compliant with specific standards.
Shannon Pritting: And what we found was that there wasn't a lot of developed processes.
Shannon Pritting: For actually using the content or any of the reviews there certainly were at some campuses but that.
Shannon Pritting: As what often happens when there's a system wide policy it takes a little while for the internal and the local processes to catch up.
Shannon Pritting: But what we found is that at least 13 campuses of the 30 who responded were already requiring some sort of testing, in addition to V pat review so going much farther than than the other consortia were.
Shannon Pritting: And when I reached out and started talking to the directors are the people who were involved in that in that sort of compliance activity.
Shannon Pritting: All but one or two said, we really need some help we don't have the knowledge said, we need to really scale up here in order for us to feel like we can do this and we're comfortable at it and on the other, spectrum some campuses were saying.
Shannon Pritting: we're not even being asked for a V pat We know this is coming, but it hasn't really been baked into a lot of our processes yet so as, as is typical there are you know very different life cycles of the implementation and what we wanted to do is to become.
Shannon Pritting: As helpful in the process, as we could at the current state that we're working so we figured that the testing the compliance required.
Shannon Pritting: Related to renewals and new subscriptions if those actually were happening that that was the thing that would likely cause the biggest issue and would prevent.
Shannon Pritting: A more gradual and reasoned approach to he it reviews and accessibility reviews in library, so we focused a lot on that.
Shannon Pritting: And what I often found is that there's a really nice parallel or very interesting parallel between approaches to copyright.
Shannon Pritting: So either a campus was extremely conservative in compliance, even more so than the implementation guidance from suny or others and we're you know that was causing really big issues with.
Shannon Pritting: Requiring too much compliance, especially for library resources, most of which are medium or low impact, he it and then others we're we're taking the similar approach with you know kind of how copyright is is just ignoring it until it really became an issue so.
Shannon Pritting: What we did is we formed a Sunni library accessibility cohort to address the immediate concern, which was you know scaling up on testing and then, with the hope to.
Shannon Pritting: start to build more expertise and knowledge, so that we could share that with the implementation of library accessibility components of VIP plans going forward so i'm going to turn it over to Rebecca who is one of the fantastic chairs of the cohort.
Rebecca Oling: hi so my name is Rebecca rolling I am the.
Rebecca Oling: Can you hear me okay.
Rebecca Oling: yeah I am the interim director of digital accessibility of purchase college which.
Rebecca Oling: really is a very new kind of position to really focus on accessibility within the library and i'll talk a little bit about that relationship, a little bit later on, but really the vision for the cohort was how could we come together as a kind of learning community.
Rebecca Oling: Each and each with different skill sets and provide our group some kind of ongoing self directed and guided training so that we could develop a deeper knowledge and accessibility and accessibility practices.
Rebecca Oling: And i'm just going to circle back to a point that Shannon made that as a cohort we look at the databases which many of us have I mean, I think it purchased we have 172 of them.
Rebecca Oling: As medium to low impact, and when we say that what we mean is that not every student or every employee who comes through the College must use each one of these resources, and so, in that way.
Rebecca Oling: they're they're much lower impact so gaining an understanding of where we fit in the spectrum with regard to accessibility, could we develop some kind of.
Rebecca Oling: Self directed and guided training suggesting modules to people, suggesting videos and resources to people within the cohort so that we could develop this mutual understanding of accessibility as a whole and get on the same page with regard to the standards both Sunni wide and legally.
Rebecca Oling: So we use this as an opportunity to gather input on accessibility issues from.
Rebecca Oling: campus stakeholders and their institutions as Shannon said he gathered a lot of information from.
Rebecca Oling: Various campuses but within the cohort ourselves, we engage in a lot more discussion on our campuses about what the practices are because a lot of us individually in the library didn't necessarily.
Rebecca Oling: have a job that we crossed into procurement a whole lot So this was a new area for a lot of us.
Rebecca Oling: And part of what we did as well, was to try to set our sights on developing and maintaining a shared repository of accessibility documentation.
Rebecca Oling: Because there's no point in being being part of a system without enjoying some of that system this so I believe you Yvonne will speak to that a little bit later, but we we worked on gaining the skills to be able to create that repository.
Rebecca Oling: And, and a lot of this was really asking cohort members to face some of their accessibility fears and work as a team to critically review accessibility documents.
Rebecca Oling: To create that shared repository so could we look at these V pat's understand the via pat could we learn how to approach the testing of that and, at times, that was an uncomfortable process for some of us, but I think we learned a great deal.
Rebecca Oling: Can you advance the slide.
Rebecca Oling: yeah so when we look at the overview of the training for the cohort we really use Sunni blue as a kind of landing page so on Sunni blue, and this will be passed around.
Rebecca Oling: you'll have all of the library accessibility guidelines, the it webinar series and you'll have access to the communities of practice, which include not only access to the workplace for.
Rebecca Oling: The cohort which is open, although I think we have very few I think we only have like 17 Members really the the kind of uses more of a conversation space.
Rebecca Oling: And so you'll see those there, we also really leaned on at the beginning of the pandemic that that Sunni accessibility week playlist that really had some amazing presentations and some of us have gone back to those many times.
Rebecca Oling: So that's been a great resource for us, and then the Sunni it accessibility evaluation training, which I believe mark greenfield and natalie were involved in and probably Shannon as well.
Rebecca Oling: And I think all of us had had consumed, a lot of that as well and have gone back to that several times.
Rebecca Oling: But beyond that, beyond sending people out to do these sort of individual okay do your own training thing I think we really needed as a cohort to come together as a community and understand that.
Rebecca Oling: While some of us, maybe had a little bit more experience with certain parts of accessibility, you know we felt insecure in other areas and.
Rebecca Oling: It was a wonderful opportunity for us to come together and actually engage a friend of mine who is.
Rebecca Oling: used to work at suny and is completely non visual and he came in and gave us the opportunity to really test a tool with him in one of our databases and ask him any question at all.
Rebecca Oling: So that was a really unique opportunity, because not all of us have that ability to just sort of reach out and ask somebody a question like that, as a real user so that I think that was a very congealing moment for us as a cohort.
Rebecca Oling: But getting back to workplace as as one of that community of practice we use workplace and leverage that as a place to.
Rebecca Oling: Share successes asked questions share resources with each other and so that's been extremely valuable one of the resources that you'll see on the Sunni blue is also a explanation of the dq training and i'm going to turn that over to carly to discuss a little bit.
carli: hi my name is carly spina and i'm the head of research instructional services at the fashion Institute of Technology library at suny.
carli: And i'm going to be talking a little bit about some of the resources that we've used for training and i'm focusing on resources specifically that.
carli: are available to anyone really who is interested in training, some of them are subscription but mostly they're ones that are pretty common access so i'm going to start off with dq, which is something that Sunni currently has access to.
carli: So you can contact your dq university administrator or if you don't have one contact your campus he it accessibility officer, if you want to gain access to this.
carli: dq is basically organized as trainings So you can see, an example of one in this screenshot here but i'll describe it briefly as well, basically, it gives you a little outline of a topic so this topic was accessibility fundamentals disabilities guidelines and laws and any point in the.
carli: outline you can click on if you're just interested in that one topic, or you can proceed through the entire lesson.
carli: You do get certificates that you can print out if you complete lessons.
carli: or even sort of series of lessons that come up as sort of individual topic areas, and they have them on a lot of different topics that may be interesting.
carli: to people in a lot of different areas, actually, so, while this one is sort of a high level overview, it offers some really interesting information about different types of disabilities and some helpful examples of.
carli: How that might impact how people interact with what you're providing and they also offer trainings on things like providing.
carli: Good customer service for individuals with disabilities and serve a disability etiquette section and that goes, all the way through to things like making documents accessible or developing.
carli: online content that's accessible, and that includes everything from testing existing online content to developing websites to even now they've got a relatively new one.
carli: about developing mobile Apps that are accessible so there's really something here for everyone, from somebody who works at a service point on your campus.
carli: To somebody who develops websites on your campus and pretty much everybody in between so it's a really great resource and we do have a subscription right now so i'd really encourage everyone to take advantage of it, while we do have this subscription.
carli: Another resource that I want to mention, if you could go to the next slide please Michelle.
carli: Is this is linkedin learning, this is the only one where not everyone may have access, but some campuses have access to linkedin learning subscriptions.
carli: Through their library, or it department and also quite a number of public libraries have access, so you might be interested in looking to see if your public library has access, if your campus does not.
carli: And these are a little bit different because they're more video based, then the dq trainings are dq is a little bit more text based, and if you find that you learn better through videos this is more video lecture style and.
carli: Some even serve screen cast of what's happening on the screen and they offer a lot of different topics related to accessibility, as well, with a little bit more of a focus on.
carli: User experience testing or web development so not quite as much in the area of customer service as dq has but still some really interesting content.
carli: And some stuff that you might point to people who are either testing content that's online or developing content that's online, for your campus and Michelle if you can go to the next slide.
carli: And then the other one resource, I wanted to mention for training really is webbing this one is freely available to anyone, it is not something that anyone needs subscribed to it's just on the Internet, you can just even Google web aim.
carli: And they offer a variety of things they do offer page trainings but we're not really focused on that when i'm talking about this, I can't speak to those myself have been not taking them.
carli: What I really think is useful that they offer is a variety of different articles survey data and other information about.
carli: users with disabilities they'll tell you a lot of the sort of why of accessibility.
carli: Why is it necessary to do different things which I think can be helpful in getting buy in sometimes because they will really tell you who you're helping through this and why.
carli: Different types of activities are necessary and they'll also help you with things like let's say you're trying to figure out which.
carli: screen reader you want to use for testing purposes they run a regular survey that sees what the most popular amongst survey respondents of the screen readers that's available on the market is and sort of track how that uses changing over time.
carli: They also offer access to some testing tools and we're going to talk about wave in a moment, but they also offer a contrast checking tool that will tell you whether the colors on your website are sufficiently high contrast.
carli: So.
Shannon Pritting: i'm going to launch a poll really.
carli: quickly I just.
Shannon Pritting: want you to be surprised by that.
carli: Okay um.
carli: So basically they send a lot of information on their website that's just freely out there and is this is really something I would recommend if you're looking for more free content for training folks at your institution.
carli: i'm Michele to it goes next slide Thank you so the final slide here is that we're going to be talking about some free testing and evaluation resources.
carli: So these are going to be a little less on the side of training, but they are going to let you start dipping your toe into testing accessibility, without spending any money at all so.
carli: let's start with accessibility testing tools, I think they're a little bit more approachable to use the first one is from web aim which we just talked about it's called wave and the URL is there it's wave.webbing.org and basically this tool that you paste in.
carli: The URL for a site that's really available on the Internet and test its accessibility and gives you a report.
carli: If you do want to use it for testing databases, for example, you can do that by installing the browser extension that they have.
carli: And then that way you can be logged into a resource that does require a login and still test it so that's a really good reason to use wave, in my opinion, because it offers both of those options, even in the free resource.
carli: They do offer a paid version of their testing tool as well, but again I can't speak to that one because I have not actually used the paid version for my purposes i've always used way.
carli: On the other one is X and, as you may guess from the URL which is.
carli: www.dq COM slash a X eat it is related to dq the company that we were talking about for training purposes, and this is another free testing tool that's similar to wave.
carli: You can test websites and run reports about what are sort of the biggest accessibility issues on whatever site, it is, and again there's a way to do that with a browser extension, so that you can use it even on things like databases.
carli: And the last one is lots of these accessibility testing tools is helping I pronounce a song patch yellow.
carli: And it is basically for contrast checking so weapon does offer a contrast checker, but this is another one it's www dot patch yellow group COM slash color dash contrast dash checker.
carli: And it again will test to see whether or not your color contrast is good enough, I would say that if you're going to get started with.
carli: Testing color contrast, I think is a good one to check it's something that impacts, a lot of users.
carli: Even people who maybe would not consider themselves disabled it's easy to do with free tools and.
carli: I think frequently you might be surprised by the results you'll find that actually things that you think might be fine are in fact not.
carli: And you may even find that things like some logos and school colors are problematic so it's a good starting place I think it's pretty easy, and you can have a big impact with minor changes.
carli: Now to talk about the next column free screen readers so using screen readers is a bit trickier.
carli: To be sure, there's more of a learning curve to get comfortable with them, but if you are interested in I would definitely encourage you, for trying to try that out.
carli: There are some free ones, and I wanted to make people aware of that, because I think people, maybe know a lot about some of the more expensive ones like jaws.
carli: And may not be aware that there are some good options, especially for testing that are free, so, first of all there's a tool called voiceover that's included in all ios devices, so a version of it is on everything from the iPhone to your MAC air computer and.
carli: it's included it's relatively straightforward there's a lot of documentation available for it and so that's one way to start out with screen readers if you are using a PC and have Microsoft tools.
carli: Microsoft narrator.
carli: is included on all windows computers and that's kind of similar free screen reader.
carli: And then envy da is another one for PCs it's not included standard on computers, but it is available for free download.
carli: And that's actually one of the pretty popular ones, most of the polling i've seen has put that behind jaws but above voiceover a narrator in terms of popularity.
carli: So you might find that some of your users actually use that as their preferred, because it is just so much more accessible price point, point way wise then suddenly like jaws is.
carli: And I just want to finish by mentioning that this has been focused on free testing tools, but it's always worthwhile to check with people on your campus.
carli: about having access to additional paid resources there are tools that will do some of this work for you or make nice reports for you.
carli: And a lot of times, an IT department or disability services Office may already be paying a subscription for those and maybe willing to give you access so that's a really good option to check for as well, and so now Barbara is going to talk about her perspective as a Member.
Barbara Scheibel: hi my name is barb scheibel and i'd like to share my experiences as a Sunni accessibility cohort number with respect to training.
Barbara Scheibel: i'm i'm I was relatively new to the accessibility world when I came onto campus I did take a udl Academy, which is a universal.
Barbara Scheibel: Learning design academy gave me an introduction introduction to accessibility resources but it wasn't until about a year year and a half ago, I was contacted by a professor and she requested that I work with.
Barbara Scheibel: One of our students who is blind and she was having some trouble navigating our databases and.
Barbara Scheibel: We connected and I worked with her, she was using the jaws screen reader and.
Barbara Scheibel: She was getting caught up in some of our databases and was having trouble getting to the articles and information she needed from our databases.
Barbara Scheibel: And what I saw really firsthand was the difficulties that she faced accessing the information that we provide in our databases.
Barbara Scheibel: She wanted to enjoy the same services as all the other students.
Barbara Scheibel: On campus So when I saw the email about joining me Sunni cohort for accessibility, I really thought this would be a great opportunity to really dive in and to learn more and see if I can help possibly help students have better access our resources and our content so.
Barbara Scheibel: I was felt like I was still fairly beginning and diving into these.
Barbara Scheibel: These issues and one of the things that the fellow cohort members advised us to do was to start.
Barbara Scheibel: Taking those dq university training sessions and honestly that really was my foundation for learning about accessibility as as carly has described a dq university it's an online digital training platform.
Barbara Scheibel: ranging from accessibility fundamentals, which I found very helpful to testing tools both manual testing tools and automated testing tools.
Barbara Scheibel: Creating accessible documents, which I found very useful creating accessible documents there's a whole course on word there's another one excel and PowerPoint creating accessible pdfs that was extremely useful in in many aspects of my library world.
Barbara Scheibel: And these classes, usually take between maybe one in three hours you can stop you can start once you're logged in so you don't have to finish them right.
Barbara Scheibel: Right and in one sitting and when you're done, I think carly mentioned this, you get a certificate of completion, which might be helpful for some folks for their professional development.
Barbara Scheibel: there's some discussion about maybe creating micro credentialing taking some of these classes and getting a micro credential so that that might be something to look into as well.
Barbara Scheibel: So the dq training was really my go to.
Barbara Scheibel: Training method to get up to speed to be able to do these fee pat reviews, but another really.
Barbara Scheibel: helpful component I think Rebecca talked about a little bit was our workplace our shared documents are my fellow cohort members shared YouTube videos tutorials websites that really enhanced my training my foundation training through dq.
Barbara Scheibel: So as a beginner I feel now I have my foot in the door, and I completed.
Barbara Scheibel: My first V pat review on a database and i'm going to do some more.
Barbara Scheibel: And I really think this training has not only helped me as a cohort Member and to participate in this endeavor that we've.
Barbara Scheibel: committed to, but justice my, you know as a teacher creating documents for my students that are accessible for all, and you know monitoring our information management at the library.
Shannon Pritting: So I.
think that.
Barbara Scheibel: that's all I got there.
Shannon Pritting: Alright alright, thank you, Barbara.
Shannon Pritting: So i'm going to talk a little bit about the repository which i'm seeing through a poll, how much you all know about this and I wanted to say that this has been extremely helpful to get the perspective of all of the things that we tried to do to structure, a course.
Shannon Pritting: For the cohort members to.
Shannon Pritting: go from someone who was interested in accessibility to someone who felt like he or she or they had enough expertise to do reviews and engage meaningfully and he it committee activities, etc.
Shannon Pritting: And you know this was extremely helpful, I think it will inform what we're going to do, longer term with e it as far as trying to provide support, but we also determine that.
Shannon Pritting: The skills needed to conduct a V pat review wasn't something that you could quickly create or it wasn't something that you know, we could say to someone.
Shannon Pritting: Take two hours of training and call me in the morning and do the pat review it took a lot of back and forth and mutual support and training.
Shannon Pritting: So we tried to take the first cut of the resources in Sunni of what we could get the most return on our investment of time to review so.
Shannon Pritting: we're trying to get to what we think will be about 80% of the resources subscribed, this is kind of a poor version of.
Shannon Pritting: Of the purina principle I think it's probably about 20% of the actual number of resources that everyone subscribes to but there's a really long tail.
Shannon Pritting: of content, it only one or two campuses subscribe to so we're going to hit the major ones, because we think that will benefit the most people.
Shannon Pritting: For the majority of Community colleges likely, especially if you don't have a large budget, this will get almost all or everything that you're subscribing to.
Shannon Pritting: And what we've tried to do and nationally helped us a lot with this, and I want to thank I think mark greenfields also on the call.
Shannon Pritting: But we had other, as we said naturally find the people that you think would be most critical of the reviews send it to them, because we want this to.
Shannon Pritting: not be like a lot of things that we usually see in Sunni wide implementations where we try to do something centrally and then.
Shannon Pritting: One third of the campuses say i'm going to do it my own way, we talked to the it officers we've talked to the procurement officers to say.
Shannon Pritting: If we do this centrally if we do this collaboratively Will you accept the reviews that we're doing, as you know.
Shannon Pritting: As your as your review tests, you know as your reviews, as you go through, to see if you want to continue to subscribe or renew so through that we wanted to make sure that we were.
Shannon Pritting: That we were methodical and since we knew we had a variety of different levels that we were putting in layers of reviewing on top of the reviewing so that we had.
Shannon Pritting: At least two people doing a V pat review and top level testing and then someone doing peer review of those two reviews to see.
Shannon Pritting: Where their vast you know where their major differences between the two because people can read things differently, based on different things that they're keying in on etc, and our goal in the next.
Shannon Pritting: You know 60 days is to have all of the 80% resources, you know, so the one subscribe to by you know most of Sunni that will have a review of them done and we will have it in the accessibility repository so.
Shannon Pritting: Based on the pole it looks like this is a new or a lot of new information to you, and what we wanted to do, but by talking about this today is.
Shannon Pritting: For you all to take a look at this and to start to adopt it into your local practices, so that if you're being asked to do.
Shannon Pritting: A review that you would use a Sunni review rather than do one yourself, or you know that you would only do reviews for that niche database that you're doing that you have to subscribe to.
Shannon Pritting: And, and to try to reduce the stress of overall E it compliance, so that you can focus on some other areas, in addition to testing and reviewing i'll turn it over to Yvonne who's going to talk a little bit more in depth about exactly what we mean by a top level test and a review.
Shannon Pritting: Thanks Shannon.
Yvonne Kester: My name is Yvonne caster and I work as a support specialist with sls.
Yvonne Kester: In order to develop a process for reviewing the pet based conformance reports a small group from our cohort created two forms.
Yvonne Kester: Of the pat review form which focuses on reading the conformance report itself and regarding the scope of product.
Yvonne Kester: The conformance report date version of the pat template used whether the report was completed by the vendor or a third party, whether the vendor has an accessibility roadmap to guide their progress toward a better accepts accessibility in the future.
Yvonne Kester: Whether methodologies are described the testing methods methodologies are described, and whether conformance levels are backed up with documenting evidence and remarks.
Yvonne Kester: The other form that was created is a methodologies task form that outlines top level testing tasks and tools to use in order to verify the validity and thoroughness of the conformance report.
Yvonne Kester: We tested these forms with the group the first one was the V pat review form and we broke out into pairs to do a review of a V pat and then brought our experiences, together with with the group.
Yvonne Kester: And then each member completed the methodologies form separately, keeping a log of questions that came up to share with the cohort.
Yvonne Kester: and discuss and refine the forums.
Yvonne Kester: OK, Michelle.
Yvonne Kester: Once we had the forms in place, we were ready to begin the review and testing process to members of the cohort conduct conducted preliminary reviews on Jay store and eps co host and this collaboration resulted in a template that we have used for subsequent reviews.
Yvonne Kester: This has been a learning process for us all, and we continue to share completed reviews with one another in order to refine our process and make sure that we are completing the goals that we set out to.
Yvonne Kester: To hit.
Yvonne Kester: Two of our biggest hurdles and doing this work have been to put aside our insecurities about our lack of expertise.
Yvonne Kester: And to focus on the V pat itself it's thoroughness and veracity rather than focusing on the platform, we found that it's it's quite easy to go down a rabbit hole and find everything that may be wrong, with a platform.
Yvonne Kester: But our purpose is to review the vendors conformance report, not their product.
Thanks Michelle.
Michelle Eichelberger: Sure hi everyone i'm Michelle eichelberger and i'm the discovery and he resources program manager for sls and i've been helping with this project.
Michelle Eichelberger: So I just wanted to give you a brief information about the repository itself, the link to the repository is at the bottom of this slide.
Michelle Eichelberger: And what we've done is we've set up the tabs by vendor name, so that can throw you off a little bit if you're looking for something like sat rough.
Michelle Eichelberger: And you don't remember that the vendors name is teton data systems, so you can search within the guide to find a particular database, if you can't find it easily just by tapping through.
Michelle Eichelberger: Because we are Librarians we also put some see references in there that can hopefully help you, but what we've done is on the homepage we have made a list of the completed reviews, so you can see at a glance what we've already done.
Michelle Eichelberger: And then on the tabs if we have not completed it, there is a placeholder where we've tried to include information about the vendor itself in terms of contact for accessibility, or if they have a roadmap online or if they're the pad is online.
Michelle Eichelberger: One of the things that we've done is if we had to request a V pet from a vendor our assumption is that they don't really want that publicly available for everyone, or they would have put it on their website, so we have put that kind of content behind a password.
Michelle Eichelberger: And you just can contact us if you need that password through the SLC Libya answers.
Michelle Eichelberger: The other thing we've done is that once we've completed a review when we post those documents in the repository those are behind a password as well.
Michelle Eichelberger: Just because we thought that that would work better for all of Sunni, so I think I have covered everything.
Michelle Eichelberger: All right, that's all I had to cover.
Rebecca Oling: So Carla do you want to take the first half I can I can.
carli: Go ahead if you want, nobody got it um so.
Rebecca Oling: we're.
carli: Basically, just talking about what's next.
carli: For the cohort.
carli: As we move into the second half of our time working as a cohort we're focusing on developing best practices.
carli: For as we're doing our own testing and our own review, but also that would help other campuses as they want to move towards doing more testing and review as well.
carli: and part of that is that we're going to be working on implementation toolkits and what we have in mind, for that is basically putting together some of the stuff that we talked about today.
carli: Along with some other information, including model communications with vendors so some model language that you might use if you're requesting a V pat from a vendor or if you're explaining what the pet is to a vendor or.
carli: If you're talking to a vendor who may be saying they don't have one available, also including some more.
carli: Information about accessing the repository and how to use that and then guidance on the creation of an exception process on your campus so some best practices and additional examples and.
carli: guidance for those who are saying how would we go about saying yes, we know that this isn't fully accessible but it's needed for X, Y or Z reason.
carli: Or it provides access to be with these types of disabilities, even while it's not providing as good of access to people with other types of needs.
carli: So that's sort of what we're thinking will be included in these toolkits though I think I know I would personally be really interested there's anything else anyone wants to share in the chat that they would be interested in seeing included Angela.
Rebecca Oling: yeah I think the only thing, maybe to add is that in the model vendor communications we've we've also sort of envisioned a moment in which a vendor.
Rebecca Oling: You know, as Michelle said, maybe they don't want their V pad out there, some of them don't want to provide a fee pat or.
Rebecca Oling: may be struggling with the process overall So how do we communicate with them and impress upon them, the the sort of system wide need for making sure that they have that available.
Rebecca Oling: And then I think the last part that's important because we do want to sort of endpoint for the people here, even though you know everybody's you know, welcome to continue on.
Rebecca Oling: forever as a group, but more casually is, how can we foster a relationship between the campus library and he it as a whole.
Rebecca Oling: As I said when I first started presenting you know in my job I didn't necessarily have.
Rebecca Oling: Much awareness of the procurement process or even have much contact with people in procurement, so I think that that's one thing that will certainly come out of it, at least on my campus what is that relationship to.
Rebecca Oling: Procurement because in the library.
Rebecca Oling: Maybe we we've collected V pads but we haven't been grade reviewing them, and certainly not a testing them.
Rebecca Oling: And now, especially with the financial pressures that are on the entire system and certainly on our campus.
Rebecca Oling: You know we're going to be looking a lot more critically at our database renewals So what will that exception process look like for those niche databases that Shannon was talking about that we have to have for our programs.
Rebecca Oling: But what will that relationship be to procurement and how can we actually help procurement through this process since.
Rebecca Oling: On a lot of campuses they may not have a V pat review process that's been tested in the way that we've been doing.
Rebecca Oling: The other thing is that, on my campus i'm actually part of the accessibility committee which implements our plan and we may see some people from the cohort I helped break off into that but, at the very least, be sort of point people for that.
Rebecca Oling: As a as a resource for that process because that's really going to require all hands on deck from all stakeholders and the library is a big part of that we're a.
Rebecca Oling: group of natural advocates and certainly with a number of resources that we have, and I also think that, in our service desk the number of files that we come up against with students who say i'm unable to get into this I can't get to that I can't read this I can't print that.
Rebecca Oling: it's sort of a natural relationship, so I think that's another piece that we're going to be seeing in this next half of the cohort.
Shannon Pritting: Alright, so i'm going to.
Shannon Pritting: launch a poll, and I.
Shannon Pritting: will say it was intentionally not.
Shannon Pritting: designed to be able to select more than one so it's a tough choice.
Shannon Pritting: So, as we went through the the suny library accessibility cohort what what I was doing and what Michelle and Yvonne and I have been constantly talking about.
Shannon Pritting: is really looking at this holistically to say what is the best use of our resources, as we have them so.
Shannon Pritting: We know that funding will continue to be an issue, so we can't outsource to someone like the queue or another reviewing company, because just there aren't funds they're available.
Shannon Pritting: And we can't hire additional staff likely because it's unlikely that campuses would come to us and say.
Shannon Pritting: Yes, we would like to pay for a portion of an accessibility specialist to help us with reviewing so we know we have constraints in a variety of areas.
Shannon Pritting: One of the things that we've also noticed and we we tried to be as reflective as we could about training and also people's abilities over the course of six months to a year to.
Shannon Pritting: develop expertise in these areas, and one of the things I will say you know, not necessarily a positive and i'm not really blaming anyone and certainly no, no, no judgment on this is that we've had more people.
Shannon Pritting: Leave and drop out of the cohort than we have had stay in the cohort because of expressions of just you know it's it's too much to take on it's a you know not something that the library staff felt comfortable with.
Shannon Pritting: And we know that we're going to run up against that, if our approach is only one where we had a shared service that would be.
Shannon Pritting: Training related, we know that it.
Shannon Pritting: has to be some sort of a balanced approach, we also know that reviewing library databases is time consuming, especially if you don't have a lot of expertise it's one of those things where repetition.
Shannon Pritting: brings efficiency and you know we're interested in that as much as possible and as we as as we've talked about the accessibility cohort it has become extremely clear when people reach out to me how quickly, it becomes in depth consulting on accessibility compliance strategies.
Shannon Pritting: And that's also something that we're thinking of in you know we've learned this from the library services platform from everything else that we do.
Shannon Pritting: there's no one size fits all approach there's no baseline that we can do this is going to make everyone happy for accessibility.
Shannon Pritting: So expect that we'll have a multi pronged approach that probably won't work for everyone, but if you.
Shannon Pritting: Are you know looking for all of the pieces put together it's going to meet as many needs as we possibly can, so there may be some additional training, there may be some.
Shannon Pritting: Opportunities for consulting or there may be some you know opportunities to do more, shared work but we're looking at this right now, and how much of the you know ready to adopt.
Shannon Pritting: Policies and toolkits that we're able to do in the second half, will likely inform some of the things that we might do because it might make that he it compliance easier.
Shannon Pritting: So I want to leave a little bit of time for some questions feel free to feel free to unmute yourself or.
Shannon Pritting: ask questions so there was one poll.
Shannon Pritting: That we intended to do at the beginning, and I think it's relevant so i'm going to pull it now, while you're thinking of your questions.
Shannon Pritting: Any other presenters would like to say anything.
Shannon Pritting: The one thing I can say from the sls standpoint is we're committed to finishing up that you know, the majority of the library resources to make sure that there is a V pat review and top level testing.
Shannon Pritting: To you know, to help people along and we should have that done in the next couple of months at most, we have many already completed.
Shannon Pritting: In as i've reached out to people at campuses i've said, please point to that and see if that is something that can buy you some time for lack of a better term as you start to think more holistically about your E it strategy.
Shannon Pritting: NASA can you answer that one who does the E it compliance officer contact for Sunni access to dq.
Nazely Kurkjian: Sure, so that would be kareena void sheva I can put her email in the chat and so basically the it officers, they may be the university administrator or they may designate that to someone else once someone is the campus administrator for gq All they do is send.
Nazely Kurkjian: Any person's interest into training at dq calm, so I i'll get that in the chat shortly.
Shannon Pritting: So it looks like to what what we're seeing just by you know how how involved, people are with the it.
Shannon Pritting: With you it plans or committees is it's it's a bit of a balance or you know there's different people.
Shannon Pritting: involved at different levels at campuses and I think that's what we're trying to figure out is how are we helpful from a more collaborative standpoint, in the short term, while building in the long term, two.
Shannon Pritting: Other questions.
Lauren Jackson-Beck: Shannon this is this is lauren from Potsdam.
Lauren Jackson-Beck: um I think one of the the issues that we.
Lauren Jackson-Beck: We are struggling with is.
Lauren Jackson-Beck: How to get procedures at the university i'm talking now as someone who's on this, he it committee for the campus.
Lauren Jackson-Beck: And, and not just in the library, but dealing with kind of the whole all those different five five subject areas.
Lauren Jackson-Beck: How we get kind of procedures updated and put into place in other departments like like procurement.
Lauren Jackson-Beck: And how we get those kind of approved and overhauled so for us it's no big deal Carol frank is here on the call she is our e it library person, and if we need to do stuff on the web.
Lauren Jackson-Beck: and your support, with the databases is incredible credibly important we just do it, but when we are coming up against, how do we.
Lauren Jackson-Beck: So our procurement people are asking for V packs and accessibility for the resources that we are renting and purchasing each year, how do we get that embedded.
Lauren Jackson-Beck: Because we have like one person who does all the purchasing and and the accounting and so kind of kind of getting the procedural.
Lauren Jackson-Beck: envelope across campuses is, we think, going to be be a tricky one, and this may not be something we can answer here, but I think if we can show.
Lauren Jackson-Beck: What the SLC has been doing for the libraries in a cohort type of fashion, this might might help us as well, and maybe Sunni can create some you know they need forms or whatever I don't know.
Shannon Pritting: yeah, and this is a great point um and and you've touched on one of my favorite things to talk about as, naturally, probably knows of like.
Shannon Pritting: My my comment is like how Sunni develops policies is they take a policy from another Sunni and say, I trust that person I know.
Shannon Pritting: That that Sue me so i'm going to adopt it here and we see that going on all the time it list serves etc and i've joked a lot about with natalie about that.
Shannon Pritting: And it's actually a really good approach of like you know you're trying to benchmark you're getting something that works, obviously in a similar environment.
Shannon Pritting: And that's what we hope to do and what I was kind of prompting Rebecca and carly to think about is like let's turn a corner.
Shannon Pritting: and get more of that, because that is what I think at least I think i'm not sure is really going to help libraries going forward so we tried to dabble in that about four months ago, and I think we were.
Shannon Pritting: Three months behind our three months ahead of the curve on it when we tried to put out some recommendations on classifying library databases as medium or low yeah it, but I think.
Shannon Pritting: I think it's something that will be coming at the second half of this cohort.
Nazely Kurkjian: yeah I would just like to say and i'm very sorry, I have to run to another meeting that i'm leading but.
Nazely Kurkjian: it's like Shannon said we're a bit ahead, I think, in this cohort than many campus are are with respect to developing their Ai te purchasing processes and so.
Nazely Kurkjian: I think there's some real need for our constituents, the accessibility officers in the purchasing association professionals to.
Nazely Kurkjian: brainstorm for those who have a one person purchasing office one person library and because I do feel confident that we have.
Nazely Kurkjian: Persons in these exact situations that are their maturity varies, but together we can absolutely come up with processes that work for differently sized and differently resourced institutions.
Shannon Pritting: And I would say, go ahead.
Rebecca Oling: I was just gonna say I put in the chat I was able, I haven't gotten very far down the road with our procurement folks but I was able to get somebody who's in charge of procurement at purchase.
Rebecca Oling: To agree that over a certain amount when the bid goes over a certain amount they have to put it out, and I think it's called the state recorder, that they will actually make a mention of accessibility and the need for V pads so that's at least something I mean it's a step forward.
Shannon Pritting: And this is the worst time for natalie to go, but any any any system wide agreement has you know pretty strong language with accessibility.
Shannon Pritting: And, as many of you know where we're building many more system wide agreements, and we will be doing accessibility review for those.
Shannon Pritting: So you know that's something that we're hoping we can build on by.
Shannon Pritting: You know, doing our part on the system level to start to connect to those different communities, so we go to the procurement associate procurement officers association.
Shannon Pritting: meetings that I think are quarterly or every two months and trying to like explain what we're doing so that when you go to your procurement officer lauren that it might not be news to him or her.
Shannon Pritting: Other past time so we'll maybe wrap it up with this one one last question.
or not.
Lauren Jackson-Beck: I would just like to say that what Shannon and his folks are doing is huge huge the the organization, the review of the V pads.
Lauren Jackson-Beck: The amount of work that they are saving each campus library, by doing this and and pulling it all together for us is is huge and it is just really, really remarkable and I wish that everybody in all those other for the for other groups.
Lauren Jackson-Beck: Could could benefit by having a similar group in their in their subject area, because this is huge Thank you Shannon.
Shannon Pritting: Well, I will say, and naturally would would you know would would say is we've tried to make sure that we're you know.
Shannon Pritting: spreading our approach as much as we possibly be as much as we possibly can, because if you think that we're overwhelmed with reviewing databases imagine it department trying to implement this or.
Shannon Pritting: You know, educational technology, so I know natalie's trying to spread that with the other groups as well and.
Shannon Pritting: You know, try to get a model that works or say this is what did work and didn't work and.
Shannon Pritting: I also wanted to thank everybody on the on the cohort Adam you're like right in front of my face so like Adams pitched in everybody's been pitching in to do these reviews as well and it's it's not easy and it takes a lot of time and effort yeah.
Rebecca Oling: And one of the things we've talked about as a cohort is that sometimes it's a little emotional because we don't feel like we're experts right we're still learning so it's a very vulnerable place to be, but there are steps we have to take.
Shannon Pritting: All right, so February 11 is when we're going to have a panel presentation and then now that we've kind of done some level setting I expect we'll have some more information coming out about the cohort and the products.
Shannon Pritting: And you know continue the conversation I appreciate everybody's time.
Shannon Pritting: Thanks.
Michelle Eichelberger: Thanks everybody bye bye.
Yvonne Kester: Thank you bye.