MONICA OLSSON: Good morning, everyone. This is Monica Olsson from the State Board. Welcome to our very special Valentine's Day edition of the ctcLink Accessibility Open Forum. And thanks for being here. Before we get into the content we have prepared to share with you today, as always, I do have a few housekeeping things to let you all know. We do have a CART captioner with us here today, Natalie. So if you'd like to turn your live captioning on, you can do so using, either you're going to see the three ellipses button or the CC button at the bottom of your Zoom screen. And you can turn on captions that way. 

And my name is Monica Olsson, policy associate for accessibility at the State Board. And I think we're recording today's session as we always do. I am, to quote Taylor Swift, hi, it's me, I'm the problem. I am behind in getting our recorded sessions live on the State Board website and I'm aware of that. 

So if you have gone to our accessibility web page looking for a previous recording and haven't found it, I apologize. I'm working on getting us all caught up there. You can directly message me and email me and I can send you a link to the Zoom recording. For the time being, it's a time-sensitive need. But just wanted to acknowledge that with you all. And without further ado, Chris, I think that's it for me right now. I'll hand it over to you. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Good morning, everyone. I'm Christopher Soran, applications support manager here at the State Board. And it's more people waiting to get in and we'll let them in. 

[LAUGHS] 

So we'll get rolling with today's forum. All right. So today we're talking about Enter Time page, an FAPRP, or Financial Aid PeopleSoft Release Patch Set, OAAP or Online Admission Application portal, some service desk tickets we have with Oracle. And then we didn't have any questions rolling in, but so the terms and definitions still there at the end of the slides. And we'll continue to add things as our questions come up about new acronyms and whatnot. It's very acronym heavy area. 

So the accessibility updates, as well as updates that benefit everyone, we're made to the Enter Time page where it displays the information about the supervisor and more information about the job. This comes into play in particular if you have multiple jobs with the same job title, for example, someone may have multiple adjunct faculty roles that all say adjunct faculty. And it's hard to differentiate without seeing what the associated supervisor is. 

Or if you're trying to enter time using a screen reader, certainly, you're not going to be able to tell the difference either. So that fix was deployed on January 24. So if you're going to the Enter Time page, you'll see a change at the top of the page with that additional information. And then when you select a different job, the screen reader reads out that new job information to you as well. 

So those are the changes that were made. Those are in the last set of slide decks from last month. Showed that and talk about that. It's finally ready to go and out there for you to use. 

And then we're also there's a financial aid PRP or PeopleSoft Release Patch we're planning to deploy that on the 16th. And so there are, in addition to the financial aid updates that it's bringing into the system, there's some accessibility updates to some ISIR pages which is Institutional Student Information Record or ISIR. So making corrections to students FASFA data. So those are staff only pages. So that's-- I'll show information on that here. 

So there is a IOVD or Image Overview Document, an accessibility image overview document that we create anytime new accessibility fixes are introduced into the system through the Oracle updates. And so this will get published out with all of the other IOVDs. And so this shows on the services in the Financial Aid Federal Application Data and then correct the 2023/24 ISIR pages there. So there was some-- before and after fields were incorrectly grouped on the page, that got fixed. 

Also on that Financial Aid Federal Application Data Correct 22/23 ISIR page, the same fix was made there. So those are two different pages. So this fix is mainly done to each of those two different pages as well as there was a missing control and changing tab order on the fields, that wasn't quite right. And that was on the set of SACR Park-related Financial Aid College Financial Planning Institution Information. So there are some changes on that pages as well. 

Not heavily used pages, but hey, we'll take accessibility fixes anywhere we can get them. And it's nice for the people who do use them. 

MONICA OLSSON: And Chris, this accessibility IOVD document gets posted to the accessibility web page. So if people wanted to read that more closely, they can go there to find it. Correct? 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: That's correct. 

JOSH: Hi, this is Josh from SBCTC Usually this gets posted right before we do the Q&A sessions for the image update. And usually that's around the same time as we have this meeting. So they're usually up by the time we have this meeting. This one is not up yet, but it should be up soon, probably by the end of this week. 

MONICA OLSSON: This is Monica. Thank you, Josh. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Thanks, Josh. Any questions on these? Updates? 

MONICA OLSSON: I have one comment to share around update number one, the Enter Time Page accessibility fix for folks who are selecting one of two or more jobs at the same job title. I was in a conversation where some folks asked, why can't the job titles themselves just be changed or edited to be unique to each other? And I thought that's not a bad question. 

And there's a very valid reason why that can't happen that I wanted to make sure this group was aware of which leads to why the fix that got deployed on that page showing more information about the particular job selection, like the unique supervisor's name, rather than changing the job title itself. Because job titles, many of our job titles, most of them in our CTC systems, many of them have specific classifications and OSM plays a big part in how job titles are classified and what they're called. 

So actually changing a job title in our system for many different types of positions is not an easy thing to do. And actually has to go through a big rigmarole process that includes outside entities, not just the college and the State Board. So that was good for me to learn and be educated on and I just wanted to state it for the record, because I think it's a logical and fair question of why don't we make the job titles themselves more unique so people can know which one they want to select? 

There's very valid reasons. So that's why Padma worked to get additional information on that page available for people to read and perceive depending on which selection they're making. So thanks, Chris. Just wanted to throw that in there. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Yeah, that's a great comment. I had the exact same question first time I went to the page and saw the problem. And then when I learned that, that made more sense. All right, Monica. 

MONICA OLSSON: OK. Thanks, Chris. This is Monica. So this is my slide. Updates continued. I have two main updates to share with you today. And unfortunately, my colleague, Vicky is out today. So they're not with us to add to the conversation. Over the last few open forums, we have made mention that OKTA has made some major redesign and changes to their sign-in widget or log in widget. And OKTA is the MFA or multi-factor authentication tool that we're using. 

And Vicky and I were invited by test managers and product managers at OKTA to help perform accessibility conformance evaluation and testing of their new design for their site and widget. And that's been completed for some time now. We've been in conversation with them back and forth. I don't have exact dates for when that-- for when the new sign in design is going to be deployed. But I know that they're planning to do an early adoption or EA hopefully sometime in the next month. 

So I'm sure as I learn more about that timeline, we'll include those updates here in the open forum as well as other steps where that information gets posted. In one of our most recent conversations, excuse me, with OKTA, we discovered an issue that wasn't part of our-- wasn't part of what we are originally testing for then, a month or so ago, but we found it through working directly with a student who was also an employee at the college who's the full-time screen reader user who was having some issues after successfully signing in through OKTA and then landing on OKTA's dashboard page. There was some rough navigation issues for that student depending if we were in what's called List View or Grid View on that page. 

And so Vicky and I discovered that through working with this individual and we've contacted OKTA to have a conversation with them about that and document it with the product manager. So that's what I have to share with you today about OKTA, our MFA tool. Any questions or comments before I move on? OK. And then the other update I have is the-- I'm leading a 10-week intensive web accessibility learning lab or WA Lab Training Program. It launched last Thursday on February 9th and goes through April. 

We have some amazing teams participating. This year we had 12 applications and seven teams are participating in this year's cohort. So we have some folks from Bellingham Technical College. We have folks from Lake Washington Institute of Technology, Olympic College, Peninsula College, Brighton Technical, SPSCC. And then we also have a team from the State Board from SBCTC that is led by Meredith Crouch, our new web administrator. So it's going to be a great learning opportunity and capacity-building opportunity across our system. And I'll share more as I can. That's it for me. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Thanks, Monica. So the OAAP or Online Admission Applications Portal. So Josh doing great work working with Kastech, the vendor that makes the OAAP product. And so he's been working through about 100 accessibility fixes with them, which has been quite a list to work through. So some of the things that we've been working through and getting fixed, inappropriate heading structure, unnecessarily alt text on decorative images, identical labels for buttons, missing list markups, insufficient color contrast, missing instructions for mandatory fields, the logical tab orders, as well as many other items. 

But Kastech has been quite responsive and working through and fixing all these things. And we're targeting a March 11th deployment for those fixes. 

JOSH: This is Josh again, from SBCTC. And I actually got a message from Kastech this morning. They've pushed over a bunch more things that were in development into SIT. So I'll be testing a few more changes to add to the list and hopefully make the March 11 deployment day for this. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: So are there any questions around all this? Oh yes, what is SIT? Yes it's testing after it's developed before it gets launched into production, system integration testing is what SIT stands for. Testing out the fixes, seeing if it does what it should. 

JOSH: And also making sure that it doesn't break anything else. We did have a couple issues with that where we had a lot of fixes brought into the system. But it changed some functionality that we were expecting it not to change. And they had to go back and fix that. And so yeah, something like regression testing as well, making sure that nothing is broken that we expect to be working or not have been touched. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Yeah and regression testing, that's where we're going through and testing things in the system just to make sure everything else is still working, like Josh mentioned. We're bringing a fix sometimes as unintended consequences. So testing other areas to make sure everything's still working. 

And right now, the application support team and the State Board were working through the PeopleTools 8.59.21 getting that implemented in the system, we're still early on in that process. But there's some accessibility fixes that will be coming in with that PeopleTools upgrade. And we'll be getting the image overview document posted with all those accessibility changes closer to the deployment day. 

MONICA OLSSON: Chris, this is Monica. Forgive me if you've mentioned this before and I just don't have it in my memory. What's the projected timeline for this PeopleTools update? Do you know yet? 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Estimated launch date is late April. 

MONICA OLSSON: OK. So a couple months from now. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Yeah. 

MONICA OLSSON: And this slide is communicating to us that you're kind of deep in the weeds reviewing what those accessibility fixes that are coming out with PeopleTools as Oracle has documented them with us, is that correct? 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Yeah. And we've also reached out to Oracle and some that don't have enough information for us to tell what was changed. Because we'll have a whole list of like all these bug fixes that they did. And then maybe it'll just be like the title of the fix they did, which is too vague for us to tell what was changed systems wise. So we'll send off an email with a list of all the things that we don't have enough information on to tell what was changed to Oracle to get more information from them on those items. 

MONICA OLSSON: Yeah. That makes sense and for our audience, if you're not quite following what we just said, sometimes Oracle will provide a list of their accessibility fixes that are coming out with the update or release. And if they don't provide enough information, it's hard for our in-house folks to actually pinpoint what changed on that page or where to go to test or review the code. 

And I'm sure simplifying and watering it down a bit and Chris and Josh might use different words to explain this. But that's unfortunate because it means that sometimes the team, Chris' team has to go back and ask Oracle, can you please provide more information, be more specific about what this fix is and doing and what its change on the page that we can actually look at it under the hood, so to speak? 

And that has been an issue too with HCX successful updates where we've needed some more clarification on what actually changed or was done. So just something for you all to be aware of as part of the reality of working with third party companies and external partners. I hope I gave that a fair explanation, Chris. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Yes. Yeah. Sometimes Oracle will provide the navigation and the replication steps or sometimes we'll get just a 65 character limit description where we don't even know what page the change was made on then we have to figure out what was changed. So there's only so much investigating, we can do with 65 characters. Yeah, we reach out to get more information from them. 

JOSH: It is Josh here. And sometimes they will add the-- they'll say that they use their internal tool and they got an error. And that doesn't really help us at all if we don't have access to their internal tool just to show what kind of error it would produce. We have to get more clarification on items like that as well. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: There's a question in the chat. So Meghan was wondering when the update was rolling out. Yeah. So, we're on currently on PeopleTools 8.57.21 And we're skipping over PeopleTools 8.58 and going directly to tools 8.59.21. 

MONICA OLSSON: When? 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Late April is our plan. Thank you. 

MONICA OLSSON: And Megan, I'm not sure if you were on the call, but we just spent the last of minutes talking about the process that Chris and his team is in right now reviewing the list of accessibility updates and fixes that were documented by Oracle for this PeopleTools release and that sometimes we don't have enough information to actually understand what they change on the page. So it's this back and forth. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Yeah, because we want to be able to communicate all the changes to everyone and make sure that the changes they made at work and doing that open-ended ticket because it's not working like we expected to and all that good stuff. So yeah, I just wanted to-- this is more of an update of current work that we're going through. 

And we go through that with every update that we do, whether we the next Campus Solutions image that we might work on or the next Human Capital Management when we go from HM44 to HM45 all of bug fixes, whether it's accessibility or not. Sometimes we get more information to be able to communicate out all the changes. Go ahead, Megan. 

MEGAN JASURDA: Yeah. I didn't know if there's any direct communication between the State Board and Oracle or could there-- would be my advocacy about when they're going to get-- whether they're going to get themselves together and like do they have a goal or a roadmap to be fully accessible? Because we've been live with ctcLink for how many years? 

And I know that there's pieces here and there. But do they have any holistic goals? Could we ask for that? Could we advocate for that because it's taxing on you all at the State Board, it's taxing on the end user student. So I just didn't know-- or just something to think about if you need help with that. Yeah. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Yeah. So as far as the direct communication we have with them. So we have a standing meeting with Josh and myself and our team to talk through all of the open-- what all the statuses are with everything we got open, all the tickets we have open with them to give us more direct updates on those things, the problems that we report in or we figure out ourselves and report to Oracle. 

And then Oracle also has an HCM forum where they invite any of their customers to come in that are working in the accessibility side of stuff so they can have a little more know how and answer questions. And sometimes they even ask, here's two compliant ways to fix this thing. What do you think is the best? 

So that's the sort of stuff that they'll show us. So yeah all the fixes are coming, sort of, roadmap-ish. 

MEGAN JASURDA: Kind of piece by piece. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Yeah. So here's the stuff that's going to be coming in, this coming in, PeopleTools 8.59 here's service coming and people say 8.59 [INAUDIBLE] 

MEGAN JASURDA: Yeah. And I guess maybe I'm not stating clearly. And so others can clarify or ask questions, but I'm really Monica's-- my question is does Oracle claim to be fully compliant to a certain WCAG level or are they aiming to be? Like do they have a roadmap of like, we're going to be 2.0 by this time, we're going to be 2.1 by this time? And they might whine that it's difficult to achieve this. But regardless it puts us in a compliance risk. 

So I mean, I'm wondering-- I'm asking if we're having the direct conversation with Oracle, instead of being like yay, you're fixing some pieces, you're fixing some pages, you're fixing some things, can the State Board entertain, because you all are our liaison to them, like I don't have a direct contact to Oracle, but I'm out of college. I was really concerned about it and OCR is concerned about it and talking to my college, right? So I'm trying to figure out, do you all need help from me? I can I bring up this idea this advocacy the State Board ask for something big. They ask Oracle to work on being fully accessible. 

And I know that it's not on any one of us to make that happen. But collectively as a group, maybe we can. We're 34 community colleges, we've paid them. We have their product. So I'm just asking if you all as my partners at the State Board could start to have conversations with each other, with State Board leadership, I'm like can we ask for something bigger? Because years are going by and we're having pieces of the system fixed and roll out some small things, but have we asked for something big? A fully accessible goal, a fully accessible system, I guess? 

And again, I don't have the direct connection with Oracle. So I'm not hearing the excuses and the technology restrictions. But I'm just like dreaming that the system can work for everybody. Rant over, Monica. 

MONICA OLSSON: Thanks again, this is Monica. Chris I have a few thoughts to explore unless you have something that you want to say right now. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Go ahead. 

MONICA OLSSON: OK, let me put my hand down because I actually find that very distracting to look at. OK. Thank you, Megan, for your comments. And I want to start off by acknowledging the frustration that everyone in this relationship, folks at the State Board, working directly with Oracle, including Chris and Josh attending those meetings still, and the extra frustration that our colleges, especially Clark and their students feeling-- are feeling right now. 

I also want to acknowledge the hard work that folks are doing to advocate for this. And push Oracle on those meetings and doing everything we can to submit SR tickets and document the problems in the way that they also require us to to even engage in those conversations, which is another point of frustration that I know Chris has mentioned here before. When you're thinking about is there something more we can do or something meatier or bigger, I want to see for myself personally, I would like to take some time to consider to consider my response to you more fully. 

However, I do have some ideas around moving forward. Perhaps Chris and I can think strategically how to engage other leadership at the State Board if that's an appropriate move. But that's a conversation I want to have with Chris too who right now is in many ways holding and navigating our relationship with Oracle-- with the Oracle folks right now. And then I'm also aware, I've had a little back and forth with Chris about this. And at the time, I was unable to pursue this more, but there's-- Chris, you might have to help me say what the acronym stands for, hug H-E-U-G. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Higher Education User Group. 

MONICA OLSSON: Which is a collective of-- I mean, a group of Oracle users, right Chris? And it's nationwide. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Specifically higher education. 

MONICA OLSSON: Higher education users nationwide of Oracle, correct? That's what this group is. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Yes. 

MONICA OLSSON: So at this point in time, I know that when-- occasionally when they have a conference yearly, I have not been-- they have had some accessibility sessions and accessibility tracks, but at this point in time, I'm not aware if they actually have an accessibility focus group or advocacy group within the HEUG, I think we call it hug, that's how we say the acronym, group. And that might be a powerful place for some pushing to happen on Oracle, is voices even beyond our 34 community technical colleges through that group. Again, I'll say I, right now, don't have a direct tie into that group and I haven't been able to pursue my curiosity around that group yet. But I did, I guess I'm saying it here now as a potential avenue. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Oh go ahead. 

MEGAN JASURDA: Thank you all for the conversation. I'm feeling like I can be honest. And it's just like I got to ask this probably every year. I got to be real with you all about just wondering how we can join together. I'm also frustrated for you all just to having to fix the system in pieces. But yeah, anyway, so let us know, as Shawn is saying in the chat, let us know if there's something that colleges can do, if you want us to get a document together, student employee stories, for higher ups at the State Board to know the impacts. 

Yeah. So just keep us-- let us know if there's something that we can help out with on these efforts. Or if there's something else we should, another place that we should be advocating to as colleges. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Yeah, one thing that would help me is continuing to submit tickets to us on things that you find and not just like, I found these five things. It'd be helpful if you had five things to have five tickets and then we could tackle them all and be like, let's fix this one fix this one. Just continuing to keep pressure on them to fix this. I know it seems piecemeal and unfortunately, there's no magic wand. We just need to keep pressuring and fix every problem we find in the system and keep them going for that goal. 

So I know I know it's frustrating with the ticketing, but we're opening service requests with Oracle with things that we find, but we don't use every page in the system in the same way that everyone else uses it too. Maybe this page works great with Jaws which doesn't work well with Dragon or Zoom text or something like that. So even in different assistive technologies and the way they interact with the pages. And just saying, I use this technology on this page, it didn't work in this way. And then we can get them-- force them to fix it. 

It feels like a huge hill climb. And I know it's frustrating to keep submitting those tickets. But if we just keep plugging at it and keep forcing them on every little thing that we find, we're going to see bigger and bigger changes come in. 

JOSH: And it's not just-- and this Josh again, it's not just pushing Oracle. We have to know what the issues are to be able to address them holistically. Like we were told last issue that were given to us by Clark was the Report Time and Enter Time pages not being accessible. We went to Oracle with as much as we could get from them to fix that. And then whatever we had to customize ourselves, we did that as well. And that's the last thing I remember being reported from Clark. So if there's anything that's outstanding that we haven't started working on-- 

MEGAN JASURDA: I mean, our students can't register. But we don't know how to-- we can't ticket their ID numbers. We just-- I have as a DSS director, I haven't been ticketing. I also don't want-- I'm also not trying to get more OCR complaint. So I'm just like-- I just don't know. Maybe Monica can advise me, how do I take it for student stories. 

So many of our students aren't using ctcLink. They're going through people like us to do the things for them or registration. So we're just circumventing it in some aspects because we don't want that microaggression, that frustration but we're not ticketing a ton at Clark. But there are individuals who are-- I'm not the only one at Clark that knows how to put in a ticket. But we're not a lot for students. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Yeah, I'd love to get more details on what's stopping the students registering and how we can fix that. They should be able to certainly. Yeah. What's these technology tools are they using? How are they getting in? Are they using HighPoint? Are they using-- 

MEGAN JASURDA: They used to use HighPoint, but with the update, they've run into accessibility bugs. But yeah, maybe we can have a conversation another time. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Certainly. We'll have it. Registration is pretty basic functionality in the system. Everybody better be able to do it. Yeah. Certainly. Yeah, absolutely. I want to acknowledge frustration and I want to help make it better. I just want to-- 

MONICA OLSSON: Chris, this is Monica. I was listening to Megan around some of the limitations around ticketing what's happening for students because there is that confidentiality piece of not wanting to send in, I guess, student ID or name. So how do we document what's going on? One thought I'm having is whatever-- as much of information-- describing the experience the student's having, maybe Vicky can partner with you guys with some sort of test student account to replicate the steps that an actual student is telling Megan or Megan's colleague they can't do independently with their assistive technology. And we can document it that way. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: This is Christopher. Yeah we don't always necessarily need a student ID number. If it's specific to their account or something like that, that's helpful. But if you're on a certain page and you're navigating and the tab index is out of order, well, it's not specific to that student. We would need to get that fixed. Or the search results aren't reading out for a screener in the way that you would expect, or I don't know what specific things they're facing, but certainly we'd want to get whatever it is fixed. 

So yeah, if you just tell us like the steps you took, what page you're on, what's happening in the process, and we could-- because Oracle is going to ask us to replicate it and provide some sort of trace file. And they want us to run through all the steps. And so we just got to be able to just to force them to fix it, just repeat the steps knowing what steps those students are taking so we can repeat it. That's helpful. That's something we can put in a ticket. So are there any other questions or thoughts, things came to mind? 

So one thing that everybody's likely doing right now, getting their W-2s, working on your taxes. This is one, man, this took me a while to get Oracle to convince them it was a problem that needed to be fixed. I was on them for like a year, where I finally got them to agree, which was lovely that they finally did. So yeah. It's been a long, long story. But the story is just now is the downloadable PDF version of the W-2s isn't tagged correctly. 

And they keep making progress on it, like the last that they had them, it was working right I think with, I can't remember which-- it was working right with some screeners, but it wasn't working right with voiceover. And so they wanted to make sure that when they brought out, that it was fixed and working for everybody for everything. So they're hoping to have for next year's taxes, the downloadable version of the PDF to be properly tagged and usable for screenwriters. 

The HTML version, so if you just navigate to that page where you can pull up all that information, that's still accessible. And you can still get to all that information using assistive technologies. But they're still working on it. And they're still making progress. They're giving me updates. 

And of course, it's not going as fast as I'd like, but they're still going. So I'll give you updates as I learn more. But I'm assuming everybody right now has that question in mind as you're working through your taxes. 

MONICA OLSSON: Chris, this is Monica. I just put in a little summary of what you say in there. So the message. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Yeah, the day they fix that I feel like I want to party. 

[LAUGHS] 

So many meetings and questions on that. So yeah. And so please continue to submit your questions and we'll get them addressed, give them the slides. Maybe we have the accessibility web page where you'll see that financial aid PeopleSoft release patch set updates as well as other new accessibility fixes that are coming in and all the new-- all the new updates in our next forum a month from now on March 14. Please come again. 

MONICA OLSSON: All righty. I think that brings us to the end of this forum. Thank you, Chris. And thank you, Josh, for your hard work and for being here and facilitating this conversation with me. And thank you, everyone, across our system for attending these monthly open forums. We appreciate the conversation and your participation. And Megan, thank you for your difficult questions and for your advocacy. I appreciate you. 

And as Chris mentioned, our next open forum is March 14, same time, same place. And this will be my last call for comments or questions before I end the recording and say goodbye. So is there anything else anyone would like to share? Okey dokey. Well, thanks again for being here. I'm going to stop our recording.