ctcLink Accessibility Update from SBCTC Deputy Executive Director/CIO

Yesterday, Grant Rodeheaver, SBCTC Deputy Executive Director/CIO, updated the Washington Association of Community and Technical College (WACTC) presidents, the Disability Student Services Council, and the Committee for Accessible Technology Oversight (CATO) on recent progress made to improve ctcLink accessibility for students and staff.

ctcLink Accessibility Update

Level Access, an independent accessibility vendor, completed a ctcLink/PeopleSoft implementation accessibility review last fall (September 2019) and issued its initial findings.

Oracle Corporation, makers of PeopleSoft, confirmed that many of the issues Level Access identified during its assessment will be resolved with the upgrade to PeopleSoft PeopleTools 8.57.

I am proud to announce that Sandy Main, SBCTC Application Services Director for the Information Technology division, assumed a leadership role in the ctcLink accessibility coordination efforts early this year. In just a short time, Sandy and members of the ctcLink Customer Support team have focused our overall strategy; making great strides to track, test and set implementation timelines.

SBCTC-IT staff implemented PeopleTools 8.57 in a test environment in March and Level Access will review the upgrade in the test environment.

Level Access started its work in late April and is expected to complete its review in late May 2020.

Next Steps: Testing and Implementation

• Level Access will provide a report of accessibility issues resolved with the upgrade and which issues they believe still remain. The information will be posted along with a mitigation plan as soon as the information becomes available.
• Accessibility items not resolved with the upgrade to PeopleTools 8.57 will be escalated to Oracle for resolution.
• System Integration Testing (SIT) to deploy PeopleTools 8.57 into production (the live ctcLink environment) will begin in July.  SIT is testing carried out on a complete, integrated system to verify the software's behavior and evaluate the system's compliance with the requirements.
• The SBCTC testing team is currently upgrading the production SIT test framework to include changes introduced with the PeopleTools upgrade along with incorporating new and updated test scripts developed by the project team during their deployment activities.  This work is expected to be completed by end of June.
• Final User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and implementation is scheduled for August 2020. During UAT, colleges staff will have the opportunity to review changes introduced in the PeopleTools 8.57 upgrade.
• The ctcLink Working Group approved the schedule for August implementation, because this work must be scheduled among the many projects already on the calendar for ctcLink implementation, updates and other projects.

Key Fixes to Important Pages

Fixes to certain customized ctcLink pages — Log-In page, First-Time User page, and Security Questions page — fall outside the PeopleTools upgrade.

The Log-in and First-Time User pages have been developed and are now undergoing testing (SIT and UAT) to be completed in May, with deployment to live ctcLink environment planned for early June 2020.