MONICA OLSSON: And Chris are you comfortable if I go ahead and get started? 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Yeah. 

MONICA OLSSON: Great. OK. Good morning, again, everyone. This is Monica Olsson from the State Board, policy associate for accessibility. Welcome to our October edition of ctcLink Accessibility open forum. Thank you for being here with us today. As people enter the waiting room, we'll continue to let folks in and move along that way. 

Before I hand it over to my colleagues, Chris and Josh, there are a few housekeeping items that we like to make everyone aware of at each open forum. We do have a professional live transcriber, provider, here with us today. 

So if you need to look at live transcription captions during this meeting, please either hit the CC, Closed Caption button on the bottom of your Zoom screen. If you don't see a button with the letter CC on it, you'll want to select the three dots ellipses at the far right on the bottom of your Zoom screen. And select show transcript from that menu option. 

We do record each open forum. And post that recording with our slide deck and transcript after each meeting. We do have material that we come prepared to share with our colleges each month. But our hope is that this is also a collaborative back and forth conversation. 

So if at any point you have comments, or questions, or perhaps you don't understand something we're talking about and you need to ask for further clarification, you can put that question or comment directly in the chat. We'll do our best to monitor chat. You can raise your hand using the raise hand function, or unmute yourself, and make yourself known that way. And I believe that is it for now. So without further ado, Chris, I'll hand it over to you. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Good morning, everyone. I'm Christopher Soran, the application support manager here at the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. Thanks for attending the session today. I help with support of Accessibility within ctcLink, as well as I manage a fantastic team of engineers, one of which is Josh. And he's joined us today. 

JOSH GIHA: Hello. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: So I'll be here to help answer questions, in addition to myself. So we'll go ahead and get rolling. So the same agenda as usual. So we're going to do some general updates, any updates in the last month. We've had on some service requests that we have open with Oracle. And then time for you to share. Feel free to ask questions in the chat or raise your hand. And we'll let you go. All right, Monica. 

MONICA OLSSON: Thanks, Chris. Back to me. All right, you all-- so Vicki Walton is here with us today. They also attended September's open forum as well. Vicki's first day with the State Board was last week on Wednesday, October 5th. 

And Vicki reports to me. And he sits in our educational technology department within the education division at the State Board. And Vicky's title is web accessibility specialist and QA tester. So within this role, Vicki is going to-- as it pertains to ctcLink and these open forums, Vicki will be assisting Chris's team, and doing some accessibility conformance testing of ctcLink pages, HCX Mobile, et cetera. Helping to document those issues and communicate those to the vendor. 

Working directly with me, Vicki and I will also be identifying further accessibility events and training opportunities for the agency, as well as our system of colleges. So welcome again to Vicki. And Vicki, if you want to just take one moment to say hello, you can go ahead and unmute yourself. But we're happy to have you here. 

VICKI WALTON: Yes. Well, I'm totally pumped to be here too. When I was at Columbia Basin College, I was part of the ctcLink Accessibility forum as well. But I've missed a few meetings from then to here. So I'm just trying to catch up. But I'm pumped to be here. And I'm really grateful to be working with some awesome people. And hope to do my part for Accessibility with ctcLink. 

MONICA OLSSON: Thanks Vicki. And Chris, do you want to take the next bullet point? Or do you want me to say something about that? 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: All right. So Grant and I will be attending the DSSC fall meeting and provide some ctcLink updates, similar to how we do today. I'll let you know what's going on. So we're also going through three different image updates, as well as a HCX update right now. So we got four big project updates going on this moment. 

And I wanted to point out-- so if you go to the Accessibility page on the State Board site, the link is in the slides as well. If you just scroll down just a little bit here, you'll see these sections here. So we have campus solutions, financials, and capital management. 

So we would go to human capital management and then this accessibility supplemental document here. You'll notice if you scroll through it, it lists out all the accessibility updates. We had enough information this year. Oracle likes to-- they provide a bunch of accessibility updates. And sometimes, it's not always clear where it is or what was changed. So we work with them to try and figure it out. And then provide that information to you here. 

So there's updates on the external candidate gateway showing screenshots of what it was before and after, as well as the navigation to get to the pages. So there were some changes to the enter time page, the payable time page, and both employee self service, manager self service. I don't want to scroll to quickly through these and give you some nausea from all the scrolling. But if you go through this document, you'll see all the listed updates here. 

This image we put in on Saturday. So all these updates are in production currently. If you go back to the-- if you were to go back to the ctcLink accessibility page, we'll go to the campus solutions section. There's both the campus solutions image 26 supplemental document, as well as the high point accessibility document there. 

I'll start with the CS 26 one. The company with CS 26 got a nice little content section here, you can click to go to the section. So the autocomplete attributes, page fields for fluid self-service, name as here. So there were some added autocomplete fields on that like on this contact details page, where you can add your name. Scroll down. 

So there's some corrections on this add address. There are some corrections on the ISIR correction, ISIR suspense page, which it's more staff facing, student facing there. There was also, in the self service, some great adjustments upon updates. So there's details here. 

JOSH GIHA: Yeah. This is Josh, SBCTC. I helped create this document. So if I could just add to that. As far as the grid adjustments, they added some labels and titles to the table attributes in the new image. So just to add to that. Everything else you said has been spot on, Christopher. 

There's also been some thought adjustments on other self service pages like wherever a student does class search or browse catalog they've adjusted the font on those items, so that way, they're a little bit clearer and more bold in some areas that weren't bold before. 

They've also done some label fixes on these staff facing ISIR pages, where they had groupings not very separated, they're bunched together, and the styling was off. They've made adjustments and fix those on several pages. 

And here's another area where they added an attribute or a title to the table, which would not be seen visually, but it would be announced by the screen reader. 

And here's another page where they adjusted the visual look of the table as well as added some field set legends, which is another HTML structure thing that is-- provides a better experience for screen reader users. And that's about it. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Thanks, Josh. So the next bit here is the-- if you ever check out the-- this. There's the general HCX 22.2 upgrade overview. So this is the overview of all the new features coming in, as well as the specific. So accessibility supplemental document, which is this document right here. 

So at the beginning here, we have-- I'm trying to zoom in here a little bit. So this is a full listing of all of the changes that have come in all the different point releases. 

One thing to note, the-- we're updating a few point releases with HCX in the earlier part of the year with all of the deployment groups and the new school is coming on. We weren't able to keep the usual pace we have with our updates, all updates going to have to be pushed to the second half of the year with the deployment groups in the first half. So we're going to continue to update HCX. In fact, HCX came out with an update while we're in the middle of this update project. So we'll be looking to start a new update project right after we get this updated. 

So we're continuing on that explanation for why it's been a little while since we've pushed out some HCX updates. They're coming here. 

MONICA OLSSON: Chris, this is Monica. I will just take a moment to remind everyone that when we're talking about HCX, we are talking about a series of web pages. So HCX is a product that's developed by High Point, that's the name of the vendor. 

And HCX-- high-point HCX mobile is a series of web pages. And then colleges can decide what different types of tiles and activities they provide on their landing page. And it's also an app that students could download and access on their phone. And it provides many of the different functions or tasks that a student would be doing inside ctcLink, but in a different user interface. 

And the document that Chris is going over right now is intended to help us track and understand and communicate to you all of the accessibility updates that the vendor has provided to us in the release notes with the newer version that we're moving to later this month, which is version 22.2.2, I believe. 

And as just a little reminder, a little over a year ago in December 2021, some members of CATO did some accessibility conformance testing of the HCX version we're currently running, and provided a written document of issues, data, and concerns in a video recording to the State Board, which was then also communicated with the vendor. 

So now here, we are pushing out, as Chris said, an update. And we're behind on updates due to deployment and go live. And we're in the process of doing that accessibility conformance testing, hopefully, starting tomorrow. 

And so the document that you're looking at is to help organize all that information in one place so people understand what changes are being made in this new release coming. And also that-- and also to know that testing is going to be taking place in the near future. 

Thanks for letting me jump in and give context. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: This is Christopher again. That's all great context. Appreciate it, Monica. Let's see, if you scroll down, that's that full list. So there's also some information here. If you want to speak to this piece, Josh, here. 

JOSH GIHA: Hi. It's Josh again. Yeah, sure. So we-- so like it was mentioned before, we submitted some bugs to high point early, I think, last year. And then they came back and said, well, you're not on any version close to the most recent version. So we want you to be on a newer, more up to date version before you submit these issues. 

But they actually still did take some of the-- some of the issues that were listed under advisement. And they were put into the-- not the most recent release but a couple releases back. 

So there are in the version that will be going into production shortly. And some of those included missing labels, like for example, on this first issue here, on the schedule feature for students, they had included new filters that had checkboxes to activate the filter, and none of the checkboxes had labels on them. So we submitted that as an issue, and they turned it around right away. 

As one of the other issues that was brought up by CATO was the semantics for the springboard tiles and the heading structure. It was using H2 heading tags on the labels for the tiles, which was a violation. And they put that in, I think, in 22.1 or 21, one of the earlier versions. And we have that fixed in the new version that we'll be installing. 

And let's see. The schedule calendar has also been refactored to be more accessible, wherever they had a calendar feature or a schedule feature, they made some enhancements to make it more keyboard friendly as well as change the fonts to make it more visual, a better visual representation for low vision users. 

And I think, yeah, we can go down a little bit further. OK. So there is currently some high priority issues or issue, wherever there's a page that has a list of items that you can select, like if you were going to drop a class and you have a full schedule of classes and you wanted to drop one of those classes. 

There-- the main Submit button on the page is at the top of the page, and it is deactivated until you make a selection or deactivate a checkbox. So a screen reader user would not know where to submit their changes after they made the changes, unless they were to navigate all the way back to the top of them or activate the list to show that what buttons are active on the page, which is not acceptable. I mean, we-- 

So we submitted that to High Point. And they said it's on their radar but they have not given us answer yet. I was hoping to have an answer by this meeting, but we expect to reply to us shortly. 

They've been pretty responsive in the past when we've submitted issues to them. So we're looking forward to seeing this one resolved as well. I've given them a few suggestions on possible solutions, one being not to deactivate the button at all, another one is to put it at the bottom of the tab order. And we're just hoping that they come through with one of those. 

Right now, the workaround is to know that the Submit button is at the top of the page. And once you make a selection on the checkbox, whether it's deactivating something that's already selected or selecting a new checkbox, then the Submit button shows up at the top of the page. 

I think that's about it for that one. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Yeah. Thanks so much, Josh. Yeah. And that's all the documents there. And those are on the State Board accessibility site, where you can go check those out any time. 

And we'll also be working on one for finance because later this month, we'll be updating to finance 41 image. 

So before I move on to the next one, was there any questions on those updates so far? 

MONICA OLSSON: This is Monica. And I'll just take this opportunity to remind folks that you-- as you, users of ctcLink at your colleges or working directly with students, staff, or faculty, who use assistive technology, we also have documentation on the accessibility pages for the ctcLink open forum on how to submit tickets if you encounter issues or things that you think are accessibility-related issues. 

So we welcome hearing from you that way as well. And I'm just going to probably plug that every meeting, so people know there's a way for the State Board to receive that feedback from colleges as well. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Yes. We're very grateful to hear from you. If we're facing any challenges, I'd love to get it fixed. 

So the Academic Advisement Report, PDF export. So the Academic Advisement Report has two different versions. There's an HTML version which just loads up in the page, and then there's also a downloadable PDF version. 

So we had submitted a service request with Oracle on that, asking them to fix the tagging in the PDF because it's not tagged correctly. And so they-- there was a duplicate CSS declaration on the HTML page on the academic progress fluid page. And they corrected that, they fixed that, which is good. I mean, it's something they need to fix on the HTML page. But they didn't end up making any updates to the PDF, though. So we said that's not good enough to fix it. 

So we pushed back on that last week. And I'm waiting to hear back for an update on them, on that one, so we can get those-- that downloadable version correct as well. But the HTML version is-- it's good and correct so everyone can still access that information just on the page. It's just that downloadable PDF version that we also want fixed. 

JOSH GIHA: And I believe HCX is-- this Josh, SBCTC. And I believe HCX also redesigned their HTML version of the Academic Advisement Report. They call it Degree Progress Page. But yeah, so there's two different flavors of the HTML academic advisement, one being in PeopleSoft, another in High Point or HCX. 

MONICA OLSSON: Josh, this is Monica. I'm just capturing some notes. And in HCX, it's called-- you said it's called something different. It's called the Degree Progress Page rather than Academic Advisement Report? 

JOSH GIHA: Yes. Yes. And I actually think that it's in PeopleSoft on the student home page, it's not called the Academic Advisement Report first to get to it, I think it's called Academic Progress tile. And then once you click PDF version, it says, Academic Advisement Report within the PDF version. 

So yeah, that might be a little bit confusing there. And HCX doesn't even have a PDF version. So from what we've been told that when you click the PDF button, it opens up the PDF in the browser first before you're able to actually download the file. And that does something to the tags, apparently. 

So we're still wanting them to find a solution or I guess, not offer the PDF, I guess, if they're not going to make it so small. 

MONICA OLSSON: Thank you. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: So that's the action from the last month. Lots of image and HCX updates happening, new updates coming in. 

So feel free to submit your form ideas on our online submission form page. These slides are posted up as well. That ctcLink Accessibility web page that I was showing off earlier with all the supplemental accessibility updates for the image, the image overview documents or IOVDs. [LAUGHS] I like acronyms. 

Our next forum is coming up in November. Same place, same time. 

MONICA OLSSON: Yup. So our next forum will be Tuesday, November 8, from 11:00 to noon, same Zoom link. I'll work to send out reminders beforehand. 

This is Monica speaking from the State Board. I believe our team has presented all the information we had prepared to share with you today. So are there any comments or questions from our participants in the room or anything that you need further explanation on that didn't make sense? 

OK. Well, we look forward to meeting with you again in November, and to provide further updates and information to you. And we're hoping to move forward with our HCX accessibility testing very soon this week. So thank you to Vicki for being here and joining our team. And thank you to CATO too for being a part of the conversation and the advocacy. 

Thank you to my colleagues, Chris and Josh, for all of the hard work you do in testing and documenting and advocating with our vendors. It's much appreciated. It definitely is a holistic team effort. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Pleasure. Go, team. 

MONICA OLSSON: All right. Well, I'm going to pause our recording or stop our recording now.