MONICA OLSSON: To our agenda. Good morning, everyone. Happy July. Welcome to the ctcLink Open Forum. I need to take responsibility for a mistake. I did not realize that our real-time live captioner contract ended in June, which was the end of the fiscal year. I need to reschedule that for this upcoming fiscal year. So today, we are relying on Zoom's auto-captioning feature. So please turn that on if you need captions to follow along. 

I apologize. We'll have that fixed by August. And we do send these recordings to 3Play Media for accurate professional video captioning before we post them on the website. So that's what I wanted to say there. Before I hand it over to Chris to welcome you to our agenda, I also want to note that you'll see a slide that says Okta updates. 

And there's no information on that slide. I have information in my noodle right here that I'm going to share with you when we get to that place. And then we will add those bullet points to the slide deck before we post online. And I think that's all the housekeeping I need to say. I will hand it back to you, Chris. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Sounds great. Good morning, everybody. I'm Christopher Soran, the Application Support Manager here at the State Board. And we'll give you some updates for the month. CDC and accessibility. So got a few topics today. Roll through them all. That's the agenda there. So the dynamic page headers and the time pages, I got diploid to production between the last meeting and this meeting. 

So you'll notice at the top of the time summary enter time absence balances, cancel absence few requests, and manage absence pages. In here is one example on the Manage Absence page. It's a screenshot highlighting the top of the page, having new additional information. The name, person ID, job title, department. And the main piece there, the most important piece being the supervisor name and hourly rate. Hourly rate in particular, so that folks with the same job title could distinguish between the different jobs that were inputting hours for or requesting leave for. 

So I was just curious if that anybody has used it or saw it, or got some value out of it, or any feedback. That's all good. It's out there. It's better. It's improved. Sounds good. So one thing we found this month. So we found an issue with tabbing just in MacOS Safari. Not iOS, not your iPad, or your iPhone. Just your Mac, like your Mac laptop or desktop. 

And we didn't on the Mac. We found this didn't happen in Firefox or Chrome, just Safari. So we found that when you're tabbing through a page, instead of going to the Save button, the focus kicks back up to the URL bar when you're doing keyboard-only navigations. And so we posted a workaround. So if you change those settings in Safari, it'll go to the Save button like it does in Firefox and Chrome. So we wanted to let folks know that workaround was there some tabbing issues on Safari. 

MONICA OLSSON: It looks like the workaround steps are actually right there 1, 2, 3, 4. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Go to your preferences and change the setting. Then it will work like it does everywhere else. 

MONICA OLSSON: Cool. 

Hey, it's me. It's the Okta. The Okta update. Well, something just opened up on my computer covering all of your beautiful faces. I don't like that. All right. I'm back. So, as a gentle reminder, folks from the State Board, including myself, Chris, Padma, Josh, Vicky, and others meet semi-regularly with Okta, which is our multi-factor authentication tool to talk about accessibility. 

And we were doing those monthly. They've now started to happen maybe every other month, every three months. My sense is Okta has had some interesting staff turnover these last six months. I've met several new product managers in a short time frame. So I think they're finding their new homeostasis, which has impacted our schedule a little bit with them. But I will say that overall, when I go to those meetings with Okta to talk about accessibility, I feel pretty positive leaving them. I feel like they take our feedback seriously. 

They respond respectfully. They come with their own updates as well. So from my perspective at least, I don't know if my state board colleagues would say differently. It's been, I think, a pretty positive partnership. And we had a meeting last week with our Markell's, our customer service representative, and then the various new product managers. And I have some updates for you all. So, probably, I'd say the happiest update is that Okta, as a company, decided to hire and partner with a third-party accessibility firm, DQ, state boards worked with DQ before as well. 

And DQ did a series of audits on their different products. So the sign in widget, where you do username and password, their user settings dashboard. Okta verify experience that you go through on your mobile device. So DQ did a variety of audits, gave them detailed report of accessibility issues and bugs. And as I think as a next step is going to continue helping them update their VPAT. But they do have some new VPATs published on the website as well. We'll get to that in a minute. 

DQ has worked through about 90% of those bugs that-- or excuse me. Okta has worked through about 90% of the accessibility bugs that DQ put in their report for them. They're looking into what they can and cannot share with us. But I've asked their product managers to consider giving us a list of the known accessibility issues that they have yet to address in their roadmap, so that we have an understanding of where the potential issues or blockers are for our users. 

And we're waiting for an update there. Vicki, I'm wondering if you could grab the URL that they gave us that has their newly published VPATs on it, just in case people are curious. 

VICKI WALTON: I'm looking for it right now just right before you said that. 

MONICA OLSSON: OK, cool. Let's see. I'll see if I've got it open right here. Because I've got a million tabs open. And it might be that I still have it open. And it might be that I don't. But anyway, I mean, maybe I do. Yes. I got it, Vicki. So here's a link going to now. And you'll see at the top of the page under Okta with their logo, it says 2025 ACRs. So those are all their brand-new recently published VPATs for their various products. 

And Vicki is going to help me work through reading those to see if we've got any glaring red flags or follow-up questions for them. And then as a next step, Vicki and Josh will be partnering together to do some of our own internal accessibility functional testing of Okta verify. So, from start to finish. And then we'll have follow-up discussion and meetings with the Okta team once we start that work. So October, September time frame. Let me check my notes and see if there's anything else. 

VICKI WALTON: I just want to say, too, Monica. This is Vicki. With the Okta platform, that includes updated ACR for the end user dashboard and the sign-in widget. Because those show up on the list as 2022. But they are included in the Okta platform document. 

MONICA OLSSON: So that top bullet point, that top bullet point link includes those two products in their updated ACR. Thank you. Vicki, you were at that meeting with me. Do you think there's anything else that I missed? Is that a pretty good summary? 

VICKI WALTON: I mean, we had they have had staff turnover and stuff. But we did get the Okta or the ACRs. And Josh and I will be doing accessibility testing. So, yep, you covered it. 

MONICA OLSSON: And then their work with DQ which I found really positive. So cool. That's it. Sorry I'll get those bullet points updated on the slide deck screen that you're looking at right now. So Okta, our MFA, that was our last accessibility meeting. And that's the end of my update. Do people have any questions about that? 

MARY: Hi. It's Mary. Hi. I don't have a question about this. I have a question about the PDF remediation tool. Is this a bad time to ask about that? 

MONICA OLSSON: Which one? 

MARY: It was the one. They said they'd get some news in July about it. 

MONICA OLSSON: Oh, the Department of Enterprise RFP? 

MARY: Yeah. [INAUDIBLE] got it? 

MONICA OLSSON: Because there's also other PDF things going on in my world, too. And + not directly related to CTC links. So we're taking a little bit of a detour swim, Chris. This is a very hot topic for our colleges. So context is Department of Enterprise Services, DES, several months ago started a state RFP process to identify successful accessibility vendors that can do PDF and document remediation services for clients. 

And Vicki and I were a part of the initial team that wrote the requirements for that RFP before it hit the streets. It hit the streets. I think there was 40 different vendors that responded. It was way more than I ever anticipated. So where we're at right now is evaluation is still taking place. So there's two types of evaluation happening. There's a technical team which is actually looking at their sample documents with assistive technology and testing those against PDF accessibility standards to see how well the vendor has performed. 

And then there's a non-technical team that is reading and scoring the written responses from those vendors. And it's a ton to get through. I think we were thinking maybe 20 businesses would respond. And it was double that. So I don't think those evaluations are going to be done until August at some point. So announcements will likely not happen till end of August, September. 

MARY: Thank you. That was a hot question with KEG steering committee. So I'll report back to them to just wait. 

MONICA OLSSON: And I'm still staying over in our side detour. But I will mention for this group because I think related. And this is a hot topic for folks. Vicki and I have had some conversation with the support from IT leadership, including Grant and Saravanan, who manages Chris and his team. We're going to be doing a small pilot project with Adobe and Amazon Web Services around an AI PDF remediation tool that shows some promise for certain types of projects. 

So the five pilot schools have been identified. But we haven't had our kickoff call yet. So I'll just put that there. Again, not directly related to ctcLink, but definitely, of interest to a lot of folks on the call. And that side tour. And we'll go back to ctcLink now. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: It's all important. I appreciate the updates. PDFs. 

MONICA OLSSON: I know. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Never been a fan. 

MONICA OLSSON: No. So we reported last month on the makeup payment enhancement request, changing that over, getting that off of the classic style page that it was into the new fluid page, which will-- in particular, the old page violated the Reflow success criteria. So, when you zoomed in, it didn't resize to fit the screen. And that's particularly problematic on HCX, where you had to scroll side to side to get access to the page, trying to just pay for your glasses on your phone. 

So that was a delayed a couple of weeks. But did go to production. And so what I'm showing here is a screenshot of what it looked before. So this is the page just on a desktop. And then this is a screenshot of the page as it looks now with the new fluid setup. So not too terribly different, but certainly a lot more functional on a mobile device. And more accessible overall. And so that went to production. It's been in there for a week now. So I was just curious if you had any feedback or everything seems fine. So it's good. No news is good news. 

But I think to put a bug on people's ears, especially those of us in the room who have daily or weekly contact with students looking at you, Mary, et cetera like putting feelers out if for especially for students are using screen readers or other assistive technology if they've noticed any improvements when they're making a payment on those pages, it would be nice for us to hear that things have improved. And I agree with Chris. If we're not hearing an actual concrete complaint, generally, we take that as good news. Anyway, so if students are telling you things about that experience, please let us know if it's positive or negative. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: For sure. All right. So on June-- so last month, we met with some Oracle reps to talk about Title II. And so we got Oracle to agree. So they have a quarterly PeopleSoft accessibility focus group. They got some support staff across the colleges and agencies that are using PeopleSoft. But the focus has been on people tools which is foundational across the system. So it really does apply everywhere. 

But also HCM. We've asked them to include the Campus Solutions group as well in future meetings. And they agreed to do that. So that's good. And one of the biggest problems which I was just talking about with the make a payment page violating the Reflow. So, on any of the classic and classic plus pages, when you zoom in to 400%, you're going to get the side scroll bars. It's not going to resize properly. It's only on what most of the fluid pages that works correctly. 

And to be fully compliant would mean porting like they reported to us. It'd be like over 4,000 transactions over in just in HCM, just one of the three pillars. And that they said that won't happen by next April. So we've asked that they prioritize most heavily used student pages. That would be what we would want converted. And when they're doing that classic to fluid conversion, it's not always an exact one to one. They may introduce some new functionality or something like that. 

But it's generally a better version and a more modern version of the page type. And so the VP of the PeopleSoft strategy development, it was in the meeting. He said he's going to go advocate for a long-term solution for the Reflow issue and get back to us. Because that's really across the system. But most of the pages folks use daily aren't fluid. But there are many pages that are. But that's the biggest hindrance to 100% compliance is that Reflow piece. 

So we're certainly going to want a long-term solution in place. And we certainly push them for that. So we're going to keep at it. So any questions? Sounds good? 

MONICA OLSSON: I just want to thank Chris and just emphasize that it took some pushing and keeping at it to get the VP that we spoke with in the room with us for an hour to talk about Title II ADA compliance. And I thought it was a pretty productive conversation. I felt like he was listening to our words and understanding what we were saying, where we were coming from. Even though some of the updates we were hearing weren't like exactly what we wanted to hear. 

But also in the indication that he will go back and try to advocate for a longer-term plan around reflow of the pages and prioritizing the student pages and student experience. It's good. Getting them to connect different teams together so that the CS pillars included in those accessibility focus meetings has something I've wanted to see happen for quite a while. So I'm glad that it's happening now, moving forward. 

And I think we'll just from here, monitor what happens from Oracle out of that meeting, but then continue to ask for updates and future meetings as necessary to follow up on the promises that were made. So it takes some muscle to get people in the room from Oracle to really focus on this issue. But I think we didn't hear everything we wanted, but we also heard some positive stuff, too. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Great. Thanks, Monica. We'll keep pushing for years to come. We're on it. Hopefully, we'll see some change. All right. That's all the topics we have for today. Let us know if you want to add any other agenda items for next month. Meet August 12. That'll be our next meeting. Is there any other last thoughts or questions? 

MARY: Thank you for letting me sabotage your meeting. I really appreciate it. It's nice to have Monica in the room because she knows all. So thank you. 

MONICA OLSSON: That's a huge compliment. Thanks, Mary. I do not I do not know all everybody, but I try. And I think it's good that we talked about the PDF work. Because there's a lot of people who care about accessibility and multiple facets of their work and college here at these open forums. So it's totally OK. And maybe I'll have another brief update in August around the DES RFP that we can take a minute to share during this open forum. I think that's cool with Chris. 

I have a question for people here. Now there's only 17 of us on the call. But I'm curious, when we send out the reminders by email for the open forum, are people reading those from the ctcLink Accessibility email listserv, or are you getting those reminders like from other groups that you're a part of, at court email list or the DSSC email list or [INAUDIBLE]? I have a reason why I'm asking. So I'm curious what people have to say about that. Where are you reading those reminders? 

MICHAEL HARRISCOM: All of the above. 

MONICA OLSSON: So those are all those different groups? Thanks, Cecilia. The reason why I ask is several years ago, right before Sandy Maine retired, she and I started the CTC accessibility email listserv with the idea that it would be a place where we could remind people of the upcoming meetings and share materials, but could also be a conversational space. So people who wanted to chat or ask questions about ctcLink Accessibility. 

We could have ongoing conversation in the listserv, not just once a month, these open forums. The email listserv is essentially dormant. The only activity that happens on the ctcLink Accessibility email listserv is the monthly reminders of the meeting. Meanwhile, we're getting like 600-plus weird requests for subscriptions from emails. So I ask because I wonder if it just doesn't need to exist anymore because people are getting reminders from other areas. So we don't need to make a decision. But thanks for letting me pull you. And that's it for me. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Great thanks, everybody. We appreciate your attendance. We'll see you again next month. Thanks for your time. Have a good day, everybody.