SPEAKER: This meeting, we do have a professional captioner in the room with us. So you can use the closed captions section on the bottom of your Zoom screen if you need that to follow along. We do our best to monitor the chat for comments and questions throughout our time giving you updates. But always feel free to raise your hand and unmute yourself. That is fine as well. This might be a little bit of a sweet and short meeting. We do have some updates for you. And with that, I think I will hand it over to Chris Soran. 

CHRIS SORAN: Good morning, everybody. Thanks for coming to this May edition of our Open Forum. All right. So on deck today, we are going to be talking about the upcoming PeopleTools 8.61.17 upgrade that we're going to be putting into production on Saturday, in particular, the new accessibility features that are coming in with the update. Yeah. So I'm going to turn it over to Padmaja. 

PADMAJA VILLALON: All right. Are you able to hear me? 

CHRIS SORAN: Yeah. 

PADMAJA VILLALON: All right. Let me share my screen. 

Are you able to see my screen? 

SPEAKER: Yes. Now it's loaded. 

PADMAJA VILLALON: All right. All right. Let's get started. My name is Padmaja Villalon. You can call me Padma. So this 8.661.17 is a small release of tools. Still, we have got four fixes that are specific to accessibility. So let's go over those. All right. Do you see my screen? All right. 

SPEAKER: Yes. But please describe what's on your screen if folks can't see your screen. Yes. 

PADMAJA VILLALON: So the first fix is about company logo. As you know that in screen reader mode, graphics are not really displayed, but text is displayed instead of graphic. So on the banner of the ctcLink, we see first the company logo, followed by three buttons, which are for recently visited favorites and accessibility. 

So the order that these buttons display is first, the company logo, followed by those three buttons. But in screen reader mode. That's not how this it was read out by screen readers because of the way behind the scene, the placement of that text was. 

So in screen reader mode, it was getting the three buttons for recently visited favorites and accessibility were getting read out first by the screen readers. And then the logo, ctcLink logo was getting read. So this issue is fixed now. And now, it is getting read same as the way it appears on the screen. So ctcLink logo first, followed by the three buttons. That's the first fix. 

Second fix. Actually, five years ago, I remember that we had a ticket with lots of issues regarding accessibility in time tile and enter time. And one by one, we got those fixed through Oracle bringing up those issues. But the one issue that they were refusing to fix was that there is this date picker on the enter time tile. And actually, in various places, this appears, where a user can enter, actually type in the date. And that edit box for the date has a button to actually display the calendar and pick a date from the calendar. 

So that calendar button, which is right next to the date. Just in Firefox browser, that calendar button was getting read as just button. So the screen reader user who comes there has no clue what that button is and whether to click it or not. So our team really pushed for that, and it's finally fixed now. 

So this button, which is next to the date, which was getting read as just button, it's actually now getting red as calendar date button in screen reader mode, clearly defining the purpose of that button. So that's a win that we got. 

CHRIS SORAN: Woo. 

PADMAJA VILLALON: Yeah. 

CHRIS SORAN: That's all thanks to Padmaja's persistence. 

SPEAKER: Yeah. We love correct labeling. 

PADMAJA VILLALON: Yeah. They were pushing back saying it's a browser issue. It's not our issue. 

CHRIS SORAN: It's a vendor issue. 

PADMAJA VILLALON: Right. And then the issue, because it works in Jaws, they closed it like three times, and we had to keep reopening it and pushing for it. 

PADMAJA VILLALON: The next one is notification instructions in screen reader mode. So on the banner, on the right hand side, there is a bell icon, which is for notifications like approval is waiting for you or different alerts that display. Those display in those. By clicking on that notification button, we can see all those alerts. 

But when there was no notification, there was a text that was displaying there, and that text was when new notifications arrive, the 

Refresh button will show a badge. Now badge is a graphic. And it did not make any sense in the screen reader mode. Also, along with another graphic displayed with a dot, which really did not have any purpose or any specification in screen reader mode. So this was very confusing. 

And so they have fixed that now. They have corrected, made that no notifications message appropriate to screen reader mode now. And they have removed this redundant graphic which did not make sense. So let's see here. This is the refresh button. Now they have removed that redundant graphic. And the message is now corrected to when new notifications arrive, an announcement will alert you and instruct you to select the refresh notifications button to access them. So they have specified its announcement and the button. So it is very clear now. So that's a fix they added in this release. 

The next one, this is a kind of tricky and interesting one. And thanks to our Josh, he really identified this issue. So you must be aware that throughout our application, there are search pages. So search pages display the criteria where we can enter the criteria. We can click on search button. And then whatever criteria we entered, that search gets executed, and the results are displayed. 

So all that is fine. But what was happening is a user enter search criteria. And instead of clicking on that search button, there is no clicking in screen reader mode because no mouse. Everything is with the keyboard. So generally-- not generally. Enter key is very specific to doing the function of submitting whatever is there on the screen and displaying results. 

So when the user entered the criteria here, like academic program starting with A, do the search on this. So when they hit enter, instead of submitting that criteria and executing the search, what the system was doing was just wiping out that criteria from there and did nothing. No search was getting executed. 

So this issue is it's not specific to any particular product line throughout the tools everywhere it is happening. So they have fixed this issue now. So when enter key is pressed after entering the search criteria, it executes the search and displays the results. So that's all the fixes that are there. 

SPEAKER: That's a big fix. 

PADMAJA VILLALON: This is a big fix. 

SPEAKER: That's a big one. Yeah. I mean, the graphic labeling is important too and getting rid of the redundant graphic. But this, in terms of user experience and functionality, is a big win. So yes. Thank you, Josh and Padma. 

PADMAJA VILLALON: Yeah. Thank you. So that's all I have got. Any questions? 

SPEAKER: I just saw Josh said that Troy from Tacoma brought this particular issue to our attention. So yay, colleges, for sure for sharing your experience and bringing the issues forward. We're doing what we can on our end, but you all are users of this product, as we are. So the collaboration between colleges and our teams here at the State Board is much appreciated. I see Chris nodding. 

With that, I want to share, I'm going to keep it high level because we're still looking into these issues. And I don't know if the people from this college are on the call today or not. But a week or so ago, folks and I met with two people from one of our colleges. One of whom is a screen reader user who wanted to share with us some navigation issues with the class roster page that's viewable for faculty and in the faculty center of ctcLink. 

And so there were some issues with table navigation and certain actions being located potentially at illogical spot on the page. We're still looking into that. But it was a great meeting, and we were able to record and document what was happening for that user and also document the follow-up steps that the State Board is going to do to continue to understand those issues and what is a violation that needs to be reported to Oracle or not. So just wanted to share that. And once we're further along in that process, I think we'll be able to bring back more concrete information to this group. 

CHRIS SORAN: Yeah. Thanks, Monica. Thanks, Padmaja, for sharing. Yeah. Not having your searches cleared out. Press enter. It's a big deal. Yes. And thanks for letting us know about that and meeting last week. We're here to make sure you have a good experience and everything works. 

So we don't have any updates. We're still just persistently working to get any resolution. Any issues we find, continue to report them. Yeah. And so feel free to let us know if you have any things you want to bring up at this meeting. I'll get them on the agenda for the next month and our online forum. 

And we have our ctcLink accessibility web, page where you'll find this update document, showing all these new features, as well as any new features that come in with new feature updates. And note that ctcLink will be down most of Saturday morning and early afternoon as we work on getting these updates installed. And we've got our forum next month. June 9th, 11:00 AM, our usual time. 

SPEAKER: Yep. And if things come up for you all out there at the colleges before then how to reach us by email or the web form. Thanks for attending. It's a big group today. 

CHRIS SORAN: Yeah. Appreciate everybody's time. Thank you. 

SPEAKER: OK. See you next month. Bye. 

PADMAJA VILLALON: Thank you.