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00:00:06
Mike Zackrison: Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's webinar. We will give it just a few minutes for everyone to filter in here. So, we'll start at one minute after the hour. So hold tight. Okay, I think we'll get going. So, welcome everyone to today's webinar.
00:01:02
We're going to present "Accessibility Made Easy", our introduction to UDOIT Cloud 3.0, the latest version of the UDOIT accessibility checker tool. My name is Mike Zackrison. I'm co-founder and CEO of Cidi Labs. I'm going to do a real quick introduction and set today's session up and then turn it over to my colleague Jennifer Malkovich who will go through a demonstration and she'll
00:01:30
also introduce our additional speakers who will join us at the latter part of the presentation. So real quick about Cidi Labs, I know a lot of you who are on this call are either customers of ours or already know us pretty well but for those who are new I'll just provide a little bit of an overview here. At Cidi Labs, we provide tools for Canvas that help organizations scale their online course design and delivery practices. We do this through
00:02:00
a model where we collaborate with universities and institutions who are developing tools in-house on their own to solve important challenges of their own and we partner with them to make those solutions broadly available and fully supported through what we call our SAS sharing model. So we'll partner with we have two partners right now Utah State University and the University
00:02:26
of Central Florida who we've partnered with around the solutions that we offer. We are a company that started in 2016 so we're five years old at this point. We have a small team but a growing team. We've added several team members over the past couple of months. Collectively we have over 100 years of experience people years of experience in K12 and higher ed
00:02:53
instructional design and the LMS space and around Canvas. I myself worked for Instructure from 2012 to 2015, so we're well versed around the Canvas community and building courses and all that kind of stuff. We've had the good fortune of working with over 350 clients now with
00:03:16
with all of our solutions. We have four tools that we offer. DesignPLUS is probably the one that most of you know. That's our most popular solution and the first one that we started with. We have also added to the mix UDOIT Cloud which we'll talk about today, TidyUP, and ReadyGO. DesignPLUS is our course design tool set for Canvas that makes it really easy to rapidly build
00:03:44
courses that engage students without having to know a lot of HTML and CSS to make that work. ReadyGO is a tool that was developed by Utah State University in-house to help the instructional design team go through their quality checks and their preparations before the beginning of a new term or new semester. We also offer TidyUP which
00:04:10
is a utility to help you efficiently identify and delete unused files and content inside Canvas and then finally UDOIT Cloud. This is our course level accessibility checker tool that scans and reports and helps you fix successfully accessibility issues and the first version of this tool was developed in-house by the our friends at the University of Central Florida.
00:04:39
So today's session we're going to focus on the new version of version 3.0 of UDOIT Cloud. We've spent over a year now working on this version of the product. It includes a new user experience which we hope you'll all appreciate and enjoy. We also did a kind of a ground-up rebuild of the infrastructure of the tool in order to kind of re-architect things so that we could
00:05:08
add in some API layers to make it easier for us to interoperate with third-party libraries that we may want to include in the future or to plug in other video repositories or even potentially to extend UDOIT to work with other LMS systems. So there was a lot of architectural work behind the tech stack and then a lot of effort went into
00:05:34
creating that new user experience. In addition to that there's also some new administrative and reporting capabilities that we've added to the tool as well. I want to just throw out a big thanks to our beta partners who helped us beta test the product and get us to the point where we're prepared to launch this within the next couple of weeks here. The American College of Healthcare Sciences in Oregon helped us, Brown University,
00:06:06
our friends at the University of Central Florida, and also the University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin Systems. They both played an important role in helping us validate and vet and refine this product. I'll also mention the University of Minnesota has been there they were one of our very first UDOIT Cloud customers several years ago and a lot of their
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feedback helped inspire a lot of the use usability issues that we've fixed and addressed in this in this iteration of the product, so a special thanks goes out to that team there as well. So with that introduction, Jennifer i'll go ahead and turn it over to you in order to do our demo today. Jennifer Malkovich: Thanks Mike! I will bring up my screen does that look okay Mike?
00:07:01
Mike Zackrison: Yes and I just realized we didn't do any housekeeping around questions, if you have any questions for us today feel free to enter those into the Q&A tool that's available in zoom. We'll keep an eye on that stream of questions and we'll have time at the end here to address some of those publicly and we'll also address a few
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of the questions privately as well, but go ahead and use the Q&A tool if you have any any questions for us. You'll notice it's being recorded we will share recording at the end of this as well. Jennifer Malkovich: Great! Alright so let's jump in. I'll start by just explaining a couple of the basics for those of you who have not seen UDOIT Cloud even in prior versions to date.
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It's a tool that can be installed and made available to all courses automatically and it's the tool that appears in the left-hand navigation here or when you install it choose to allow individual course users to turn it on themselves through the navigation settings. That's really a decision that you can make at your institution. Also when you do the install which we
00:08:23
do with you; you can choose to name the link in the navigation something different perhaps that makes more sense to your users or perhaps is a name you use internally or things of that nature. Also, I'll point out that the tool is not visible to students. We get that question a lot. Once a course designer clicks on the tool, they will for the first time they enter
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that the course content is being reviewed and they will come to a welcome page which provides some good contextual and sort of orienting information. I'll also point out that again based on some great feedback that we received along the way, this page is customizable by your institution so if, for example, you have resources that you like to link to from here or
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guidelines for users that you want to ensure to read to reiterate when they start checking their course for accessibility issues you can customize this page to include all of that information, but we include just some default information about what the tool is. Also, we include details around what UDOIT looks for so there are both errors and suggestions that we sort of look
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for and report on as you'll see in a minute but under each of these you can see more of an explanation for what this issue is caused by and how you may get around it. Really this becomes a very educational tool just right at the outset and and we hear that a lot that not only is it helping
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course designers make their courses more accessible but they really end up learning a great deal around what accessibility means, why it's important, and how to really build courses more accessible from from the get-go. As I mentioned this screen comes up by default, but for anyone that knows what it is and doesn't want to see this again you can always click skip
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and it won't show it the next time. I also want to mention the message that said that it was scanning the content appeared only briefly and that's because this course has been scanned recently as I've been in here you know throughout the day. Each time a user comes in to UDOIT the system will automatically scan the course content in automatically so if you've used UDOIT in the past
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you know that it was a process that you had to kick off manually and sort of make some decisions around what exactly you wanted to scan and that can be a little bit you know overwhelming for a new user coming in they're not even sure what it's going to do or what is what they should or shouldn't scan. So, we've enhanced this version to make that happen automatically in the background
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and it's smart enough that each time you come back to the tool it keeps track in the background of new content that has been added or content that has been changed can only scans that. In that way it's very efficient and very performant so it should work much faster. You could see again that it scanned very quickly the first time takes a little longer but certainly
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you know on the order of typically seconds not several minutes. Once we get past the the scanning message and the welcome message we land on what we are now referring to as the home page. In previous versions you saw a report just a long list of issues that the scan found in your course. One of the things we really took to heart from as feedback from our
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customers that have used it in the past is that that can be overwhelming especially for faculty who might not be as familiar with accessibility and it can be daunting to see a really long list of issues, so we've really tried to simplify this landing page this home page the sort of bird's-eye view of what is happening in your course in terms of accessibility. You can see here that there are
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33 errors and 39 suggestions and we will list here the most common, the ones occurring in the greatest numbers, here. It will also show you in a prominent way how many you've fixed, as well as, resolved and reviewed. We'll get into what the difference between those are in just a minute. Probably most importantly on this kind of home page or I think of it as kind of the
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bird's-eye view of your accessibility issues we've provided some ways to get started. These are both aimed at helping new users just know where to begin versus again having to figure that out from a long list. Also, this is a way to help even experienced users because they can search, for example, just by a certain issue type. Perhaps, you know,
00:14:06
you're going to come in and work on just caption type issues or media type issues. You can become familiar with the different issue types and and just click on those. It's also possible to just focus on all your errors or all of the open issues. Occasionally, we find that users want to potentially focus on one type of content in a course so
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perhaps all of the html files for example and so that's a way to start as well. So every link essentially on this page is just a pre-built filter. We have done the work of sort of guessing what are the most common ways that different types of users would want to filter this list of 60 plus
00:15:01
issues that they have to get through and and how can we give them kind of shortcuts to those. Let's start out by looking at those that are easiest to fix. So we picked a handful of error types that we know are really easy to fix even for those who are new to accessibility and really get in there and give them an early feeling of success. You'll notice when I click "Get Started", I am now in the "UFIXIT" area. This is the area where we really roll up our sleeves and start
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working on the issues. I'll just take a minute to orient you to this page and kind of get you familiar with how this works now. Again, this is this is quite different from previous versions where you just really went through kind of one issue at a time from the home page. You can see here there's a this is a filtered list and these are listing the existing filters.
00:16:01
If I wanted to filter further, I have this pullout bar here menu filter menu so I could still further refine by content type or perhaps I want to see the issues that I've already fixed. Give me again that feeling of progress. Also I could hide my unpublished content. I just
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want to focus on that which is published obviously more important that we get those errors fixed first. Really just a number of different ways that you can again hone in on the list of issues that you want to fix. I can also search for a specific issue type so if I wanted to just look at all the ones having to do with alt text, I could type that in and you can see now here
00:16:53
the list is only issues that that have the word alt in it. Whoops. Okay, so also I invite you to watch this bar at the top which is a summary bar that essentially keeps track of the number of errors suggestions as well as all the progress we've made as we're working through the issues and again really keeping the user with a bird's-eye view
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of the progress that has been made as they go. I like to sort by issue here and sort of focus in on one issue type at a time. In that way, you kind of get used to how to fix it and then you can really go through it much more efficiently. If we just pull up our first error here.
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When we start working on issues we're brought to this new window where it really provides a wealth of information to help fix the issue. First there's more information about the actual reason why this is a problem so you know here it explains that you have to have a brief description because it will propose a problem you know for a screen reader you can there's a link to go read more
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etc. At this point even if I don't know a lot about accessibility or about alt text I'm in a much better position to fix this. Why don't we go ahead and fix this in line and I think I will just shorten this to mention who is in the picture and I'll go ahead and save that. Now, you can see my changes were saved and also this issue
00:19:02
is marked as fixed. Another thing that I wanted to point out and I'll do that when I go to the next issue so without having to even leave this screen I can go to the next issue right from here and now I can see I'm on issue number three because I had started on issue number two because issue number one was already fixed. One of the other great things that we can do here is, if I am a
00:19:28
more advanced user and I want to really just take a look at the html behind this I can do that here. Also, this provides a preview of the image so I'm not just trying to remember what it was, but if I needed further context I could click on this link and it takes me in a new tab to the exact place in my course where this image appears, and now I can really see in context
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you know where this is and perhaps that will better inform what I need to write in my alt text. For this one the the issue is pretty straightforward but it's that you shouldn't use the file name as your alt text. Here we can just edit this and update our image and save it. We could keep going through these issues you can kind of see how I could really get
00:20:34
in a groove here of now this is the same exact issue type so it's saying that I can't use the file name so I could quickly go through and fix several of these issues at the same time. I'm just going to show you a couple other issue types so you can get this sense for how UDOIT provides help to the user in fixing these different issues. Here you can see that
00:21:01
in this one we are using color to emphasize text and that we shouldn't use color alone because again it poses a problem for screen readers. So here there's a number of just different suggestions but I could make this text italic and now you can see you know the issue has been fixed.
00:21:27
So we just look at maybe one other issue type so here we can see this one is really...once again addressing an issue that can pose a problem for screen readers in that we are using styles such as color to convey document structure. It's basically helping us
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understand that we need to add a heading tag which we can do again right from within here. You can get the sense of how much time that saves me and even expertise it saves me for having to go in and edit the html or things that I may not be familiar with or comfortable with. The other thing I wanted to point out is if we perhaps go back to the home page and so this is
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really how we envision users kind of interacting with this version is really again using the home page as the the bird's-eye view and the jumping off point in order to be able to decide what types of issues to tackle. I'm reminded that now I've fixed six issues if you recall at the beginning I think it was only two so we just quickly worked on four issues which is great.
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Let's say that you know I'm a more experienced user and I know that I want to work on you know some of the media issues for example. Let's look at this one here so here's a video in my course where I'm being told that the captions were auto generated and the explanation here is that
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typically auto generated captions are not really accurate and are not reliable you know for meeting the accessibility requirements. This is not something that we yet have a magic button to fix, but it is number one calling it to our attention so we know. Let's suppose that I sort of went and
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checked my file and read through the captions and decided that they actually were great they were right on and so we feel comfortable saying that this is not an issue anymore. Rather than having this issue keep coming up each time because we can't automatically fix it. We now have the ability to mark this as resolved so that's kind of the difference between fixed and resolved as we
00:24:20
mentioned at the beginning resolved is something that the user independently determines is resolved and again it's sort of like don't show me this again. It's all set. Here we can see it's resolved and now we can close this and we should see our count went up. The great news is our error
00:24:46
count is going down. Our number of issues fixed and resolved is is going up actively. The next thing that I wanted to show was this other area that you would typically visit maybe after fixing all the the issues reported on the home page but basically it's it's an area that we've dedicated to reporting all of the files, or sorry, displaying all of the files in your course
00:25:20
because we know that often files are not optimally accessible. While we don't yet have the ability to scan for accessibility issues and report accessibility issues on files we are providing them in a list here so that you can see all the files in your course and when you go through them,
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one at a time, you can do a number of things. You can view it again in the LMS so you can see remind yourself where it is and what the context is you could download it if that was important. You can drag a new file here to replace it and perhaps provide a more accessible version. Here, we use the term reviewed so for files you know it's it's not always a matter of fixing them
00:26:16
or you know marking them as resolved but we wanted to provide a way for you to keep track that this has been reviewed. When we do that you know again here we can just keep going through the files don't need to close this and go back to the list each time, so a very efficient way of going through a number of files we can always see where we're kind of at in the list and how
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many more we have to go. When we do finish our work here you know we can quickly see how many we've reviewed and how many still need to be looked at. Again, I don't know if you saw me do that but I turned off the filter so if we wanted to just focus on items that we need to review we can hide the reviewed ones and here again we have the ability to hide unpublished files.
00:27:09
Okay, so that was a quick tour of kind of the whole experience of seeing what issues exist in a course and fixing them and reviewing them. Now, I just want to show you a couple of other things that the course level user would have access to so we have this reporting area where
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you can see a history of all of the different times you've accessed the tool and what the state of accessibility was in this course at each time the tool was accessed. You can see you know when I first started out there were 37 errors after coming in a few times and just chipping away at it you can see that number is down to 29.
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It also sort of shows it here it's a little gradual but how these bars are are obviously shrinking because I'm there are fewer and fewer issues and suggestions to report. That's another nice way to kind of keep tabs on what's happening as far as accessibility in your course. The last thing I'll point out here is that maybe two last things. You can also manually
00:28:30
if you just went and changed a bunch of files in your course and you for some reason wanted to rescan your course we we left that option in here but again each time you come in the scan happens automatically so that's why this option is sort of in this menu, it's not something we think anyone really needs to access very often. Also, you can download a PDF of the issues in your course so
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at any given time it will show just a long list of what issues appeared throughout your course, and some details around you know what the content was that it the issue was pertinent to and so on. Now that we've taken a pretty in-depth tour of how the course level user so an instructor or a
00:29:20
course designer would use UDOIT Cloud. I'm going to shift gears over here and take you into the admin tool so if you are an admin in your Canvas instance this tool can be enabled in order to provide you visibility into a few different things which it's really important to point out it's context sensitive. This will show all of the courses
00:29:53
in the domain that you have admin permissions for. If you're a sub account admin it will only show the courses in in your sub account, for example. That's a question we get a lot too so I just wanted to point that out. Also, if you were like most typical instances of Canvas have you know different accounts as well as obviously multiple terms you can filter here this is our demo our
00:30:23
you know sort of staging instance so we don't have a lot of term data in here, but there would be a quick and easy way to filter the this by term. Also you could do a quick keyword search, so if you were just looking for all the courses that pardon the irrelevance to you but had the word demo in it but you could imagine it could be the word biology, right? You could quickly
00:30:54
filter and just show a subset of the courses so what's really important and valuable here is that from this list the admin user can actually kick off a scan of the course. If they see that perhaps you know something hasn't been scanned for quite some time you know we can see these weren't scanned since last week which isn't terribly long ago but we could kick off
00:31:23
a scan from here and we could scan any and all of the courses that are in our account. Also, the administrative user in this area has access to the same reports only covering all of the courses that of course are in their account. So here, you can imagine the numbers are bigger
00:31:47
and but it's a good way to kind of get a sense of what's happening across the different dates you know across the weeks and how many things are getting fixed and sort of what progress is being made. Also there's an area for users where you can you know sort of see who's been in and when they last logged in and so on and so forth. This area you know
00:32:17
again is something that's new to UDOIT and we think will end up providing a lot of value. That concludes the demo. I'm going to shift back to the slides here and just say a couple of words before I turn it over to the next two presenters. First, if you're an existing UDOIT Cloud customer
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hopefully you liked what you saw and you're excited to get this new version. A few things we wanted to point out, one is that it will be available for install starting in July so we are super excited to be able to offer that starting next month and it will require a new install much like the the one you did with us the first time you installed UDOIT. It will be
00:33:12
performed by our technical team at Cidi Labs on a call with you again as it was the first time. If you want to schedule yours please just complete the install form on the cidilabs.com support page. There's a specific form for UDOIT and I think what's implied here and what's important to point out is that we won't be flipping a switch in the Cloud environment and where all existing
00:33:42
UDOIT Cloud accounts are automatically updated to version 3.0 you will have the ability to decide and determine when it's appropriate for your institution to move to this new version. Also when you do move to the new version, you will be able to run, for as long as it makes sense, both versions in parallel. So if there's a transition period where, you know some of your
00:34:11
newer users for example, you just want them on the new version but some of the, you know, people who have been using the older version need it for a little while longer for whatever reason, you'll be able to do that. The last thing that I wanted to share was, as Mike mentioned, our team has grown this year. So we're very happy to have a number of new developers
00:34:38
on our team that can help work on UDOIT Cloud and so, with that, we are building a robust roadmap to reflect some things that we've heard from beta customers and from existing customers things that are important and things that we really have on our radar. I want to make it clear that we're not sure yet exactly when or in what type of capacity. We will be releasing all of these
00:35:07
features, but I wanted to let you know that it's things that are, you know, high on our list and foremost in our in our thoughts in terms of what's coming after this version. The first thing is really just around more capabilities for scanning those documents those files such as PDF or Word files that maybe in a course and we know often pose
00:35:37
accessibility issues so we'd really like to provide the ability to actually have the system scan those files and then following that to provide some options or an option or for remediating those files with issues. We have a few different options for what we might do here whether it's you know potentially incorporating a third-party technology to automatically convert
00:36:08
files you know to HTML or even audio we're just really still in the exploratory phases of this and if you have any feedback or thoughts around that we always love to hear from you and beyond that we also want to expand on that admin ability to scan courses so rather than just being able to
00:36:33
go in manually and scan any course in or courses in the Canvas account we also want to be able to automate that further by being able to set up schedules. So, you know, on Fridays scan all these courses or next week scan all those courses. Just have that really be an embedded part of sort of the the process of preparing courses. Then we also want to
00:37:02
expand on our reporting capabilities so we've had some feedback on additional reporting, you know, items that would be useful as well we've been requested to provide a download or a export of the reporting data so that it could really be kind of sliced and diced or more easily analyzed or shared. We'll be looking to provide that soon as well.
00:37:32
Last but not least again these are hitting just sort of the major items we would like to expand our video scanning capabilities by potentially integrating with other video repositories, such as Kaltura. That's something that we often get asked about as well. So these are just again the
00:37:56
things that are sort of at the top of our roadmap. As always, we will keep you posted on when we know more about when some of this stuff might be coming but we are excited to continue working on this. As excited as we are to get 3.0 available to you next month, the work won't stop there. At this time I am super pleased to be able to introduce to you two of our customers and
00:38:28
specifically our beta customers who offered to join the webinar today and really just share a few words around what this new version means for their institution and their accessibility efforts and we just always figure that you'd love to hear from them as much maybe more than you love to hear from us. Without further ado I will introduce Kristina Cibuzar who is from the
00:38:58
University of Minnesota and she'll speak first and then Kristina if you can pass the floor over to Dr. Regina Nelson from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville after that. Thank you. Kristina Cibuzar: Alright, are you gonna leave the share screen up? Will you? I don't have slides or anything so. Jennifer Malkovich: Okay...yeah why don't we do that. Kristina Cibuzar: Well, I guess, hello my name is Kristina Cibuzar as Jennifer introduced me I work as an Education
00:39:32
Technologies Consultant which is what I tell people who don't know tech. My official title is actually Academic Technologist. I work with a lot of faculty in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota which is the largest college we have. I want to say like roughly, I don't know, 10,000 students in there and we have probably about 2500 classes every semester and I am on a team of four and we're the only people who help with academic technology within
00:40:04
CLA and I'm the only one who really focuses on accessibility. So, you can tell we've got kind of a scale problem when it comes to instructional design and accessibility and UDOIT has been super super helpful for figuring some of this out so I don't actually go in and do a lot of scanning and fixing for my faculty and instructors. I teach them how to use UDOIT directly so I'm really
00:40:31
excited about this new version because a lot of the feedback we gave back in, I want to say, like, in 2019 I think is when we started giving feedback to Cidi Labs, has really been put into production and it's really exciting. The speed is a huge one. This new Cloud version is so much faster especially when you have people who have hundreds of errors in their courses. Maybe they don't want to see the results that fast, but I like getting results back that fast. And, with
00:40:57
that, the filtering is a huge deal. I personally like to use the filtering in very particular ways that I don't advise my faculty to use necessarily but, what Jennifer was saying earlier, focusing on particular issues is really how we are telling instructors at the University of Minnesota to focus on accessibility because, you have a course that has 900 errors, that's really overwhelming. What we say instead to do is say "yeah, you have this many errors but only focus on alt text
00:41:25
for now and just clear out all the alt text and then when you have more mental bandwidth come back and fix all your links." Being able to filter is going to make that so much easier than the old UDOIT, which was great, but also this you know this is a big improvement on that we think and we really think that that will be very helpful and will encourage more people to use it at the U. Then another one that was really commonly asked for in our pilot data and when I train people is the mark is resolved especially with captions. We are really cracking the whip at the University
00:41:56
of Minnesota on captioning and making sure people know that it's the law and you have to do that. And, being able to mark that as like, yep it's done and you can forget about it is great! We also like that you can go in and review what has been marked as resolved in case you have an instructor who sort of goes rogue and starts marking things resolved that aren't actually supposed to be resolved. You can get in there as an admin and see what's going on there which is really great.
00:42:23
And then a big one for a lot of our people is seeing that progress that you make through using UDOIT. So let's say you have that course of 900 errors and 150 of them are about alt text. Being able to see that you've made progress and it's not just. oh you still have 900 errors so you only have a little tiny bit and there's some great graphs in there to visually represent what's going on that is super super important to our customers
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to our faculty because a lot of them aren't numbers people, liberal arts, right a lot of them aren't numbers people and don't really understand tech that well so anything that we can give them a really great visual representation helps them a lot with understanding why or how they're making progress and why they should keep going. Overall it's just been a very enjoyable experience using this new version. I got to do the alpha testing and the beta testing and I could see even with the
00:43:17
alpha that significant improvements were coming and I was very excited to use it from the get-go. I guess that's my perspective from working with faculty and at a course level so I will pass it off to Regina for more of the UDOIT admin side, right? Regina Nelson: Yeah and I think I can echo everything that Kristina said about just the user experience on the new tool. For individual faculty, it is an easy to use and everything that she just said.
00:43:48
My perspective, being one of 14 institutions in the University of Wisconsin System, I'll tell you the story briefly is that with the first version of UDOIT you do a 2.0 I was really excited about all of the things that were there. I'd heard that there were some reporting options and I'm thinking okay, you know, being similarly staffed as Kristina, in this field we just don't have a lot of people
00:44:17
to help the faculty so we need to be strategic and I said surely I should be able to pull a report from my institution and see you know what errors are happening more often. Unfortunately, because the way that our we use Canvas and the way that Canvas is set up at our at our institution, UW System is the root level and then all of the four institutions are sub accounts.
00:44:42
Immediately, I could find the errors for the entire UW system which wasn't going to help me do much. I started to nag a little bit with our admins in the system and they said well, you know, UDOIT in Cidi Labs, they're working on this beta testing and, you know, maybe some of the problems could be fixed with reporting and, I tell you, I've got to thank the crew at UDOIT Cidi Labs because I
00:45:09
didn't think that would happen this fast that, you know, something would happen with reporting because people tend to be really quick to change the user interface, what the end user sees all the time, but the effort put in on the admin on this, the reports and all of that, have just been, you know, beyond anything I've seen before. So I do have to give kudos to the team for that. So why do I want that and how can I use that? Well it's benchmarking. You know, imagine now that I can
00:45:35
look at my entire campus and see, or what are the errors that are happening the most. Well we can target our accessibility training on some of those errors and then making sure people know what they should be doing at the beginning. We could even have contests to motivate people across different departments now that we can do some of those things. And, you know, I think captioning is also going to be something we're cracking the whip on here a little bit, and you know
00:46:01
we could use the way that we can filter this data to provide much much finer details. A department could do just the things for their own department and we can bring more partners in. I was really disappointed because I knew, even at the first UDOIT, what we had the potential to do. To see that they have made all of those steps and continue to do more. I mean, when we can take
00:46:30
the data out and put in an Excel file and slice and dice as Jennifer said, it's just those simple changes, will at the end of the day, increase accessibility across our entire UW system. The students are going to get a better experience because at our level we can help the faculty just create better courses because we can see the data. So thank you. And, you know, I'm gonna let Mike finish up with some of the details at this point.
00:47:03
Mike Zackrison:Excellent. Thank you Regina and thank you Kristina for your thoughts and for all your efforts as we were beta testing and alpha testing the product with you. We appreciate that. At this point, we are going to handle some questions that have come through. I will start out with a few kind of general ones and, you know, looks like we've got ten minutes or so to do this.
00:47:33
There were several questions that came across around the cost and whether or not... I think there was some confusion as to whether this was part of other Cidi Labs products or if this is a separate thing so, real quick, to that point, that UDOIT Cloud offering is a separate offering of ours. It is distinct from DesignPlus which is a product that many of you are using of ours.
00:48:01
There is an additional cost involved to license UDOIT Cloud. If you're already a subscriber to our UDOIT Cloud Service there will not be any extra cost for this version that we're releasing now So the the the pricing will be, you know, in line with whatever your price has been up to this point. In the future, as we add more capabilities where we have to incur costs
00:48:35
to provide them, for example document scanning often relies on proprietary third-party libraries in order to perform those functions, you know, we're going to have to incur costs in order to add some of those kinds of features down the road. As those future roadmap items become present and available to them, we will likely end up having, you know, sort of a basic version
00:49:01
that will kind of keep the cost structure similar to what you you're experiencing today and then some of those more advanced features will probably be included in a more update, you know, more advanced version of the product that will have a higher price point. Related to that, there are a number of questions that have come in around how does this compare to Blackboard Ally.
00:49:28
If you think about it Blackboard, UDOIT, what you saw here in the UDOIT demonstration UDOIT really came at the accessibility problem within Canvas from the HTML side, so scanning pages for errors and issues related to the html that sits on a Canvas page. Whereas, if you think back to the origins of, Blackboard Ally, its core strength was scanning files, the PDFs and Word
00:49:57
documents, those kinds of things, and alerting, you know, automating the process of having access to different file types and and alternative formats and so forth. They kind of came at the problem from a different angle and some of you have remarked here in the questions that, you know, it appears that we're trying to kind of close that feature functional gap. The
00:50:24
short answer is yes, we are. You know, we see that as an opportunity for us to, you know, to add some of those capabilities that are more file oriented, where Ally has its strength. At the same time the Ally road map, I know, is focusing more and more on scanning for html issues on the page as well. So both products are sort of working to that, you know, that spectrum of capabilities, if you will. I think
00:50:52
that our approach will be a little bit different than Blackboard in the sense that we probably won't ever get into the mode where we're just programmatically automatically having this stuff happen in the background. I know with Blackboard they with the Ally tool there's scanning going on and the presenting of alternate formats as links available on each file in the system. Our approach
00:51:21
will probably be to empower faculty or course designers with the ability to kind of make some more decisions around which files actually need remediation which files need alternative formats which errors and so forth to focus on as far as the HTML on the page. We do have quite a cost advantage to Ally. We're significantly cheaper than Ally today. We anticipate maintaining a you know cost advantage even as we close the gap with
00:51:56
regard to adding file scanning and some of those more advanced capabilities that will make the tool a little bit more competitive with what you experience with Ally today. There was a question... So hopefully that addresses kind of how we're positioned vis-à-vis Blackboard Ally in the marketplace. It's a great tool. You know, Ally's great. If you want the Cadillac solution then, you know, by all means, you know, go get it. It works very well, but we do feel like there's a more
00:52:28
price conscious alternative that we can continue to evolve and offer to the market. There was another comment, some questions, about open source. Many of you know that the original version, there's still a version available open source that University of Central Florida maintains. There were questions about version you know 2.7, 2.8, which is what our current
00:53:00
Cloud offering is based off of, we're in the process of pushing this code into the open source repository. For the usability updates, so the UI screens and the usability that we presented today, those will all be available in the open source repository version 3.0. Where you'll see some divergence with our Cloud offering and the open source code base down
00:53:27
the road is, as we start adding in external services that are integrating with that API layer that's new. So the big difference is that the code base is different for version 3 versus previous versions. We've even made some enhancements to the underlying Ally or what's it called PHP Ally which is the engine that's running the scans and actually
00:53:55
doing the accessibility checks in the background. We've made some additions there that have been pushed into the open source as well, but the big difference is between earlier 2.X versions and 3.0 is the underlying code base, the architecture one, and then the usability the new user experience both of which will be pushed into open source 3.0. Again, where we'll diverge those as we
00:54:25
add file scanning or additional support for you know video platforms and those kinds of things. Our strategy is to have those be part of that product offering where we can recoup some of the additional costs for the investment that we're making in tying up the tool with those external services. Hopefully that makes sense. There's still more details that we will work out
00:54:54
in the future and communicate, but for those of you who are currently running you know the Cloud version from us today, you'll go through the update process. But as far as the licensing, you know, your current license will cover this initial set of features that we're releasing today.
00:55:20
Chuck or Jacob is there anything you would like to add? Hopefully I characterize the you know the differences or you know contrasting the open source project with the work we've done here. Hopefully I've characterized that properly. Is there anything you would like to add? Jacob Bates: Yeah just really quickly, I did answer this in the Q&A but we will be continuing to develop UDOIT as an open source tool and like Mike said there may be some features that Cidi Labs
00:55:56
wants to add as something that's just for their customers but the core product will still continue as an open source project and we are looking to get more people involved in the open source development of it and because you know if you have any developers that could contribute to
00:56:19
it we can make the open source, well, we can make the whole tool better for everyone so that's it. Chuck Crandall: That's great! Excellent. Thank you! I don't have anything to add to that. Mike Zackrison: Alright, there have been a couple of questions related to how UDOIT compares to the accessibility checker that's built into Canvas or the accessibility checking capabilities that
00:56:46
are built into DesignPlus. Both the accessibility checker in Canvas and DesignPlus, those are page level checkers. Those are tools that operate on an individual page and surface issues on that page. The advantage of UDOIT Cloud or UDOIT, in general, is that it's a course level check and, as you can see, as we add the the additional administrative features on top of that it's, you
00:57:15
know, down the road, it'll become more and more of a an account level check if you need to, you know, run checks across the entire account. That was a big driver for why we at Cidi Labs wanted to partner with UCF to bring UDOIT into our portfolio as a Cloud offering because we did see the advantage for our clients to, you know, have the tool, a tool that runs
00:57:43
at the course level. We saw an advantage of, you know, being able to kind of move up that checking activity to the course level as opposed to having to go page by page through your Canvas courses in order to remediate those issues as they come up. Hopefully that answers that question. Let me just scan real quick here. We're quickly running out time. Jennifer, maybe...
00:58:09
Jennifer Malkovich: While you're scanning for other themes or questions, I noticed there were a few around and Kristina mentioned large courses with lots and lots of files in them. I'll go ahead and put in a little plug for TidyUP which is a separate product that Mike mentioned at the beginning but we know that some of our customers actually use TidyUP very successfully in conjunction with UDOIT. So they will run a TidyUP scan and identify unused files in the course
00:58:42
or antiquated files. I remember the University of Minnesota sharing stories with us about you know after you've upgraded from different LMS the clutter really builds up, right? We all are familiar with that problem. So TidyUP is a great way to really clean out the course and much of the content so that you're only scanning for accessibility issues, the content that's really
00:59:11
relevant and in use in the course, and making that scan faster but also the job of addressing issues and sorting through everything much much easier. Mike Zackrison: Excellent, thank you Jennifer. There were also a number of questions, from existing users, related to how some specific behavior from the current tool may or may not carry forward in the new tool. So if you have some you know some of those specific questions that we
00:59:45
didn't get to today, feel free to submit a support ticket to us and/or you know request a quick demo and we're happy to do a personalized demo with you and give you a little bit more insight into some of the things that have changed. Going forward, like that whole concept of scanning a course in the current tool you have to go in, open the tool, click scan, it runs a full scan of all the content
01:00:12
in the course, changing to an incremental scan model really kind of changes that whole scanning behavior. Not only does it speed it up but it also you know make sure that you're not revisiting errors and issues over and over again that you may have previously addressed. So yeah, if we didn't answer fully some of those types of questions I encourage you again to reach out to us and we're happy to give you more detail about how it works. I think with that
01:00:44
we're at the top of the hour so I want to respect everyone's time. Thank you again for taking an hour out of your day to join us today and I hope what you have seen is exciting and we're really happy to be able to offer this new version to the market and just reach out and let us know if there are any additional steps that we can do to kind of improve your journey through accessibility as
01:01:15
you're putting plans together to tackle that at each of your institutions. So again, thanks for your time and thank you for our guest speakers who joined us today. We will talk to you again soon. Thanks everyone.
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