CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Recording is in progress. 

VICKI WALTON: Cool. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Good mornings. 

VICKI WALTON: Hello, Michael. 

MICHAEL: Good morning. 

VICKI WALTON: Nice to see you. 

MICHAEL: Yes. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: It's Aaron. Nice to see you. 

AARON: Good to see you, Chris. How are you doing? How's everybody doing today? 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Doing good. Yeah. Give people a minute or two to get in and get rolling. 

All right. We'll see you after, so we'll get going today. Got a little bit of crew, but I appreciate everybody who showed up. Thanks for your time. So I'm Christopher Soran, application support manager here at the State Board, and we're presenting on accessibility and CTC link here in March, so I've got the latest updates for you. 

So stuff on HCX, just some accessibility testing tools, and some HCM updates. All right. So for HCX our HighPoint Campus Experience , that's the mobile app, as well as the mobile web version. 

So HighPoint, the company that makes the product, they've hired the Perkins School for the Blind to do an accessibility audit, and they're hoping to have that done by the end of March, so we'll see. That's a quick turnaround. 

They just got hired on beginning of March, so we'll see if they get done in time, but I'm sure it'll get done shortly after. So I'm looking forward to seeing their testing results and their audit. 

There was four items that they supported with exceptions previously in their VPAT. So after this process, they'll have an updated VPAT and they should fully support it now. Those four they said they fixed. So and we'll be looking to deploy that version that they're auditing in October. 

So we'll be kicking off that update process in June, but it's a fairly lengthy process to get it through, get things updated and diploid and tested and all that. So we'll be kicking that off here, not too long from now. Any questions on that one? 

All right. So recently, there was a few of us here at the State Board. We did a trial, like a three week trial, the Axe DevTools Pro, and it has some nice features with intelligent guided tests for like tables and keyboards and interactive elements, scanning pages and such. 

And we also-- so we're going to continue to explore tools, see we can figure out which is the best ones. We also use other tools like ANDI and WAVE, and I was just exploring the Microsoft accessibility-- what's that one called? The Accessibility Insights for web, which is-- it's actually built on Axe DevTools, the free version, but it looks like they expanded on it. 

I was exploring some cool stuff with tab stops and maps it out. And so we're going to continue to explore some other tools and see which ones might help our being our tool kit for when we're doing testing for accessibility pages. So if you have any recommendations for ones that work great for you, I'd love to hear any feedback. 

VICKI WALTON: Chris, this is Vicki. I just wanted to expand on this a little bit. With this same group we also did a trial version of the TPG ice ARC Toolkit so that we could compare what tools our developers might like to use. 

So we've had a little bit of a start of tools that we can use to help expedite accessibility in the development, but some of our testers they are familiar with the WAVE tool, ANDI tool, and then those other things that are already in our browser. 

So we're just trying to expand the tools available for our developers so that they don't have to spend so much time in the meat of everything where these tools might be able to help with their development and coding. So that's all I wanted to add. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Thanks. Yeah, we're certainly not going to send out any code that has accessibility violations, but a chunk of the work we do is just working with the vendors, finding the violations, letting them know about it, so these tools help us identify all those issues so we can get all the details over to whatever vendor is going as the problem going on and getting that in a ticket and working with them to get it fixed. And we can always dig into the code and find the problem, but these things save us some time. 

All right. So we got some updates in human capital management. So on the time pages, there's a focus issue. So when you're in the calendar which just popped up, when you're hitting previous or next, you're expect to stick in the calendar widget, but the focus goes back to the banner when you go previous or next. So you got to circle all the way through to get back into the calendar widget and that's a clear focus issue. 

And so we've got a provisional fix, Oracle that we're testing out. Make sure that that's a good experience when you're on any of those time pages and with the W-2 PDF, which is accessible this year, which is just absolutely fantastic, we found one tiny thing. When you're in the cell header for Box 13, it reads out colon Y. 

So we got a service request with Oracle on that, but the fact that you can actually read through the PDF with JAWS or NVDA is years long in the making to get fixed. 

So this is the first tax year, where people will be able to have that available to them, and so I'm pretty excited about that. You can always still go to the web version to get that same information as well, and until this tax year, it's just been just absolutely useless image-based PDF. So that has been fixed. 

And then we had opened a feature request with Oracle to have them add in-- they added in a feature in the last HCM update to allow you to have configurable headers, but the configurable headers didn't have any labels and no option for labels. 

And so they accepted our enhancement request, and they saw a little demo of it that Oracle has a quarterly accessibility HCM meeting, and they had that like a week or two ago, and they showed off how they set it up. 

So you can go into the settings and add in the labels and it looks like a fairly straightforward process. So we might be able to leverage the configurable headers in in some more ways like going to click on some of the time pages and things like that to improve the accessibility on those pages, but we weren't going to go ahead with using that feature until they had resolved all the issues with it. 

I was glad that they accepted it and they're working on it, and things look good in the demo they showed. So it sounds like they're aiming to have it available in HCM Image 49, so hopefully development stays on track and they can get it out without having to delay it to 50, but we'll see. We'll get some updates as we learn more. 

And that's all the updates for this month. It's a kind of a fairly quick one, so feel free to submit ideas for future meetings in our online submission form. Check out our web page, and we got VPATs and image documents there, all the accessibility updates like when I talked about HCM Image 49 when we go to do that update or when we go to the latest or HighPoint Campus experience version. 

We'll be posting those-- all the new accessibility features that are coming in those updates on this ctcLink Accessibility web page, so you can always go check out all the previous ones. 

And we've got our next meeting come April 9, same day of the week, same time. Anybody have any questions or have you heard from anybody that are experiencing any screen reader or some text issues or anything going on with CTC? We'd love to-- they can do it and get it fixed. 

Yes. No news is good news, right? 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Good. Just. sit in the uncomfortable silence for a little bit. Anybody have anything? No. So yeah, we're just keeping on making sure these vendors are giving us good stuff. 

VICKI WALTON: Absolutely. We appreciate all you do with the CTC Link and Oracle, so two thumbs up for you guys. 

AARON: Especially with the HCM 49 and headers issue, Hadman, Christopher, they went through the gauntlet to get that one through. So especially Padma, she did a lot of work on-- a lot of heavy lifting on that. 

VICKI WALTON: Yay, Padma. 

PADMA: Thanks. Thank you. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: She did, Yeah, oh, my goodness. It was back and forth, and back and forth in that SR for months. They wanted more information, and then finally they came around to say that they weren't going to do anything. And so that was a moment. I was left frustrated, but they said, well, if you submit an enhancement request, we'll think about it. 

VICKI WALTON: Wow. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: We'll do that. So we went out and we got the votes, and they accepted it. So I'm glad they accepted it. It's a little frustrating to have put us through the gauntlet on that, and I appreciate Padma for sticking with it. But I got patience. So if they want to play the long game, I ain't going anywhere. 

VICKI WALTON: Good for you. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: We'll get the fixes. They won't hear the end from me. 

VICKI WALTON: Aaron posted a comment in the chat. Thank you, Chris, for always advocating for accessibility. Appreciate all you do. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Oh, thanks, Aaron. Appreciate you. 

VICKI WALTON: Just in time for us to close the meeting. 

CHRISTOPHER SORAN: Sounds good. Well, I hope everybody has a great week. Appreciate you coming. Thanks for your time. 

PADMA: Thank you all. 

AARON: Take care. Thank you. 

ROSALIE MADISON: Thank you. 

VICKI WALTON: Thank you.