Tags:collective knowledge, digital accessibility, institutional change, open educational resource, project planning and stakeholders
Abstract:
Recently many of us have voiced concerns about updating our Electronic Thesis Dissertation Administrator (ETDA) practices to support digital accessibility mandates. Responding to a need for more clarity, planning, and direction, this virtual roundtable session aims to combine our collective knowledge and ingenuity towards practical guidance for our community. Iowa State University is a publicly funded land-grant university responsible for making its research available and accessible to the public. Its digital accessibility policy will be in full effect by July 1, 2026. This policy has implications for the Thesis and Dissertation Writing Program (TDWP) run by the Center for Communication Excellence (CCE), housed within the Graduate College. To ensure that our TDWP will be prepared for the policy, we have begun documenting our journey in an Open Educational Resource (OER). In this session, we will share a list of questions related to resources, auditing, stakeholders, and other issues. We will also share strategies and resources in place as well as tentative ones. We invite our USETDA partners to join our discussion to add to our list and focus on strategies for small, medium, and large universities and divisions of responsibility. Our goal is to create and share an OER that can provide ETDAs with a tool kit of strategies for marshalling expertise and determining needs and responsibilities for relevant stakeholders. The shared vision and ideas from this session will make the OER into a versatile roadmap to digital accessibility for theses and dissertations.
Rallying A11Y Stakeholders: Digital Accessibility Project Planning Roundtable Session