Allied for A11y: The Campus, System, Vendor Partnership Good morning. Our presentation is “Allied for Accessibility, The Campus, System, Vendor Partnership.” April 17, 2018

University Information Systems Brad Baker Assistant Director Student System Development University of Colorado System Art Figel Assistant Director of Student Systems Chris Toomer Assistant Director Enterprise Portal and Mobile Applications My name is Art Figel. With me are my colleagues, Brad Baker and Chris Toomer. We work for University Information Systems which is the IT department for the University of Colorado System. UIS supports enterprise-wide applications in use across our four campuses.

About the University of Colorado System CU is a four campus system with Boulder, Colorado Springs, Denver and Anschutz Medical Campus Boulder, 33,000+ students Denver, 15,000+ students Colorado Springs, 12,000+ students Anschutz Medical Campus, 4,000+ students Nearly 32,000 faculty and staff Some quick information about the University of Colorado System… Kosta had 35,000 employees in his slide, which may include student employees

Overview Partners Facet Review Case Studies Questions & Answers GreyHeller PeopleMobile (GHPM) Fluid CU Resources Questions & Answers Here’s a quick overview of what we’ll be covering at a high level. Partners, who are the parties that we’re talking about Facet Review, what are the factors that are considered during software development and implementation Case Studies, we’ll go into two current examples of our evolving partnership and processes Lastly, we’ll have time for Q&A at the end

Partners CU System – University Information Systems (UIS) UIS maintains and supports system-wide enterprise applications CU Boulder – Office of Information Technology (OIT) OIT maintains and supports campus applications Accessibility and Usability Lab (AUL) provides testing and evaluation of IT solutions for usability and accessibility Vendors (example cases) GreyHeller Oracle System Boulder Vendors Laura talked about the importance of talking about accessibility with vendors and stressing the importance with them. I couldn’t agree more. I want to add that it’s also important to talk with your internal partners and stakeholders. Some of you know the recent history and catalysts for advances CU has made in accessibility in the last 4—5 years. Even prior to that…

Facets at UIS Quality Assurance Browser Compatibility System Stability Navigability Usability Accessibility QA – how we start with requirements, design, testing (automated, UAT) Browser Compatibility – validating applications on different platforms System Stability – load testing, system monitoring Navigability – from a user perspective Usability – looking at the user interface design Accessibility – one thing that we’ve become increasingly aware of is the ongoing maintenance cost and risk of not doing the work up front

Partnership and Facets: UIS and UCB Examples Browser Compatibility: UIS/UCB shared BrowserStack licenses System Stability: UIS/UCB shared Silk Performer instance Usability: Partnering with UCB UX staff Accessibility: Partnering with UCB AUL Some quick examples of where UIS and CU Boulder partner on some of these facets. Browser Compatibility – share BrowserStack licenses System Stability – share Silk Performer Usability – partnering with UCB UX staff Accessibility – AUL

Partnership and Facets: Vendors Examples Vendors: GreyHeller Active partnership, changes to base code Customize as necessary Oracle Implement delivered, certified products GreyHeller – Active partnership – smaller vendor, quick turnaround on changes to base code Customize as necessary, which we can do without affecting the base code because of the nature of the software Oracle – Implement certified products as delivered, customize as necessary, care needs to be taken to preserve customizations during patches and upgrades I’d like to call out a difference between these vendors and the one that Laura talked about, Canvas. GreyHeller are on-premise solutions – we license the software and host it on our own servers. Canvas is a SaaS (software as a service solution). With the on-prem applcations we generally have more control over when we deploy updates. With the Saas…

Case Study: GreyHeller PeopleMobile PeopleMobile is an add-on for Campus Solutions (CU- SIS) to transform content, improving accessibility and responsiveness It is a configurable, real-time transformation that allows large scale changes to PeopleSoft web pages Seven month project to deploy PeopleMobile, including GreyHeller (vendor) work with transformation logic The “classic” Campus Solutions interface for student self-service had many significant accessibility challenges. PeopleMobile provides a layer to adjust this content in real-time, in part using jQuery Worked with GreyHeller on a proof of concept before the project, evaluating the feasibility and pre-testing accessibility improvements The result is generally much better, responsive and usable, but not perfect

Case Study: GreyHeller PeopleMobile, continued GreyHeller, the vendor, provided browser accessibility testing that showed significant issue reduction AUL provided in-depth user testing that exposed additional issues, some were severe The dual testing layer gave us information needed to resolve usability problems with the vendor Use of the JAWS screen reader was important for development teams 70-100% reduction in violations depending on the testing tool (aXe, Ainspector) and page Iterating on problems identified by AUL with JAWS or NVDA was important to implement solutions – this experience showed the vendor’s JAWS testing was insufficient 49 pages of test results (CS9.2 upgrade), ongoing process to remediate these items after CS9.2 Performance is another concern that’s taken significant time – jQuery transform can slow the system

GreyHeller Peoplemobile at CU Several teams were involved in the project, including: CU-SIS domain experts, developers, Accessibility/Usability Lab and GreyHeller Project success as a combination of AUL, Vendor (GreyHeller), and CU-SIS domain experts, and developers Domain experts provided functional validation, GreyHeller and CU-SIS Developers adjust the configuration layer to mitigate identified issues, AUL provided detailed testing feedback for areas to focus on

Student Center Tiles Student center content grouped into tiles by topic The original layout was an unorganized collection of tables with links, and several cases of position based organization After the transformation, links and content are organized into contextual tiles that simplifies navigation

Case Study: New CU Resources CURFES: CU Resources Fluidization and Elastic Search Created Steering Committee / Stakeholder Group Campuses, Employee Services, UIS Created Technical Working Group Campus Technologists, ES Product Owners, UIS Technologists Agile-like SDLC UIS Developers now learning Assistive Technologies UIS – AUL partnership is helping UIS improve our deliverables Agile-like SDLC – Development, Stakeholder Review and Feedback, Technical Working Group Review and Prioritize, Repeat

CU Resources Example Navigability, replaced quick links with tiles and one-click access to tools people use the most

UIS Skills/Process Improvements JAWS license (purchased) NVDA (free) Development standards and processes Professional Development/Training Accessibility for web development Request for FY19 UX training and Conference Requests for FY19 Conference attendance AHG, HEUG/Alliance, Collaborate, OpenWorld, others

Questions? Contact Information Brad Baker: brad.baker@cu.edu Art Figel: art.figel@cu.edu Chris Toomer: chris.toomer@cu.edu