In accordance with the Website CMS User Policy, as of May 1, no new documents (or replacing documents) can be added to the website unless they have been remediated by the vendor. You will find our recommendations to Manage Documents on the Website Help Hub.

May 1, 2024  | Any new document (including PDF, Excel, Word docs, etc.) must be remediated before it can be posted on a Drupal website.

October 1, 2024 | All existing documents must be reviewed and a decision for action made.

May 1, 2025 | Any document linked from ohio.edu must be remediated or it will be removed from the website until it is in compliance.

Many colleges and offices have documents stored in the OHIO Website SharePoint folder for linking from the web. These documents need to be reviewed to ensure only needed/relevant documents are stored here. This Sharepoint library is not to be used for document storage and should be reserved to house documents linked to from the ohio.edu website.

Please review the SharePoint PDFs spreadsheet for your office. In the Action column, designate if the document will be deleted, made into a webpage, or remediated. Note that the OHIO Website folders are only for active documents linked from the web. Any documents stored for historical or internal use, should be stored in your department’s SharePoint library (not OHIO Website library).

If you need to remediate a PDF, make sure it is created following the Accessible Document Guidelines, and then complete the UCM Request for document remediation by our third party vendor.

This summer, the Digital Accessibility office will provide a report of all PDFs that are referenced on the website (mostly stored in Drupal) as part of the PDF Purge. The PDF Purge is a joint effort between OIT's Digital Accessibility office and the UCM Web Team to provide support and a structured approach to completing the various phases of document accessibility by the required deadlines outlined above. There may be some overlap with the files you have in SharePoint, but it is important to check both reports to make sure all documents are accounted for.  

As a reminder, we recommend that editors use either Microsoft Forms or Qualtrics forms for their digital forms. Please consider these form types as a way to digitize any document forms you currently have on your site. OIT supports both types of forms, and all OHIO employees can create and manage their own forms. The form creator has control over editing the form and managing submissions. OIT has provided a tool comparison and training resources for each. (If a form must stay on the web as a PDF, then it needs to be created as a fillable form and remediated for accessibility.)

As you may know, our Learning Management System (LMS) is transitioning from Blackboard to Canvas. We have partnered with OIT to ensure that website references to Blackboard are updated in conjunction with the phased implementation. We are asking site editors to check website references to Blackboard and evaluate whether and when they should be changed to Canvas, as each instance is nuanced. You can see the timeline for this transition in each college/department on OIT's website. If you are unsure whether a reference should be updated or not, please contact your Dean's Office or departmental chair. We will be sending out reminders and updated audits each semester in this newsletter.

In looking through this audit, please evaluate whether the reference to the LMS is truly necessary on the webpage at all. As a reminder, links to both Blackboard and Canvas are in the top green bar across the entire ohio.edu site, under "Quick Links."

OIT’s Digital Accessibility team invites you all to attend the next OHIO-DAN meeting on Thursday, June 27th at 4 pm EST. The meeting will include a report on the document accessibility grant project, a brief discussion on the new DOJ ruling under the ADA, information about the WebCMS User Policy, and kickoff this year's PDF Purge.

To help you meet the October 1, 2024, deadline to make a decision about the documents on your site, each web manager and their teams will be receiving information about the PDF Purge. We highly encourage you all to attend to learn more about how the digital accessibility team and UCM will be partnering to support all WebCMS users through this process. 

If you are not already a member of the OHIO-DAN, you can join the Teams channel and simply add the meeting to your calendar.