2020 ATHEN Annual Meeting Minutes

November 18, 2020 (Wednesday) 
Accessing Higher Ground Conference 
Virtual Meeting 
Minutes by Krista Greear  

Brought to order 12:15 pm Mountain by Dawn Hunziker, Executive Board President.  

Executive Council Members Attending 

  1. Dawn Hunziker, President 
  2. Krista Greear, Vice-President 
  3. David Schwarte, Treasurer 
  4. Shannon Lavey, Membership Coordinator 
  5. Wink Harner, Member at Large 

Ascertained a quorum of members in attendance. 

Membership Update – Shannon  

  • 2021 Dues update 
  • 51 Professional 
  • 25 Institutions with a total of 84 Institutional Members 
  • 3 Associates/Partners 
  • 1 student 
  • 5 new members signed up as part of the summer ATHEN Virtual Conference 
  • 16 new members signed up as part of AHG 

Treasurer Report – David  

Balance 

$32,820.08 as of October 31 2020 

Expenses include 

  • Virtual Conference: $380.00 
  • Quarterly Meetings: $237.00 
  • Scholarship and Professional Development Awards:  (Tabled for this year) 
  • Webhosting and Zoom client:  $693.14 
  • Full financial report available for those who want it 
  • Contact David at schwarte@purdue.edu     

Approval of 2019 minutes – Dalton/Dawn 

Dan Comden motion to approve minutes of 2019.  

Wink Harner seconded. 

Unanimous pass using Zoom’s raise hand feature 

Proceeding Year Activities 

Teresa Haven Scholarship Award – Michele 

  • The Teresa Haven Scholarship Award is an academic scholarship for a student with a disability. 
  • The $1,000 Teresa Haven Scholarship was awarded to a student from Wichita State University. 
  • Thank you to Sean Kugler, RaLynn McGuire, Janet Fukuda, Sushil Oswal, and Cindy Poore-Pariseau for volunteering to participate as members of the 2020 Teresa Haven Scholarship Selection Committee. 
  • We will ask for volunteers for the 2021 selection committee via the listserv sometime around January 2021. 
  • We will begin accepting nominations sometime around February 2021. 

Ron Stewart Professional Development – Dawn  

  • A professional development award to cover a 1-yr membership to ATHEN, hotel and conference costs for AHG, free of charge, to someone who has never attended AHG and who is working in higher education in accessibility.  
  • Award postponed for 2020 due to uncertainty on AHG conference venue and COVID-19. 
  • Nominations will open around August 2021. 

Quarterly Meetings – Dawn  

  • During 2019 ATHEN Membership meeting, decided to hold meetings more often. Set up Quarterly meetings 
  • Meetings held April, May (COVID follow-up) and June. 
  • Attendance  
  • First quarter 2021 meeting topic – discuss ATHEN/Vendor collaboration discussions
    • Hold the date January 27, April 28, July 28 – all meetings to be held at 2:00 PM Eastern
      • Executive Council will send out email invite 
    • November – Annual meeting at AHG. 
  • General effectiveness?
    • Suggestion to send a survey or google poll for that response Krista. anonymous to with option to include name 

ATHEN Virtual Conference – Humans behind the Tech. – Krista 

  • Occurred in June 2020.  
  • Was free for ATHEN members, did garner some new memberships 
  • Used ATHEN Zoom account.  
  • Had a captioner available for live captioning.  
  • Averaged about 20 participants per session. 3 sessions. 45 mins presentation plus 15-min questions.  
  • Special thanks to:
    • Darren Gabbert – Single Switch Scanning: Strategies, Outcomes and Keys to Success 
    • Robert Beach – Screen reader vs text reader 
    • Wink Harner – How voice recognition software changed my life. 
  • Please share recommended/favorite sessions from AHG 2020 with athenpresident@gmail.com. 

Election Results – Krista 

  • Election results
    • President – Dawn Hunziker 
    • Secretary – Michele Bromley 
    • Member at Large – Wink Harner 
  • Special Election: Member-at-large
    • Due to Michele’s vacancy 
    • Last for 1-year term 
    • Responsibilities are often focused around the Scholarship and Professional Dev Award.  
    • Send a message to athenpresident@gmail.com indicating your interest.  
    • Please include a short bio 

New Business 

Listserv 

We are migrating to a new listserv service. What information do we want to share here? 

  • Terrell: UW is changing their archive process to only 1 year instead of all years
    • Archives are highly used so we want to retain archives 
    • Executive Council would like to keep the listserv more close to ATHEN 
  • Looking to host list via AHEAD
    • Use pretty much the same version of Mailman 
  • Move date! 
  • Going to move archives from old list to the new list 
  • Tues, Nov 24th 
  • Impact to ATHEN list subscribers
    • Slightly different email address
      • May want to check your filters / mail rules after Nov 24th 
    • Executive Council will move you to the new list for you 
    • You will get reminders via the ATHEN list 
  • Cost?
    • $0.00 due to the generosity of AHEAD 
  • Parameters of the new list
    • Same as old – no web based interaction, stay as an email distribution list 
    • Can’t send attachments
      • Comment: Should be no reason to send attachments when everyone has a place to share via cloud storage and the like 
    • Vendors are still not allowed to post / spam 
  • Limitations?
    • Question: Institutional members will still be able to have as many folks on the list as they want?  As I understand it, AHEAD limits the numbers on the listserv 
    • Free, open to all 
    • No membership required 
    • No limits 

Bylaws 

  • Voting will begin Monday, 11/23.  
  • We need 2/3 quorum to pass this vote 
  • Major changes include
    • More gender-neutral language 
    • Updating membership status with minor clarifications 
    • Added Emeritus status 

Other topics  

Publish 

  • Suggestion: would like to see us do more white papers.  Publish or perish!
    • Wanted to have this type of conversation at January annual meeting (i.e. how do we do work that we feel comfortable publishing under ATHEN’s name or putting ATHEN’s name on something? Publishing? Vendor Collaboration? Is this valuable for membership?) 
    • Lots of discussions about this at AHG 2019 
    • Barrier: not clear standards and thresholds for testing and viewing these tools, not a way to assess skill level of a tester, what certification requirements would be needed?
      • Comment/Question: Could we also come up with a common testing template? Perhaps that would be helpful 
      • Comment: Procurement is a major issue for so many campuses. While the challenges are real, there are ways to overcome them.  There are also a number of other organizations interested in helping including the OCR. 
    • Barrier: how to store and share this information about testing results 

January Meeting 

  • Testing
    • See notes above 
  • Vendor Collaboration
    • Groups of individuals at or across universities have ongoing relationships with vendors, giving feedback on accessibility of software 
    • When and where to use the ATHEN name? 
    • Comment: If we can leverage the buying power of the entire higher education vertical, it will push vendors to address accessibility issues. 
    • Comment: maybe have a representative determined by ATHEN to represent ATHEN in these conversations 

Supporting New Members 

Meeting adjourned @3:15 Time Dawn Hunziker motioned to adjourn. David Swcharte seconded.