Introduction
Hello and welcome to PEAT Talks, the virtual speaker series from the Partnership on Employment and Accessible Technology. On the third Thursday of every month, PEAT Talks showcases various organizations and individuals whose work and innovations are advancing accessible technology in the workplace. My name is Corinne Weible. I'm the Deputy Director for PEATS, and I'll be hosting today's talk.
Before we get started, I'm going to quickly review a few logistics. We will have time for questions and answers, so please enter your questions in the Chat window at any time. You can also use the Chat window if you are having any technical difficulties, and we will do our best to resolve any issues. You can download the presentation on www.PEATworks.org and an archived recording will be posted online following today's event. We will be live tweeting today's event from @PEATworks, so please feel free to join us and follow along using the hashtag PEATTalks.
PEAT is pleased to welcome three speakers today from Oracle who will be discussing the challenges and successes their team has experienced in making Oracles popular Taleo Talent Management System more accessible. They will also share details about some of the accessibility features that are currently in production.
Peter Wallack directs the Accessibility Program at Oracle. His team designs the Accessibility Guidelines for all Oracles products to follow; and he works with UX designers, developers, documentation writers, sales, consultants, education, and support groups to incorporate those standards into their processes. Peter has been with Oracle since 1989.
Ali Moosvi is Director of Product Management for the Oracle Talent Acquisition Cloud. He leads planning and investments across the Oracle Talent Acquisition Cloud suite of products.
Priyanka Jampana is an Accessibility Test Engineer at Oracle's Accessibility Program Office. She helps product teams across Oracle with accessibility testing, guidance, and training on both Web and mobile platforms.
It's worth noting that Taleo is leading Talent Management System used by HR professionals worldwide, and PEAT is delighted that Peter, Ali, and Priyanka are here to tell us about the details of their accessibility efforts. With that, I'll turn it over to Peter.
Great, thank you so much, Corinne; and thank you for inviting us to do this presentation. This is actually the second time I've been involved with the presentation. Working with PEAT has been a wonderful experience, not just because the name is similar to mine, Peter; but I think all the resources that you are providing and the presentations that you guys have been doing at events like CSUN have been just extremely informative.
Thanks so much and likewise.
Just so other people on the phone know, we're sort of doing this in a remote control mode because we are geographically dispersed as we present this. So I'm going to be saying, "Next slide, please," and it's not because of voice activation; but it's because, I think, Corinne is going to be advancing the slides for us. With that in mind, we are going to be specifically talking about the Oracle Talent Acquisition Cloud product today.
Next slide, please.
Very quickly, we'll do another quick round of who we are; and then we'll talk about Oracle's high-level approach towards accessibility. Then, really, the genesis for this whole thing was PEAT's findings, a CSUN presentation that Corinne and others did back in 2015; so we've got some material from that. Then Ali will talk about the product itself, Talent Acquisition Cloud; and we'll review the evolution of steps that we did to make it accessible. A quick section about responsibilities of other people outside of Oracle, and then we'll get on to the highlight of the show, which is actually going to be Priyanka doing a demo of the product with the JAWS screen reader.
Next slide, please.
We can go over that one. I think we got an introduction ahead of time; but again, my name is Peter Wallack, and I run the Accessibility Program. Just so you can hear everyone's voice right now, Ali, can you introduce yourself?
Hi, I'm Ali Moosvi, Director of Product Management for the Talent Acquisition Cloud.
Great, and Priyaka?
Hello, I'm Priyanka Jampana, Accessibility Test Engineer at Oracle; and I work for Peter.
Great, okay, next slide, please.
Presentation
So a quick introduction to Oracle — if you're not familiar with us, we offer a comprehensive and fully integrated stack of cloud applications, platform services, and engineered systems. We like to deal in acronyms, so some of the common acronyms for our products would be: SAAS, S-A-A-S, Software as a System; or IAAS for Infrastructure as a System; or PAAS, Platform as a System — these very large cloud applications that are running enterprise class systems.
We currently have 420,000 customers in 145 countries. All of the Fortune 100 use our product. Oracle happens to be number 82 on that list of the Fortune 100s. I believe every U.S. Federal agency runs our products; so we are basically in every large organization that's running some Oracle product, including the top agencies in aerospace and defense, automotive, engineering, construction – pretty much every industry – public sector, high tech. We're kind of No. 1 in the vast majority of those.
An important aspect of this is that we run our own products. We build HR systems. We build Talent Management Systems, Talent Recruiting Systems, Payroll Systems. So we run all of those systems that we sell; we run them internally at Oracle. This is quite important because it's a secondary need for why we need to make them accessible, so that we can have employees with disabilities able to successfully do their own jobs.
With that in mind, next slide, please.
Our CEO, Safra Catz, has committed to making our products accessible. Let me read this whole slide: "Oracle is committed to creating accessible technologies and products that enhance the overall workplace environment and contribute to the productivity of our employees, our customers, and our customers' customers."
So she recognizes the full impact not just on the sales side of Oracle selling to our customer, but also that customer in turn deploying the product to their customer and Oracle using the product itself. So all three facets of this by making our products accessible, we're increasing our ability to sell; the ability of our customer to sell and interact with people with disabilities; and our own ability to employ the best and brightest, regardless of whether they have a disability or not.
Next slide, please.
A quick introduction to our program – we view it as having five steps. To make a product accessible, you have to design it properly; develop it properly; do the proper documentation; test it; and finally, write a VPAT, which is a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. It's an industry standard way to report the degree of conformity.
So this is the ideal flow if you are starting a product from scratch. Most products don't really end up doing that though because often when we get involved with an acquisition, such as Taleo, they're already on Version No. 12 or 13 of the product. So it becomes a challenge when you can't redesign a product because it's already been established for a long period of time. We'll talk through some of that a little later about what we were able to do and the technologies we were able to use to enhance an existing product and bring it into this flow of making the whole thing accessible.
Next slide, please.
We work off of checklists, and we are very focused on international standards. Way back in 1999, we started looking at the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Version 1.0, known as WCAG 1.0. Then U.S. Section 508 came along, WCAG 2.0 came along and, most recently, in fact just three months ago, U.S. Section 508 was revised back in January. So as these international standards come out, we uptake them and we fold them into our corporate standards.
Of course we are now starting to look at the revised U.S. Section 508 standards, and all of our products develop a roadmap for when they can conform to the newest set of standards. That's not information that we can publicly disclose on a product-by-product basis; but the general notion is that every product, because of the desire from our CEO to have accessible products, they are all obligated to do this work as fast as is practical and slot it in with all the other requirements they have to do for their product.
Next slide, please.
Testing is probably the hardest part about accessibility. We do six different types of testing on all of our products. It starts with automated test tools. We built our own proprietary test tools to Firefox plug-ins. There were a variety of reasons we did that, mostly because we could make it aware of certain characteristics of our products.
So we start with automated tests, but that only covers a small amount of the standards. Then we move on to tool-assisted tests, where the tools will reveal certain information; and it's up to a trained accessibility expert to judge is that content good enough. Part of that would then involve visual inspection of the screen – for example, how is color being used – and then manual operation of the screen, mostly can you use it from a keyboard only.
Then we move on to assistive technology, and we do two types of testing there. A lot of testing is done by people who don't have a disability; but then we, of course, test the products with people who have disabilities. There's a lot of assistive technology we could test with; because we are very focused on standards, we believe that by meeting the standards it should allow us to interoperate with the broadest range of assistive technology. So in general, we focus our testing on screen readers, particularly JAWS on the Windows platform; and then, like on mobile platforms, we would do voiceover or talkback or whatever is appropriate.
Next slide, please.
Now we'll move on to the Talent Acquisition product itself. Again, this was mentioned earlier, the CSUN presentation that the PEAT folks did back in 2015 really had a very big impact on me. This is one of the slides they showed; and it talked about in the job application process, 46% of the people rated their last experience applying for a job online as difficult to impossible, and that was a shocking number to me. Of those, 9% were unable to complete the application and 24% required assistance. Of course these numbers were across all products, not just Taleo; but that really sunk in with me and said we've got to look at this and do a lot better.
Next slide, please.
The types of issues they were seeing are the types of issues that we always see. Navigation is too complex or it's not logical; there are timeout restrictions; if something had video, it didn't have captioning; no alternative text for images; poor screen contrast; inaccessible for fields – typically fields that either were not in the tabbing sequence or didn't have labels; and then mouse-only input, in other words, you couldn't use it from a keyboard only. So those are certainly not unique problems in the recruiting space; we see those as the top issues for any type of product.
As I said, this presentation really hit me hard. In fact, when I was in the room and it was being presented, I was afraid to even identify myself as being associated with Oracle. There were many of our customers in the room at the time. But what I did was immediately I came back from this; and I had a discussion with our Taleo folks, and I said, "Let's commit to fixing the product and presenting at the 2016 CSUN the fruits of our work. And we did that, so we'll be able to show some of that off here again.
Next slide, please.
Now I'm going to turn it over to Ali to talk about the product itself.
Great, thank you, Peter.
As Peter mentioned, our primary focus today is on the Talent Acquisition suite of products. So what I wanted to do is give a quick overview of our product set. When we look at the overall Talent Acquisition space and where Oracle sits within this space and we look at the Oracle Talent Acquisition Cloud, there are essentially three core modules as part of that.
At the top of the funnel, where we see the most interaction with our product, is essentially the product set that we call "sourcing." This is where candidates come in, interact with the site. They go through discover information about jobs, apply, and go through the application process. This is where the primary, the broadest set of users are essentially interacting with the product. Then once they've applied and get through some of the screening questions, the recruiting process kicks in where we actually start processing the candidates with the help of recruiters.
So recruiters go through and use the core recruiting system's APS capabilities like screening, interview scheduling, and moving them through the overall application workflow and eventually extending these candidates an offer.
Then down towards the bottom, the most narrow part of the funnel is onboarding. This is where once a candidate has been extended an offer, they become a new hire. What new hires need to do is get ready for Day 1. What our onboarding capabilities do is help these new hires complete the tasks that they need to, to get ready for Day 1.
Throughout this, we have a number of interactions with social sites; and we also have an analytics layer that supports the overall reporting capabilities of the products.
Then when we look at the Oracle Talent Acquisition Cloud in the broader context of the overall human capital management system, we're really at the tip of the spear, so where candidates first come in and then get converted to employees. Then they get imported over to the broader HCM Cloud for processing in areas such as global HR, workforce rewards, workforce management, and some of the work life capabilities.
One thing I do want to call out here is as I've talked about, we have interactions with external sites – social sites like LinkedIn, Facebook. So it's important to recognize that while we are focusing on building out an accessible candidate experience, we sit inside a broader ecosystem that also needs to become aware of these needs and also build with those requirements in mind.
Next slide, please.
So just to give everyone a quick idea of the evolution of the Talent Acquisition Cloud, Oracle acquired Taleo around 2012. This is around when we had about 700 customers. Up until now and continued, we've invested in the product in multiple areas, whether it's launching a new onboarding application, whether it's increasing some of the integration capabilities with our fusion suite, or building out some more candidate-basing capabilities with our sourcing products. As part of those investments, we also, back mid-2014, started our accessibility journey; and the key word here is "journey." As we continue to build out products and build out capabilities in our product sets, we're building with accessibility in mind. So our accessibility investments continue to today and beyond.
Next slide, please.
Just to give you a sense of where we sit in the overall marketplace, Oracle HCM Cloud is a cloud leader in the overall human capital management space. We have over 6,000 customers; 73% of the Fortune's 100 companies run the Oracle HCM applications; and 65% of core HR customers use the Taleo Talent Acquisition suite. We have incredible amounts of investment in our HCM Cloud, and we have millions of people using the overall HR capabilities and the Talent Acquisition capabilities of our set of human capital management products.
Next slide, please.
So just to educate everyone in the overall process that we follow for Oracle Talent Acquisition suite development and as it relates to accessibility, what we're really focused on first, while Peter has said that our overall charter is to make the extensive suite of products accessible, we're first starting our journey and we're focusing our initial investments on the candidate experience. This is because, again, this is the largest set of users that interact with the product; and this is where we need to make sure that candidates are able to apply and complete their application process in an accessible manner.
So as I said, the first focus is on the candidate and the tasks that candidates perform, as far as where accessibility investments are concentrated. Then as part of that, we're evaluating our set of capabilities that candidates perform against the WCAG 2.0 AA Guidelines. As Peter mentioned, with this in mind, we perform six types of testing. The first is what we would call – just to remind everyone – algorithmic testing, where we do some automated tests. Then there is a set of three tests that we do done by a human, so a tool-assisted test; a visual inspection test; and a manual operation test. Then we do some additional tests with assistive technology. We do that with a person who is disabled, as well as with people who are not disabled.
Then as part of the overall development process, we're making sure that we educate both QA and development on the importance of accessibility, the guidelines, how to test and code with accessibility. So we have numerous training sessions that are ongoing as people onboard into the company so that they become aware of these standards and are cognizant of these standards when they develop and code.
Then the overall process is to code/test, code/test, code/test. So it's a very iterative process to build out capabilities and test those capabilities with accessibility in mind.
Next slide, please.
As I mentioned, our accessibility investments are focused on the candidate experience; and this is, again, a journey for us. Up to now, just to provide everyone an update, some of our key accomplishments in our accessibility journey are making sure in the candidate experience that there is alternative text for images. We have meaningful headings. We have labels for the controls on the screens. We have instructions that don't rely just on a single sensory characteristic.
Additionally, some of our accomplishments include event notification for error handling using ARIA alerts. This is something we've received a lot of positive feedback around. We have also ensured that we have a logical tab order and the visual focus moves in a logical manner and there are no keyboard traps. Additionally, we have links to skip to the main content to help candidates process through the application flow a lot easier. Then, we've invested in making sure that we have a logical reading sequence so that a person who may not be able to see the screen is able to understand how the screen is laid out or the general flow of what is being presented on the screen. Then, as I mentioned, we have meaningful titles as well on pages.
Next slide, please.
I'll turn it over to Peter to talk a little bit about this.
Great, thanks, Ali.
I wish I could say that our products are perfect. They aren't. Of course, we try to make them perfect; but they are extremely large products, constantly changing, new features being added all the time. We are aware that there are some enhancements we'd still like to make. I've listed a couple of them here; in the interest of time, I'm not going to read all of them.
But just as one example, we still have situations where – and some of these are pretty technical – things that look like buttons that are actually links under the covers. While that may not seem like a huge problem, we recognize that it actually is. It can lead to unusual interactions between a sighted user and a blind user. For example, a sighted user says, "Press the button." The blind user brings up their list of buttons, and there are no buttons. And yet the sighted user says, "Clearly, there's a button; it looks like a button on the screen." So we are aware of that type of issue; and that's the type of thing over time we will absolutely address; but as Ali said, right now we're focused on the core tasks and making sure that a candidate can successfully complete the task and apply for the job.
We are very transparent about these current defects. I mentioned the VPATs earlier. We publish all of our VATS out on the Oracle.com/accessibility site. So you can go and see our current representations about the Taleo product or any Oracle product, and we will disclose the current known significant defects within those documents.
Next slide, please.
I'm going to switch back to Ali at this point.
Thank you, Peter.
One of the key things I do want to call out is that our product is incredibly configurable. The reason it's incredibly configurable is because it's meant to be used by customers of all shapes and sizes across geographies and across industries.
One of the things that comes with this configurability is that our customers need to be aware that they're making configuration decisions that are aligned with some of these accessibility guidelines. So when we talk about the candidate experience, there are a couple of key areas that customers need to be cognizant about in terms of how they actually configure the product. I'll go through these areas and some of the areas that they may impact.
One of the key areas that customers need to be aware of when they're configuring is the site branding. A lot of customers will receive our product, and then they'll need to configure that product to align with the overall look and feel of the corporate brand or the company brand. One of the things that site branding will impact is essentially the contrast and the look and feel. So we need to make sure that the site branding is done in a way that's aligned with the contrast ratios prescribed by the WCAG Accessibility Guidelines.
A similar story with themes – themes are another area where customers can configure the product to align with the overall corporate and company brand. When doing this type of configuration, customers need to, again, be aware that there are some accessibility implications based on some of the decisions they can make around color for links, color for text, and color for other elements on the screen.
Similarly, when we look at content, that's essentially the content that not only instructions that customers are providing or maybe customizing on their site for how to fill out the application, but also in the context of the job description. For example, customers need to make sure that they're creating job descriptions that are written in an accessible manner and don't rely on pictures, don't rely on other elements to tell the story or the requirements of the job. So a non-sighted user may be able to understand the spirit of the job and understand the spirit of the requirements without using the tools that they have at their disposal. So this is certainly something that customers need to be aware of – again, not only in the context of instructions for how to complete an application but, more importantly, the content of jobs that they're creating and posting.
Next is titles and labels; again, these are areas that customers need to be aware of how they're configuring the product. Labels and titles, by default we have them describing the overall sections of the product; but again, customers like to customize the language of these elements. As part of that, customers need to make sure that the language that they use is descriptive of the title of the page, the labels that are being used are descriptive of what elements they are next to. Again, there are multiple areas of accessibility that can be impacted in terms of making sure headings and labels are descriptive and making sure title are descriptive and making sure any links and that sort of thing that are being used in the product or in the application flow are descriptive of where they will lead the end user.
Next slide, please.
Peter, I'll turn it over to you; but I think we missed a slide.
Yeah, so one other thing I did want to mention is one of the things that we still see as a major gap in the whole solution here is that unfortunately we're still seeking a lot of users, particularly blind users, relying on screed readers who just aren't keeping up with the technology and the capabilities of screen readers. We, unfortunately, still encounter a lot of people who run a screen reader and press the tab key; and they really don't know about the various modes of a screen reader, and this becomes a problem. We are conscious of this in terms of our self-service applications and trying to keep the UI simple, not using very complex widgets; but we are very well aware, like for instance, if you don't know the table reading command in JAWS, you're not going to be successful with this product.
So this is a huge area – again, not unique to the Talent Acquisition product; it's any complex enterprise class product. People need to get training on their assistive technology and know more than just the most rudimentary commands in order to be successful with these applications.
Next slide, please.
I think we're approaching demo time here.
One more slide – Ali will give a quick overview, and then we will switch to Priyanka's screen for the demo.
Thank you, Peter.
Priyanka is going to do a demo of our application with assistive technology with a screen reader. Essentially, the flow that Priyanka will take us through will be through the eyes of the candidate or with the candidate user in mind. So what Priyanka will do is first search for job, then find the job and go to the job details. Then she will apply to the job. Then she'll go through the application flow, providing the necessary information; and then she'll finally submit that job.
With that said, I'll turn it over to Priyanka to demo the capability.
All right, so we're just going to do some magic here now and make sure we get the right screen presenting; we switch laptops.
[Pause]
I think we can call that successful.
All right, Priyanka, take it away.
Can we crank up the volume and just get JAWS really loud? I wish we could turn up Priyanka's volume too, the same way as JAWS.
33:07 [Demo begins]
"Job search, job search nationally." (voice of computer).
Hello, everybody. I'm Priyanka, and I'm going to do a demo of this application process using JAWS as my screen reader.
On this Home Page right now, I am going to look for a job in the "Keywords" field and then apply for it. So I'll just let JAWS take over and talk to you guys.
[Audio from JAWS application]
So I'm going to stop here for a brief moment and (inaudible) guys notice that the list elements and the headings (inaudible) and they can read properly with JAWS for a visually impaired user. Now I'm going to go the "Keywords" field and look for a specific job, in this case a sales job, and apply for it.
[Audio from JAWS application]
So if you notice, this is the ionized region, and there's a notification given to the users that the page has been loaded so the user is not lost and he exactly knows the (inaudible) and what he has to look for. So let's go to the job of interest and try to apply for it.
[Audio from JAWS application]
So I'm going to click on it to look at the job description.
[Audio from JAWS application]
So I'll take this opportunity to bring up the list of headings, so that a user can directly jump into the headings instead of navigating through the entire page. I'm going to use a JAWS command with this, "Insert+F6."
[Audio from JAWS application]
So I'm going to click on Description 2, which is the No. 2 heading; and let's see what happens.
[Audio from JAWS application]
I'm going to go to the "Job Description" and (inaudible) the customization aspect of it.
Yeah, so this is actually something that Ali mentioned. All of this content – the description, the qualifications, the job itself – that is the responsibility of the person using the system, the recruiter creating the job post. So visually, we see things that look kind of like headings; they look kind of like lists. That's the responsibility of the person creating that content to actually do that properly. In this particular example we did, but that's not something that Taleo can enforce. The content of the job itself is the creator's responsibility to get that right.
Also, I think this is a good opportunity to talk about the focus. As you can see, there's a focus around "Apply/Online" and the focus indicator is (inaudible).
[Audio from JAWS application]
So I'm going to log in. To apply online, I have to log in to the application.
[Audio from JAWS application]
In the interest of time, I'm going to skip to the main content.
[Audio from JAWS application]
As I said, submitting this manually with the radio button and then continue.
[Audio from JAWS application]
So I clicked to "Main Content," and I'm on the first edit field, which is "First Name."
And notice too it said, "required," and maybe that happened before; but we do enunciate attributes such as required.
[Audio from JAWS application]
If you notice, I purposely left the "Last Name" field to see if (inaudible) the error message properly and can be used by the blind user.
[Audio from JAWS application]
So I click on the "Error Message" link.
[Audio from JAWS application]
So if you notice, not only the screen reader handles the error message; it also uses (inaudible) so there's no condition. It says, "Last Name is Missing." So the user can (inaudible) and fill in the information.
[Audio from JAWS application]
And then apply.
[Audio from JAWS application]
So right now, I'm on the Education Page; and I'm going to fill in the information and proceed with the application.
[Audio from JAWS application]
So I'm going to select on my selection from the (inaudible) and move to the next field.
[Audio from JAWS application]
I'm going to select "Marketing" from the List items.
[Audio from JAWS application]
I'm going to skip through these, and go to the "Save and Continue button."
[Audio from JAWS application]
These fields work perfectly. I'm just trying to navigate quickly.
[Audio from JAWS application]
I'm going to choose my "Employer" now; this is Oracle.
And we're very thankful for that. I'm not happy that she's applying for a new job, but it's just a demo.
[Audio from JAWS application]
I'm going to choose "Job Function" and fill in the field. I'm going to apply for a sales position.
[Audio from JAWS application]
I'm tabbing through these fields in the interest of time.
[Audio from JAWS application]
So that's a long legal document, so we'll skip that.
[Audio from JAWS application]
So on this page, you can review all the information which you submitted so far and correct it if you need to make any changes.
[Audio from JAWS application]
So that was just an important little thing. Visually, we just see "Edit." But behind the scenes, there's additional text because there are actually multiple edit links on this page. So we've made it unique for a screen reader user. Again, that's the type of attention to detail that needs to go into this.
[Audio from JAWS application]
So in the same way, you can edit candidate personal information, education, et cetera.
[Audio from JAWS application]
So I click on "Submit."
[Audio from JAWS application]
So the Oracle information message is saying "Thank you," so our application is accepted.
Thank you for doing that demo, and please don't do that for real ever because we do want you to stay here and not apply for another job. It's always an interesting thing when we are running this application.
At this point, we're kind of done; and we can just open it up for Q&A.
Q&A
Fantastic, thank you so much.
Yes, as Peter said, we would like to take questions now. So you can enter those in the Chat window. You can also tweet them to us using the hashtag P-E-A-T-T-a-l-k-s or you can e-mail them to: info@PEATworks.org.
To get us started, I have a question too. So the first one: What kind of feedback have you gotten from customers who have benefitted from the accessibility of Taleo, and what features are users most satisfied with?
I can take that one. I think a lot of customers really appreciate the fact that we've focused on accessibility first off, and we've kind of undertaken this journey and we provide a flow to actually complete an application in an accessible manner. As Peter mentioned, one of the key pieces of documentation we have is our VPAT, which customers also appreciate so they know what are some of the still remaining areas that we need to remediate this part of the product; and they can configure around those or put the additional instruction where there may be some areas for improvement. So the VPAT is another key area that customers provide great feedback around.
Then within the actual application, one of the areas that customers find particularly useful is the ARIA alerts, especially in the cases of error handling. So to help the candidate through the application process, this is a very useful mechanism that we've implemented.
Fantastic, thanks, Ali.
I see a question from Tiffany: What impacts are you seeing with the recent revisions of Section 508?
This is Peter; I'll take that one. That's a great question. I mentioned that, yes, indeed Section 508 was revised back in January after an almost 11-year ordeal with the Access Board. The good news is that Section 508 is now based on the WCAG 2.0 AA standards, and that's something that Oracle had anticipated years ago. So while there are some additional criteria over and above that, most of it pertains to a different type of software, not Web applications. There are some new requirements for authoring tools that we're now looking at. We believe aspects of this product would be considered an authoring tool, so we're starting to grapple with that and see what we can provide.
There are documentation requirements in the revised 508. We think we're already meeting that because we already document how to use the product in an accessible way. But as I mentioned, our corporate standards are being revised as a result of the revised 508; so every product team at Oracle – not just Taleo – is now studying those standards and determining the exact impact on them.
Thanks, Peter.
Now I see a question from Marge: Does Oracle have a Disability Help Desk that would assist an applicant who got stuck on Taleo jobs application sites and realize issues may be caused by the Taleo client if the contact is not accessible?
That's an interesting question because I would think the company that is deploying the Taleo system would be the first-line Help Desk situation. The only time a customer using our system would contact our support organization is more when they are in the process of deploying it and configuring it and working through those issues.
Ali, correct me if I'm wrong; but I don't think that we provide first-line support for a candidate using one of our systems.
That's correct, Peter. For candidates, as Peter mentioned, the primary first line of contact would be the customer. That's because there are so many different ways you could configure the product, and the customer is in charge of actually defining a lot of the content. So the customer is essentially the first point of contact for that candidate. Subsequently, if there is an issue found with regard to the way a component works or the way a component is functioning, the customer would then raise a service request with Oracle to actually investigate the issue with regard to an application component. But for candidates, the customer is the first line of contact.
Some things we see are there are outsourcing companies that do Help Desk support for these types of requests that customers may engage for this type of service.
That makes sense. I know we always recommend the best practice of a company providing another method to contact in case of those sorts of situations, like a toll-free number or something, is obviously part of the accessibility process from the company and the ones offering the actual job. So thank you so much.
I see another question from Lauren: Does Taleo integrate with PeopleSoft?
Yes, Taleo has a fairly robust integration capability. One of the toolsets that we provide is TCC, Taleo Client Connect. This is a way to import and export information from the Taleo system to other third-party systems whether it be PeopleSoft, Fusion, another HR system. But there is a fairly robust toolset to support integration.
Thank you.
One more question: In addition to Taleo, we'd love to hear about what else Oracle is working on. Are you making any other types of workplace technology more accessible in the near future right now? Likewise, have you received any specific requests from your customers?
This is Peter. As I mentioned earlier, it is our goal to make all of our products accessible; so all of our product lines are working on this, including the newly-revised Section 508 standards. So this is not just Taleo but it's PeopleSoft, Fusion applications, Siebel, JD Edwards – all of our products have to meet the corporate approach toward accessibility.
It's interesting talking about this topic because if you had asked me, like, 10 years ago who was interested in accessibility, it was the U.S. Federal Government and pretty much nobody else. Five years ago, I would add to that list state and local government and higher ed. Now it's pretty much every customer. It's very rare that we respond to a request for information about our products and a customer does not ask us about accessibility. So that's a great trend to see in industry as a whole, that everybody is understanding the importance of this; and we're doing our best to respond to it.
Wonderful, I agree it's a wonderful trend; and I think that's a great stopping point. So thank you, that's all we have for today.
Conclusion
Please join us on Thursday, May 18th, at 4:00 p.m. ET for our next PEATtalks featuring Dr. Vivienne Conway of Web Key IT. In honor of Global Accessible Awareness Day, Vivienne will discuss the highlights from the Web for All Conference, held earlier this month, which focused on the theme of accessible work. Please note that while our talks are normally held at 2:00 p.m. Easter Time, we will be holding this special event at 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Easter Standard Time to accommodate our global audiences.
Again, Peter, Ali, and Priyanka, thank you again so much for joining us on this fantastic topic.
Our pleasure, thank you for asking us.
Thank you as well to everybody who took the time to join us today. We hope you enjoy the rest of your afternoon.
