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Non-accessible Survey Questions to be Disabled

Qualtrics surveys contain several questions that cannot be read or responded to by people with disabilities who rely on assistive technology for access to their computers. As such, these “non-accessible” survey questions do not comply with Ohio State’s web/digital accessibility policy and a settlement agreement with the Office of Civil Rights. Unless granted an exemption by the University ADA Coordinator, any digital information or service by any campus unit must meet the Minimum Digital Accessibility Standards (MDAS).

These non-accessible survey questions will be disabled for all users this summer. Exemptions may be submitted to either the ADA Coordinator’s Office or the Digital Accessibility Center and are approved by Scott Lissner, Ohio State’s ADA Coordinator and 504 Compliance Officer with the Office of Compliance and Institutional Integrity. The exemption request form can be found at: https://accessibility.osu.edu/files/OSU-Request-for-Alternative-Access-Exemption.pdf. The Digital Accessibility Center is available to assist campus units through the exemption request process. You can request assistance by emailing accessibility@osu.edu.

[Action Required] API Security Upgrade Test

As part of ongoing efforts to upgrade security, Qualtrics is deprecating users’ ability to access their accounts over unsecured HTTP connections.

This is a notification regarding upcoming deprecation HTTP endpoints of Qualtrics public APIs.

This email details the steps necessary to move over to the secure HTTPS endpoints and the timeline.

What is HTTPS?

HTTPS (Secure HTTP) denotes the use of HTTP with encryption protocols to create a secure connection between two machines. This encryption prevents attackers from intercepting sensitive information passed as part of a request from a website or API. This encryption is enabled when connecting to a secure part of a website or API indicated by an HTTPS URL, that is, a URL with the prefix https://.

What Action Needs to be Taken?

Version 2 API users must update the base URL of their API calls to begin with ‘https’ instead of ‘http’. This would be a simple string change in applications that call Qualtrics APIs. No additional code changes are necessary.

The base URL for the version 2 API is: https://survey.qualtrics.com/WRAPI/ControlPanel/api.php

Users that are using the API without the ‘s’ in the ‘https’ portion of the URL can search for ‘WRAPI/ControlPanel/api.php’ in their applications in order to find where it must be updated.

The deadline for switching version to API usage to HTTPS is June 15th, 2017.

After June 15th 2017, HTTP endpoint will be deprecated – which means applications that continue to call the HTTP endpoints will stop working.

Also note that API users may take this opportunity to transition to the newer version 3 API. Version 3 API  is fully RESTful and more state-of-the-art. Version 3 API documentation can be found at api.qualtrics.com.

 

 

Welcome!

Qualtrics survey software has several uses at the university:

  1. Course requirements: students may need access to Qualtrics as a requirement for a course.
  2. Academic research: faculty conduct surveys that may need to be approved by institutional review board (IRB), or their results may contain sensitive and private data or be subject to HIPPA compliance.
  3. Administrative surveys: staff in various offices of the university and the Medical Center conduct surveys to make administrative decisions.
  4. Event registration: several people with Qualtrics accounts use it as a tool to register people for events and seminars.
  5. Proposal/Grant Submission and Review: some staff use Qualtrics to manage and review proposals and grants.

Qualtrics offers its own robust customer service and training resources through knowledge base articles on its website at http://www.qualtrics.com/university/researchsuite/. Students, staff and faculty are encouraged to first use these resources as they interact with the software or if they have a question that is beyond the scope or knowledge base of OSU staff.

This site has been established to provide one location from which faculty, staff and students can obtain basic information and access to resources for Qualtrics use at Ohio State.