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How Libraries and Publishers are Advancing Accessible Scholarly Publishing Amidst Evolving Legislation
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How Libraries and Publishers are Advancing Accessible Scholarly Publishing Amidst Evolving Legislation
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Segment:0 .
Thank you. Thanks, Simon. Well said. Again, I'm Catherine. In addition to leading the information policy portfolio for arl, I also staff our advocacy and public policy committee. And actually, the chair of our committee is in the back here. Hi, Doug.
And so one big thing that we're doing around accessibility is tracking and analyzing accessibility policy, including the two laws that we've just described for you, the advocacy and public policy committee. One of our major goals this year in particular is advocating for born accessible publishing. This is something that came up through our work on the Marrakesh Treaty, which is an international treaty that's meant to facilitate global access to accessible versions of published works.
And so during that project, we realized that it would be more efficient and effective for works to be published with accessibility features of built in. Of course, libraries are going to remain committed to accessibility and do remediation whenever possible. But that's this idea of. Accessible publishing is something that AOL and the Canadian Association of research libraries has been advocating for.
That's one reason that we're really interested in the ENT. Like we said, we're hoping that it will have more of a global impact and lead to the availability of born accessible ebooks in particular. We're also so in addition to tracking policy, we're also doing a lot of work to make sure that libraries and others are aware of and kind of implementing ADA Title Ii.
So this involves a lot of collaboration with other Library Associations, publishers, groups like the library accessibility alliance, and even international partners like the accessible books consortium. There, there. The links on the slide include a lot of the resources that we've put together with a lot of these partners, and so I hope that you check them out and put them to use. Am I doing challenges to be sure.
OK, I'm going to leave this slide up with the resources, but I wanted to speak to some of the challenges that you're likely aware of. And I think the big one, we heard a little bit about this in the plenary today is uncertainty. And so I think every time we talk about ADA Title Ii in particular, the question always comes up, well, is this updated regulation going to remain on the books. In fact, recently a group of higher education associations wrote to the administration and asked them to delay or provide additional information about ADA Title Ii.
They pointed to shifts in administration priorities, changes in leadership and staffing as creating a lack of clarity and certainty around what it means to comply with this law. So that's one major challenge. Another one, of course, is these laws don't come with resources or funding, but I'm sure that's something that we'll hear a lot about. I think in the beginning, another challenge was libraries were working to understand how ADA Title Ii applies to libraries library content in higher Ed.
I mentioned that it's really written for state and local governments, so it's not quite a perfect fit to libraries and library content. And just ending on of opportunities. So I talked about partnerships and collaboration. But I don't mean that in a squishy way. There are real examples of collaboration. Last year at the Charleston library conference, we hosted a lunch with libraries and publishers on accessibility, and we've stayed in touch throughout the year, sharing resources and information, serving on one another's panels, speaking at meetings like this.
Simon, I think we'll talk about the Elsevier library accessibility advisory board, which I'm honored to be a member of. So there are real opportunities to collaborate and work together and learn from one another. I'm going to pause there, but I have more to say as we go along. So thank you. Thank you.
So I'm going to talk here a little bit from a perspective as a publisher, a little bit as a platform provider and a little bit as a librarian. So Michigan publishing is the publishing division of the University of Michigan. And we're based in the library. We run our own platform called fulcrum, and we host other publishers content on that platform.
So we've been thinking about accessibility, both for our University press but also for other publisher clients. And we've been thinking about platform as well as Content Accessibility for a little while. And I've learned a lot from colleagues at the University. And one of the things I've really learned is that accessibility is good digital design. So when one thinks about this beyond compliance, one thinks about opportunities around the digital preserve ability of an object because it's a well described object for the future.
One also thinks about the fact that accessibility is a lot about machine reading, and so other kinds of machines will want to read our stuff. So that's a lot about discoverability and AI licensing and so on. So it's good business sense. The three things that we have been advised to do from a practical point of view, because even though it's good business sense, it's resource intensive, are listed here.
So these are the three things we're focused on as deadlines rapidly approach. The first one is have a really good process for requesting accessible copies. Just make it really easy. And that often might mean linking to Bookshare share or to the access text network clearly indicates. And if the books are not in there, linking to a way of requesting a copy for remediation purposes, if you don't have an accessible copy, the second one is clearly indicate the accessibility level of each book, even if it is poor.
So that's something we've recently turned on fulcrum, and many of our books will say it's not accessible, but at least it's transparent that it's not accessible. And that's information pulled out of the EPUB automatically into the platform, I should say automatically, because it is magic to me. And finally, Sharon, maintain a roadmap for remediation. I think what we're hoping for is a certain amount of forgiveness at this point, as long as we're clear that we have the right intentions and are constantly updating people on what we're planning to do, even if we can't do it immediately.
And this brings me on to major challenges. So since about 2021, we have been working on our front list and we did. It was a fairly heavy lift by my colleagues, but we got to Benedict certified EPUB three workflow status in about 2023, and that's a good way of checking on our workflow every year. Our workflow is audited. New requirements are implemented based on Bennett's feedback.
But one of the big issues we have as all presses, I think, are faced with if they have backlist, is backlist and ACLs. Heb is one of the collections we host on fulcrum. It's the American Council of learned societies humanities e-book collection. It's probably one of the oldest e-book collections, and it's based on backlist. So it's whole workflow is based around image based PDFs or image based EPUBs rather.
So that's a huge lift lifts and it's a small collection. It makes about $1 million a year. Most of that goes back to the 125 plus publishers who participate. But you can imagine that that's a huge lift in terms of backlist remediation. And we do think that will cost at least a year's income to do that work. So this is where the asking for forgiveness, having a roadmap, having a process is important.
One of the things I'm concerned about because we're starting to receive the messages from public University libraries in the US, is we don't want to be caught in a situation where we are just being sent a procurement office form letter and don't have the opportunity to talk to the library. And I do think those of us who run our platforms will be receiving more and more of these rather intemperate letters form letters from University procurement officers and libraries.
And I'm hoping that there's more forgiveness behind the scenes, even though those letters are received and we've been able to negotiate when we've received those letters. Major opportunities. Very exciting to hear all the work being done on AI assisted PDF remediation. That's a huge theme in the exhibit Hall, and I really applaud the vendors who've taken a great step, even though some of them say very honestly, there's this danger of not very good Alt text just for the sake of having Alt text.
So I think we have to watch that. And then a challenge relevant to this meeting, this conversation this session particularly is library press collaboration. I think there is a lot of capacity now within libraries, even if libraries don't feel that way. There's a lot of capacity to do work on accessibility. And within the Big Ten Academic Alliance, we're now looking at opportunities for libraries to help smaller presses remediate their backlists.
And at a national level, this educational materials made accessible project run out of University of Virginia library could be a real nexus for collaborative work to actually allow libraries to help make works accessible for smaller presses. So thank you. So passing on to Karen.
That was great. Thank you. Hi, everyone. I'm going to be talking about things specifically from the library's perspective. I'd say for the past year since ADA was announced, we've primarily been working on internal issues. Well, first on understanding the law, which, as Catherine mentioned, isn't a perfect fit with University libraries that are public institutions.
So there was a fair bit of back and forth and having to being able to piece together how and when and why it spoke to our specific materials. And of course, that's all the materials we provide access to as well as then our own internal materials. So the other part that we took on this past year was primarily focused on sorting out workflows for our internal materials and for making requests.
So we actually have now, folks, some of the work that used to be done in University accessibility services has now been moved to the library. We will be we're kicking off sort of in the next month, a larger conversation around vended services specifically. And we have the additional challenge that our campus is the main campus, and we also service a number of regional campuses.
So we have to work across multiple places. I'd say, again, of course, the challenges are the obvious lack of resources. This is a law that doesn't come with any additional funding, and in our state's case comes with less funding this coming year. I'd say from the vendors that we work with, from publishers that we're working with. There are three things that I expect we're going to need.
One is clarity around what materials meet the ADA requirements and which ones don't. Two, what ongoing efforts are being done to continue moving forward. We understand that there's an undue burden, but we need to see we need to see and understand what continues to move forward over time. What does that look like. And then 3, a very clear, user focused workflow for how to request materials.
I think one thing that we haven't touched on a lot is that just because something is sort of quote unquote accessible, doesn't mean it actually meets a specific user's needs. So there's a lot of times where something can be made accessible that you still actually need an accessible version because it's not accessible for that particular user. Opportunities, of course, as I mentioned, we have this now newly developed workflow that we're now beta testing, which I think is going to be really helpful to our IU community, in which we are now working together across multiple libraries that are in our institution to make sure we're getting materials to them in a much, much faster way and a more comprehensive way so that they're not having to put one off requests in and can do a student comes into a course and they know they need this whole packet of materials made for them, and we can accommodate that much more easily now.
And then I'm going to move on to some last ones. So as Jude mentioned, my role is the head of Content at Elsevier. And every publisher is different. Elsevier is a big science publisher. So when we're thinking about accessibility, we need to think about scale. And so therefore, I think it's very easy to think about innovation in accessibility as how can we raise the ceiling.
To be honest, I'm more interested in raising the floor. And as a visually impaired person myself. For me, accessibility has always been about normalizing accessible content and normalizing what I'm calling the basics. So if you use a screen reader like I use a screen reader and you come across an image that doesn't have an image description or what we might call Alt text, it just completely Mrs. it out.
So can you imagine reading a medical book where all the images were just missed out. That's what inaccessible content looks like. Think about all the knowledge you would miss. And so for me, when I think about current work, it's about normalizing the basics, it's about making sure that everybody has everybody with accessibility needs, has the same choice as everybody else, that they're not coming across content and thinking, oh, well, I don't know if that's accessible because the metadata is rubbish or I don't know if I can access any of these images because there's no description or oh, there's videos, but I'm a deaf person and therefore I have no idea what's going on in them and I can't follow them.
So therefore I'm missing out on half of this material. And so what we're doing at the moment is really thinking about how to normalize at scale accessible content in our workflows. And so in terms of challenges, the two things are ancillary materials. So that's test banks and slides and flash cards and whatever else comes with a book or even a journal article. These are often quite non-standard pieces of material.
And what accessibility looks like might be quite different. So working out what's relevant, how to make them accessible in a scalable way is quite important. As Charles said earlier, we also need to think about the backlist, and we've been publishing since 1880. And therefore, as you can imagine, if we publish, say, for journals, think about the ADA. If we publish 700,000 journal articles every year, imagine trying to remediate all of those articles at once.
It gets expensive. Not only does it get expensive, but depending on how you do it, it's extremely time consuming as well. And this is where our favorite friend AI comes in. I think when we're talking about AI, there's obviously a challenge here where on the one hand, and this comes on to the opportunities, what we could do here is transformational.
Over a billion people in the world have a disability, 15% of the world's working age population. And if it were possible to immediately have image descriptions, say for every piece of to every image, in every journal article we've ever published, instantly using AI, that would be amazing. At the same time, the reason that people read Elsevier content or read any of the content that any other academic publisher releases is because they believe it to be true.
And if we are publishing stuff that isn't true, then existentially, we don't have an industry anymore. It's actually that serious. And so therefore, the challenge is to really be able to harness the power of this technology for all the people that need it in a way that is financially sustainable. And sustainable from a workflow point of view, but also preserves the integrity and the trust on which we are built. Central to our core mission.
I'm not saying we've got the answers right now, but I do think we need to be bold but cautious. We need to experiment with this stuff. We need to see what works. And we need to understand that not all content is the same. So we publish a lot of complex charts and graphs, for example. And how we deal with them is going to be different to how we deal with less complex images, for example.
We need to be open about those conversations. Catherine mentioned the library accessibility advisory board. The reason that's important is because actually, in terms of our approach and in terms of our priorities, those need to be the same as the people who are licensing our content. We're not doing our best by the communities that we serve. It's also not very good business practice to not talk to the people buying your content.
It's as simple as that. And so therefore, when we're thinking about these things, I don't think from a publisher point of view, it's about a top down approach saying, we have all the answers. This is what we're going to do. Deal with it. It's about saying we have a shared problem. Our goal is the same in order to try and make content accessible to as many people as possible and increase our readership, how we do that needs to be a thought partnership between all parts of our industry libraries, publishers, vendors, funders, readers.
That includes, for example, running focus groups like we're doing with people with disabilities to get feedback on, say, Alt text. Because at the end of the day, if you're releasing a new product feature, how do you know if it's fit for purpose. Unless you ask the most important people, the people who are using it. So when you're thinking about this stuff, think beyond compliance.
This really helps us increase the impact of what we do in order to make sure, for example, that our work is more discoverable, that it's easier for people to use and they can use it in the way that suits them. But in order to do that, all stakeholders and parts of the process must be considered. And so what we're really trying to do is to take a holistic view.
And I would really encourage in whatever way you can for everybody here to do the same. Accessibility is owned by all of us. But what that means is that everybody needs to have a seat at the table. Now, Jude is going to tell me that I've talked for way too long already, so I'm going to sit down and let him ask some questions.
Yes, Simon, I was just going to start playing some Oscar's music, in the background to usher you out. Yeah what Simon just said, what Simon just said is completely right. And coming from a publisher as well, like with Wiley and more importantly, at upon, we also really value collaboration and putting things out into the world and getting different perspectives. So we also released a five step guide for organizations to prepare for the EAA.
So you can go check that out as well. So I'm not going to talk more about what publishers are doing, because we always hear about that. But we just hear in a lot of these panels no shade whatsoever about collaboration. But we really need to know what are the pain points, how are we going to get affected, publishers, libraries included, how we're going to feel this pain. And it's not a bad pain.
It is something that we need to transition into. So with that, Katherine, my first question goes to you. So with the EAA and the ADA coming into force, what are the most significant changes that laws will bring for libraries and publishers, and how can organizations best prepare for this whilst fostering a culture of inclusivity. Just as Simon said, it's important to make sure that we get multiple genuine perspectives in the room and get some genuine data.
Thank you. Is it on. Just no. It's not. Sorry yeah, that would help. Hi thank you. So we talked about some of the challenges around of uncertainty of compliance and things like that.
But one thing that RL has really reinforced to our library members and the broader community is that the Americans with Disabilities Act itself. The underlying law has been around since the 90s. It's still in the books. And so we've really encouraged libraries to do really what Karen talked about, which is understand the fundamental features of the law, undue burden and exceptions and things like that.
And then develop things like workflows, things like roadmaps to really help to understand and comply with the updated, regulations. I think that one sort of opportunity for publishers and libraries to work together is I could talk a lot about special collections, but I think really what licensed content presents a particular opportunity. So I think in negotiations for licensed content, I think that's an opportunity for libraries and publishers to communicate with one another to talk about their requirements and capacity and things like that.
I think Simon mentioned that it's actually the institutions of higher education who are taking on who have the legal onus to comply with ADA and with disability laws in the US. So it's not the publisher. But we've seen some really solid examples of libraries and institutions that are requiring VPATs. They're requiring warranty language, and they're requiring indemnification language in their licenses for e-resources to say, if to first of all, ask the publisher to warrant or promise that they're going to provide an accessible version and then to require them to indemnify the institution or the library if they provide content that isn't accessible.
And we're talking about it with publishers, too. So Uc Berkeley is a really solid example of this. They spoke at the Charleston library conference last year about this. All of their licensing language and strategies is available in some of the links that I shared earlier and on their own website. They were able to do that. Well, OK.
The elephant in the room. They are Uc Berkeley, so they're a large system, but they also have the buy in of their faculty and the system president, because accessibility is so, so important. I wanted to mention too, that arl like this licensing strategy is so important that arl recently published a book about licensing strategies. And so I think it's interesting from the publisher perspective as well.
It kind of breaks down some of the legal concepts that might show up in negotiations, but it's not. It's for people who aren't lawyers and don't have a legal background. And it uses accessibility as an example, it talks about how libraries can point to the disability laws that are on the books and use those in their negotiations, so definitely encourage you to check that out. And actually asked about inclusivity.
I think Simon talked about Alt text testing and things like that. I think part of I mentioned for an accessible publishing earlier, part of that requires people with lived experience, people with disabilities to be involved in the production, in the publishing process. And so I think in like designing and testing materials for accessibility, the more that we can use, the more that we can incorporate people with disabilities into those processes and share the results with one another.
I think that that's only going to make us all collectively stronger. We've talked about the library accessibility alliance a couple of times now. I want to make sure that everybody knows that group actually does testing and makes the results publicly available. So if you check out library accessibility alliance evaluations page, you can see the results.
And I think that's a really shared resource and kind of a move toward inclusivity. I think I'll stop there and elaborate more later. Thanks cool. Perfect so I'll just quickly go on to the next question because I'm time conscious. Next question is to Simon. So given the scale, of course scholar and you say scholarly publishing, it's huge and it's complex.
So what are the biggest challenges you've encountered in making both frontlist and backlist content accessible, and how are you leveraging partnerships and technology to address this. Sure yeah, I think everybody can hear me. So as I mentioned earlier, the challenge is not just the scale of what we're trying to do, but for example, the age of some of our content as well.
We've been publishing since 1880, and therefore, you'll be shocked to hear that not all of our journal articles, for example, or book chapters, are XML based. Because so therefore, thinking about what's possible, what's viable as well, and what's going to be most useful, with limited resources. And obviously, I'm sure you're all rolling your eyes saying Elsevier limited resources, but that is the reality for every publisher and every library out there.
There is no magic wand here. So we need to think about how to prioritize. So for us that's the most recent content and the most used content. In terms of backlist for frontlist, as I mentioned, it's thinking about things like ancillary materials. It's also the AI challenge that I talked about as well. I also want to talk about what Catherine mentioned there about integrating people with disabilities into the process.
I think that's something that I'm hopeful will come more widely, let's say, in the post compliance era, when people realize that hitting the compliance isn't quite good enough. Actually, it's about making sure that what we're doing is best in class, just like we all strive to with our content too. So I think there's a lot to do in quite a short space of time.
I think taking a deep breath and realizing that for all of us, taking one step forward at a time is the key here. Having a proper plan, having a proper roadmap, experimenting, thinking about how technology can help, and iterating when things go wrong. I think we mustn't be afraid to have the hard conversations saying, we tried this AI based approach. There was some great things about it, OK, there were things some things that didn't quite work.
Let's adjust, let's iterate, and let's keep moving here. I think the key point to make about accessibility is that this isn't a one and done thing. I think about it very much like something like data privacy or security standards will continue to evolve, just like technology evolves and the need involves as well. And so I see these laws as kind of baselining everybody. I hate to break it to you all, but just because you've complied with the law doesn't mean that everything is automatically amazing in accessibility land.
That's a bit like getting a C grade in accessibility. That's a baseline that we're all starting with, and we can all then move forward from there. At the same time, I don't want perfect to be the enemy of the good here. And as Charles said, everybody needs to start somewhere. And if you can't make what you're doing perfect, that's OK. Start off by having a point of contact where people can inquire in order to get publisher files.
I think in terms of the challenges and opportunities, one day at a time, one step forward, one task at a time, I think, is what I'd counsel. Brilliant thank you. Simon, I do have a couple of follow UPS, but we need to leave time for you guys to ask some questions. My next question goes to Karen. So Indiana University has a very strong record of advancing digital accessibility in higher education.
So my question to you is how are you approaching the integration of accessibility into library systems and scholarly communications at your institution. And this is a two part question. So what strategies have proven most effective for building campus wide support and ensuring that accessibility is embedded in both, of course policy, but more importantly, day to day practice.
Yeah so to the first part, I think, again, primarily we've been trying to have a workflow that works all the way across our institution. That's served at this point by a rotation of librarians and library staff, which has been, frankly, quite valuable because we're developing a lot of internal expertise as well as documentation. I think previously a lot of this work has been located not just elsewhere in the University, but our connections to it have been sort of random throughout the libraries.
The day to day, sort of embedding this in policy is, again, relatively straightforward. And that's something we're moving on already. I think the day to day piece is always the bigger challenge. We have had a template to make deposits to our institutional repository accessible for at least five years. So anyone who deposits there needs to step through a system. A piece in the system that says, here's how you make your deposit accessible.
I can promise you that. That does not mean that all of our deposits in the last five years are actually accessible. So that outreach component is tough. And I'm sure you all on the publisher side, see it from a different point. But it's that part I think is just an ongoing day to day struggle. There's just has to be constant outreach.
I think in libraries we often look to graduate students because they tend to be the folks who are more keen on change. So we often look to them in terms of we need to educate the next round of scholars. I did, separately and totally unrelated, want to go back briefly and also mention one thing that hasn't come up as someone with a background in area studies.
One of our and again, at an institution where we have a significant area studies collections. So it's something we think and talk about a lot. One of my bigger worries and why I'm anxious not to lay down hard rules around we're going to just cut all of our publishers off who don't meet specific things by a specific date is because of our connections with publishers coming from the Global South. And they're still frankly, a lot of work that we're trying to do.
We're just sort of getting started working with some of those folks, but that I would really love to see more on the publisher side here as well to make sure that we're educating and bringing those publishers along with us in this process. Again, they may not mean anything by a specific deadline, but we still need them to be aware of ADA. We need them to be working on it, and we need there to be resources available to them so that they are also able to move forward on this.
Those resources are incredibly important and don't deserve to be left out by this. Thank you, Karen. So moving on to Charles. So a remediating backlist content can be resource intensive as we've already heard. So what strategies. I mean we've explored this a little bit, but I kind of want to hear your perspective in a little bit more detail.
So what strategies have you found effective for prioritizing and funding accessibility updates, and how do you balance these needs with ongoing publishing operations. Yes And just to reassure people, I wasn't just playing on my phone all the time. I was looking up. So disrespectful. Well, I was but what is the Candy Crush level of yeah, my goodness, low.
But this is what Uc Berkeley sent. So license or warrants of the licensed materials comply with California and federal laws and regulations and conform to the accessibility of web Accessibility Initiative. Web Content Accessibility guidelines WCAG 2.1 level AA licensor agrees to promptly respond to and resolve any complaint regarding accessibility of licensed materials. So that's pretty fierce.
And that's pretty fierce. And the reassuring part is that when we got back in touch and explained, then we could negotiate something that showed will rather than immediate compliance. But that's just to say that the backlist thing is a serious issue. And we all need to work together on this. And literally I do think it's working together.
I mean, I'd like to point out, Simon, I'd like to call out Simon Jude, also Stacy Scott at Taylor Francis because those are arch competitors. But actually they're modeling a behavior of collaboration around this issue that I think we can all model. And I'd also say that when I say all, I think all of us who are vendors in this space are doing an excellent job.
I wouldn't count myself, but I'd look at the people in the exhibit Hall and I would say those are, as SSP always says, these are our collaborators, these are our colleagues and a real shout out to all the great work that all the companies in that space are doing now. So we can't do it all at once around backlist accessibility. So how do you prioritize. And I think that's number one problem.
We don't have great usage stats as publishers often to be able to really say in terms of usage, what should be prioritized, we can prioritize in terms of requests for accessible copies, but I'm not sure that we track those as well as we should. So definitely working out how to prioritize is quite a big lift in itself, and requires us to develop muscles that we actually may not have actually really had like being able to group usage data from multiple platforms, I think that there's a really interesting potential being shown by this rather undervalued initiative at the University of Virginia library.
So this is the m.a initiative educational materials made accessible, run by John Unsworth, who will soon be leaving University of Virginia library. This is his last year, and he's really going around trying to make the case that if libraries and publishers could work together around the back end, collaborate around the back end with disability services offices, we could really achieve a lot together. So really doing this true collaboration and is an opportunity, and he's created a beautiful nexus for that collaboration, which is rapidly going to run out of funding if people don't support it.
And his insight is rather than requiring that all the accessibility remediation that's done at an institutional level be done once at each institution, why not make sure that a remediated mediated copy is actually put into a repository. And is available to other institutions. But also, why not make sure that that's available to the publisher so that the publisher can then get a copy back and actually can help build their own backlist remediated copies, because it's not a competitive sport.
Everybody benefits if the multiple number of people have an accessible copy they can give to somebody who needs an accessible copy, or to people who don't need an accessibility copy on the surface, but will really use an accessible copy. So anyhow, I draw your attention to Emma, and I really hope that kind of model of deep collaboration can scale, because I also see a future where that could be a nexus for mass accessible remediation and making larger difference.
So anyhow, that's my answer on that. Brilliant thank you Charles. Since next door seems to be having a lot of fun, they're probably at question time or something. Let's actually go to that part. So the floor is open to anyone who wants to ask any questions. Please just step up to the mic. And yeah, if you have any questions. Oh goodness.
Please have some questions. OK. Hi, I'm Jillian Poland. I work with Wiley. I'm wondering about what strategies or tips any of you have for bringing people with disabilities into the process. Recruitment's been difficult because we typically don't gather that information about our users, either through law or just good practice.
So how do you identify those users to bring them in. OK, so I'll say two things here. One, ask people. So for us we literally just advertised on LinkedIn, for example, and said, we're looking for people with scientific background who have accessibility needs. And we ran that as a little project. And we advertised we also published some disability studies journals.
So we use that as a vehicle as well. More broadly, if you're a bigger company, which obviously you guys are as well, there are organizations. So I'm going to call up microlink, for example, as one and who are able to professionally find people with the right qualifications and bring them to us, obviously for a fee. In the same way as you'd get any other market research organization involved.
So those are things to think about in terms of the kind of within hiring and what have you. Obviously, it's discriminatory to hire someone on the basis of disability one way or the other. However, you can certainly ask for people with experience in the accessibility field. I have recently hiring at the moment for a product manager for Content Accessibility, and certainly I asked for people with experience.
We got some people who volunteered lived experience. Other people who didn't. Obviously you always give it to the best candidate, but if you ask for people with the right experience, you'll find people with the right experience, whether that's lived experience, learned experience or other experience. I want to add that your library partners might have thoughts as well.
We did a focus group as part of the Marrakech project that I mentioned with graduate students from York University, and it was fascinating. And then also, I think some of the disability rights associations, American Foundation for the Blind, National Federation of the blind. I found that they're very willing and eager to partner on things like this. Thank you.
OK next question. Hi, I'm Jeff Lang with figure 2. And I know one of the tensions is that even as we talk about remediation for backfill, new content is still not all being published, fully accessible. And there's this tension between especially in the journal space, encouraging authors to provide material that is accessible and knowing that there are, fatigue to how much time people are willing to spend in the journal publishing process.
And I know a lot of the conversations around trying to find a balance, but it feels very open ended still. Do you all have opinions, recommendations on where you think the right balance is for today to try to make both of those happen. Well yeah, I think that's AI think that's a great point about author fatigue. It's that imposing this extra requirement on authors is a lot.
And it's true in the book space as well as the journal space. And it's a difficult conversation. The ideal is that the author does the work because the author knows the content the better. Although there was an interesting point that I think Simon or Stacy might have made at one point, it was Simon who made this, which is again in a minute. Yes and I'm going to let him make it again in a minute, because it is a really good point about that.
But I think it's a huge issue, and especially when you get to complex multimedia objects as well as still images, and more and more of us are trying to get those into our publications. And that starts to get pretty complicated to describe a 3D archaeological fly through model. But do you want to make your point, Sam. Yeah so I'm going to politely and respectfully challenge. Yes, please.
Fight No. Just kidding. So you. Politely and respectfully challenge. I think for authors, what authors offer is great brains and great scientific or great humanities content. I think the Venn diagram between authors who want to write Alt text and authors who know how to write Alt text is not actually that huge.
And certainly when we did some experiments with authors writing Alt text themselves, we found it actually costs more to get our vendors to remediate the Alt text than it was to just get the vendors to write the Alt text. And we feel that authors role is really to check and to validate and maybe to edit the Alt text, not only because I think psychologically an author is always more likely to correct something that's wrong, rather than to write something from scratch, but also because this is a different type of writing.
And as Charles just said, actually, just because you understand how something complex works doesn't mean that you have the right skills to describe it super accurately. I think the reason that a lot of the focus, though, is on the back list is for is for that very simple reason the author isn't there. Write the book or the journal has already been published. Or if it's a long time ago, they might not be alive anymore.
And so therefore, we need to think about what do you do in a world where author involvement isn't possible, which is what got us all scratching our heads. So I definitely think that authors are really important in terms of contributing to this, but I think there is a healthy debate within the industry at the moment, whether it's writing the descriptions themselves or as I think it's more about validating the descriptions.
OK next question, please. Hi, I'm Theresa from the American Mathematical Society. I guess I just my question was kind of piggybacking on the authors and their responsibility in the whole process, especially just because the W3C guidelines are very create how to create accessible content and the creation is in the authors hands. So it kind of goes hand in hand with they don't want to write Alt texts, but if they write accessible content, then it's easier to have Alt text generated and stuff like that, rather than retroactively making content accessible, I imagine.
So I'm just kind of curious if you thought of it in that manner as well, and if there's any responsibility that we should be putting on the authors in that manner. I'm going to answer quickly and then hand over to everybody else. I think the key about the law here is consistency. It's important that every image or every video or every book or every journal has accessible content. And the challenge here is that when you get authors to write this.
They're not always consistent. You've got a multi contributor book. There might be some chapters where they write something for every image, and others where the author of that chapter doesn't write it at all. Are you going to delay publishing the whole book. I think that's where we need to be really careful and not as I said, let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Yeah, I'd be interested in those thoughts. Actually, I'm going to. Karen made an interesting point about repositories. Institutional repositories. At our libraries are a big question mark. Question mark. At public universities with ADA. And one of the things that we have in our repositories is theses and dissertations.
And in fact, that's by far the most used content. And we've got 65,000 theses and dissertations in our Deep Blue deeply repository. And I think what that points to is an opportunity for libraries, especially that I think many libraries are embracing to educate the authors of the future and start with really good practices at the point that they are producing dissertations or producing their first research materials.
And that means a lot of partnering with people like the graduate school. And so on. But this is a perfect role for information, for informationists and subject specialists, librarians. Yes, those kinds of librarians. So I mean, in that note, I'll actually pose another question because I don't think we talked about AI enough.
This is that was meant to be a joke. But let's talk about AI. And after all that fighting, going back to collaboration again with that. So I want to start with Karen on this because I want the library's perspective. How can libraries and publishers collaborate more effectively. I mean, not just to meet legal requirements, but to drive innovation and accessible publishing, including through the responsible use of automation and AI.
I put you on the spot. Didn't I just say the most genius thing ever. So let me. I'll dumb it down because that's where my brain is. I would say what we really need collaboration around right now is probably more on the back end. On the infrastructure, which frankly, speaks to Charles's point about Emma. What we need is we know we don't have enough resources or time or funding, so we need to be figuring out how to combine those resources so that we're not duplicating our efforts individually.
Whether that means working across the Big Ten, whether that means working across a URL, whether it means collaborating with specific publishers because accessibility is never one, and done because it has to keep going. We need to be putting all of those together so that we can continue to pull from them over time. Some of this getting authors to put headers and things like that into a manuscript.
Those are tools that are already there's already development. Our faculty are already using things like Canvas and Blackboard that flash things at them. If they don't use headers, right. It's like, no, no, that's not accessible. You have to go back and change it. So they're already being nudged in this direction with a lot of the tools that they're using in the day to day lives, and we just need to keep building on that and pushing it forward.
Brilliant and I just also want to ask Katherine, as our policy expert, what are your views on this. I just to bring that kind of concept down into the weeds a little bit more. I can imagine library and publisher partnerships where costs are shared. You have agreements on how the work is shared. You're bringing in people with lived experience, you're working with AI and you're developing metadata for accessibility.
So I think just like plus 1 to that, but with the resourcing as well, which is something that we're lacking but could advocate for. And I we heard a lot in the plenary about demonstrating the value of scholarly communication, to policymakers. And so let's make accessibility like part of the conversation, not an add on, not a nice to have. Brilliant so I want to close by saying thank you to the panel.
But more importantly also they're important. But you guys are important for showing up here and showing that this topic is of importance to all of us because it has so many different cause and effects. And also it's a good thing that's happening. So thank you very much.
Segment:0 .
Thank you. Thanks, Simon. Well said. Again, I'm Catherine. In addition to leading the information policy portfolio for arl, I also staff our advocacy and public policy committee. And actually, the chair of our committee is in the back here. Hi, Doug.
And so one big thing that we're doing around accessibility is tracking and analyzing accessibility policy, including the two laws that we've just described for you, the advocacy and public policy committee. One of our major goals this year in particular is advocating for born accessible publishing. This is something that came up through our work on the Marrakesh Treaty, which is an international treaty that's meant to facilitate global access to accessible versions of published works.
And so during that project, we realized that it would be more efficient and effective for works to be published with accessibility features of built in. Of course, libraries are going to remain committed to accessibility and do remediation whenever possible. But that's this idea of. Accessible publishing is something that AOL and the Canadian Association of research libraries has been advocating for.
That's one reason that we're really interested in the ENT. Like we said, we're hoping that it will have more of a global impact and lead to the availability of born accessible ebooks in particular. We're also so in addition to tracking policy, we're also doing a lot of work to make sure that libraries and others are aware of and kind of implementing ADA Title Ii.
So this involves a lot of collaboration with other Library Associations, publishers, groups like the library accessibility alliance, and even international partners like the accessible books consortium. There, there. The links on the slide include a lot of the resources that we've put together with a lot of these partners, and so I hope that you check them out and put them to use. Am I doing challenges to be sure.
OK, I'm going to leave this slide up with the resources, but I wanted to speak to some of the challenges that you're likely aware of. And I think the big one, we heard a little bit about this in the plenary today is uncertainty. And so I think every time we talk about ADA Title Ii in particular, the question always comes up, well, is this updated regulation going to remain on the books. In fact, recently a group of higher education associations wrote to the administration and asked them to delay or provide additional information about ADA Title Ii.
They pointed to shifts in administration priorities, changes in leadership and staffing as creating a lack of clarity and certainty around what it means to comply with this law. So that's one major challenge. Another one, of course, is these laws don't come with resources or funding, but I'm sure that's something that we'll hear a lot about. I think in the beginning, another challenge was libraries were working to understand how ADA Title Ii applies to libraries library content in higher Ed.
I mentioned that it's really written for state and local governments, so it's not quite a perfect fit to libraries and library content. And just ending on of opportunities. So I talked about partnerships and collaboration. But I don't mean that in a squishy way. There are real examples of collaboration. Last year at the Charleston library conference, we hosted a lunch with libraries and publishers on accessibility, and we've stayed in touch throughout the year, sharing resources and information, serving on one another's panels, speaking at meetings like this.
Simon, I think we'll talk about the Elsevier library accessibility advisory board, which I'm honored to be a member of. So there are real opportunities to collaborate and work together and learn from one another. I'm going to pause there, but I have more to say as we go along. So thank you. Thank you.
So I'm going to talk here a little bit from a perspective as a publisher, a little bit as a platform provider and a little bit as a librarian. So Michigan publishing is the publishing division of the University of Michigan. And we're based in the library. We run our own platform called fulcrum, and we host other publishers content on that platform.
So we've been thinking about accessibility, both for our University press but also for other publisher clients. And we've been thinking about platform as well as Content Accessibility for a little while. And I've learned a lot from colleagues at the University. And one of the things I've really learned is that accessibility is good digital design. So when one thinks about this beyond compliance, one thinks about opportunities around the digital preserve ability of an object because it's a well described object for the future.
One also thinks about the fact that accessibility is a lot about machine reading, and so other kinds of machines will want to read our stuff. So that's a lot about discoverability and AI licensing and so on. So it's good business sense. The three things that we have been advised to do from a practical point of view, because even though it's good business sense, it's resource intensive, are listed here.
So these are the three things we're focused on as deadlines rapidly approach. The first one is have a really good process for requesting accessible copies. Just make it really easy. And that often might mean linking to Bookshare share or to the access text network clearly indicates. And if the books are not in there, linking to a way of requesting a copy for remediation purposes, if you don't have an accessible copy, the second one is clearly indicate the accessibility level of each book, even if it is poor.
So that's something we've recently turned on fulcrum, and many of our books will say it's not accessible, but at least it's transparent that it's not accessible. And that's information pulled out of the EPUB automatically into the platform, I should say automatically, because it is magic to me. And finally, Sharon, maintain a roadmap for remediation. I think what we're hoping for is a certain amount of forgiveness at this point, as long as we're clear that we have the right intentions and are constantly updating people on what we're planning to do, even if we can't do it immediately.
And this brings me on to major challenges. So since about 2021, we have been working on our front list and we did. It was a fairly heavy lift by my colleagues, but we got to Benedict certified EPUB three workflow status in about 2023, and that's a good way of checking on our workflow every year. Our workflow is audited. New requirements are implemented based on Bennett's feedback.
But one of the big issues we have as all presses, I think, are faced with if they have backlist, is backlist and ACLs. Heb is one of the collections we host on fulcrum. It's the American Council of learned societies humanities e-book collection. It's probably one of the oldest e-book collections, and it's based on backlist. So it's whole workflow is based around image based PDFs or image based EPUBs rather.
So that's a huge lift lifts and it's a small collection. It makes about $1 million a year. Most of that goes back to the 125 plus publishers who participate. But you can imagine that that's a huge lift in terms of backlist remediation. And we do think that will cost at least a year's income to do that work. So this is where the asking for forgiveness, having a roadmap, having a process is important.
One of the things I'm concerned about because we're starting to receive the messages from public University libraries in the US, is we don't want to be caught in a situation where we are just being sent a procurement office form letter and don't have the opportunity to talk to the library. And I do think those of us who run our platforms will be receiving more and more of these rather intemperate letters form letters from University procurement officers and libraries.
And I'm hoping that there's more forgiveness behind the scenes, even though those letters are received and we've been able to negotiate when we've received those letters. Major opportunities. Very exciting to hear all the work being done on AI assisted PDF remediation. That's a huge theme in the exhibit Hall, and I really applaud the vendors who've taken a great step, even though some of them say very honestly, there's this danger of not very good Alt text just for the sake of having Alt text.
So I think we have to watch that. And then a challenge relevant to this meeting, this conversation this session particularly is library press collaboration. I think there is a lot of capacity now within libraries, even if libraries don't feel that way. There's a lot of capacity to do work on accessibility. And within the Big Ten Academic Alliance, we're now looking at opportunities for libraries to help smaller presses remediate their backlists.
And at a national level, this educational materials made accessible project run out of University of Virginia library could be a real nexus for collaborative work to actually allow libraries to help make works accessible for smaller presses. So thank you. So passing on to Karen.
That was great. Thank you. Hi, everyone. I'm going to be talking about things specifically from the library's perspective. I'd say for the past year since ADA was announced, we've primarily been working on internal issues. Well, first on understanding the law, which, as Catherine mentioned, isn't a perfect fit with University libraries that are public institutions.
So there was a fair bit of back and forth and having to being able to piece together how and when and why it spoke to our specific materials. And of course, that's all the materials we provide access to as well as then our own internal materials. So the other part that we took on this past year was primarily focused on sorting out workflows for our internal materials and for making requests.
So we actually have now, folks, some of the work that used to be done in University accessibility services has now been moved to the library. We will be we're kicking off sort of in the next month, a larger conversation around vended services specifically. And we have the additional challenge that our campus is the main campus, and we also service a number of regional campuses.
So we have to work across multiple places. I'd say, again, of course, the challenges are the obvious lack of resources. This is a law that doesn't come with any additional funding, and in our state's case comes with less funding this coming year. I'd say from the vendors that we work with, from publishers that we're working with. There are three things that I expect we're going to need.
One is clarity around what materials meet the ADA requirements and which ones don't. Two, what ongoing efforts are being done to continue moving forward. We understand that there's an undue burden, but we need to see we need to see and understand what continues to move forward over time. What does that look like. And then 3, a very clear, user focused workflow for how to request materials.
I think one thing that we haven't touched on a lot is that just because something is sort of quote unquote accessible, doesn't mean it actually meets a specific user's needs. So there's a lot of times where something can be made accessible that you still actually need an accessible version because it's not accessible for that particular user. Opportunities, of course, as I mentioned, we have this now newly developed workflow that we're now beta testing, which I think is going to be really helpful to our IU community, in which we are now working together across multiple libraries that are in our institution to make sure we're getting materials to them in a much, much faster way and a more comprehensive way so that they're not having to put one off requests in and can do a student comes into a course and they know they need this whole packet of materials made for them, and we can accommodate that much more easily now.
And then I'm going to move on to some last ones. So as Jude mentioned, my role is the head of Content at Elsevier. And every publisher is different. Elsevier is a big science publisher. So when we're thinking about accessibility, we need to think about scale. And so therefore, I think it's very easy to think about innovation in accessibility as how can we raise the ceiling.
To be honest, I'm more interested in raising the floor. And as a visually impaired person myself. For me, accessibility has always been about normalizing accessible content and normalizing what I'm calling the basics. So if you use a screen reader like I use a screen reader and you come across an image that doesn't have an image description or what we might call Alt text, it just completely Mrs. it out.
So can you imagine reading a medical book where all the images were just missed out. That's what inaccessible content looks like. Think about all the knowledge you would miss. And so for me, when I think about current work, it's about normalizing the basics, it's about making sure that everybody has everybody with accessibility needs, has the same choice as everybody else, that they're not coming across content and thinking, oh, well, I don't know if that's accessible because the metadata is rubbish or I don't know if I can access any of these images because there's no description or oh, there's videos, but I'm a deaf person and therefore I have no idea what's going on in them and I can't follow them.
So therefore I'm missing out on half of this material. And so what we're doing at the moment is really thinking about how to normalize at scale accessible content in our workflows. And so in terms of challenges, the two things are ancillary materials. So that's test banks and slides and flash cards and whatever else comes with a book or even a journal article. These are often quite non-standard pieces of material.
And what accessibility looks like might be quite different. So working out what's relevant, how to make them accessible in a scalable way is quite important. As Charles said earlier, we also need to think about the backlist, and we've been publishing since 1880. And therefore, as you can imagine, if we publish, say, for journals, think about the ADA. If we publish 700,000 journal articles every year, imagine trying to remediate all of those articles at once.
It gets expensive. Not only does it get expensive, but depending on how you do it, it's extremely time consuming as well. And this is where our favorite friend AI comes in. I think when we're talking about AI, there's obviously a challenge here where on the one hand, and this comes on to the opportunities, what we could do here is transformational.
Over a billion people in the world have a disability, 15% of the world's working age population. And if it were possible to immediately have image descriptions, say for every piece of to every image, in every journal article we've ever published, instantly using AI, that would be amazing. At the same time, the reason that people read Elsevier content or read any of the content that any other academic publisher releases is because they believe it to be true.
And if we are publishing stuff that isn't true, then existentially, we don't have an industry anymore. It's actually that serious. And so therefore, the challenge is to really be able to harness the power of this technology for all the people that need it in a way that is financially sustainable. And sustainable from a workflow point of view, but also preserves the integrity and the trust on which we are built. Central to our core mission.
I'm not saying we've got the answers right now, but I do think we need to be bold but cautious. We need to experiment with this stuff. We need to see what works. And we need to understand that not all content is the same. So we publish a lot of complex charts and graphs, for example. And how we deal with them is going to be different to how we deal with less complex images, for example.
We need to be open about those conversations. Catherine mentioned the library accessibility advisory board. The reason that's important is because actually, in terms of our approach and in terms of our priorities, those need to be the same as the people who are licensing our content. We're not doing our best by the communities that we serve. It's also not very good business practice to not talk to the people buying your content.
It's as simple as that. And so therefore, when we're thinking about these things, I don't think from a publisher point of view, it's about a top down approach saying, we have all the answers. This is what we're going to do. Deal with it. It's about saying we have a shared problem. Our goal is the same in order to try and make content accessible to as many people as possible and increase our readership, how we do that needs to be a thought partnership between all parts of our industry libraries, publishers, vendors, funders, readers.
That includes, for example, running focus groups like we're doing with people with disabilities to get feedback on, say, Alt text. Because at the end of the day, if you're releasing a new product feature, how do you know if it's fit for purpose. Unless you ask the most important people, the people who are using it. So when you're thinking about this stuff, think beyond compliance.
This really helps us increase the impact of what we do in order to make sure, for example, that our work is more discoverable, that it's easier for people to use and they can use it in the way that suits them. But in order to do that, all stakeholders and parts of the process must be considered. And so what we're really trying to do is to take a holistic view.
And I would really encourage in whatever way you can for everybody here to do the same. Accessibility is owned by all of us. But what that means is that everybody needs to have a seat at the table. Now, Jude is going to tell me that I've talked for way too long already, so I'm going to sit down and let him ask some questions.
Yes, Simon, I was just going to start playing some Oscar's music, in the background to usher you out. Yeah what Simon just said, what Simon just said is completely right. And coming from a publisher as well, like with Wiley and more importantly, at upon, we also really value collaboration and putting things out into the world and getting different perspectives. So we also released a five step guide for organizations to prepare for the EAA.
So you can go check that out as well. So I'm not going to talk more about what publishers are doing, because we always hear about that. But we just hear in a lot of these panels no shade whatsoever about collaboration. But we really need to know what are the pain points, how are we going to get affected, publishers, libraries included, how we're going to feel this pain. And it's not a bad pain.
It is something that we need to transition into. So with that, Katherine, my first question goes to you. So with the EAA and the ADA coming into force, what are the most significant changes that laws will bring for libraries and publishers, and how can organizations best prepare for this whilst fostering a culture of inclusivity. Just as Simon said, it's important to make sure that we get multiple genuine perspectives in the room and get some genuine data.
Thank you. Is it on. Just no. It's not. Sorry yeah, that would help. Hi thank you. So we talked about some of the challenges around of uncertainty of compliance and things like that.
But one thing that RL has really reinforced to our library members and the broader community is that the Americans with Disabilities Act itself. The underlying law has been around since the 90s. It's still in the books. And so we've really encouraged libraries to do really what Karen talked about, which is understand the fundamental features of the law, undue burden and exceptions and things like that.
And then develop things like workflows, things like roadmaps to really help to understand and comply with the updated, regulations. I think that one sort of opportunity for publishers and libraries to work together is I could talk a lot about special collections, but I think really what licensed content presents a particular opportunity. So I think in negotiations for licensed content, I think that's an opportunity for libraries and publishers to communicate with one another to talk about their requirements and capacity and things like that.
I think Simon mentioned that it's actually the institutions of higher education who are taking on who have the legal onus to comply with ADA and with disability laws in the US. So it's not the publisher. But we've seen some really solid examples of libraries and institutions that are requiring VPATs. They're requiring warranty language, and they're requiring indemnification language in their licenses for e-resources to say, if to first of all, ask the publisher to warrant or promise that they're going to provide an accessible version and then to require them to indemnify the institution or the library if they provide content that isn't accessible.
And we're talking about it with publishers, too. So Uc Berkeley is a really solid example of this. They spoke at the Charleston library conference last year about this. All of their licensing language and strategies is available in some of the links that I shared earlier and on their own website. They were able to do that. Well, OK.
The elephant in the room. They are Uc Berkeley, so they're a large system, but they also have the buy in of their faculty and the system president, because accessibility is so, so important. I wanted to mention too, that arl like this licensing strategy is so important that arl recently published a book about licensing strategies. And so I think it's interesting from the publisher perspective as well.
It kind of breaks down some of the legal concepts that might show up in negotiations, but it's not. It's for people who aren't lawyers and don't have a legal background. And it uses accessibility as an example, it talks about how libraries can point to the disability laws that are on the books and use those in their negotiations, so definitely encourage you to check that out. And actually asked about inclusivity.
I think Simon talked about Alt text testing and things like that. I think part of I mentioned for an accessible publishing earlier, part of that requires people with lived experience, people with disabilities to be involved in the production, in the publishing process. And so I think in like designing and testing materials for accessibility, the more that we can use, the more that we can incorporate people with disabilities into those processes and share the results with one another.
I think that that's only going to make us all collectively stronger. We've talked about the library accessibility alliance a couple of times now. I want to make sure that everybody knows that group actually does testing and makes the results publicly available. So if you check out library accessibility alliance evaluations page, you can see the results.
And I think that's a really shared resource and kind of a move toward inclusivity. I think I'll stop there and elaborate more later. Thanks cool. Perfect so I'll just quickly go on to the next question because I'm time conscious. Next question is to Simon. So given the scale, of course scholar and you say scholarly publishing, it's huge and it's complex.
So what are the biggest challenges you've encountered in making both frontlist and backlist content accessible, and how are you leveraging partnerships and technology to address this. Sure yeah, I think everybody can hear me. So as I mentioned earlier, the challenge is not just the scale of what we're trying to do, but for example, the age of some of our content as well.
We've been publishing since 1880, and therefore, you'll be shocked to hear that not all of our journal articles, for example, or book chapters, are XML based. Because so therefore, thinking about what's possible, what's viable as well, and what's going to be most useful, with limited resources. And obviously, I'm sure you're all rolling your eyes saying Elsevier limited resources, but that is the reality for every publisher and every library out there.
There is no magic wand here. So we need to think about how to prioritize. So for us that's the most recent content and the most used content. In terms of backlist for frontlist, as I mentioned, it's thinking about things like ancillary materials. It's also the AI challenge that I talked about as well. I also want to talk about what Catherine mentioned there about integrating people with disabilities into the process.
I think that's something that I'm hopeful will come more widely, let's say, in the post compliance era, when people realize that hitting the compliance isn't quite good enough. Actually, it's about making sure that what we're doing is best in class, just like we all strive to with our content too. So I think there's a lot to do in quite a short space of time.
I think taking a deep breath and realizing that for all of us, taking one step forward at a time is the key here. Having a proper plan, having a proper roadmap, experimenting, thinking about how technology can help, and iterating when things go wrong. I think we mustn't be afraid to have the hard conversations saying, we tried this AI based approach. There was some great things about it, OK, there were things some things that didn't quite work.
Let's adjust, let's iterate, and let's keep moving here. I think the key point to make about accessibility is that this isn't a one and done thing. I think about it very much like something like data privacy or security standards will continue to evolve, just like technology evolves and the need involves as well. And so I see these laws as kind of baselining everybody. I hate to break it to you all, but just because you've complied with the law doesn't mean that everything is automatically amazing in accessibility land.
That's a bit like getting a C grade in accessibility. That's a baseline that we're all starting with, and we can all then move forward from there. At the same time, I don't want perfect to be the enemy of the good here. And as Charles said, everybody needs to start somewhere. And if you can't make what you're doing perfect, that's OK. Start off by having a point of contact where people can inquire in order to get publisher files.
I think in terms of the challenges and opportunities, one day at a time, one step forward, one task at a time, I think, is what I'd counsel. Brilliant thank you. Simon, I do have a couple of follow UPS, but we need to leave time for you guys to ask some questions. My next question goes to Karen. So Indiana University has a very strong record of advancing digital accessibility in higher education.
So my question to you is how are you approaching the integration of accessibility into library systems and scholarly communications at your institution. And this is a two part question. So what strategies have proven most effective for building campus wide support and ensuring that accessibility is embedded in both, of course policy, but more importantly, day to day practice.
Yeah so to the first part, I think, again, primarily we've been trying to have a workflow that works all the way across our institution. That's served at this point by a rotation of librarians and library staff, which has been, frankly, quite valuable because we're developing a lot of internal expertise as well as documentation. I think previously a lot of this work has been located not just elsewhere in the University, but our connections to it have been sort of random throughout the libraries.
The day to day, sort of embedding this in policy is, again, relatively straightforward. And that's something we're moving on already. I think the day to day piece is always the bigger challenge. We have had a template to make deposits to our institutional repository accessible for at least five years. So anyone who deposits there needs to step through a system. A piece in the system that says, here's how you make your deposit accessible.
I can promise you that. That does not mean that all of our deposits in the last five years are actually accessible. So that outreach component is tough. And I'm sure you all on the publisher side, see it from a different point. But it's that part I think is just an ongoing day to day struggle. There's just has to be constant outreach.
I think in libraries we often look to graduate students because they tend to be the folks who are more keen on change. So we often look to them in terms of we need to educate the next round of scholars. I did, separately and totally unrelated, want to go back briefly and also mention one thing that hasn't come up as someone with a background in area studies.
One of our and again, at an institution where we have a significant area studies collections. So it's something we think and talk about a lot. One of my bigger worries and why I'm anxious not to lay down hard rules around we're going to just cut all of our publishers off who don't meet specific things by a specific date is because of our connections with publishers coming from the Global South. And they're still frankly, a lot of work that we're trying to do.
We're just sort of getting started working with some of those folks, but that I would really love to see more on the publisher side here as well to make sure that we're educating and bringing those publishers along with us in this process. Again, they may not mean anything by a specific deadline, but we still need them to be aware of ADA. We need them to be working on it, and we need there to be resources available to them so that they are also able to move forward on this.
Those resources are incredibly important and don't deserve to be left out by this. Thank you, Karen. So moving on to Charles. So a remediating backlist content can be resource intensive as we've already heard. So what strategies. I mean we've explored this a little bit, but I kind of want to hear your perspective in a little bit more detail.
So what strategies have you found effective for prioritizing and funding accessibility updates, and how do you balance these needs with ongoing publishing operations. Yes And just to reassure people, I wasn't just playing on my phone all the time. I was looking up. So disrespectful. Well, I was but what is the Candy Crush level of yeah, my goodness, low.
But this is what Uc Berkeley sent. So license or warrants of the licensed materials comply with California and federal laws and regulations and conform to the accessibility of web Accessibility Initiative. Web Content Accessibility guidelines WCAG 2.1 level AA licensor agrees to promptly respond to and resolve any complaint regarding accessibility of licensed materials. So that's pretty fierce.
And that's pretty fierce. And the reassuring part is that when we got back in touch and explained, then we could negotiate something that showed will rather than immediate compliance. But that's just to say that the backlist thing is a serious issue. And we all need to work together on this. And literally I do think it's working together.
I mean, I'd like to point out, Simon, I'd like to call out Simon Jude, also Stacy Scott at Taylor Francis because those are arch competitors. But actually they're modeling a behavior of collaboration around this issue that I think we can all model. And I'd also say that when I say all, I think all of us who are vendors in this space are doing an excellent job.
I wouldn't count myself, but I'd look at the people in the exhibit Hall and I would say those are, as SSP always says, these are our collaborators, these are our colleagues and a real shout out to all the great work that all the companies in that space are doing now. So we can't do it all at once around backlist accessibility. So how do you prioritize. And I think that's number one problem.
We don't have great usage stats as publishers often to be able to really say in terms of usage, what should be prioritized, we can prioritize in terms of requests for accessible copies, but I'm not sure that we track those as well as we should. So definitely working out how to prioritize is quite a big lift in itself, and requires us to develop muscles that we actually may not have actually really had like being able to group usage data from multiple platforms, I think that there's a really interesting potential being shown by this rather undervalued initiative at the University of Virginia library.
So this is the m.a initiative educational materials made accessible, run by John Unsworth, who will soon be leaving University of Virginia library. This is his last year, and he's really going around trying to make the case that if libraries and publishers could work together around the back end, collaborate around the back end with disability services offices, we could really achieve a lot together. So really doing this true collaboration and is an opportunity, and he's created a beautiful nexus for that collaboration, which is rapidly going to run out of funding if people don't support it.
And his insight is rather than requiring that all the accessibility remediation that's done at an institutional level be done once at each institution, why not make sure that a remediated mediated copy is actually put into a repository. And is available to other institutions. But also, why not make sure that that's available to the publisher so that the publisher can then get a copy back and actually can help build their own backlist remediated copies, because it's not a competitive sport.
Everybody benefits if the multiple number of people have an accessible copy they can give to somebody who needs an accessible copy, or to people who don't need an accessibility copy on the surface, but will really use an accessible copy. So anyhow, I draw your attention to Emma, and I really hope that kind of model of deep collaboration can scale, because I also see a future where that could be a nexus for mass accessible remediation and making larger difference.
So anyhow, that's my answer on that. Brilliant thank you Charles. Since next door seems to be having a lot of fun, they're probably at question time or something. Let's actually go to that part. So the floor is open to anyone who wants to ask any questions. Please just step up to the mic. And yeah, if you have any questions. Oh goodness.
Please have some questions. OK. Hi, I'm Jillian Poland. I work with Wiley. I'm wondering about what strategies or tips any of you have for bringing people with disabilities into the process. Recruitment's been difficult because we typically don't gather that information about our users, either through law or just good practice.
So how do you identify those users to bring them in. OK, so I'll say two things here. One, ask people. So for us we literally just advertised on LinkedIn, for example, and said, we're looking for people with scientific background who have accessibility needs. And we ran that as a little project. And we advertised we also published some disability studies journals.
So we use that as a vehicle as well. More broadly, if you're a bigger company, which obviously you guys are as well, there are organizations. So I'm going to call up microlink, for example, as one and who are able to professionally find people with the right qualifications and bring them to us, obviously for a fee. In the same way as you'd get any other market research organization involved.
So those are things to think about in terms of the kind of within hiring and what have you. Obviously, it's discriminatory to hire someone on the basis of disability one way or the other. However, you can certainly ask for people with experience in the accessibility field. I have recently hiring at the moment for a product manager for Content Accessibility, and certainly I asked for people with experience.
We got some people who volunteered lived experience. Other people who didn't. Obviously you always give it to the best candidate, but if you ask for people with the right experience, you'll find people with the right experience, whether that's lived experience, learned experience or other experience. I want to add that your library partners might have thoughts as well.
We did a focus group as part of the Marrakech project that I mentioned with graduate students from York University, and it was fascinating. And then also, I think some of the disability rights associations, American Foundation for the Blind, National Federation of the blind. I found that they're very willing and eager to partner on things like this. Thank you.
OK next question. Hi, I'm Jeff Lang with figure 2. And I know one of the tensions is that even as we talk about remediation for backfill, new content is still not all being published, fully accessible. And there's this tension between especially in the journal space, encouraging authors to provide material that is accessible and knowing that there are, fatigue to how much time people are willing to spend in the journal publishing process.
And I know a lot of the conversations around trying to find a balance, but it feels very open ended still. Do you all have opinions, recommendations on where you think the right balance is for today to try to make both of those happen. Well yeah, I think that's AI think that's a great point about author fatigue. It's that imposing this extra requirement on authors is a lot.
And it's true in the book space as well as the journal space. And it's a difficult conversation. The ideal is that the author does the work because the author knows the content the better. Although there was an interesting point that I think Simon or Stacy might have made at one point, it was Simon who made this, which is again in a minute. Yes and I'm going to let him make it again in a minute, because it is a really good point about that.
But I think it's a huge issue, and especially when you get to complex multimedia objects as well as still images, and more and more of us are trying to get those into our publications. And that starts to get pretty complicated to describe a 3D archaeological fly through model. But do you want to make your point, Sam. Yeah so I'm going to politely and respectfully challenge. Yes, please.
Fight No. Just kidding. So you. Politely and respectfully challenge. I think for authors, what authors offer is great brains and great scientific or great humanities content. I think the Venn diagram between authors who want to write Alt text and authors who know how to write Alt text is not actually that huge.
And certainly when we did some experiments with authors writing Alt text themselves, we found it actually costs more to get our vendors to remediate the Alt text than it was to just get the vendors to write the Alt text. And we feel that authors role is really to check and to validate and maybe to edit the Alt text, not only because I think psychologically an author is always more likely to correct something that's wrong, rather than to write something from scratch, but also because this is a different type of writing.
And as Charles just said, actually, just because you understand how something complex works doesn't mean that you have the right skills to describe it super accurately. I think the reason that a lot of the focus, though, is on the back list is for is for that very simple reason the author isn't there. Write the book or the journal has already been published. Or if it's a long time ago, they might not be alive anymore.
And so therefore, we need to think about what do you do in a world where author involvement isn't possible, which is what got us all scratching our heads. So I definitely think that authors are really important in terms of contributing to this, but I think there is a healthy debate within the industry at the moment, whether it's writing the descriptions themselves or as I think it's more about validating the descriptions.
OK next question, please. Hi, I'm Theresa from the American Mathematical Society. I guess I just my question was kind of piggybacking on the authors and their responsibility in the whole process, especially just because the W3C guidelines are very create how to create accessible content and the creation is in the authors hands. So it kind of goes hand in hand with they don't want to write Alt texts, but if they write accessible content, then it's easier to have Alt text generated and stuff like that, rather than retroactively making content accessible, I imagine.
So I'm just kind of curious if you thought of it in that manner as well, and if there's any responsibility that we should be putting on the authors in that manner. I'm going to answer quickly and then hand over to everybody else. I think the key about the law here is consistency. It's important that every image or every video or every book or every journal has accessible content. And the challenge here is that when you get authors to write this.
They're not always consistent. You've got a multi contributor book. There might be some chapters where they write something for every image, and others where the author of that chapter doesn't write it at all. Are you going to delay publishing the whole book. I think that's where we need to be really careful and not as I said, let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Yeah, I'd be interested in those thoughts. Actually, I'm going to. Karen made an interesting point about repositories. Institutional repositories. At our libraries are a big question mark. Question mark. At public universities with ADA. And one of the things that we have in our repositories is theses and dissertations.
And in fact, that's by far the most used content. And we've got 65,000 theses and dissertations in our Deep Blue deeply repository. And I think what that points to is an opportunity for libraries, especially that I think many libraries are embracing to educate the authors of the future and start with really good practices at the point that they are producing dissertations or producing their first research materials.
And that means a lot of partnering with people like the graduate school. And so on. But this is a perfect role for information, for informationists and subject specialists, librarians. Yes, those kinds of librarians. So I mean, in that note, I'll actually pose another question because I don't think we talked about AI enough.
This is that was meant to be a joke. But let's talk about AI. And after all that fighting, going back to collaboration again with that. So I want to start with Karen on this because I want the library's perspective. How can libraries and publishers collaborate more effectively. I mean, not just to meet legal requirements, but to drive innovation and accessible publishing, including through the responsible use of automation and AI.
I put you on the spot. Didn't I just say the most genius thing ever. So let me. I'll dumb it down because that's where my brain is. I would say what we really need collaboration around right now is probably more on the back end. On the infrastructure, which frankly, speaks to Charles's point about Emma. What we need is we know we don't have enough resources or time or funding, so we need to be figuring out how to combine those resources so that we're not duplicating our efforts individually.
Whether that means working across the Big Ten, whether that means working across a URL, whether it means collaborating with specific publishers because accessibility is never one, and done because it has to keep going. We need to be putting all of those together so that we can continue to pull from them over time. Some of this getting authors to put headers and things like that into a manuscript.
Those are tools that are already there's already development. Our faculty are already using things like Canvas and Blackboard that flash things at them. If they don't use headers, right. It's like, no, no, that's not accessible. You have to go back and change it. So they're already being nudged in this direction with a lot of the tools that they're using in the day to day lives, and we just need to keep building on that and pushing it forward.
Brilliant and I just also want to ask Katherine, as our policy expert, what are your views on this. I just to bring that kind of concept down into the weeds a little bit more. I can imagine library and publisher partnerships where costs are shared. You have agreements on how the work is shared. You're bringing in people with lived experience, you're working with AI and you're developing metadata for accessibility.
So I think just like plus 1 to that, but with the resourcing as well, which is something that we're lacking but could advocate for. And I we heard a lot in the plenary about demonstrating the value of scholarly communication, to policymakers. And so let's make accessibility like part of the conversation, not an add on, not a nice to have. Brilliant so I want to close by saying thank you to the panel.
But more importantly also they're important. But you guys are important for showing up here and showing that this topic is of importance to all of us because it has so many different cause and effects. And also it's a good thing that's happening. So thank you very much.
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