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What Does Accessibility Mean To Our Community? The View from Campus Disability and Accessibility Services
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What Does Accessibility Mean To Our Community? The View from Campus Disability and Accessibility Services
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
No the last batch of concurrent sessions. Thank you for coming. I know it's been an action packed couple of days, so we're all ready to relax. But this is going to be a great session. So just to introduce myself, I'm Nicola Posner. I'm the director of marketing and sales at the American Medical Society. And I also coordinate our accessibility working group, which is how I became sort of interested in some of these topics.
And I'm very excited to introduce this session today. So many publishers in the last few years have really started paying increased attention to making their content accessible, particularly online content and in keeping with the SSP values of inclusivity and adaptive adaptability. It makes sense that this would also be on our agenda here at SSP, which has offered webinars, Scholarly Kitchen blog posts and presentations at this annual meeting and previous ones as well.
But in order to get beyond checking the box, filling out a vpat, telling ourselves we've done what we need to do on accessibility. It's also important that publishers, as one of the themes of the conferences, are really seen as trusted partners by our community to be doing the work that we can do to truly tackle what can be some really complex challenges. And particularly coming from a math space, it can be particularly challenging as well.
So that means also hearing from stakeholders within our ecosystem that we may not always hear from, which is why we're very excited to have our panelists with us today. But I want to tell you a little bit about the history of how this panel came to be, because as so often happens, from the initial idea to what we're actually going to do today, it's evolved a little bit. My initial idea was to reach out to several institutions in the area and invite disability services, accessibility educators.
And when I started doing that, I heard, oh, but you don't want to hear from me. You really need to talk to the folks at Portland Community College. So what I quickly learned is how lucky we are to be here in Portland, because Portland Community College is really a true leader in this area. And so we're really excited to have panelists from Portland Community College that is really leading the way in accessibility and committed to meeting the needs of their students, faculty and staff, both for teaching, learning and for research needs.
Access the accessibility Ed and Disability Resources team at PCC is recognized as a leader not only in this region, but they have advised and trained institutions in the Midwest and the East Coast. So they're recognized nationally as well. So I'm really happy to have these speakers. When the panel shifted to this approach, I was asked by one of the members of the Accessibility Task force on whose behalf we submitted this panel idea, whether we should now be calling it a case study, but we did not go that direction.
Oops, I went too far on the slides. I'm sorry, because we do still have three panelists with very different perspectives, even though they're from the same institution. So we are joined by the director of the accessibility and Disability Resources at Portland Community college, Kayla parks, who leads a multi-campus team and co-chairs the pcc's accessibility council. We are also joined by Alex Jordan, mathematician, mathematics instructor and contributor to several open source technology projects supporting math, education and accessibility, and Jennifer Lucas, who is from the accessibility accessible technology team and works hands on with publisher content.
Our speakers will start with a presentation and there will be time for questions and discussion. So I want to thank them all for the time they took to prepare for today's session. I have already learned quite a bit just from our prep calls, so I know that this group is going to really benefit from hearing from them today. So I turn it over to Kayla. Thank you very much.
I'll let you get situated. All right. Well, hello, everyone. And I'm so pleased to be joining you today. My name is Kayla, and I wanted to start with just a little bit of context around Portland Community College. So we are the largest post-secondary institution in Oregon by a long shot.
We have four comprehensive campuses. We also have several centers. We serve our whole community across the Portland area, workforce development, community education, as well as credit and non-credit programs. We are an open access institution and we have a mission and a strategy that is focused on equitable student success. And that means looking critically at things like outcomes for students and whether there are differences in who's coming to us looking for educational opportunity and who's actually graduating and moving on with their intent fulfilled.
It's hard to do that kind of work and you often see things that spark a need for further conversation and investment. So our accessible Ed and Disability Resources team, as Nikola stated, we are a national leader and we're proud of the work we do. We do provide training and we have produced materials to help other institutions who may not have the same capacity or who have not make the same investments, I should say, as well.
The next thing I want to say is disability is common. It's really common and it's natural and it's normal. But I think what often happens is that people think about formal accommodation requests in a post secondary environment and they think that that is what we're talking about when we're talking about the disability experience or about disabled students.
And I just want to be really clear that you can't do that because disability is a lived experience and people have different cultural norms, different access to resources. And so there are some individuals who experience disability who do formally disclose and make an accommodation request. But for every person who does that, there are others in the same spaces who are experiencing barriers but who have not disclosed.
And I have a quote here. This comes from Rosemarie garland-thomson. She was the founding director of Emory University's disability Studies Initiative. And this is what she said. Most of us will move in and out of disability in our lifetimes. Whether we do so through illness and injury or merely the process of aging.
Still, most Americans don't know how to be disabled. And I say that because I think. Ableism is a word that not everyone is familiar with, but it's pervasive. So we are often socialized to think about disability in certain ways, and the ways we think about disability often influence the ways we think about accommodation or access or our responsibilities. So the piece at the top says the largest minority and anyone can join.
And I think that's important to keep in mind. So with that, I think it's important to consider the human experience. Right so what is the impact of inaccessible scholarly sources? And I have an image on this slide. We see a nice paved path leads right up to a locked fence. There's a sign. It says, hey, shared path is closed. And a little bit further along there's a detour.
And we know about detours is they are typically a delay, right? A detour means you are no longer on the path with your peers on the same journey, but now you're taking a side route and that can be difficult socially, that can be difficult. It can feel othering and it can also just honestly produce delays that make it less likely that you're going to reach your destination.
We are a quarter system at PCC. That means we have 10 week terms. Just imagine 10 weeks. And if the first couple of weeks are spent trying to figure out this detour, we're losing time on that journey. We're getting separated from our peers. So what this looks like.
Students and employees have a right to accessible formats, scholarly materials that are used in classes or jobs. And when those materials are not already accessible, when they're published, there's going to often need to be remediation done. Right? that takes time. That takes resources. And then this next point is one that I really want to explore a little bit, which is that remediation in that accommodation model, it's triggered by that individual who is willing to say, I hit a barrier.
I'm going to share information about myself that's personal because I want you to understand that barrier, and then I'm going to ask you to come up with a detour for me. That's a process that it's kind of intense, honestly. It doesn't feel that great for everyone. And depending on the institution you're in, how responsive? What do you get as a response to that process? Varies widely. I'm really proud of our team and about the approach we take to try to make that process human centered, to connect with people, not require documentation before we can have a conversation and not be overly bureaucratic.
But I can't say that every institutional experience is going to be the same for a student who's navigating that that process. So an individual rights based approach, which is what the accommodation process is, it can be burdensome, right? And honestly, it can carry risks. Sometimes people are judged or assumed to have or not have what it takes in a certain program.
Judged by instructors, judged by peers, judged by family members. So it carries risks, right? It means there's a debate that has to happen in one's own mind about whether or not this is worth it. And it seems from my perspective that people who have the most privilege are often the most able to navigate that process. So when we're thinking about who's harmed.
It's disparate. It's not. It's not. It's not the same for everyone. So what this means, honestly, is that a lot of times when people hit that barrier, when they see that detour sign, they just don't get what they need. That's the end result. So I wanted to mention one of the things that we've done at PCC, because we understand that, right?
We understand that point. And so we're trying to do things that we can to eliminate the barriers before someone would hit them so that that fence that's closing that path isn't closed in the first place. So we have an accessible technology policy. Now, there are many colleges and universities that have accessible technology policies, but I'm going to be honest, most of the time they are put into place because of a lawsuit or a civil rights investigation or some sort of other external pressure.
And that's tough because when a policy is put into place under duress, there's often not a real sustainable approach and plan for operationalizing it. It can be more expensive and more stressful. It's also harder to maintain fidelity. Ours was done proactively, again, because we understand our responsibility to our community. And it's pretty comprehensive in scope.
I would say that there are some accessible technology policies that focus almost exclusively on public facing websites, some that broaden from that to enterprise level technologies. But there are a fewer number that also look at OpenCourseWare. Some systems like library systems have been called out in specific compliance investigations, and so you'll see variation in what gets named in a policy again, often in response to what's been called out through a complaint process.
So our policy is quite comprehensive. Intentionally and it is actually operationalized. This is the part I get excited about because I think often a policy or a procedure exists in theory in writing, but it's not always a part of the practice and the culture. It isn't always a part of what really happens. And so for us, end user testing is a really critical part of how we operationalize that policy. So any time a technology is going to be procured or adopted and that includes OpenCourseWare if it's integrated in our system.
Then we're going to do a review and our review is going to be focused on usability. So we do a review. Of course, we're looking for that, but we're going to couple it with having folks who actually use assistive technology as their daily driver. Check it out. Does it work?
Is it intuitive? Does it meet all of the needs or some of the needs? And then we give that feedback because we want people to know where there are gaps. And when we do that, we're not looking at particular disability related diagnoses. We're looking across a wide range of end users who use technology in a variety of ways. So we're looking at mobile devices, we're looking at Apple as well as Windows systems, jaws, voiceover Braille displays.
We're also looking at things like voice recognition. We're looking at keyboard navigability, we're looking at contrast. We're looking at a variety of things. And it's part of our review process in the same way that information security reviews are part of our process. Those pieces are actually coupled in our review process.
So I guess just to think about the different models that are out there, I think a lot about the historical dominant perspective. I think of it as a medical rehabilitation model, and I think it's very pervasive. Honestly, it's the idea that functional limitations are these personal tragedies that exist in an individual person's body.
You know, they're suffered, they're endured. And people often need I'm going to use the air quotes, special assistance. Right in order to get access. And people are often kind of pitied unless they can. Heroically magically overcome. And that's a very pervasive, persistent way of thinking about disability. It's an individual person's individual problem that exists in their individual body, but it's not the only model out there.
So the model that we ascribe to is what I would think of as more of a critical perspective, a social or cultural model where we say, oh, actually functional limitations are totally normal and natural. And like I said earlier, common and disability is political. It is. So accommodation does not and actually cannot level the playing field.
Access is a civil right and barrier removal is a shared responsibility. And when we do this, when we embrace this kind of an approach, there are benefits. So what are the benefits of accessible scholarly sources? Right well, we have reduced the need for that disability disclosure and accommodation request process. We are potentially reducing the delays for students in gaining access to the Materials they need.
And the resources for a team like ours can be focused on the more specialized, individualized outputs, on training, on community building, rather than doing what I would consider kind of some of the basic remediation over and over and over and over. And the thing is, often when something is published in a less than accessible format, it's not just my institution's team who's doing that work over and over.
It's every other institution that's also replicating that work every term for every class over and over. It's exhausting. We don't want to do that. So the idea is that everyone can benefit from well structured, accessible electronic formats. A lot of people like being able to change the contrast, reduce, eyestrain.
Magnify things. Access image descriptions. Look up definitions. It really helps everyone. And that's where I'm going to hand it over to Alex. Hello, everybody. So my name is Alex Jordan and I'm here today with two hats on and the slides.
That I'll put before you. There's clearly two different hats I'm wearing as we transition at one point, but I'm a math instructor at PCC. Math has its own. Accessibility concerns with math notation. And I've been working happily with Kayla and her team for about 10 years on delivering math education to my students within my within my department.
And that's the one hat that I have. And the other hat is that I am a hobbyist working on open source software for math education purposes. And one of those projects is an open source publishing scheme that I'll talk about a little bit. But getting back to my hat as a teacher, I want to just kind of echo things that Kayla says. And I'm sure that Jennifer is going to say, too, that making my materials as a teacher accessible, it just, you know, it starts out as I'm going to have students with very special needs, maybe in an extreme case, a blind student.
So maybe I'm producing accessible materials for them at first, but in the end. While that has relieved this burden of the remediation model, there's this pro that comes from making my accessible, my materials accessible. And I'm kind of listening here. And so let's look at this picture. This is maybe a metaphor that is overdone and used a lot, but I just like it so much.
You know, the button you see on a door to push to open the door. OK that was produced for a wheelchair user originally. But I use the button all the time, even though I don't currently have a mobility disability. I've got my own disabilities for sure. It's probably some undiagnosed ADHD and a little bit of something called.
Pathological demand avoidance, if you've heard of that one. But anyway, I might. I might have my arms full. I hit the button. I may be trying to get my bike through the door. I hit the button. I may just be wary of germs and I use my elbow to hit the button because I don't want to grab the door.
So so there's the metaphor, something that's designed originally for what people think of as a remediation purpose actually can benefit lots of people. So if you produce something that's a PDF, I'll just start talking through my examples here. And the PDF is structured. I mean it's, it's going to benefit all users. Let's just cite one little thing.
The PDF reader will have a nice navigable table of contents. Didn't have to have that. But because it's structured well, it's there. Um, in a digital format. If you have some math content, if the math is structured well, then not only can maybe assistive technology blind student read that math, but all students can navigate into that math. If it's a complicated equation with parts, they can start navigating this part, that part, this part.
If it's something new to them, they don't know how to pronounce it. The speech that's there for all kinds of purposes can educate that student on how to say that new concept. Color contrast. Readability You might put these things in place like having a high color contrast ratio for the sake of someone like me with color blindness. But it actually has an effect on all readers, even if they don't have a diagnosed threshold color blindness level, their ability to uptake that content improves.
Keyboard operability that it's there at first, you might think for people who don't see the screen, but then for certain users, they find that it becomes more comfortable and quicker to navigate those materials than with using a mouse. And you've increased their experience. Improved their experience. And another thing I'm listing here is having your materials available in multiple forms.
We have some web, some materials that we teach math with that are all digital, all online, and that harms some of our learners who learn better from that tactile experience of having a physical book and getting their hands on it and maybe even like writing in it. Didn't learn better that way. And vice versa. We have learners who will learn better with the screen.
Maybe use their digital device, their small device, and something about a book might put them to sleep. So there you go. Having accessible materials. In this last slide, I was maybe focusing on how it benefits the students, but it affects the instructors as well. First of all, we're humans too, with the same disabilities that the students have.
So everything from the last slide applies to the instructor as well. Kayla did an excellent job of discussing how the workload issue of doing this repetitive accommodation remediation process. That's a heavy burden. And if you can spend some upfront investment on having your materials accessible, you permanently relieve yourself of that type of burden.
When I have happy students, I'm happy. They it just makes me feel fulfilled, you know, like you want your students to learn whether they learned everything or not. When at the end of the term they had a good experience with you, it makes me feel like I did a good job. And when I'm open about disability and providing accessible materials for disability needs, I have these personal relationships that form with students who are willing to talk to me about their own disabilities.
And that gives me an in that helps them cross barriers they may be having learning more so than otherwise. And at the end of my list here, I put course evaluations. I mean, there's talk about how these things impact instructors. Well, I guess maybe I don't worry about it at my institution. But having nice high rated course evaluations at the end of the term can be a good thing for you professionally.
So these are my slides about my role as a math teacher at PCC. I'm going to switch over to this other hat I have where I'm part of a project that helps people publish open educational resources. We have this. Pipeline of how we do our work. And I thought people at this event might be interested in hearing about it, but. We ask our content authors to structure their work semantically and they need to disregard all their little notions of how it's supposed to be presented.
I want this paragraph to be wrapped in a blue box. Well, that's a cosmetic thing that we can talk about later after you tell me why you're structuring it that way. Content authors. We also ask them to provide Alt text for images. Maybe someday I can take an image and do an excellent job of describing it. But in the context of a math education setting, there's something maybe specific that the author wants the reader to see.
And you just have to at this point have the human element there to write that Alt text. Once that work is structured semantically well, then the publisher can translate it into something that is pleasing to look at. But the print form or the web form is just a nice experience for all users. They can also translate that semantic structure into an accessible presentation, which hopefully is the same thing as the aesthetically pleasing.
But if need be, they can be separate. They come from the same well structured source. So we can do that. Publishers should cooperate with authors. So when that one author wants that one paragraph wrapped in a blue box, for some reason you have a discussion with them. And ask them, why is that meaningful to you? Why do you think that's going to matter to your learners?
And maybe eventually you get the real core semantic meaning of what they're after, some sort of assemblage that was tying together some ideas and then you implement that. And let some stylist down the road worry about making it a blue box. And then and this is, I guess, a hard part. I was I was chatting with someone earlier insisting that the authors work this way. I mean, they may be invested in particular cosmetic feel to their final product.
And we have the benefit of just this is an open source project. It's a hobby. It's OK for us to be firm with our authors when we want to. Readers you know, they get the product, they get the book, and you want to maintain a relationship with them to give feedback. So we implement something where the readers can provide feedback, just automatically click something. Tell us about their experience.
But also I think it's important to organize readers cooperating with publishers to do more formal studies. There's one thing I'll just mention as a side note. I'm really interested lately in this notion where the digital, you know, you can already Zoom in, Zoom out to whatever your desired magnification level is. But I would like to see a future where it's very easy for that end user to change the font, to adjust kerning and stuff like that.
And they don't even have to know about those things. But there's a project that I have read about that is conducting diagnostic tests on readers to just kind of find what that individual person's idealized font kerning, et cetera, combinations are and like have a browser plug-in that just does that for them. So anyway, organizing a study about how readers are interacting with your final product could then circle back into the developers and the publishing house to make improvements that just improve your reader's ability to uptake that information.
I included some pictures from our model is just XML source there on the left from which we produce print ready PDF. Also digital PDF. I've got a screenshot of that same content translated into Spanish from the web version of the book. And this is one that we're really. Proud about the ability to produce Braille.
That looks like I don't know. Until recently, I didn't have direct experience with Braille. But a file like that is what Braille looks like to a sighted person, and each of these characters are transcribed into a pattern. But it's something that you get as payoff from highly structuring your content in the first place. So I have one more slide.
I was just going to. Just put it out there. That open source development drives accessibility. I mean, things like wcag standards are openly developed and that can maybe be at odds with the publishing industry where publishers need revenue and have to keep certain things locked up. Are the two things compatible? And I just want to encourage us to look for all the little ways that you can make the work that you all do open.
Sometimes it's maybe not going to be the author's source, but your workflows may have components for doing this. And then this and then this, and maybe some of those components along the way, can be openly developed and shared and improved upon. All right. So I'm going to hand it off to Jennifer now. Thank you.
Alex knows me. OK I'm Jennifer Lucas. I work for the accessible education and Disability Resource office at Portland Community College. I started working there part time, I want to say four years ago. It's not very long. It's wild how much things have happened in the last few years. So now I coordinate the Alt media work within our department.
And so I'm going to talk about how we work with the Materials that you all send to us when we have an accommodation request. Um, we get a lot of requests. We have a lot of variability in what we receive. Last fall term, we had 847 etext requests in 61 different subjects, and that came out to 298 different titles from over 80 unique publishers.
And those are just the ones where I know who the publisher was. And a lot of those in our database, it was left blank. I don't know who those people were. And I cleared out all of the ones that were just imprints of the major publishers too. So those are a lot of small presses involved there. And everybody has every company, every publisher has their own policies and their own ways that they produce material and their own idea of what should be sent to us when we ask for an accessible document.
A lot of what we get are PDFS that were designed for printing, so a lot of those will pretty much never have semantic tagging or image descriptions, which means unless we do a lot of work on our end, it'll be more difficult to navigate. And any information in those images is not available to somebody using assistive technology. Frequently those images will contain text or tables. Tables are really commonly in print versions presented as an image because they know it's going to stay looking the way they wanted it to look.
If they turn it into an image. And that. Means that someone using assistive technology can't access it. And it's always way too much. Information for us to just put into the Alt text. So we have to sort of rebuild that table from scratch. Often we'll have what I call shape collages, which is just a whole bunch of stuff on top of each other to make one picture.
Those can be really helpful to me actually when I'm making tactile graphics, but as something to deliver to an end user. It is no good. So we have to sort of flatten those and come up with descriptions for them. And then something I call wingdings, even though I don't think that's usually the right font, which is a lot of the time, there will be symbols that are actually characters in a weird font, and so they'll come across an Apple and the screen reader says H. And that makes no sense to anybody.
Sometimes we get image only PDFS, so all of the text data is gone and we have to sort of manually restore it. We'll run it through ocr, but then we essentially have to have somebody read the entire textbook to make sure everything is correct before we can deliver that to the user. So for a full textbook, that can take a lot of time and for 100 text books, that's a lot, a lot, a lot of time. So we get a lot of variation in what we receive, though sometimes we do receive nice, simple, clean, text based books that are fully tagged like this example is from a philosophy class.
It was already tagged. We can see when I open the read order panel, which is what that second screenshot shows, that everything reads in the right order. The only little problem there is that the W is a picture, so it'll read L if you're a screen reader user instead of well, but otherwise nice simple clean textbook don't really need to mess with it too much. And then on the opposite end, we will get incredibly complicated image rich PDFS that are completely untagged.
So we have to, you know, interpret all of the images and come up with descriptions. And this example is an accounting textbook, which is largely tables. This example is tables with arrows pointing between the tables that are annotated with information in another table and very complicated to navigate. I mean, for me, just looking at it, I have trouble interpreting it.
So turning that into something that can be interpreted audibly is very complicated. This textbook also comes with a homework system that is completely inaccessible. Many of the questions are marked as accessible, but if you are a screen reader user trying to navigate them, the browser crashes immediately. So students with screen readers navigating that homework system have to have assistance.
They cannot complete it independently. So when we're done with preparing all the digital materials, end up producing a lot of tactile materials for students with those particular requests. Oh, sure, Yeah. Nikola is going to walk around with some examples that we brought in. We have two different kinds of tactile materials here.
One of them is the same kind that I have in the pictures, which is embossed on a big noisy machine. And then the other kinds are swell paper, which we preprint on those with ink. And then it has a layer that when you heat it, it puffs up. And those are really fun, but a lot more expensive. And the maps that are made in this paper, for those of you who are here playing with it, are of the Oregon zoo.
So if you want to go to the zoo, that's what it's shaped like anyway. So my first picture that I have up on the slides is that same accounting textbook, just the supplements that we made for one term, just for the chapters that that particular class was going to use and really only the tables. So we ended up with about 900 pages of Braille just recreating those accounting tables in a way that would be easy for somebody who reads Braille to navigate.
I don't usually get to take a picture like this. That's the whole supplement completed because usually we're sort of sprinting through it throughout the term, trying to keep up with the accommodation for a live class. But this was a really lucky moment where somebody else took the class again after we had already done that. So I was able to just run the whole textbook at once and say, Oh my gosh, that's a lot of material, and take a picture of this.
I don't even know how thick that stack is, but those are 11.5 by 11 inch sheets of paper and very heavy. And we end up binding those in a maximum 50 sheets at a time and mailing them out to the student. The second image is from an ESL class. Those textbooks are really, really image heavy because they're using that to sort of convey all of the information that students are supposed to be learning as they're learning English.
And so. The unique challenge there of recreating some of those really complicated pictures. And floorplans was actually pretty fun because there weren't that many chapters. So how we go about producing tactile materials. First we have to evaluate all of the Materials that are available for that student and decide which should be embossed.
A lot of the time we'll come across pie charts and flow charts and those don't really make any sense to turn into tactile. Those work better as tables and as lists. But things like this very complex economics graph, we would want to turn into a tactile that they can navigate. And economics classes normally have a lot of graphics. We design a digital tactile sorry, we design the tactile representation digitally with a big emphasis on simplifying the material so that you'll be able to explore it tactically and understand what you have, and then add the Braille labels, keys and transcriber's notes.
We usually do this work inside of illustrator, and then we have to physically emboss and bind and ship it or deliver it to the student in person. And so all of that takes it takes a lot of time for this one graph that I have here we made for tactile because there's so much information that we had to sort of break it down into four sheets of paper. So that the student would be actually be able to read all of the information and answer the questions on their homework and have all of the data that you can.
I mean, I don't really understand that looking at it, but I got all of the data into the tactile. Um, other considerations are homework system. So as I mentioned, that accounting textbook came with a homework system that the student simply could not complete without help from an aide. So they had to schedule time to work with an aide in order to get their homework done. Every week that same student went to our next accounting class, which was a different homework system from a different publisher, and stopped meeting with his aide after the first three weeks because he could do it.
He didn't need help anymore and that was incredible. And now he's in another one and it's the other publisher again, and we're back to the same situation. But it's possible to make homework systems that are fully accessible and interactive material that is accessible. And I think a lot of people think that accessible materials have to be dull and boring. And I think it's important for people to know that that's not true.
They can be fun, they can be engaging. They can be beautiful. I forgot that I had already opened that tab. Sorry and this link, which is in the slideshow. So you can all explore this later because we did share the slideshow with you is our Accessible Media showcase. This is all materials that we produced in house as part, of course, developments at PCC.
And so we've got some explanations of audio description and vector graphics and some interactives here. Like was it making a tapping sound really loud? Sorry about that. This interface tour from one of our computer literacy classes and this one's my favorite. The travel time diagram from the volcanoes and earthquakes class, which the traditional method of completing this assignment involved, like cutting out a piece of paper and sliding it along the diagram.
And so the instructor, I was part of the instructional design team on this class and the instructor said, I have no idea how we can make this something we do online. And so I took a lot of input from them and I worked directly with, you know, people who use assistive technology natively to make sure that I was making something that would work.
This is keyboard navigable and provides really robust feedback to screen reader users in the form of a little invisible box here that you can't see. But it's describing what's happening as you navigate the graph. And I did that and my degrees in wildlife biology. So I feel like, you know, you guys have all these fancy web developers, they should they should be able to figure it out.
Um, and I think that's it for me. I think I'll just describe this last one from here, probably just to kind of summarize, you know, comparing workflows with that more print centric model where kind of the expectation is that people are going to be consuming the information visually and comparing that to this more structure centric model where the idea is that the information itself will be consumed in flexible ways, different ways by different users, and print can be one of them for sure.
But the idea is that the structure is there to allow for all those different flexible outputs and for people to get what they need natively from that structure. Just that's a quick little synopsis, kind of summarizing a lot of what we've gone through. And then the very last slide after that is some resources I just wanted to share. There was just very recently a whole forum from a community supported at Cornell.
So you have some links there. How can we make accessible research papers a reality and a framework for improving accessibility of research papers? And then also the Coalition for diversity and inclusion in scholarly communications. And you guys, I see a lot of you taking photos of that. You have access to this file as well. So I love that you're doing that and you should be able to just follow the links.
But there's a home page, there's accessibility guidelines and several toolkits that they have developed. So you'll have the links to those as well as the links to Jennifer's showcase, which was on the slide prior. And we hope that what we have shared has been helpful. And I think we're now ready for the Q&A part. Yes so Thank you to our panelists. And just as a reminder, as we go to open discussion of the code of conduct, which I think we've all heard about in the last couple of days, but we wanted to put it up quickly to remind everyone.
And then I'll just go back to this slide while we're doing Q&A. So there is a mic there in the center and it looks like Simon has a question. I can also try to bring a mic to you. What was helpful. I is the mic working? Can people hear me?
OK. Hi. Thanks for a really instructive session. I'm the disability confidence lead at Elsevier. I'm also on the steering co of the keyboardist toolkit for disability equity, so this is obviously quite close to my heart. I have a question for Kayla, which is I found it really interesting, the point you made about the more, the more privileged the student, the better they're able to navigate the system that's in front of them.
And I wonder to what extent you felt, whether you liked it or not. Teaching your students advocacy was an important, if unfortunate, point of view, part of your role. And the reason I say that is because as students transition into the world of work, one thing that I observe quite a lot is that whatever infrastructure is available at University tends to fall away quite quickly as workplaces, sadly don't tend to be as equipped as universities are to provide the structures, structured adjustments, et cetera, that people with disabilities need to succeed and fulfill their potential.
Yeah so Thank you so much for that question. I think I want to take it in two parts. I want to acknowledge that part of what I'm talking about when I describe the way that privilege impacts the ability to navigate the accommodation process in a post-secondary, it's often for the entire time frame leading up to the moment they enter the college, right? So things like access to disability documentation itself, learning disability evaluations can cost $2,000 to be completed.
If you did not have a K-12 system that provided that kind of diagnostic and evaluative investment in you as a learner, then you don't have the kinds of records that many colleges and universities offices that they require to even have a conversation with you. And there is a racial component in how K-12 special Ed process works. And that's a whole topic for another conversation.
But it's something we have to acknowledge and understand is real. So some of the barriers that get in the way of effectively leveraging accommodation in post-secondary, they're part of our larger society. Once we do have the conversation or the connection, the potential to connect in a place like Portland Community college, we get to make our own institutional choices about the degree to which we require that kind of third party documentation.
That's very expensive. But I just want to say that part about that's what I was kind of getting at when I'm talking about the degree to which privilege can impact even access to the accommodation process. Now, the other piece you were asking about advocacy. One of the pieces that I'm just so excited about is equipping disabled students with space to explore advocacy and leadership and to really learn what it means to show up in community, to express true access needs, and to start expecting more out of our society.
Right? so equipping people not only with advocacy for them to advocate for what they themselves need, but to be aware of this larger community and to understand that the entire disability rights movement is about recognizing community and access needs that extend across large swaths of people. But to the degree that medical model tended to isolate and have people feel very internal feelings about disability, it kind of not only if it prevents, but it decreases the likelihood of the kinds of connections and peer support that I think we actually need to change the world.
So we're really excited to have an Honor Society for disabled students. We have a chapter of Delta alpha pi students have to have a certain GPA and have a certain number of credits completed, but then they become part of a community where they are recognized as scholars and scholars who will go into the workplace and they engage in advocacy and understand the individual rights model and the limitations of the individual rights model.
We also hire students as leaders to engage in programming not only for other students, but for our faculty. And I think faculty in closed cohort programs, CTE programs, short pipelines out into the workforce are often where we still have work to do in terms of challenging some of the assumptions. But it's not just those programs. It's also the transferring to a four year University and going on to become a researcher, to go on to becoming a lawyer, a doctor.
So I think that it's about advocacy, but it's also about community and understanding that the individual rights based accommodation process is only part of the picture. And disability justice, social justice is about. Unity and doing well for each other. Thank you all so much.
I have learned so much in such a short time. So I wanted to Thank you, but I have a number of questions. I'm trying to prioritize. So I'm a production editor at the AMS at the American Mathematical society, and I work with authors. Is there anything that you could recommend that in my role, working with typesetters, working with formatting that I could stress to authors to kind of include in their, their latech files in their code that would make accessibility easier.
My my second question is, do platforms like Canvas make accommodations for accessibility easier or are they hindrances? And then I had one other question that I can't remember, so we'll just keep it at those two. I'll try to field the first question, but remember, I'm not a professional publisher. I'm just a hobbyist contributing to some open source projects.
And in our experience. When our would be authors want something a certain way. We have success I think by talking about it with them, by showing them it takes several back and forths over a discussion thread, but showing them what the benefits will be if they relinquish what they're asking for. Showing them, you know, that you can have your version readable by a blind student having the web output be, you know, gold star, triple-a, accessible.
Just showing them these things. And they know, I don't want to assume that our authors know the vocabulary and the jargon and the ins and outs of the technology that goes underneath it. But also, I want to assume that they are smart people. And if they can just hear us out like 99% of the time, they come around to see things. Now we also try to implement things that they really, really want.
But we have that long, drawn out conversation to figure out what it really is semantically that they want. Not not, you know, I want that word bold. Why do you want it? Bold, you know, what is it? Is it a vocabulary term? Are you trying to emphasize something? So that's the experience that I have. And actually, before you go on to the second question, which I suspect maybe Jennifer will take on, I'm curious to hear from the publishers in the room if anybody.
You know, we certainly at the AMS, we do a lot of book publishing, which is different from journal publishing. And we do have maybe authors who are more invested in the formatting and what it's going to look like when it publishes. So I'd love to hear any success stories if anybody has one of tools you've found or persuasive arguments you've used with authors who are really particularly invested in something, and I don't know, maybe we can chat about it on the app, maybe if not here in the session.
But we're always looking for those answers as well. And then the second question was about, oh, Canvas and homework systems and. Well, Thank you. I can't really speak to Canvas directly because we mostly work within our own LMS, which is d2l brightspace. But I would say if it's the one that the institution is using, then it is usually helpful and it depends on how it's been set up obviously by the particular school, but we have some pretty robust accommodation features within our LMS that are set up.
But I feel like if what you're talking about is an LMS external to ours being used by the publisher, it would depend on how you set it up. I've found that usually our instructors do not have access to a lot of accommodation features in external LMS that aren't the ones being managed by our college. But I don't know. Do you know of more? Yeah maybe we'll kind of tag team on this one a little bit.
I think there's a lot that can come into a question around using a learning management system and about what are the kind of. Baked in features. And then what are the pieces that can be optimized? And I think so part of what came to mind was integration. So when you take third party content and you integrate it inside of an LMS, this is why we do our end user testing.
We have found at times that when we go out and test that third party content on its own server, in its own location, it functions one way. But once we integrate it inside of our LMS, we have a different scenario. So we actually really try to do title specific platform specific reviews and know whether it's going to be integrated or not integrated. When we do that review because we don't want to we don't want to waste the time of instructors and testers going through and evaluating and finding that's not that's not going to be the same reality for the students who are enrolled.
So that's one thing I would say is that integrations need to be evaluated on a title by title, platform by platform basis because you get surprises otherwise. And then the other thing I would say is that. I think sometimes there are features that can be optimized, but it's about people knowing the value of doing that. I think people are, you know, humans like shortcuts. You know, we like to feel like we're crafty and we figured out a way to do it quicker or better.
But sometimes there are unintended consequences of those decisions. So for me, it always comes back to end user testing. Because if you're only experiencing an LMS or an integration through the way that you individually prefer to navigate it, you'll never be aware of the barriers that are present. You have to have people who experience technology differently giving you feedback.
And then the last thing I'd say is that even if you do all of that, each of these technologies are changing rapidly. So the way that the browser, at and the learning management system, you know, interact with each other, any one of those three can have a major update or a change. And now, now everything you thought you knew, you don't know anymore. So good times.
Yes, Michael. Hi, Michael Kass from J&J editorial. I really love the presentation. I also have tons of questions, so I'm trying to prioritize, but I think I want to sort of do you have much interaction or influence over faculty to try and push them to use sources that are more accessible so you don't have so much work to do with remediation and kind of related.
Do you all depend or recommend certain XML standards? Like in our industry, we're sort of centering around a few good, fairly widely adopted XML standards for structured content. So I'm wondering if that's reached you all as well. You like you would have more information about the XML question, but we try to encourage instructors to use accessible materials, but we have this whole academic freedom thing.
Yeah, I mean, I'm going to I'm going to put on a lens, so I'm part of a number of professional associations. So I'm going to actually answer this not just from our own Portland Community College standpoint, but based on conversations I've had with many colleagues working at many different institutions. And I would say that there is enormous variety in terms of how institutions approach curricular adoption processes. So, you know, at some institutions there's a lot of individual instructor decision making that is not just allowed but encouraged where individual faculty members are really making those.
Yeah academic freedom informed decisions. There are other institutions where there is more of a department level or even college wide adoption process that has a regular cadence and there is a more formal review process that might or might not be in place in those kinds of settings. So I think it's hard to say that there's one answer to a question like that.
There's a lot of different ecosystems out there. I do think kind of the point that I made at the beginning about an accessible technology policy, I think historically many institutions tried to focus their accessible technology, work on public facing websites and enterprise level adoptions and kind of not touch the OpenCourseWare piece as much. I will say that at our institution, really the conversation in part was framed around the distinction between adopting a book and adopting courseware, which is actually technology.
And so that's a fundamental shift that has been happening for a while. But I think this academic freedom conversation plays into it because with a textbook adoption, you're choosing the content that you believe will most effectively facilitate teaching and learning. Excuse me. When you're talking about a OpenCourseWare adoption, you're talking about a technology interface that students who have paid for registered in a class are required to use, and that if it's not accessible, we're in fact violating civil rights.
And so that's an important difference between a book. I always used to say, no matter how big a book is, no matter how complicated a book is, we can handle it, even if it's more resources, more resources. I'm not saying it's easy to do, but we can scan a book. We can deploy the labor to add the structure. What we can't do is get behind a firewall and modify what exists in a digital OpenCourseWare release that our faculty has adopted and our students have individual credentials to access.
I don't have a way into that system, which is which means what is the accommodation? Remember, accommodations are meant to provide equally effective access. How can it be equally effective if we can't even get in the door? Right so we end up doing what Jennifer described in that accounting class. We have a person on the side, an aide who's assigned to the student.
But this means you're scheduling your study time. You don't have the luxury of navigating your coursework at your leisure, which is what most students do. You know, so it's fundamentally unfair. And that's, I think, where that conversation is shifting. And we have to look at OpenCourseWare adoption as a technology adoption, not as a book adoption. And Kayla said that there are a lot of.
Of Uh, difference is out there. But I was immediately thinking within our own school, I mean, my math department is, is one class where we have a structured process and we adopt every when something is adopted, it's for the whole department across the whole four campuses. The psychology at PCC, as far as I understand, is like every instructor doing their own thing. So it's even it's even worse than just one school to another school.
It's and I'm sorry, I don't. What was the question? Standard question. I mean, I'm only familiar with the pretext vocabulary, that pretext. And it sounds like sinister. It's a pretext. And maybe it is, right, trying to rope you into our system because you'll see how cool the output is.
But it's about like the text is the final product and the pre is the work that goes into making that final product. And so it's just a vocabulary that there is a schema for, but it's all part of this project. It's not from some standards that were developed. Maybe, maybe we're in the middle of a 20 year process of developing a set of standards. I don't know.
All right. I think we are at time. So I want to thank everybody again for coming and Thank our panelists.
Segment:0 .
No the last batch of concurrent sessions. Thank you for coming. I know it's been an action packed couple of days, so we're all ready to relax. But this is going to be a great session. So just to introduce myself, I'm Nicola Posner. I'm the director of marketing and sales at the American Medical Society. And I also coordinate our accessibility working group, which is how I became sort of interested in some of these topics.
And I'm very excited to introduce this session today. So many publishers in the last few years have really started paying increased attention to making their content accessible, particularly online content and in keeping with the SSP values of inclusivity and adaptive adaptability. It makes sense that this would also be on our agenda here at SSP, which has offered webinars, Scholarly Kitchen blog posts and presentations at this annual meeting and previous ones as well.
But in order to get beyond checking the box, filling out a vpat, telling ourselves we've done what we need to do on accessibility. It's also important that publishers, as one of the themes of the conferences, are really seen as trusted partners by our community to be doing the work that we can do to truly tackle what can be some really complex challenges. And particularly coming from a math space, it can be particularly challenging as well.
So that means also hearing from stakeholders within our ecosystem that we may not always hear from, which is why we're very excited to have our panelists with us today. But I want to tell you a little bit about the history of how this panel came to be, because as so often happens, from the initial idea to what we're actually going to do today, it's evolved a little bit. My initial idea was to reach out to several institutions in the area and invite disability services, accessibility educators.
And when I started doing that, I heard, oh, but you don't want to hear from me. You really need to talk to the folks at Portland Community College. So what I quickly learned is how lucky we are to be here in Portland, because Portland Community College is really a true leader in this area. And so we're really excited to have panelists from Portland Community College that is really leading the way in accessibility and committed to meeting the needs of their students, faculty and staff, both for teaching, learning and for research needs.
Access the accessibility Ed and Disability Resources team at PCC is recognized as a leader not only in this region, but they have advised and trained institutions in the Midwest and the East Coast. So they're recognized nationally as well. So I'm really happy to have these speakers. When the panel shifted to this approach, I was asked by one of the members of the Accessibility Task force on whose behalf we submitted this panel idea, whether we should now be calling it a case study, but we did not go that direction.
Oops, I went too far on the slides. I'm sorry, because we do still have three panelists with very different perspectives, even though they're from the same institution. So we are joined by the director of the accessibility and Disability Resources at Portland Community college, Kayla parks, who leads a multi-campus team and co-chairs the pcc's accessibility council. We are also joined by Alex Jordan, mathematician, mathematics instructor and contributor to several open source technology projects supporting math, education and accessibility, and Jennifer Lucas, who is from the accessibility accessible technology team and works hands on with publisher content.
Our speakers will start with a presentation and there will be time for questions and discussion. So I want to thank them all for the time they took to prepare for today's session. I have already learned quite a bit just from our prep calls, so I know that this group is going to really benefit from hearing from them today. So I turn it over to Kayla. Thank you very much.
I'll let you get situated. All right. Well, hello, everyone. And I'm so pleased to be joining you today. My name is Kayla, and I wanted to start with just a little bit of context around Portland Community College. So we are the largest post-secondary institution in Oregon by a long shot.
We have four comprehensive campuses. We also have several centers. We serve our whole community across the Portland area, workforce development, community education, as well as credit and non-credit programs. We are an open access institution and we have a mission and a strategy that is focused on equitable student success. And that means looking critically at things like outcomes for students and whether there are differences in who's coming to us looking for educational opportunity and who's actually graduating and moving on with their intent fulfilled.
It's hard to do that kind of work and you often see things that spark a need for further conversation and investment. So our accessible Ed and Disability Resources team, as Nikola stated, we are a national leader and we're proud of the work we do. We do provide training and we have produced materials to help other institutions who may not have the same capacity or who have not make the same investments, I should say, as well.
The next thing I want to say is disability is common. It's really common and it's natural and it's normal. But I think what often happens is that people think about formal accommodation requests in a post secondary environment and they think that that is what we're talking about when we're talking about the disability experience or about disabled students.
And I just want to be really clear that you can't do that because disability is a lived experience and people have different cultural norms, different access to resources. And so there are some individuals who experience disability who do formally disclose and make an accommodation request. But for every person who does that, there are others in the same spaces who are experiencing barriers but who have not disclosed.
And I have a quote here. This comes from Rosemarie garland-thomson. She was the founding director of Emory University's disability Studies Initiative. And this is what she said. Most of us will move in and out of disability in our lifetimes. Whether we do so through illness and injury or merely the process of aging.
Still, most Americans don't know how to be disabled. And I say that because I think. Ableism is a word that not everyone is familiar with, but it's pervasive. So we are often socialized to think about disability in certain ways, and the ways we think about disability often influence the ways we think about accommodation or access or our responsibilities. So the piece at the top says the largest minority and anyone can join.
And I think that's important to keep in mind. So with that, I think it's important to consider the human experience. Right so what is the impact of inaccessible scholarly sources? And I have an image on this slide. We see a nice paved path leads right up to a locked fence. There's a sign. It says, hey, shared path is closed. And a little bit further along there's a detour.
And we know about detours is they are typically a delay, right? A detour means you are no longer on the path with your peers on the same journey, but now you're taking a side route and that can be difficult socially, that can be difficult. It can feel othering and it can also just honestly produce delays that make it less likely that you're going to reach your destination.
We are a quarter system at PCC. That means we have 10 week terms. Just imagine 10 weeks. And if the first couple of weeks are spent trying to figure out this detour, we're losing time on that journey. We're getting separated from our peers. So what this looks like.
Students and employees have a right to accessible formats, scholarly materials that are used in classes or jobs. And when those materials are not already accessible, when they're published, there's going to often need to be remediation done. Right? that takes time. That takes resources. And then this next point is one that I really want to explore a little bit, which is that remediation in that accommodation model, it's triggered by that individual who is willing to say, I hit a barrier.
I'm going to share information about myself that's personal because I want you to understand that barrier, and then I'm going to ask you to come up with a detour for me. That's a process that it's kind of intense, honestly. It doesn't feel that great for everyone. And depending on the institution you're in, how responsive? What do you get as a response to that process? Varies widely. I'm really proud of our team and about the approach we take to try to make that process human centered, to connect with people, not require documentation before we can have a conversation and not be overly bureaucratic.
But I can't say that every institutional experience is going to be the same for a student who's navigating that that process. So an individual rights based approach, which is what the accommodation process is, it can be burdensome, right? And honestly, it can carry risks. Sometimes people are judged or assumed to have or not have what it takes in a certain program.
Judged by instructors, judged by peers, judged by family members. So it carries risks, right? It means there's a debate that has to happen in one's own mind about whether or not this is worth it. And it seems from my perspective that people who have the most privilege are often the most able to navigate that process. So when we're thinking about who's harmed.
It's disparate. It's not. It's not. It's not the same for everyone. So what this means, honestly, is that a lot of times when people hit that barrier, when they see that detour sign, they just don't get what they need. That's the end result. So I wanted to mention one of the things that we've done at PCC, because we understand that, right?
We understand that point. And so we're trying to do things that we can to eliminate the barriers before someone would hit them so that that fence that's closing that path isn't closed in the first place. So we have an accessible technology policy. Now, there are many colleges and universities that have accessible technology policies, but I'm going to be honest, most of the time they are put into place because of a lawsuit or a civil rights investigation or some sort of other external pressure.
And that's tough because when a policy is put into place under duress, there's often not a real sustainable approach and plan for operationalizing it. It can be more expensive and more stressful. It's also harder to maintain fidelity. Ours was done proactively, again, because we understand our responsibility to our community. And it's pretty comprehensive in scope.
I would say that there are some accessible technology policies that focus almost exclusively on public facing websites, some that broaden from that to enterprise level technologies. But there are a fewer number that also look at OpenCourseWare. Some systems like library systems have been called out in specific compliance investigations, and so you'll see variation in what gets named in a policy again, often in response to what's been called out through a complaint process.
So our policy is quite comprehensive. Intentionally and it is actually operationalized. This is the part I get excited about because I think often a policy or a procedure exists in theory in writing, but it's not always a part of the practice and the culture. It isn't always a part of what really happens. And so for us, end user testing is a really critical part of how we operationalize that policy. So any time a technology is going to be procured or adopted and that includes OpenCourseWare if it's integrated in our system.
Then we're going to do a review and our review is going to be focused on usability. So we do a review. Of course, we're looking for that, but we're going to couple it with having folks who actually use assistive technology as their daily driver. Check it out. Does it work?
Is it intuitive? Does it meet all of the needs or some of the needs? And then we give that feedback because we want people to know where there are gaps. And when we do that, we're not looking at particular disability related diagnoses. We're looking across a wide range of end users who use technology in a variety of ways. So we're looking at mobile devices, we're looking at Apple as well as Windows systems, jaws, voiceover Braille displays.
We're also looking at things like voice recognition. We're looking at keyboard navigability, we're looking at contrast. We're looking at a variety of things. And it's part of our review process in the same way that information security reviews are part of our process. Those pieces are actually coupled in our review process.
So I guess just to think about the different models that are out there, I think a lot about the historical dominant perspective. I think of it as a medical rehabilitation model, and I think it's very pervasive. Honestly, it's the idea that functional limitations are these personal tragedies that exist in an individual person's body.
You know, they're suffered, they're endured. And people often need I'm going to use the air quotes, special assistance. Right in order to get access. And people are often kind of pitied unless they can. Heroically magically overcome. And that's a very pervasive, persistent way of thinking about disability. It's an individual person's individual problem that exists in their individual body, but it's not the only model out there.
So the model that we ascribe to is what I would think of as more of a critical perspective, a social or cultural model where we say, oh, actually functional limitations are totally normal and natural. And like I said earlier, common and disability is political. It is. So accommodation does not and actually cannot level the playing field.
Access is a civil right and barrier removal is a shared responsibility. And when we do this, when we embrace this kind of an approach, there are benefits. So what are the benefits of accessible scholarly sources? Right well, we have reduced the need for that disability disclosure and accommodation request process. We are potentially reducing the delays for students in gaining access to the Materials they need.
And the resources for a team like ours can be focused on the more specialized, individualized outputs, on training, on community building, rather than doing what I would consider kind of some of the basic remediation over and over and over and over. And the thing is, often when something is published in a less than accessible format, it's not just my institution's team who's doing that work over and over.
It's every other institution that's also replicating that work every term for every class over and over. It's exhausting. We don't want to do that. So the idea is that everyone can benefit from well structured, accessible electronic formats. A lot of people like being able to change the contrast, reduce, eyestrain.
Magnify things. Access image descriptions. Look up definitions. It really helps everyone. And that's where I'm going to hand it over to Alex. Hello, everybody. So my name is Alex Jordan and I'm here today with two hats on and the slides.
That I'll put before you. There's clearly two different hats I'm wearing as we transition at one point, but I'm a math instructor at PCC. Math has its own. Accessibility concerns with math notation. And I've been working happily with Kayla and her team for about 10 years on delivering math education to my students within my within my department.
And that's the one hat that I have. And the other hat is that I am a hobbyist working on open source software for math education purposes. And one of those projects is an open source publishing scheme that I'll talk about a little bit. But getting back to my hat as a teacher, I want to just kind of echo things that Kayla says. And I'm sure that Jennifer is going to say, too, that making my materials as a teacher accessible, it just, you know, it starts out as I'm going to have students with very special needs, maybe in an extreme case, a blind student.
So maybe I'm producing accessible materials for them at first, but in the end. While that has relieved this burden of the remediation model, there's this pro that comes from making my accessible, my materials accessible. And I'm kind of listening here. And so let's look at this picture. This is maybe a metaphor that is overdone and used a lot, but I just like it so much.
You know, the button you see on a door to push to open the door. OK that was produced for a wheelchair user originally. But I use the button all the time, even though I don't currently have a mobility disability. I've got my own disabilities for sure. It's probably some undiagnosed ADHD and a little bit of something called.
Pathological demand avoidance, if you've heard of that one. But anyway, I might. I might have my arms full. I hit the button. I may be trying to get my bike through the door. I hit the button. I may just be wary of germs and I use my elbow to hit the button because I don't want to grab the door.
So so there's the metaphor, something that's designed originally for what people think of as a remediation purpose actually can benefit lots of people. So if you produce something that's a PDF, I'll just start talking through my examples here. And the PDF is structured. I mean it's, it's going to benefit all users. Let's just cite one little thing.
The PDF reader will have a nice navigable table of contents. Didn't have to have that. But because it's structured well, it's there. Um, in a digital format. If you have some math content, if the math is structured well, then not only can maybe assistive technology blind student read that math, but all students can navigate into that math. If it's a complicated equation with parts, they can start navigating this part, that part, this part.
If it's something new to them, they don't know how to pronounce it. The speech that's there for all kinds of purposes can educate that student on how to say that new concept. Color contrast. Readability You might put these things in place like having a high color contrast ratio for the sake of someone like me with color blindness. But it actually has an effect on all readers, even if they don't have a diagnosed threshold color blindness level, their ability to uptake that content improves.
Keyboard operability that it's there at first, you might think for people who don't see the screen, but then for certain users, they find that it becomes more comfortable and quicker to navigate those materials than with using a mouse. And you've increased their experience. Improved their experience. And another thing I'm listing here is having your materials available in multiple forms.
We have some web, some materials that we teach math with that are all digital, all online, and that harms some of our learners who learn better from that tactile experience of having a physical book and getting their hands on it and maybe even like writing in it. Didn't learn better that way. And vice versa. We have learners who will learn better with the screen.
Maybe use their digital device, their small device, and something about a book might put them to sleep. So there you go. Having accessible materials. In this last slide, I was maybe focusing on how it benefits the students, but it affects the instructors as well. First of all, we're humans too, with the same disabilities that the students have.
So everything from the last slide applies to the instructor as well. Kayla did an excellent job of discussing how the workload issue of doing this repetitive accommodation remediation process. That's a heavy burden. And if you can spend some upfront investment on having your materials accessible, you permanently relieve yourself of that type of burden.
When I have happy students, I'm happy. They it just makes me feel fulfilled, you know, like you want your students to learn whether they learned everything or not. When at the end of the term they had a good experience with you, it makes me feel like I did a good job. And when I'm open about disability and providing accessible materials for disability needs, I have these personal relationships that form with students who are willing to talk to me about their own disabilities.
And that gives me an in that helps them cross barriers they may be having learning more so than otherwise. And at the end of my list here, I put course evaluations. I mean, there's talk about how these things impact instructors. Well, I guess maybe I don't worry about it at my institution. But having nice high rated course evaluations at the end of the term can be a good thing for you professionally.
So these are my slides about my role as a math teacher at PCC. I'm going to switch over to this other hat I have where I'm part of a project that helps people publish open educational resources. We have this. Pipeline of how we do our work. And I thought people at this event might be interested in hearing about it, but. We ask our content authors to structure their work semantically and they need to disregard all their little notions of how it's supposed to be presented.
I want this paragraph to be wrapped in a blue box. Well, that's a cosmetic thing that we can talk about later after you tell me why you're structuring it that way. Content authors. We also ask them to provide Alt text for images. Maybe someday I can take an image and do an excellent job of describing it. But in the context of a math education setting, there's something maybe specific that the author wants the reader to see.
And you just have to at this point have the human element there to write that Alt text. Once that work is structured semantically well, then the publisher can translate it into something that is pleasing to look at. But the print form or the web form is just a nice experience for all users. They can also translate that semantic structure into an accessible presentation, which hopefully is the same thing as the aesthetically pleasing.
But if need be, they can be separate. They come from the same well structured source. So we can do that. Publishers should cooperate with authors. So when that one author wants that one paragraph wrapped in a blue box, for some reason you have a discussion with them. And ask them, why is that meaningful to you? Why do you think that's going to matter to your learners?
And maybe eventually you get the real core semantic meaning of what they're after, some sort of assemblage that was tying together some ideas and then you implement that. And let some stylist down the road worry about making it a blue box. And then and this is, I guess, a hard part. I was I was chatting with someone earlier insisting that the authors work this way. I mean, they may be invested in particular cosmetic feel to their final product.
And we have the benefit of just this is an open source project. It's a hobby. It's OK for us to be firm with our authors when we want to. Readers you know, they get the product, they get the book, and you want to maintain a relationship with them to give feedback. So we implement something where the readers can provide feedback, just automatically click something. Tell us about their experience.
But also I think it's important to organize readers cooperating with publishers to do more formal studies. There's one thing I'll just mention as a side note. I'm really interested lately in this notion where the digital, you know, you can already Zoom in, Zoom out to whatever your desired magnification level is. But I would like to see a future where it's very easy for that end user to change the font, to adjust kerning and stuff like that.
And they don't even have to know about those things. But there's a project that I have read about that is conducting diagnostic tests on readers to just kind of find what that individual person's idealized font kerning, et cetera, combinations are and like have a browser plug-in that just does that for them. So anyway, organizing a study about how readers are interacting with your final product could then circle back into the developers and the publishing house to make improvements that just improve your reader's ability to uptake that information.
I included some pictures from our model is just XML source there on the left from which we produce print ready PDF. Also digital PDF. I've got a screenshot of that same content translated into Spanish from the web version of the book. And this is one that we're really. Proud about the ability to produce Braille.
That looks like I don't know. Until recently, I didn't have direct experience with Braille. But a file like that is what Braille looks like to a sighted person, and each of these characters are transcribed into a pattern. But it's something that you get as payoff from highly structuring your content in the first place. So I have one more slide.
I was just going to. Just put it out there. That open source development drives accessibility. I mean, things like wcag standards are openly developed and that can maybe be at odds with the publishing industry where publishers need revenue and have to keep certain things locked up. Are the two things compatible? And I just want to encourage us to look for all the little ways that you can make the work that you all do open.
Sometimes it's maybe not going to be the author's source, but your workflows may have components for doing this. And then this and then this, and maybe some of those components along the way, can be openly developed and shared and improved upon. All right. So I'm going to hand it off to Jennifer now. Thank you.
Alex knows me. OK I'm Jennifer Lucas. I work for the accessible education and Disability Resource office at Portland Community College. I started working there part time, I want to say four years ago. It's not very long. It's wild how much things have happened in the last few years. So now I coordinate the Alt media work within our department.
And so I'm going to talk about how we work with the Materials that you all send to us when we have an accommodation request. Um, we get a lot of requests. We have a lot of variability in what we receive. Last fall term, we had 847 etext requests in 61 different subjects, and that came out to 298 different titles from over 80 unique publishers.
And those are just the ones where I know who the publisher was. And a lot of those in our database, it was left blank. I don't know who those people were. And I cleared out all of the ones that were just imprints of the major publishers too. So those are a lot of small presses involved there. And everybody has every company, every publisher has their own policies and their own ways that they produce material and their own idea of what should be sent to us when we ask for an accessible document.
A lot of what we get are PDFS that were designed for printing, so a lot of those will pretty much never have semantic tagging or image descriptions, which means unless we do a lot of work on our end, it'll be more difficult to navigate. And any information in those images is not available to somebody using assistive technology. Frequently those images will contain text or tables. Tables are really commonly in print versions presented as an image because they know it's going to stay looking the way they wanted it to look.
If they turn it into an image. And that. Means that someone using assistive technology can't access it. And it's always way too much. Information for us to just put into the Alt text. So we have to sort of rebuild that table from scratch. Often we'll have what I call shape collages, which is just a whole bunch of stuff on top of each other to make one picture.
Those can be really helpful to me actually when I'm making tactile graphics, but as something to deliver to an end user. It is no good. So we have to sort of flatten those and come up with descriptions for them. And then something I call wingdings, even though I don't think that's usually the right font, which is a lot of the time, there will be symbols that are actually characters in a weird font, and so they'll come across an Apple and the screen reader says H. And that makes no sense to anybody.
Sometimes we get image only PDFS, so all of the text data is gone and we have to sort of manually restore it. We'll run it through ocr, but then we essentially have to have somebody read the entire textbook to make sure everything is correct before we can deliver that to the user. So for a full textbook, that can take a lot of time and for 100 text books, that's a lot, a lot, a lot of time. So we get a lot of variation in what we receive, though sometimes we do receive nice, simple, clean, text based books that are fully tagged like this example is from a philosophy class.
It was already tagged. We can see when I open the read order panel, which is what that second screenshot shows, that everything reads in the right order. The only little problem there is that the W is a picture, so it'll read L if you're a screen reader user instead of well, but otherwise nice simple clean textbook don't really need to mess with it too much. And then on the opposite end, we will get incredibly complicated image rich PDFS that are completely untagged.
So we have to, you know, interpret all of the images and come up with descriptions. And this example is an accounting textbook, which is largely tables. This example is tables with arrows pointing between the tables that are annotated with information in another table and very complicated to navigate. I mean, for me, just looking at it, I have trouble interpreting it.
So turning that into something that can be interpreted audibly is very complicated. This textbook also comes with a homework system that is completely inaccessible. Many of the questions are marked as accessible, but if you are a screen reader user trying to navigate them, the browser crashes immediately. So students with screen readers navigating that homework system have to have assistance.
They cannot complete it independently. So when we're done with preparing all the digital materials, end up producing a lot of tactile materials for students with those particular requests. Oh, sure, Yeah. Nikola is going to walk around with some examples that we brought in. We have two different kinds of tactile materials here.
One of them is the same kind that I have in the pictures, which is embossed on a big noisy machine. And then the other kinds are swell paper, which we preprint on those with ink. And then it has a layer that when you heat it, it puffs up. And those are really fun, but a lot more expensive. And the maps that are made in this paper, for those of you who are here playing with it, are of the Oregon zoo.
So if you want to go to the zoo, that's what it's shaped like anyway. So my first picture that I have up on the slides is that same accounting textbook, just the supplements that we made for one term, just for the chapters that that particular class was going to use and really only the tables. So we ended up with about 900 pages of Braille just recreating those accounting tables in a way that would be easy for somebody who reads Braille to navigate.
I don't usually get to take a picture like this. That's the whole supplement completed because usually we're sort of sprinting through it throughout the term, trying to keep up with the accommodation for a live class. But this was a really lucky moment where somebody else took the class again after we had already done that. So I was able to just run the whole textbook at once and say, Oh my gosh, that's a lot of material, and take a picture of this.
I don't even know how thick that stack is, but those are 11.5 by 11 inch sheets of paper and very heavy. And we end up binding those in a maximum 50 sheets at a time and mailing them out to the student. The second image is from an ESL class. Those textbooks are really, really image heavy because they're using that to sort of convey all of the information that students are supposed to be learning as they're learning English.
And so. The unique challenge there of recreating some of those really complicated pictures. And floorplans was actually pretty fun because there weren't that many chapters. So how we go about producing tactile materials. First we have to evaluate all of the Materials that are available for that student and decide which should be embossed.
A lot of the time we'll come across pie charts and flow charts and those don't really make any sense to turn into tactile. Those work better as tables and as lists. But things like this very complex economics graph, we would want to turn into a tactile that they can navigate. And economics classes normally have a lot of graphics. We design a digital tactile sorry, we design the tactile representation digitally with a big emphasis on simplifying the material so that you'll be able to explore it tactically and understand what you have, and then add the Braille labels, keys and transcriber's notes.
We usually do this work inside of illustrator, and then we have to physically emboss and bind and ship it or deliver it to the student in person. And so all of that takes it takes a lot of time for this one graph that I have here we made for tactile because there's so much information that we had to sort of break it down into four sheets of paper. So that the student would be actually be able to read all of the information and answer the questions on their homework and have all of the data that you can.
I mean, I don't really understand that looking at it, but I got all of the data into the tactile. Um, other considerations are homework system. So as I mentioned, that accounting textbook came with a homework system that the student simply could not complete without help from an aide. So they had to schedule time to work with an aide in order to get their homework done. Every week that same student went to our next accounting class, which was a different homework system from a different publisher, and stopped meeting with his aide after the first three weeks because he could do it.
He didn't need help anymore and that was incredible. And now he's in another one and it's the other publisher again, and we're back to the same situation. But it's possible to make homework systems that are fully accessible and interactive material that is accessible. And I think a lot of people think that accessible materials have to be dull and boring. And I think it's important for people to know that that's not true.
They can be fun, they can be engaging. They can be beautiful. I forgot that I had already opened that tab. Sorry and this link, which is in the slideshow. So you can all explore this later because we did share the slideshow with you is our Accessible Media showcase. This is all materials that we produced in house as part, of course, developments at PCC.
And so we've got some explanations of audio description and vector graphics and some interactives here. Like was it making a tapping sound really loud? Sorry about that. This interface tour from one of our computer literacy classes and this one's my favorite. The travel time diagram from the volcanoes and earthquakes class, which the traditional method of completing this assignment involved, like cutting out a piece of paper and sliding it along the diagram.
And so the instructor, I was part of the instructional design team on this class and the instructor said, I have no idea how we can make this something we do online. And so I took a lot of input from them and I worked directly with, you know, people who use assistive technology natively to make sure that I was making something that would work.
This is keyboard navigable and provides really robust feedback to screen reader users in the form of a little invisible box here that you can't see. But it's describing what's happening as you navigate the graph. And I did that and my degrees in wildlife biology. So I feel like, you know, you guys have all these fancy web developers, they should they should be able to figure it out.
Um, and I think that's it for me. I think I'll just describe this last one from here, probably just to kind of summarize, you know, comparing workflows with that more print centric model where kind of the expectation is that people are going to be consuming the information visually and comparing that to this more structure centric model where the idea is that the information itself will be consumed in flexible ways, different ways by different users, and print can be one of them for sure.
But the idea is that the structure is there to allow for all those different flexible outputs and for people to get what they need natively from that structure. Just that's a quick little synopsis, kind of summarizing a lot of what we've gone through. And then the very last slide after that is some resources I just wanted to share. There was just very recently a whole forum from a community supported at Cornell.
So you have some links there. How can we make accessible research papers a reality and a framework for improving accessibility of research papers? And then also the Coalition for diversity and inclusion in scholarly communications. And you guys, I see a lot of you taking photos of that. You have access to this file as well. So I love that you're doing that and you should be able to just follow the links.
But there's a home page, there's accessibility guidelines and several toolkits that they have developed. So you'll have the links to those as well as the links to Jennifer's showcase, which was on the slide prior. And we hope that what we have shared has been helpful. And I think we're now ready for the Q&A part. Yes so Thank you to our panelists. And just as a reminder, as we go to open discussion of the code of conduct, which I think we've all heard about in the last couple of days, but we wanted to put it up quickly to remind everyone.
And then I'll just go back to this slide while we're doing Q&A. So there is a mic there in the center and it looks like Simon has a question. I can also try to bring a mic to you. What was helpful. I is the mic working? Can people hear me?
OK. Hi. Thanks for a really instructive session. I'm the disability confidence lead at Elsevier. I'm also on the steering co of the keyboardist toolkit for disability equity, so this is obviously quite close to my heart. I have a question for Kayla, which is I found it really interesting, the point you made about the more, the more privileged the student, the better they're able to navigate the system that's in front of them.
And I wonder to what extent you felt, whether you liked it or not. Teaching your students advocacy was an important, if unfortunate, point of view, part of your role. And the reason I say that is because as students transition into the world of work, one thing that I observe quite a lot is that whatever infrastructure is available at University tends to fall away quite quickly as workplaces, sadly don't tend to be as equipped as universities are to provide the structures, structured adjustments, et cetera, that people with disabilities need to succeed and fulfill their potential.
Yeah so Thank you so much for that question. I think I want to take it in two parts. I want to acknowledge that part of what I'm talking about when I describe the way that privilege impacts the ability to navigate the accommodation process in a post-secondary, it's often for the entire time frame leading up to the moment they enter the college, right? So things like access to disability documentation itself, learning disability evaluations can cost $2,000 to be completed.
If you did not have a K-12 system that provided that kind of diagnostic and evaluative investment in you as a learner, then you don't have the kinds of records that many colleges and universities offices that they require to even have a conversation with you. And there is a racial component in how K-12 special Ed process works. And that's a whole topic for another conversation.
But it's something we have to acknowledge and understand is real. So some of the barriers that get in the way of effectively leveraging accommodation in post-secondary, they're part of our larger society. Once we do have the conversation or the connection, the potential to connect in a place like Portland Community college, we get to make our own institutional choices about the degree to which we require that kind of third party documentation.
That's very expensive. But I just want to say that part about that's what I was kind of getting at when I'm talking about the degree to which privilege can impact even access to the accommodation process. Now, the other piece you were asking about advocacy. One of the pieces that I'm just so excited about is equipping disabled students with space to explore advocacy and leadership and to really learn what it means to show up in community, to express true access needs, and to start expecting more out of our society.
Right? so equipping people not only with advocacy for them to advocate for what they themselves need, but to be aware of this larger community and to understand that the entire disability rights movement is about recognizing community and access needs that extend across large swaths of people. But to the degree that medical model tended to isolate and have people feel very internal feelings about disability, it kind of not only if it prevents, but it decreases the likelihood of the kinds of connections and peer support that I think we actually need to change the world.
So we're really excited to have an Honor Society for disabled students. We have a chapter of Delta alpha pi students have to have a certain GPA and have a certain number of credits completed, but then they become part of a community where they are recognized as scholars and scholars who will go into the workplace and they engage in advocacy and understand the individual rights model and the limitations of the individual rights model.
We also hire students as leaders to engage in programming not only for other students, but for our faculty. And I think faculty in closed cohort programs, CTE programs, short pipelines out into the workforce are often where we still have work to do in terms of challenging some of the assumptions. But it's not just those programs. It's also the transferring to a four year University and going on to become a researcher, to go on to becoming a lawyer, a doctor.
So I think that it's about advocacy, but it's also about community and understanding that the individual rights based accommodation process is only part of the picture. And disability justice, social justice is about. Unity and doing well for each other. Thank you all so much.
I have learned so much in such a short time. So I wanted to Thank you, but I have a number of questions. I'm trying to prioritize. So I'm a production editor at the AMS at the American Mathematical society, and I work with authors. Is there anything that you could recommend that in my role, working with typesetters, working with formatting that I could stress to authors to kind of include in their, their latech files in their code that would make accessibility easier.
My my second question is, do platforms like Canvas make accommodations for accessibility easier or are they hindrances? And then I had one other question that I can't remember, so we'll just keep it at those two. I'll try to field the first question, but remember, I'm not a professional publisher. I'm just a hobbyist contributing to some open source projects.
And in our experience. When our would be authors want something a certain way. We have success I think by talking about it with them, by showing them it takes several back and forths over a discussion thread, but showing them what the benefits will be if they relinquish what they're asking for. Showing them, you know, that you can have your version readable by a blind student having the web output be, you know, gold star, triple-a, accessible.
Just showing them these things. And they know, I don't want to assume that our authors know the vocabulary and the jargon and the ins and outs of the technology that goes underneath it. But also, I want to assume that they are smart people. And if they can just hear us out like 99% of the time, they come around to see things. Now we also try to implement things that they really, really want.
But we have that long, drawn out conversation to figure out what it really is semantically that they want. Not not, you know, I want that word bold. Why do you want it? Bold, you know, what is it? Is it a vocabulary term? Are you trying to emphasize something? So that's the experience that I have. And actually, before you go on to the second question, which I suspect maybe Jennifer will take on, I'm curious to hear from the publishers in the room if anybody.
You know, we certainly at the AMS, we do a lot of book publishing, which is different from journal publishing. And we do have maybe authors who are more invested in the formatting and what it's going to look like when it publishes. So I'd love to hear any success stories if anybody has one of tools you've found or persuasive arguments you've used with authors who are really particularly invested in something, and I don't know, maybe we can chat about it on the app, maybe if not here in the session.
But we're always looking for those answers as well. And then the second question was about, oh, Canvas and homework systems and. Well, Thank you. I can't really speak to Canvas directly because we mostly work within our own LMS, which is d2l brightspace. But I would say if it's the one that the institution is using, then it is usually helpful and it depends on how it's been set up obviously by the particular school, but we have some pretty robust accommodation features within our LMS that are set up.
But I feel like if what you're talking about is an LMS external to ours being used by the publisher, it would depend on how you set it up. I've found that usually our instructors do not have access to a lot of accommodation features in external LMS that aren't the ones being managed by our college. But I don't know. Do you know of more? Yeah maybe we'll kind of tag team on this one a little bit.
I think there's a lot that can come into a question around using a learning management system and about what are the kind of. Baked in features. And then what are the pieces that can be optimized? And I think so part of what came to mind was integration. So when you take third party content and you integrate it inside of an LMS, this is why we do our end user testing.
We have found at times that when we go out and test that third party content on its own server, in its own location, it functions one way. But once we integrate it inside of our LMS, we have a different scenario. So we actually really try to do title specific platform specific reviews and know whether it's going to be integrated or not integrated. When we do that review because we don't want to we don't want to waste the time of instructors and testers going through and evaluating and finding that's not that's not going to be the same reality for the students who are enrolled.
So that's one thing I would say is that integrations need to be evaluated on a title by title, platform by platform basis because you get surprises otherwise. And then the other thing I would say is that. I think sometimes there are features that can be optimized, but it's about people knowing the value of doing that. I think people are, you know, humans like shortcuts. You know, we like to feel like we're crafty and we figured out a way to do it quicker or better.
But sometimes there are unintended consequences of those decisions. So for me, it always comes back to end user testing. Because if you're only experiencing an LMS or an integration through the way that you individually prefer to navigate it, you'll never be aware of the barriers that are present. You have to have people who experience technology differently giving you feedback.
And then the last thing I'd say is that even if you do all of that, each of these technologies are changing rapidly. So the way that the browser, at and the learning management system, you know, interact with each other, any one of those three can have a major update or a change. And now, now everything you thought you knew, you don't know anymore. So good times.
Yes, Michael. Hi, Michael Kass from J&J editorial. I really love the presentation. I also have tons of questions, so I'm trying to prioritize, but I think I want to sort of do you have much interaction or influence over faculty to try and push them to use sources that are more accessible so you don't have so much work to do with remediation and kind of related.
Do you all depend or recommend certain XML standards? Like in our industry, we're sort of centering around a few good, fairly widely adopted XML standards for structured content. So I'm wondering if that's reached you all as well. You like you would have more information about the XML question, but we try to encourage instructors to use accessible materials, but we have this whole academic freedom thing.
Yeah, I mean, I'm going to I'm going to put on a lens, so I'm part of a number of professional associations. So I'm going to actually answer this not just from our own Portland Community College standpoint, but based on conversations I've had with many colleagues working at many different institutions. And I would say that there is enormous variety in terms of how institutions approach curricular adoption processes. So, you know, at some institutions there's a lot of individual instructor decision making that is not just allowed but encouraged where individual faculty members are really making those.
Yeah academic freedom informed decisions. There are other institutions where there is more of a department level or even college wide adoption process that has a regular cadence and there is a more formal review process that might or might not be in place in those kinds of settings. So I think it's hard to say that there's one answer to a question like that.
There's a lot of different ecosystems out there. I do think kind of the point that I made at the beginning about an accessible technology policy, I think historically many institutions tried to focus their accessible technology, work on public facing websites and enterprise level adoptions and kind of not touch the OpenCourseWare piece as much. I will say that at our institution, really the conversation in part was framed around the distinction between adopting a book and adopting courseware, which is actually technology.
And so that's a fundamental shift that has been happening for a while. But I think this academic freedom conversation plays into it because with a textbook adoption, you're choosing the content that you believe will most effectively facilitate teaching and learning. Excuse me. When you're talking about a OpenCourseWare adoption, you're talking about a technology interface that students who have paid for registered in a class are required to use, and that if it's not accessible, we're in fact violating civil rights.
And so that's an important difference between a book. I always used to say, no matter how big a book is, no matter how complicated a book is, we can handle it, even if it's more resources, more resources. I'm not saying it's easy to do, but we can scan a book. We can deploy the labor to add the structure. What we can't do is get behind a firewall and modify what exists in a digital OpenCourseWare release that our faculty has adopted and our students have individual credentials to access.
I don't have a way into that system, which is which means what is the accommodation? Remember, accommodations are meant to provide equally effective access. How can it be equally effective if we can't even get in the door? Right so we end up doing what Jennifer described in that accounting class. We have a person on the side, an aide who's assigned to the student.
But this means you're scheduling your study time. You don't have the luxury of navigating your coursework at your leisure, which is what most students do. You know, so it's fundamentally unfair. And that's, I think, where that conversation is shifting. And we have to look at OpenCourseWare adoption as a technology adoption, not as a book adoption. And Kayla said that there are a lot of.
Of Uh, difference is out there. But I was immediately thinking within our own school, I mean, my math department is, is one class where we have a structured process and we adopt every when something is adopted, it's for the whole department across the whole four campuses. The psychology at PCC, as far as I understand, is like every instructor doing their own thing. So it's even it's even worse than just one school to another school.
It's and I'm sorry, I don't. What was the question? Standard question. I mean, I'm only familiar with the pretext vocabulary, that pretext. And it sounds like sinister. It's a pretext. And maybe it is, right, trying to rope you into our system because you'll see how cool the output is.
But it's about like the text is the final product and the pre is the work that goes into making that final product. And so it's just a vocabulary that there is a schema for, but it's all part of this project. It's not from some standards that were developed. Maybe, maybe we're in the middle of a 20 year process of developing a set of standards. I don't know.
All right. I think we are at time. So I want to thank everybody again for coming and Thank our panelists.
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