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The European Accessibility Act is here: now what?
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The European Accessibility Act is here: now what?
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Segment:0 .
STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE
HANSEN: OK, so I
HANSEN: got some more people joining. But I'm going to go ahead and dive into some of the logistics for us. So, hello. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. My name is Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen. I'm the VP of Marketing at Silverchair. This is the first of the 2025 Platform Strategies Webinar Series events.
HANSEN: We're really looking forward to today's discussion. But before we get started, I'm just going to cover a few of the logistics. So this webinar series features three virtual events, and you may register for the next two in the same page that you did for this one. And be sure to save the date for our in-person platform strategies event on September 25 in Washington, DC. Registration for that event will open in May.
HANSEN: So this year's webinar series spotlights the biggest trends in publishing technology for 2025, including accessibility, research integrity, and leveraging data to drive revenue. We designed these webinars to feel more like a discussion among the panelists, and so we encourage you to also engage in the discussion via the chat and the Q&A features throughout. And we will save some time at the end to get to those questions.
HANSEN: This event is being recorded as the voice, no doubt, told you. A copy of that recording will be made freely available on our website and to all of you via email. Finally, at the end of the event, you'll see a survey requesting your rating of this event, which helps us with our future planning. So we appreciate you taking a moment to complete that. As I hand it over now to today's hosts, Sven Molter, VP of Product at Silverchair, I'm also going to launch a poll about where our attendees are joining from to help add some context to the accessibility standards that are directly affecting you.
HANSEN: With that, over to you, Sven.
SVEN MOLTER: Awesome. Thank you so much. Hi, everyone. Absolutely thrilled to be here with you today. As Steph mentioned, my name is Sven Molter, and I'm the VP of product here at Silverchair. Overture. And today, thrilled to say that I'm joined by Simon Holt from Elsevier, Stacy Tucker from the American Medical Association-- JAMA Network, Will Awad from Maverick Publishing Specialists, and Beth Richard from the Institute of Development Studies.
SVEN MOLTER: And we are here to have-- and I'm going to take this survey too. We are here to have a conversation about the European Accessibility Act, also known as the EAA. And hopefully you are well aware of this already, but good to just cover a couple of highlights here. As you hopefully know, it's set to take effect in June of 2025, and it really is a game changer for digital accessibility across the European Union and beyond.
SVEN MOLTER: And that's one of the reasons we're having this conversation here today. So as you know, it aims to ensure that the estimated 80-plus million people with disabilities in the EU can access a wide variety of products and services, including digital ones. And so when we think about what that looks like on a scholarly publishing platform, what does that look like?
SVEN MOLTER: Well, a few things, but not an exhaustive list, to be sure, are things like accessible checkout procedures, descriptive alt text for product images, clear color contrast, keyboard navigation, accessible forms, and more. So there's a lot involved in there. And that's one of the reasons why we're having this conversation here today. So at Silverchair, we just wanted to mention that accessibility is built into our teams and processes as it's a key fundamental part of what we do.
SVEN MOLTER: And so even so, our teams have been-- spent a good deal of time preparing for the EAA and making sure that every element that we produce is in compliance. So as you know, this is a big deal. This is a huge deal. It's transformative. It really is a game changer for the landscape that we play in. And so in the spirit of building up our community, we wanted to gather a few experts and have a conversation about accessibility with the hope that the content of this conversation is edifying to you and the broader community.
SVEN MOLTER: So with that intro out of-- over, why don't we start things and set things into context? And this first question will be for Will. How would you define what truly accessible content and accessible websites look like in practice? And why does this matter beyond just regulatory compliance? And if you don't mind, our panelists, to briefly introduce your area of focus and your experience as part of your answer.
SVEN MOLTER: And we'll start with Will here.
WILL AWAD: Thank you so much for inviting me to this webinar. And my name is Will. I'm a Senior Associate at Mayfield Publishing Specialists. I'm specialized in digital accessibility and ensuring content is fully accessible for people with disability. I advocate about the subject. And I write few articles, when I have the chance, about accessibility. I have a legal background.
WILL AWAD: So I didn't come from publishing. I come from the legal sector. And I enjoy the publishing work. So what is truly content? I mean, the question is basically related to, how can we ensure that what we're producing is fully accessible and truly accessible-- whether it's content, or digital asset, or website? So basically, we have something called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that have four principles to make sure that whatever you produce is fully accessible.
WILL AWAD: And they are called POUR. It's perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Basically, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, they are international guidelines. They are the same guidelines, whether you are based in the US, in Europe, in the UK, or Australia, and New Zealand, and the Gulf states, et cetera. So what does the POUR mean? It's basically, making sure that the content is-- perceivable, in one hand, mean that everyone understand all the elements in the design.
WILL AWAD: For example, if you're taking a website that you have images, all the images have alternative text. That's one of the things. It could be also in a book, but also in a PDF. So you have an image that you provide alternative text to that. Another meaningful perceivable is the content can be presented in different ways.
WILL AWAD: It's reflowable. You can resize it [INAUDIBLE] for screen readers and without losing the meaning. So if you maximize it to 200 points in your website, you are not losing the contrast of the website or the element of the website. Other issues you can consider is the color contrast as another important issue to consider under the perceivable. Operable, that's the second principle in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines-- would mean provide alternative means for navigation.
WILL AWAD: Not everybody able to use a mouse, when you created the accessible content. You need to consider people that might have mobility issue. And then you need to use a mouthpiece to navigate. Keyboard accessibility is important. So navigate via the keys on your keyboard, and not without the mouse, and making sure also there's enough messages on your website to provide, like, submit this form.
WILL AWAD: The form has been submitted. You get a message, enough time to do that. Also, avoid having flash content because some websites, they might have video with a lot of flash. And that might affect the people who're looking at it and might trigger some seizure, which we don't want that to happen. So that's how you make sure the content is operable. And the third principle of the Web Content Accessibility Guideline is understandable.
WILL AWAD: And making sure that it's easy to navigate and read the website. So you have the hierarchy defined. The heading is there. You can navigate. The language tag is there. You have symbol tagging that you're using. For example, when you say read more, you might have more than one article to say read more.
WILL AWAD: Read more about what? So try to define this and make it simpler and understandable for people who are using the website or looking for content in the book. Robust mean the design, making design accessible on different interface. Basically, not everybody reading the website is using the laptop. [INAUDIBLE] people using mobile devices, screen reader, voice recognition.
WILL AWAD: So all of these things, making sure that the content is robust for us to understand. The code is simply-- the HTML code is simple and slick for everybody to use, and it is actually robust across all the websites. And so making sure that we have inclusive content is key for us-- for any publisher or any business because we're not talking about just publishing here.
WILL AWAD: Because some businesses hear that they have to make website accessible, if they're serving the European Union. Product and service [INAUDIBLE] define what is accessible to make sure you reach beyond the US, if you're dealing with the EU. So why accessibility matter beyond the compliance? There's a lot of reasons for that. To start with, it's inclusivity and it's social responsibility-- to make sure that our product is reached for everyone.
WILL AWAD: And there's another reason, which expand beyond audience reach-- is about, as you mentioned today, just earlier in the introduction. There's one in four in the US people-- in the US, one in four who suffer with some kind of disability. But in the world, there's one in five. It's not guarantee that you're going to reach this 20% of the people.
WILL AWAD: But if you reach even some percentage of these people, that would be great, expanding the audience reach. And the other reasons is quite a lot of them. There's enhanced SEO, so the Search Engine Optimization that will help you reach and be able to be discoverable and provide more content and overall website performance. And there is the legal issue.
WILL AWAD: In the US, for example, there is the habit in the USA that if you don't comply with the requirement, you get sued. We haven't got that in the US-- in the UK or in the EU. But we might be seeing this again in the EU as soon as the European Accessibility Act comes into force in June 28 this year. So that's also an important consideration for making sure-- making your content accessible.
WILL AWAD: And one key element is also the reputation of the business. Any business has a reputation, is to make sure that their content is fully accessible. If you are not going to provide accessible content, that might affect your reputation in the industry. And no business would like to do that. So they all want to make sure that their content is accessible and compliant. And, as I said, making content and website fully accessible now, it might also be easier to change if there's a future change in the technology-- than just staying where you are at the moment.
WILL AWAD: So the main key here is to make sure your content is POUR-- is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. And consider all the elements of your reputation, avoiding legal actions. And it is legal requirement to make content accessible. And the SEO is a key thing for making sure that you meet the accessibility for your content and for your website.
SVEN MOLTER: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Will, really appreciate that. It's a lot of great points there. And just moving next to overall strategy and approach as we think there-- and one of the great things about our panel here today is we're lucky to have panelists from very large organizations, from a small publisher, and from a consultant. And so we have a variety of experiences, which is awesome.
SVEN MOLTER: And I'd love for our panelists to speak to how you approach accessibility in your organization. For larger orgs, how do you ensure consistency across different departments and product lines? For smaller publishers, what unique challenges do you face? And/or what unique opportunities do you have? Because there's probably some of those there. And in both cases, how do you effectively secure buy-in from leadership and other stakeholders?
SVEN MOLTER: And I thought maybe Simon, we'd go over to you to kick it off.
SIMON HOLT: Yeah, thanks very much. So, hi, everybody. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Simon Holt. I'm the Head of Content Accessibility at the science publishers, Elsevier. I'm a visually impaired person myself. So this is really important to me personally as well as professionally. So I use a screen reader to access content, for example. So if it doesn't have an alt text, then I'm missing out on all the information that comes out of images.
SIMON HOLT: So this is very important to me as well. In terms of approach to accessibility, I think the really key thing to think about here is that it's everybody's responsibility. Accessibility isn't kind of a nice add-on at the end that one or two people can take care of. Actually, in order to make content accessible or websites accessible, we need to really think about the concept of born accessible-- to really build accessibility into what we're doing here from the get go.
SIMON HOLT: So in the creation of the content, think about how alt text can be created alongside the rest of the content. When you're building a website, think about how the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines-- so things like color contrast and things like navigation-- are built in when you're building the website in the first place. And obviously, at a big organization like Elsevier, it's important to have standards that cut across all the different departments.
SIMON HOLT: So what we do is we have me and my team who deal with the content, and then we have a team in technology who really look after the products and the platforms. And we're supported by a team of accessibility champions in each department who make sure that all of the departments are aware of what the standards are that people need to adhere to, taking those industry guidelines like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, but also things like metadata guidelines from organizations-- like editor for books or NISO for journals.
SIMON HOLT: And making sure, as you say, that these are consistently applied across DTDs, across-- frameworks cut across the whole organization. And so in order to do that, it's quite important to think about the why, the what, the when, and the how. And so that's where getting buy-in from senior leadership comes in. So I think, well, quite eloquently articulated, some of the important factors around why accessibility is important.
SIMON HOLT: And for me, the key one here is about content enrichment. So as publishers, our job really is to curate, enrich, and disseminate content. And when content is accessible, we really do all of that better. So for example, when you add image descriptions to images, you're turning a non-text asset into a text asset. That makes it more discoverable. It makes it better for data mining. It means that the content is more flexible, and you can do more with it.
SIMON HOLT: Similarly for captioning video content, similar for metadata, and similar for publishing in accessible formats like EPUB 3. And so therefore, when we're thinking about accessibility, we're not just thinking about those people over there in terms of people with disabilities. We're thinking about everybody and really making sure that everybody has the opportunity to learn in the way that best suits them-- whether it's reading with their eyes, or listening with their ears, or touching with their hands.
SIMON HOLT: I'm thinking about Braille. And that's where standards like XML that can spit out various different formats are really crucial in order to make sure that we have accessible publishing. So in terms of the buy-in, actually the reason we do it is because it's good for business. There's the whole kind of areas about regulation, which are correct.
SIMON HOLT: There's the whole thing about expanding our audience that are correct. And there's a whole thing about content enrichment, which are correct as well. So I think it's a combination of all of these things.
BETH RICHARD: Sven, if I could come in from a small-publisher perspective. So, hi, everyone. I'm Beth Richard. I'm really delighted to be here with you today. So a bit of a background on the perspective that I'm going to be talking from is that I work in a four-person, in-house publications team at the Institute of Development Studies, which is a small, independent research institute based in the UK.
BETH RICHARD: And there are two of us in the team, working on editorial production. And we publish a handful of books each year and in-house open access journal, and then hundreds of research reports, working papers and briefings. And so in a smaller organization, often you have people who are really passionate about a topic and will raise it as an area of importance-- perhaps before others, including senior management, are aware of it.
BETH RICHARD: And that's the case with accessibility at IDS. So during our research on improving digital publishing, we realized how essential accessible publishing is and then later that the upcoming European legislation was going to have a large impact on the organizations. And I think that that's one of the biggest challenges and realities for small publishers is that there's no dedicated team or lead for accessibility. And that often, it's quite a grassroots, bottom-up approach.
BETH RICHARD: And so the approach that we took was to start an accessible communications group with people from across the whole institute. So as Simon said, it's not just about one or two people. It's about everybody in the organization. So we included people from communications, marketing, project staff, some of our researchers. And then as the momentum built, we gained a member from the senior leadership team.
BETH RICHARD: So then we were invited to speak at senior leadership meetings to communicate key messages and ask for support. So for example, a couple of years ago, we secured budget to have an ability net audit of our website and creation of an accessibility statement, which now are going to be using for communicating with our researchers on how we're complying with the EAA. In terms of our publications, most of our publications are produced or have been produced as PDFs.
BETH RICHARD: So firstly, we're doing a two-fold approach there, working with conversion suppliers to produce valid EPUBs for our frontlist books and then making sure that-- as both Will and Simon have said about making sure that the content itself is as accessible as possible. So for us, it was improving our PDFs to start with. So first, checking them against the Adobe Accessibility Checker and now more recently, using the PAC checker to aim for WCAG and PDF/UA standard.
BETH RICHARD: And I would say that the largest challenges for small publishers undoubtedly exceed our budget, time, [INAUDIBLE], affordability, and human resources. But I think there are really big opportunities for small publishers to be quite agile and creative and proactive in our approach, and perhaps having really close relationships with authors and our freelancers that can allow you to make really small changes over a period of time.
BETH RICHARD: So we've been focusing on shifting some tasks, like writing alt text much earlier in the workflow. And I think that that's easier due to our small size, not being part of a much larger and complex set of processes and departments. So yeah, we're balancing improvements in-house, with drawing in on expertise and individuals who can support us as being such a small organization.
SVEN MOLTER: Wonderful. Thanks so much for those different perspectives. I think that really helps paint the picture. And let's see. And, Beth, maybe we can start with you on this one. Who are the various stakeholders that need to be involved in EAA compliance and accessibility efforts that come after? So as we think about it, it's not tactical aspects of the metadata.
SVEN MOLTER: So how have you approached engaging those stakeholders?
BETH RICHARD: So there are tons. So I'm just focusing on a few key ones for us. So for an organization of our size, our relationships with individual freelance copy editors, typesetters, and proofreaders are really important. And some of those relationships have been built over decades and were based originally on a very print based, InDesign-based workflow. So we're really fortunate, as an in-house team, to have very close relationships with many of our authors.
BETH RICHARD: So we've been working over the last year with our authors and freelancers to try and embed accessibility throughout the editorial and production workflow. And for authors, that's been around writing really meaningful alt text. And we don't have the resources to write image descriptions in-house or to commission a specialist to write them for us. And so we're aiming to receive them from authors on submission or during copy editing.
BETH RICHARD: And then we're also sharing information and best practice with our copy editors on them, what really meaningful alt text looks like, sending some worked examples and giving feedback for future edits. And we're also bringing forward some of the elements of EPUB production to much earlier in the process that are sometimes left until later. And these are things that we identified as quite important to us.
BETH RICHARD: So many of our publications include text in a second language. So we now ask our copy editors to confirm the ISO language and code with authors during copy editing. So we can make sure that we're definitely including the right code in the EPUB so that it's read out correctly by screen readers. And then for typesetters and designers, we've created a list of our expectations for creating new templates and what we expect them to be doing in terms of working with InDesign and using the functionality correctly, minimum color contrast, making sure that there's a link, table of contents.
BETH RICHARD: So our approach has been very much with working with these key stakeholders to build in accessibility from the start, to then make much more accessible outputs.
SVEN MOLTER: Great. Thanks. And for those of you in slightly larger organizations, how are you engaging stakeholders? And is there anything about your approach that's slightly different than Beth's?
STACY TUCKER: I think for the JAMA Network-- hi, I'm Stacy Tucker from the JAMA Network. I think for us, it's engaging everyone at the planning stage in the beginning. And it's not just a few key folks. It's the publisher. It's the marketing manager. It's the product manager. It's the project manager, QA analyst, business analyst-- and getting everyone on the same page when the project manager starts the planning process for the project.
STACY TUCKER: It's just really important that everyone's on the same page when you start the project, before you go into requirements and start writing requirements. So it's everyone's responsibility, in my opinion. It's not just a key group of people. Everyone's responsible for accessibility of the project. So that's how we like to approach.
SVEN MOLTER: Great. Thank you. Similar story here at Silverchair, it's definitely everyone's responsibility in their communications that go out to that effect, just with reminders and standards. And yeah, so I definitely echo that. Let's see. So let's say you've done it. You're fully EAA compliant.
SVEN MOLTER: I think the question is then, what comes next? What should publishers be thinking about at that point in terms of, what lies ahead? And what's their next accessibility goals be to continue improving the user experience? And, Stacy, I was wondering if you might want to kick us off there.
STACY TUCKER: Sure. I think that question is partly funny because you're never done. I think there's constant upgrades, implementations of new features and functionalities, publishing of content that if you're not maintaining and keeping up, you have the chance of falling out of compliance. So I don't think you're ever really done. Keep in mind, there's two dates associated with the EAA.
STACY TUCKER: There's the one in 2025, but there's the one in 2030. So you need to make sure you're not only compliant for 2025 with content that's June 28 forward. But in 2030, there's content that was the backfill that needs to become compliant for 2030. At least, that's my understanding. I don't want this to be legal advice. This is my understanding. This is what I've read.
STACY TUCKER: This is how I understand it. But then we also have the ADA coming up in 2026, titled Two Changes, that will-- if you've done your work for the EAA, if you follow the EN 301 549 and WCAG 2.1 AA, you should be in good shape for the ADA changes that are coming in 2026. But it's also a matter of maintaining your sites and making sure you're keeping up with accessibility, and you're not letting anything fall through the cracks in the meantime.
STACY TUCKER:
SIMON HOLT: I'll just follow up on that a little bit. Completely agree with the principles. I think in terms of ADA, Americans with Disabilities Act Title II versus European Accessibility Act, it's worth saying that the scope of the ADA is quite a bit broader in that the EAA very specifically talks about e-books and e-commerce. Whereas the Americans with Disabilities Act is any kind of content that a public authority like a university provides to students and researchers.
SIMON HOLT: So from a content point of view, for example, this will include journals as well as books-- which obviously, certainly for a publisher like Elsevier, we publish about 10 times the amount of journal content as we do book content. So this 2026 ruling will obviously ramp things up quite a bit. But as Stacy said, the principles are certainly the same.
SIMON HOLT: And I think what I'd say about accessibility is this isn't a one-and-done thing. I always use the analogy of something like data privacy or security. This is always moving, quite an iterative and evolving field. And so, for example, at the moment, we're on WCAG-- the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2. I'm sure 3.0 will come out at some point. Standards evolve.
SIMON HOLT: Laws evolve. Best practice evolves as technology evolves. And the things that are doable now were maybe not doable 10 years ago. And more stuff will be doable in 10 years time. So I think when we think about accessibility, obviously we've talked a lot about the European Accessibility Act being a bit of a line in the sand. That's really raised the floor here.
SIMON HOLT: But I see it as the start of a slew of legislation that we're going to have to keep focusing on over the next coming years, as opposed to a one-and-done thing. And then we can all forget about accessibility for a while. And obviously, if you're an accessibility advocate like me, that's great news because it means things will keep becoming more inclusive for people with disabilities. But I think it's probably worth thinking that this is something that will be with us really for the foreseeable future.
SIMON HOLT:
SVEN MOLTER: Thank you so much for that. I echo and agree with everything that's been said here. So thank you so much. As we think about how we're incorporating accessibility considerations into our existing content workflows, particularly for journals and publications with varying levels of visual content, I guess the question really is how are you incorporating accessible considerations into your existing content workflows that have varying levels of visual content?
SVEN MOLTER: And we could open that up to anybody here. I kind of fumbled the lead in. Let me try that one more time. How are you incorporating--
WILL AWAD: I'm happy to answer here.
SIMON HOLT: Yeah, you go you go first.
WILL AWAD: Thank you, Simon. Look, if we're talking about books, then we need to consider there's two things here. We need to consider the Born accessible titles. That's the workflow that we need to consider and the backlist workflow that we need to consider. For the Born accessibility workflow, actually we need to start from point zero, which means the day we commission a book with an author-- making sure when we write our contract with this author, ensure this.
WILL AWAD: When they deliver the manuscript, they have alternative text delivered with the manuscript, and that's written in their contract. And engage with the vendors, or who actually have experience in making content accessible and converting these titles to fully accessible format, or engaging in a third-party certification-- which I know there's one in the US that a lot of people follow if you post your book titles and book share.
WILL AWAD: I think is Benetech certification. I believe the EU, actually also planning to have a certification in the EU, which I think is going to be announced somehow around London Book Fair. And for the backlist conversion, start working on your most important titles. Try to find people in your team and your organization who will help writing the alternative text, or engage with freelancers who will write alternative text.
WILL AWAD: And convert the main title, the most important title for the business, because that's what you need to do. And secondly, I would also say that I will say to everybody else. When you have images in your titles, try to have an image bank in your organization. Because these images, you might be able to use it again, or you want to use it again in the future. So you have that image with the alt text.
WILL AWAD: You don't have to worry about it the next edition or the next time you use the same image. So the alternative text will be there in your CMS or whatever you want to call it, image bank that you use. So that's one of the things that I would start thinking about. And the EAA never mentioned the word PDFs at all. So if you have journals, start thinking about, how can I make these journals fully accessible?
WILL AWAD: Because as Simon mentioned, Article II in the US ADA that's coming into force in April 26 and April 27, it says anything on the screen should be accessible. So start thinking about, how can I make my journals, my PDFs fully accessible? It's not just journal. It's your marketing material, your leaflets. If they're all PDFs, they all need to be accessible. That's how I work on it.
SIMON HOLT: And I think just to add to that, I think it's really important as publishers, that we all think about the best way to engage authors with this process as well. So accessible content, especially when we think about things like image descriptions, is part of the work. Especially when we're thinking about the academic space, it's really important that the alt text descriptions are accurate, complete, and relevant-- just the same as everything else.
SIMON HOLT: And so I think it's really important that as you're creating the content, you think about, OK, what's the best way to engage authors? There'll be some publishers that decide, OK, we want the authors to write the alt text descriptions themselves. At Elsevier, we're more going down the road that we will provide the alt text descriptions. And we would like authors to review those at proof stage to make sure that they're accurate, complete, and relevant, because that's part of the service that we can offer.
SIMON HOLT: But it's really important that you think about this as part of the work and not an optional, added extra. Because as a person who uses a screen reader, I can tell you that when you are listening to a paper as it were, when you get to an image, it doesn't say this is alt text. It just reads the description just the same as part of the regular text.
SIMON HOLT: So as a reader, actually you just consider alt text as part of what it is that you're reading. So if that isn't as good quality as everything else, it will affect your experience of consuming the whole book or journal-- which if you think about your experience of working with that publisher, that will really make a big difference.
BETH RICHARD: [INAUDIBLE] I like the idea of having an image bank and an alt text in the CMS. But as I was saying, we need to just make sure that the publishers and authors understand that the alt text is really context-specific. And so the same image in one publication might not be used in the same way. The description might not be relevant in that context. So it's a really great starting point to make sure that there is a description in the CMS because there is something there.
BETH RICHARD: But for it to be really meaningful, it then needs to be looked at and edited in the context of how that image is being used.
SVEN MOLTER: Thank you so much. I was just wondering, are there practical tools or resources that have made a huge difference in your accessibility work and implementations?
STACY TUCKER: I think screen readers are very important. There's various screen readers. I would suggest using multiple screen readers because some of them read differently. The WAVE tool by WebAIM has been very, very helpful. I think SortSite scans, very helpful. And those are probably the big things that my team uses. There's contrast checkers. There's various other tools.
STACY TUCKER: But the big ones would be WAVE screen readers, SortSite, contrast checkers and things like that.
WILL AWAD: I would say, just I'll echo that. And also I would say, it's always worth just testing the data that you convert into screen reader as Stacy just mentioned, and get your team to test it in various devices. There's a lot of free tools out there. But ideally, if you have some of them on your machine, it's good that you test them as well yourself. Try to navigate. And some businesses, probably it's a good idea to hire people who use screen reader also, that will help them to make sure that the content is accessible.
WILL AWAD: And furthermore, as I mentioned, there is certification. You can send your title to third party to just give it a quick review to see if it's fully accessible and compliant. And I use, for example, Ace by Daisy to check if my content is accessible-- PAC24, as Beth also mentioned, for PDFs. For website auditing, I use a lot of tools. But the main tool I use is human, testing the website using just the keyboard.
WILL AWAD: And that's the main test I use for website auditing. I don't just rely on the automated tool because you need somebody human to test it to make sure it's fully compliant.
SIMON HOLT: Absolutely. And just a word on screen reader testing, again, I can attest as someone who uses a screen reader. These are complicated pieces of kit that take quite a long time to learn how to use properly. There's a few different iterations of them as well. There's JAWS. There's SuperNova. There's NVDA. And no doubt, there are others as well-- ZoomText.
SIMON HOLT: But no doubt, there are others as well. And these aren't things you can just pick up, and anybody can use. Because when we're talking about testing using screen reader, actually you need to do that without being able to see. Otherwise, you're not really testing it with a screen reader. So unless you're willing to learn how to use a screen reader and blindfold yourself whilst you're doing it, you really do need to engage people with lived experience in order to do this.
SIMON HOLT: The way that we think about accessibility at Elsevier is accessibility as a product. And therefore, when we're doing testing, we need to think about the people who use that product. You never launch any other product without getting testing from people who are going to use it. And so whilst I completely agree with using all these automated tools and things like Ace, and WAVE, and the Benetech certification-- are great-- I just want to put a word in for engaging people with lived experience who have accessibility needs, who can tell you whether the services and features that you're rolling out are actually solving their problems for them.
SIMON HOLT: Otherwise, you're going to end up spending a lot of money on things that you don't even know whether are meeting the needs of the people that they're designed to support.
SVEN MOLTER: Yeah, wonderful point. Just going to let that linger for a minute there. Thank you so much. Assignment question for you from the chat in regards to the screen reader and alt text for images. Should caption text begin with the word caption?
SIMON HOLT: There are various different guidelines around that. I would say no. But, well, you may have different point of view to me. And the reason I'm slightly sitting on the fence is I've seen conflicting guidance about this. And I can see Will smiling. So, Will, what are your thoughts? I would say not because it's kind of clunky, but what do you think?
WILL AWAD: I agree. We don't use the word caption. So we just put the title there, the text. We don't use the word caption.
SIMON HOLT: But because the idea here is that this is meant to be text. that is, instead of an image. So it should flow normally as part of the narrative as opposed to having some unnecessary words in there. Don't forget that for the people who are using it, most of them will be unable to see the image that we're talking about here. So it's instead of, rather than in addition to.
WILL AWAD: And the one key I would like to add is just when you have the alt text, for example, make sure it's ending with a full stop. So we know that the alt text is completed reading it before we move into the context of the book to follow.
SIMON HOLT: Great.
WILL AWAD: And that's a very important thing to do.
SVEN MOLTER: All right, I think we are just about wrapping up here. One last question for the group, because you can't have a webinar without talking about AI. So what role is AI currently playing in your accessibility efforts, if any, for tasks like potentially generating alt text? Or how do you see the work evolving with the assistance of AI in the future, if you put on your prognosticator hat?
SVEN MOLTER: So I'll turn that open to everyone.
STACY TUCKER: So we're hoping to leverage AI in the creation of meta content for our core content in the future. It's not something that we've done now-- that we're doing now. But it is something that we're hoping to leverage for prices, for summaries, for alt text-- and very excited to start working on that when we do. But as of right now, we're not really working on anything.
SIMON HOLT: So for us, we're using AI to draft out text, and then human SMEs are editing that. And then those edited versions are then going to the authors at proof stage for them to check. So it goes through two rounds of human iterations. We're also looking into AI or at least automation around metadata in terms of basically scanning all of our content and basically being able to say here's a hazard, or here's MathML, or here's a table of contents-- and so automating the metadata generation process.
SIMON HOLT: I think in general, my feelings are very much in line with Elsevier's responsible use of AI policy, which basically says you can use AI in the drafting process, but there must be a human being in order to supervise this and check for quality. I always think for an alt text in particular, AI can be quite good at what I'm going to call translation. It can tell you what's in front of it.
SIMON HOLT: So it's OK for photographs, for illustrations, that kind of thing. I don't think it's very good at interpretation so complex charts, and graphs, western blots-- that kind of thing that you could interpret a whole series of different ways. And I think in the future, AI will probably get 80% to 90% of images and do a pretty good job, but there'll always be that 10% to 20% of complex images that need human intervention.
SIMON HOLT: And the way that I think about this, Elsevier are a science publisher. And therefore, people read our content because they believe that what is coming out of our content is true. And therefore, if we're publishing stuff that isn't true, then actually that is an existential problem for us. So therefore, whilst I completely think that AI has a lot of potential in terms of helping us do a lot more at scale, which is really going to help people with disabilities because they'll be able to access content in a way that has never been possible before, we also need to be careful to make sure that we're not just letting all of our reputations be put at risk because we end up publishing things that aren't true.
SIMON HOLT: So quality must come first. And I think AI is an interesting tool and an interesting way of obviously scaling up. But it doesn't replace the human being. It may be augments and makes quicker what a human being can value-- what value human being can add. A human being adds value in terms of the knowledge and understanding.
SIMON HOLT: If somebody can mean that we're not starting off from a blank page, that's great. But I don't see AI replacing human beings anytime soon.
SVEN MOLTER: Thanks. We do have a couple of questions in the chat. And Will answered this one just a little bit, I think already, but I'll go ahead and ask it in case there's anything else you want to add. When the content is highly specialized engineering material or anything highly specialized, in your opinion, what is the best way to get alt text written with-- yeah, what is the best way to get alt text written for highly specialized material?
SVEN MOLTER:
WILL AWAD: Just maybe using a subject matter expert in this area to write the alternative text. Because, I mean, relying on AI, I don't think the AI will be able to provide accurate. Because they don't have the context of the image. I mean, the text is not uploaded, only the image. And the AI will only explain what is the image. But if you have a subject matter expert, as Simon said, it's always worth them taking a look at the image and can use AI just to help them-- put them in the right direction to write alternative text.
WILL AWAD: So my suggestion is to go with a subject matter expert who has a degree in engineering probably and will be able to write alt text for that.
SVEN MOLTER: Thanks. And another question about alt text for Simon. Are you currently using an Elsevier-built tool to generate alt text? And if so, what is the level of accuracy? And is it available as a product for other publishers?
SIMON HOLT: We're not currently using an Elsevier-built AI tool. That's something that maybe we'll consider for the future. And that's as far as I can say about that, really. I think there's a couple of things to say here. One is actually, the building of these tools is pretty complex. And we have some pretty tight deadlines that we need to consider. So if we're going to build a tool, we're certainly not going to rush it.
SIMON HOLT: We're going to do it properly. And that means that it's not surprising that we haven't built one yet. I think second of all, just on AI and alt text in general, I think AI is only as good or bad as the way that you use it. So what we found is we've done loads of experiments with different LLMs and using different companies and what have you. It's not just about the kind of AI.
SIMON HOLT: It's about whatever you put into it. So for us, we don't just put the image. We'll put the two paragraphs around the image. We'll put the book title. We'll put the blurb of the book. We'll put the image caption. And so therefore, we're giving the AI as much information as possible about the image that they're describing. And just like with a human being, if you give me lots of information about the image and then ask me to describe it, I've got much better chance than if you just give me the image without any context.
SIMON HOLT: I think Beth mentioned that alt text is all about context. And that's as true with AI as it is with human beings. So I think that's important to think about when we're considering AI and how it might be used.
SVEN MOLTER: Great. Thanks. I think one of the questions that came to Silverchair a couple of times is an organization goes through an accessibility review, and they have a number of items that they need to remediate. How do they prioritize that work? So do you have any recommendations for how someone might prioritize accessibility work as they're working through accessibility scans?
SVEN MOLTER: Is there an approach you'd recommend?
STACY TUCKER: So for the JAMA Network, what we did was we work on our accessibility conformance report twice a year. And we built requirements based on what we do not conform to in the ACR, which is just built on from the VPAT. The VPAT is the blank template. Once you filled it out, it's the ACR, the Accessibility Conformance Report. So we go through that on a regular basis and write requirements based on what needs to be made accessible.
STACY TUCKER: And from there, we give to Silverchair to t-shirt size that. So then we can go in and create a roadmap. So we've road mapped out the design and the development of these items that don't meet the conformance standards in the WCAG 2.1 AA. And we have those scheduled out from-- we started in third quarter of 2024. And we're going to go to second quarter of 2025 to meet the June 28, 2025 deadline for the EAA.
STACY TUCKER: But that's basically how we're handling changes is starting with our ACR, keeping our ACR updated, using that to build our requirements and going from there.
SVEN MOLTER: Great. And final question for today, beyond compliance, how are we measuring the impact of improved accessibility on audience reach and content engagement? How do we measure?
WILL AWAD: I mean, I always say that as a joke here. If you haven't been sued, then you're good. You're doing a good job. I mean, that's a good measurement. I mean, accessibility-- now as we say, look, there is three things we have to look at. There is the legal requirement, which is the ADA in the US. We have EAA. We have the Equality Act in the UK. And then we have the specification.
WILL AWAD: And we have the requirement. The requirement is we have to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. So we have the legislation. We have the requirement and the specification for the EPUB, which we have the HTML. We have to meet that. So as long as you're following these three steps, I'm sure your content should be accessible.
WILL AWAD: And if you have a website with accessibility statement and just to protect yourself is like a disclaimer to say, look, there might be something. And if you see something is not accessible, please let us know, and we will take care of it. So you avoiding the being sued and your reputation stay intact. So as long as you follow these steps yourself there to make sure that you keep your reputation up and following these guidelines, you should be OK.
WILL AWAD: If you get sued, then that mean you are not following the accessibility regulations here.
SIMON HOLT: I'm going to challenge you for a minute, Will.
WILL AWAD: Go ahead.
SIMON HOLT: Because why not? So I don't disagree. But I'm going to say, we can be more ambitious than that. Not getting sued feels like quite an important, but also a rather low baseline. Actually, it comes back to the why that we started at the beginning and that you talked about so eloquently. Accessibility should be there for whoever needs it, whether it's one person or whether it's 10,000 people.
SIMON HOLT: The reality is, and quite rightly, we don't ask people when they have a disability, whether they read some of our content. We don't ask people when they have a disability, whether they submit a paper to be published. But actually, because we disseminate content in our industry, we want more people to be able to read it. And we want more people to be able to publish with us.
SIMON HOLT: And so therefore, I would say that you measure accessibility in the same way that you measure content growth, whether that's reading or publishing in general. There's not a special category that says accessibility. We're not measuring disabled people separately. Disabled people are and should be an integrated part of our society. And actually as usability by disabled people grows, it means that we have more and more diverse people able to contribute, giving their voices and more and more diverse perspectives.
SIMON HOLT: And therefore, you can't measure all of this quantitatively. But you can measure it qualitatively in terms of, are we hearing from more diverse voices? Are more people able to access our content in terms of reading or publishing with us? And is our content becoming more dynamic so that people can access it in more ways? As I said, seeing it with your eyes, hearing it with your ears, or touching it with your hands.
SIMON HOLT: That's what success looks like to me. And that goes beyond metrics. And it talks about the very purpose of why we do what we do in the scholarly communications industry.
WILL AWAD: I agree. I mean, we should have-- I mean, I haven't heard some reward or who is the best publisher with fully accessible content. We never have this yearly award being done. Maybe that's something we should consider in the next year or so. That, you know, who's the best publisher with fully accessible content?
SIMON HOLT: Well, maybe Silverchair could sponsor it. That would be great.
WILL AWAD: And they have to have Oscars, yeah?
SIMON HOLT: Yeah, right.
SVEN MOLTER: All right, we just thank you so much. I really appreciate that. There's a couple of questions we didn't get to in the chat. We'll see if we can follow up with those afterwards. Simon, Stacy, Will, Beth-- thank you so much for taking the time out of your days to provide such thoughtful feedback and conversation for us here. I know we had a number of people that were really engaged, and we just really, really appreciate your time here today.
SVEN MOLTER: So I will pass it back over to Steph. And, yeah, thank you so much. It's been great to see everyone today. STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE
HANSEN: Yeah.
HANSEN: Thank you, Sven. Thank you again to all our speakers and to all the attendees for the engagement. We will look at the questions that we weren't able to get to. We are looking at putting out some more resources, including follow-ups from this webinar. So stay tuned for that. And then as you'll see on the screen, these are our next two events around research integrity-- pilots and partnerships on April 16 and one around the data revolution-- how to unlock value from your data on May 15.
HANSEN: These are both free webinars. We encourage you to sign up. And, otherwise, thanks again for joining us. Thanks again to our speakers, and have a great rest of your day.
SVEN MOLTER: Thank you.
WILL AWAD: Thank you.
SIMON HOLT: Thanks, all.
WILL AWAD: Thanks, everyone.
Segment:0 .
STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE
HANSEN: OK, so I
HANSEN: got some more people joining. But I'm going to go ahead and dive into some of the logistics for us. So, hello. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. My name is Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen. I'm the VP of Marketing at Silverchair. This is the first of the 2025 Platform Strategies Webinar Series events.
HANSEN: We're really looking forward to today's discussion. But before we get started, I'm just going to cover a few of the logistics. So this webinar series features three virtual events, and you may register for the next two in the same page that you did for this one. And be sure to save the date for our in-person platform strategies event on September 25 in Washington, DC. Registration for that event will open in May.
HANSEN: So this year's webinar series spotlights the biggest trends in publishing technology for 2025, including accessibility, research integrity, and leveraging data to drive revenue. We designed these webinars to feel more like a discussion among the panelists, and so we encourage you to also engage in the discussion via the chat and the Q&A features throughout. And we will save some time at the end to get to those questions.
HANSEN: This event is being recorded as the voice, no doubt, told you. A copy of that recording will be made freely available on our website and to all of you via email. Finally, at the end of the event, you'll see a survey requesting your rating of this event, which helps us with our future planning. So we appreciate you taking a moment to complete that. As I hand it over now to today's hosts, Sven Molter, VP of Product at Silverchair, I'm also going to launch a poll about where our attendees are joining from to help add some context to the accessibility standards that are directly affecting you.
HANSEN: With that, over to you, Sven.
SVEN MOLTER: Awesome. Thank you so much. Hi, everyone. Absolutely thrilled to be here with you today. As Steph mentioned, my name is Sven Molter, and I'm the VP of product here at Silverchair. Overture. And today, thrilled to say that I'm joined by Simon Holt from Elsevier, Stacy Tucker from the American Medical Association-- JAMA Network, Will Awad from Maverick Publishing Specialists, and Beth Richard from the Institute of Development Studies.
SVEN MOLTER: And we are here to have-- and I'm going to take this survey too. We are here to have a conversation about the European Accessibility Act, also known as the EAA. And hopefully you are well aware of this already, but good to just cover a couple of highlights here. As you hopefully know, it's set to take effect in June of 2025, and it really is a game changer for digital accessibility across the European Union and beyond.
SVEN MOLTER: And that's one of the reasons we're having this conversation here today. So as you know, it aims to ensure that the estimated 80-plus million people with disabilities in the EU can access a wide variety of products and services, including digital ones. And so when we think about what that looks like on a scholarly publishing platform, what does that look like?
SVEN MOLTER: Well, a few things, but not an exhaustive list, to be sure, are things like accessible checkout procedures, descriptive alt text for product images, clear color contrast, keyboard navigation, accessible forms, and more. So there's a lot involved in there. And that's one of the reasons why we're having this conversation here today. So at Silverchair, we just wanted to mention that accessibility is built into our teams and processes as it's a key fundamental part of what we do.
SVEN MOLTER: And so even so, our teams have been-- spent a good deal of time preparing for the EAA and making sure that every element that we produce is in compliance. So as you know, this is a big deal. This is a huge deal. It's transformative. It really is a game changer for the landscape that we play in. And so in the spirit of building up our community, we wanted to gather a few experts and have a conversation about accessibility with the hope that the content of this conversation is edifying to you and the broader community.
SVEN MOLTER: So with that intro out of-- over, why don't we start things and set things into context? And this first question will be for Will. How would you define what truly accessible content and accessible websites look like in practice? And why does this matter beyond just regulatory compliance? And if you don't mind, our panelists, to briefly introduce your area of focus and your experience as part of your answer.
SVEN MOLTER: And we'll start with Will here.
WILL AWAD: Thank you so much for inviting me to this webinar. And my name is Will. I'm a Senior Associate at Mayfield Publishing Specialists. I'm specialized in digital accessibility and ensuring content is fully accessible for people with disability. I advocate about the subject. And I write few articles, when I have the chance, about accessibility. I have a legal background.
WILL AWAD: So I didn't come from publishing. I come from the legal sector. And I enjoy the publishing work. So what is truly content? I mean, the question is basically related to, how can we ensure that what we're producing is fully accessible and truly accessible-- whether it's content, or digital asset, or website? So basically, we have something called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that have four principles to make sure that whatever you produce is fully accessible.
WILL AWAD: And they are called POUR. It's perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Basically, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, they are international guidelines. They are the same guidelines, whether you are based in the US, in Europe, in the UK, or Australia, and New Zealand, and the Gulf states, et cetera. So what does the POUR mean? It's basically, making sure that the content is-- perceivable, in one hand, mean that everyone understand all the elements in the design.
WILL AWAD: For example, if you're taking a website that you have images, all the images have alternative text. That's one of the things. It could be also in a book, but also in a PDF. So you have an image that you provide alternative text to that. Another meaningful perceivable is the content can be presented in different ways.
WILL AWAD: It's reflowable. You can resize it [INAUDIBLE] for screen readers and without losing the meaning. So if you maximize it to 200 points in your website, you are not losing the contrast of the website or the element of the website. Other issues you can consider is the color contrast as another important issue to consider under the perceivable. Operable, that's the second principle in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines-- would mean provide alternative means for navigation.
WILL AWAD: Not everybody able to use a mouse, when you created the accessible content. You need to consider people that might have mobility issue. And then you need to use a mouthpiece to navigate. Keyboard accessibility is important. So navigate via the keys on your keyboard, and not without the mouse, and making sure also there's enough messages on your website to provide, like, submit this form.
WILL AWAD: The form has been submitted. You get a message, enough time to do that. Also, avoid having flash content because some websites, they might have video with a lot of flash. And that might affect the people who're looking at it and might trigger some seizure, which we don't want that to happen. So that's how you make sure the content is operable. And the third principle of the Web Content Accessibility Guideline is understandable.
WILL AWAD: And making sure that it's easy to navigate and read the website. So you have the hierarchy defined. The heading is there. You can navigate. The language tag is there. You have symbol tagging that you're using. For example, when you say read more, you might have more than one article to say read more.
WILL AWAD: Read more about what? So try to define this and make it simpler and understandable for people who are using the website or looking for content in the book. Robust mean the design, making design accessible on different interface. Basically, not everybody reading the website is using the laptop. [INAUDIBLE] people using mobile devices, screen reader, voice recognition.
WILL AWAD: So all of these things, making sure that the content is robust for us to understand. The code is simply-- the HTML code is simple and slick for everybody to use, and it is actually robust across all the websites. And so making sure that we have inclusive content is key for us-- for any publisher or any business because we're not talking about just publishing here.
WILL AWAD: Because some businesses hear that they have to make website accessible, if they're serving the European Union. Product and service [INAUDIBLE] define what is accessible to make sure you reach beyond the US, if you're dealing with the EU. So why accessibility matter beyond the compliance? There's a lot of reasons for that. To start with, it's inclusivity and it's social responsibility-- to make sure that our product is reached for everyone.
WILL AWAD: And there's another reason, which expand beyond audience reach-- is about, as you mentioned today, just earlier in the introduction. There's one in four in the US people-- in the US, one in four who suffer with some kind of disability. But in the world, there's one in five. It's not guarantee that you're going to reach this 20% of the people.
WILL AWAD: But if you reach even some percentage of these people, that would be great, expanding the audience reach. And the other reasons is quite a lot of them. There's enhanced SEO, so the Search Engine Optimization that will help you reach and be able to be discoverable and provide more content and overall website performance. And there is the legal issue.
WILL AWAD: In the US, for example, there is the habit in the USA that if you don't comply with the requirement, you get sued. We haven't got that in the US-- in the UK or in the EU. But we might be seeing this again in the EU as soon as the European Accessibility Act comes into force in June 28 this year. So that's also an important consideration for making sure-- making your content accessible.
WILL AWAD: And one key element is also the reputation of the business. Any business has a reputation, is to make sure that their content is fully accessible. If you are not going to provide accessible content, that might affect your reputation in the industry. And no business would like to do that. So they all want to make sure that their content is accessible and compliant. And, as I said, making content and website fully accessible now, it might also be easier to change if there's a future change in the technology-- than just staying where you are at the moment.
WILL AWAD: So the main key here is to make sure your content is POUR-- is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. And consider all the elements of your reputation, avoiding legal actions. And it is legal requirement to make content accessible. And the SEO is a key thing for making sure that you meet the accessibility for your content and for your website.
SVEN MOLTER: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Will, really appreciate that. It's a lot of great points there. And just moving next to overall strategy and approach as we think there-- and one of the great things about our panel here today is we're lucky to have panelists from very large organizations, from a small publisher, and from a consultant. And so we have a variety of experiences, which is awesome.
SVEN MOLTER: And I'd love for our panelists to speak to how you approach accessibility in your organization. For larger orgs, how do you ensure consistency across different departments and product lines? For smaller publishers, what unique challenges do you face? And/or what unique opportunities do you have? Because there's probably some of those there. And in both cases, how do you effectively secure buy-in from leadership and other stakeholders?
SVEN MOLTER: And I thought maybe Simon, we'd go over to you to kick it off.
SIMON HOLT: Yeah, thanks very much. So, hi, everybody. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Simon Holt. I'm the Head of Content Accessibility at the science publishers, Elsevier. I'm a visually impaired person myself. So this is really important to me personally as well as professionally. So I use a screen reader to access content, for example. So if it doesn't have an alt text, then I'm missing out on all the information that comes out of images.
SIMON HOLT: So this is very important to me as well. In terms of approach to accessibility, I think the really key thing to think about here is that it's everybody's responsibility. Accessibility isn't kind of a nice add-on at the end that one or two people can take care of. Actually, in order to make content accessible or websites accessible, we need to really think about the concept of born accessible-- to really build accessibility into what we're doing here from the get go.
SIMON HOLT: So in the creation of the content, think about how alt text can be created alongside the rest of the content. When you're building a website, think about how the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines-- so things like color contrast and things like navigation-- are built in when you're building the website in the first place. And obviously, at a big organization like Elsevier, it's important to have standards that cut across all the different departments.
SIMON HOLT: So what we do is we have me and my team who deal with the content, and then we have a team in technology who really look after the products and the platforms. And we're supported by a team of accessibility champions in each department who make sure that all of the departments are aware of what the standards are that people need to adhere to, taking those industry guidelines like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, but also things like metadata guidelines from organizations-- like editor for books or NISO for journals.
SIMON HOLT: And making sure, as you say, that these are consistently applied across DTDs, across-- frameworks cut across the whole organization. And so in order to do that, it's quite important to think about the why, the what, the when, and the how. And so that's where getting buy-in from senior leadership comes in. So I think, well, quite eloquently articulated, some of the important factors around why accessibility is important.
SIMON HOLT: And for me, the key one here is about content enrichment. So as publishers, our job really is to curate, enrich, and disseminate content. And when content is accessible, we really do all of that better. So for example, when you add image descriptions to images, you're turning a non-text asset into a text asset. That makes it more discoverable. It makes it better for data mining. It means that the content is more flexible, and you can do more with it.
SIMON HOLT: Similarly for captioning video content, similar for metadata, and similar for publishing in accessible formats like EPUB 3. And so therefore, when we're thinking about accessibility, we're not just thinking about those people over there in terms of people with disabilities. We're thinking about everybody and really making sure that everybody has the opportunity to learn in the way that best suits them-- whether it's reading with their eyes, or listening with their ears, or touching with their hands.
SIMON HOLT: I'm thinking about Braille. And that's where standards like XML that can spit out various different formats are really crucial in order to make sure that we have accessible publishing. So in terms of the buy-in, actually the reason we do it is because it's good for business. There's the whole kind of areas about regulation, which are correct.
SIMON HOLT: There's the whole thing about expanding our audience that are correct. And there's a whole thing about content enrichment, which are correct as well. So I think it's a combination of all of these things.
BETH RICHARD: Sven, if I could come in from a small-publisher perspective. So, hi, everyone. I'm Beth Richard. I'm really delighted to be here with you today. So a bit of a background on the perspective that I'm going to be talking from is that I work in a four-person, in-house publications team at the Institute of Development Studies, which is a small, independent research institute based in the UK.
BETH RICHARD: And there are two of us in the team, working on editorial production. And we publish a handful of books each year and in-house open access journal, and then hundreds of research reports, working papers and briefings. And so in a smaller organization, often you have people who are really passionate about a topic and will raise it as an area of importance-- perhaps before others, including senior management, are aware of it.
BETH RICHARD: And that's the case with accessibility at IDS. So during our research on improving digital publishing, we realized how essential accessible publishing is and then later that the upcoming European legislation was going to have a large impact on the organizations. And I think that that's one of the biggest challenges and realities for small publishers is that there's no dedicated team or lead for accessibility. And that often, it's quite a grassroots, bottom-up approach.
BETH RICHARD: And so the approach that we took was to start an accessible communications group with people from across the whole institute. So as Simon said, it's not just about one or two people. It's about everybody in the organization. So we included people from communications, marketing, project staff, some of our researchers. And then as the momentum built, we gained a member from the senior leadership team.
BETH RICHARD: So then we were invited to speak at senior leadership meetings to communicate key messages and ask for support. So for example, a couple of years ago, we secured budget to have an ability net audit of our website and creation of an accessibility statement, which now are going to be using for communicating with our researchers on how we're complying with the EAA. In terms of our publications, most of our publications are produced or have been produced as PDFs.
BETH RICHARD: So firstly, we're doing a two-fold approach there, working with conversion suppliers to produce valid EPUBs for our frontlist books and then making sure that-- as both Will and Simon have said about making sure that the content itself is as accessible as possible. So for us, it was improving our PDFs to start with. So first, checking them against the Adobe Accessibility Checker and now more recently, using the PAC checker to aim for WCAG and PDF/UA standard.
BETH RICHARD: And I would say that the largest challenges for small publishers undoubtedly exceed our budget, time, [INAUDIBLE], affordability, and human resources. But I think there are really big opportunities for small publishers to be quite agile and creative and proactive in our approach, and perhaps having really close relationships with authors and our freelancers that can allow you to make really small changes over a period of time.
BETH RICHARD: So we've been focusing on shifting some tasks, like writing alt text much earlier in the workflow. And I think that that's easier due to our small size, not being part of a much larger and complex set of processes and departments. So yeah, we're balancing improvements in-house, with drawing in on expertise and individuals who can support us as being such a small organization.
SVEN MOLTER: Wonderful. Thanks so much for those different perspectives. I think that really helps paint the picture. And let's see. And, Beth, maybe we can start with you on this one. Who are the various stakeholders that need to be involved in EAA compliance and accessibility efforts that come after? So as we think about it, it's not tactical aspects of the metadata.
SVEN MOLTER: So how have you approached engaging those stakeholders?
BETH RICHARD: So there are tons. So I'm just focusing on a few key ones for us. So for an organization of our size, our relationships with individual freelance copy editors, typesetters, and proofreaders are really important. And some of those relationships have been built over decades and were based originally on a very print based, InDesign-based workflow. So we're really fortunate, as an in-house team, to have very close relationships with many of our authors.
BETH RICHARD: So we've been working over the last year with our authors and freelancers to try and embed accessibility throughout the editorial and production workflow. And for authors, that's been around writing really meaningful alt text. And we don't have the resources to write image descriptions in-house or to commission a specialist to write them for us. And so we're aiming to receive them from authors on submission or during copy editing.
BETH RICHARD: And then we're also sharing information and best practice with our copy editors on them, what really meaningful alt text looks like, sending some worked examples and giving feedback for future edits. And we're also bringing forward some of the elements of EPUB production to much earlier in the process that are sometimes left until later. And these are things that we identified as quite important to us.
BETH RICHARD: So many of our publications include text in a second language. So we now ask our copy editors to confirm the ISO language and code with authors during copy editing. So we can make sure that we're definitely including the right code in the EPUB so that it's read out correctly by screen readers. And then for typesetters and designers, we've created a list of our expectations for creating new templates and what we expect them to be doing in terms of working with InDesign and using the functionality correctly, minimum color contrast, making sure that there's a link, table of contents.
BETH RICHARD: So our approach has been very much with working with these key stakeholders to build in accessibility from the start, to then make much more accessible outputs.
SVEN MOLTER: Great. Thanks. And for those of you in slightly larger organizations, how are you engaging stakeholders? And is there anything about your approach that's slightly different than Beth's?
STACY TUCKER: I think for the JAMA Network-- hi, I'm Stacy Tucker from the JAMA Network. I think for us, it's engaging everyone at the planning stage in the beginning. And it's not just a few key folks. It's the publisher. It's the marketing manager. It's the product manager. It's the project manager, QA analyst, business analyst-- and getting everyone on the same page when the project manager starts the planning process for the project.
STACY TUCKER: It's just really important that everyone's on the same page when you start the project, before you go into requirements and start writing requirements. So it's everyone's responsibility, in my opinion. It's not just a key group of people. Everyone's responsible for accessibility of the project. So that's how we like to approach.
SVEN MOLTER: Great. Thank you. Similar story here at Silverchair, it's definitely everyone's responsibility in their communications that go out to that effect, just with reminders and standards. And yeah, so I definitely echo that. Let's see. So let's say you've done it. You're fully EAA compliant.
SVEN MOLTER: I think the question is then, what comes next? What should publishers be thinking about at that point in terms of, what lies ahead? And what's their next accessibility goals be to continue improving the user experience? And, Stacy, I was wondering if you might want to kick us off there.
STACY TUCKER: Sure. I think that question is partly funny because you're never done. I think there's constant upgrades, implementations of new features and functionalities, publishing of content that if you're not maintaining and keeping up, you have the chance of falling out of compliance. So I don't think you're ever really done. Keep in mind, there's two dates associated with the EAA.
STACY TUCKER: There's the one in 2025, but there's the one in 2030. So you need to make sure you're not only compliant for 2025 with content that's June 28 forward. But in 2030, there's content that was the backfill that needs to become compliant for 2030. At least, that's my understanding. I don't want this to be legal advice. This is my understanding. This is what I've read.
STACY TUCKER: This is how I understand it. But then we also have the ADA coming up in 2026, titled Two Changes, that will-- if you've done your work for the EAA, if you follow the EN 301 549 and WCAG 2.1 AA, you should be in good shape for the ADA changes that are coming in 2026. But it's also a matter of maintaining your sites and making sure you're keeping up with accessibility, and you're not letting anything fall through the cracks in the meantime.
STACY TUCKER:
SIMON HOLT: I'll just follow up on that a little bit. Completely agree with the principles. I think in terms of ADA, Americans with Disabilities Act Title II versus European Accessibility Act, it's worth saying that the scope of the ADA is quite a bit broader in that the EAA very specifically talks about e-books and e-commerce. Whereas the Americans with Disabilities Act is any kind of content that a public authority like a university provides to students and researchers.
SIMON HOLT: So from a content point of view, for example, this will include journals as well as books-- which obviously, certainly for a publisher like Elsevier, we publish about 10 times the amount of journal content as we do book content. So this 2026 ruling will obviously ramp things up quite a bit. But as Stacy said, the principles are certainly the same.
SIMON HOLT: And I think what I'd say about accessibility is this isn't a one-and-done thing. I always use the analogy of something like data privacy or security. This is always moving, quite an iterative and evolving field. And so, for example, at the moment, we're on WCAG-- the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2. I'm sure 3.0 will come out at some point. Standards evolve.
SIMON HOLT: Laws evolve. Best practice evolves as technology evolves. And the things that are doable now were maybe not doable 10 years ago. And more stuff will be doable in 10 years time. So I think when we think about accessibility, obviously we've talked a lot about the European Accessibility Act being a bit of a line in the sand. That's really raised the floor here.
SIMON HOLT: But I see it as the start of a slew of legislation that we're going to have to keep focusing on over the next coming years, as opposed to a one-and-done thing. And then we can all forget about accessibility for a while. And obviously, if you're an accessibility advocate like me, that's great news because it means things will keep becoming more inclusive for people with disabilities. But I think it's probably worth thinking that this is something that will be with us really for the foreseeable future.
SIMON HOLT:
SVEN MOLTER: Thank you so much for that. I echo and agree with everything that's been said here. So thank you so much. As we think about how we're incorporating accessibility considerations into our existing content workflows, particularly for journals and publications with varying levels of visual content, I guess the question really is how are you incorporating accessible considerations into your existing content workflows that have varying levels of visual content?
SVEN MOLTER: And we could open that up to anybody here. I kind of fumbled the lead in. Let me try that one more time. How are you incorporating--
WILL AWAD: I'm happy to answer here.
SIMON HOLT: Yeah, you go you go first.
WILL AWAD: Thank you, Simon. Look, if we're talking about books, then we need to consider there's two things here. We need to consider the Born accessible titles. That's the workflow that we need to consider and the backlist workflow that we need to consider. For the Born accessibility workflow, actually we need to start from point zero, which means the day we commission a book with an author-- making sure when we write our contract with this author, ensure this.
WILL AWAD: When they deliver the manuscript, they have alternative text delivered with the manuscript, and that's written in their contract. And engage with the vendors, or who actually have experience in making content accessible and converting these titles to fully accessible format, or engaging in a third-party certification-- which I know there's one in the US that a lot of people follow if you post your book titles and book share.
WILL AWAD: I think is Benetech certification. I believe the EU, actually also planning to have a certification in the EU, which I think is going to be announced somehow around London Book Fair. And for the backlist conversion, start working on your most important titles. Try to find people in your team and your organization who will help writing the alternative text, or engage with freelancers who will write alternative text.
WILL AWAD: And convert the main title, the most important title for the business, because that's what you need to do. And secondly, I would also say that I will say to everybody else. When you have images in your titles, try to have an image bank in your organization. Because these images, you might be able to use it again, or you want to use it again in the future. So you have that image with the alt text.
WILL AWAD: You don't have to worry about it the next edition or the next time you use the same image. So the alternative text will be there in your CMS or whatever you want to call it, image bank that you use. So that's one of the things that I would start thinking about. And the EAA never mentioned the word PDFs at all. So if you have journals, start thinking about, how can I make these journals fully accessible?
WILL AWAD: Because as Simon mentioned, Article II in the US ADA that's coming into force in April 26 and April 27, it says anything on the screen should be accessible. So start thinking about, how can I make my journals, my PDFs fully accessible? It's not just journal. It's your marketing material, your leaflets. If they're all PDFs, they all need to be accessible. That's how I work on it.
SIMON HOLT: And I think just to add to that, I think it's really important as publishers, that we all think about the best way to engage authors with this process as well. So accessible content, especially when we think about things like image descriptions, is part of the work. Especially when we're thinking about the academic space, it's really important that the alt text descriptions are accurate, complete, and relevant-- just the same as everything else.
SIMON HOLT: And so I think it's really important that as you're creating the content, you think about, OK, what's the best way to engage authors? There'll be some publishers that decide, OK, we want the authors to write the alt text descriptions themselves. At Elsevier, we're more going down the road that we will provide the alt text descriptions. And we would like authors to review those at proof stage to make sure that they're accurate, complete, and relevant, because that's part of the service that we can offer.
SIMON HOLT: But it's really important that you think about this as part of the work and not an optional, added extra. Because as a person who uses a screen reader, I can tell you that when you are listening to a paper as it were, when you get to an image, it doesn't say this is alt text. It just reads the description just the same as part of the regular text.
SIMON HOLT: So as a reader, actually you just consider alt text as part of what it is that you're reading. So if that isn't as good quality as everything else, it will affect your experience of consuming the whole book or journal-- which if you think about your experience of working with that publisher, that will really make a big difference.
BETH RICHARD: [INAUDIBLE] I like the idea of having an image bank and an alt text in the CMS. But as I was saying, we need to just make sure that the publishers and authors understand that the alt text is really context-specific. And so the same image in one publication might not be used in the same way. The description might not be relevant in that context. So it's a really great starting point to make sure that there is a description in the CMS because there is something there.
BETH RICHARD: But for it to be really meaningful, it then needs to be looked at and edited in the context of how that image is being used.
SVEN MOLTER: Thank you so much. I was just wondering, are there practical tools or resources that have made a huge difference in your accessibility work and implementations?
STACY TUCKER: I think screen readers are very important. There's various screen readers. I would suggest using multiple screen readers because some of them read differently. The WAVE tool by WebAIM has been very, very helpful. I think SortSite scans, very helpful. And those are probably the big things that my team uses. There's contrast checkers. There's various other tools.
STACY TUCKER: But the big ones would be WAVE screen readers, SortSite, contrast checkers and things like that.
WILL AWAD: I would say, just I'll echo that. And also I would say, it's always worth just testing the data that you convert into screen reader as Stacy just mentioned, and get your team to test it in various devices. There's a lot of free tools out there. But ideally, if you have some of them on your machine, it's good that you test them as well yourself. Try to navigate. And some businesses, probably it's a good idea to hire people who use screen reader also, that will help them to make sure that the content is accessible.
WILL AWAD: And furthermore, as I mentioned, there is certification. You can send your title to third party to just give it a quick review to see if it's fully accessible and compliant. And I use, for example, Ace by Daisy to check if my content is accessible-- PAC24, as Beth also mentioned, for PDFs. For website auditing, I use a lot of tools. But the main tool I use is human, testing the website using just the keyboard.
WILL AWAD: And that's the main test I use for website auditing. I don't just rely on the automated tool because you need somebody human to test it to make sure it's fully compliant.
SIMON HOLT: Absolutely. And just a word on screen reader testing, again, I can attest as someone who uses a screen reader. These are complicated pieces of kit that take quite a long time to learn how to use properly. There's a few different iterations of them as well. There's JAWS. There's SuperNova. There's NVDA. And no doubt, there are others as well-- ZoomText.
SIMON HOLT: But no doubt, there are others as well. And these aren't things you can just pick up, and anybody can use. Because when we're talking about testing using screen reader, actually you need to do that without being able to see. Otherwise, you're not really testing it with a screen reader. So unless you're willing to learn how to use a screen reader and blindfold yourself whilst you're doing it, you really do need to engage people with lived experience in order to do this.
SIMON HOLT: The way that we think about accessibility at Elsevier is accessibility as a product. And therefore, when we're doing testing, we need to think about the people who use that product. You never launch any other product without getting testing from people who are going to use it. And so whilst I completely agree with using all these automated tools and things like Ace, and WAVE, and the Benetech certification-- are great-- I just want to put a word in for engaging people with lived experience who have accessibility needs, who can tell you whether the services and features that you're rolling out are actually solving their problems for them.
SIMON HOLT: Otherwise, you're going to end up spending a lot of money on things that you don't even know whether are meeting the needs of the people that they're designed to support.
SVEN MOLTER: Yeah, wonderful point. Just going to let that linger for a minute there. Thank you so much. Assignment question for you from the chat in regards to the screen reader and alt text for images. Should caption text begin with the word caption?
SIMON HOLT: There are various different guidelines around that. I would say no. But, well, you may have different point of view to me. And the reason I'm slightly sitting on the fence is I've seen conflicting guidance about this. And I can see Will smiling. So, Will, what are your thoughts? I would say not because it's kind of clunky, but what do you think?
WILL AWAD: I agree. We don't use the word caption. So we just put the title there, the text. We don't use the word caption.
SIMON HOLT: But because the idea here is that this is meant to be text. that is, instead of an image. So it should flow normally as part of the narrative as opposed to having some unnecessary words in there. Don't forget that for the people who are using it, most of them will be unable to see the image that we're talking about here. So it's instead of, rather than in addition to.
WILL AWAD: And the one key I would like to add is just when you have the alt text, for example, make sure it's ending with a full stop. So we know that the alt text is completed reading it before we move into the context of the book to follow.
SIMON HOLT: Great.
WILL AWAD: And that's a very important thing to do.
SVEN MOLTER: All right, I think we are just about wrapping up here. One last question for the group, because you can't have a webinar without talking about AI. So what role is AI currently playing in your accessibility efforts, if any, for tasks like potentially generating alt text? Or how do you see the work evolving with the assistance of AI in the future, if you put on your prognosticator hat?
SVEN MOLTER: So I'll turn that open to everyone.
STACY TUCKER: So we're hoping to leverage AI in the creation of meta content for our core content in the future. It's not something that we've done now-- that we're doing now. But it is something that we're hoping to leverage for prices, for summaries, for alt text-- and very excited to start working on that when we do. But as of right now, we're not really working on anything.
SIMON HOLT: So for us, we're using AI to draft out text, and then human SMEs are editing that. And then those edited versions are then going to the authors at proof stage for them to check. So it goes through two rounds of human iterations. We're also looking into AI or at least automation around metadata in terms of basically scanning all of our content and basically being able to say here's a hazard, or here's MathML, or here's a table of contents-- and so automating the metadata generation process.
SIMON HOLT: I think in general, my feelings are very much in line with Elsevier's responsible use of AI policy, which basically says you can use AI in the drafting process, but there must be a human being in order to supervise this and check for quality. I always think for an alt text in particular, AI can be quite good at what I'm going to call translation. It can tell you what's in front of it.
SIMON HOLT: So it's OK for photographs, for illustrations, that kind of thing. I don't think it's very good at interpretation so complex charts, and graphs, western blots-- that kind of thing that you could interpret a whole series of different ways. And I think in the future, AI will probably get 80% to 90% of images and do a pretty good job, but there'll always be that 10% to 20% of complex images that need human intervention.
SIMON HOLT: And the way that I think about this, Elsevier are a science publisher. And therefore, people read our content because they believe that what is coming out of our content is true. And therefore, if we're publishing stuff that isn't true, then actually that is an existential problem for us. So therefore, whilst I completely think that AI has a lot of potential in terms of helping us do a lot more at scale, which is really going to help people with disabilities because they'll be able to access content in a way that has never been possible before, we also need to be careful to make sure that we're not just letting all of our reputations be put at risk because we end up publishing things that aren't true.
SIMON HOLT: So quality must come first. And I think AI is an interesting tool and an interesting way of obviously scaling up. But it doesn't replace the human being. It may be augments and makes quicker what a human being can value-- what value human being can add. A human being adds value in terms of the knowledge and understanding.
SIMON HOLT: If somebody can mean that we're not starting off from a blank page, that's great. But I don't see AI replacing human beings anytime soon.
SVEN MOLTER: Thanks. We do have a couple of questions in the chat. And Will answered this one just a little bit, I think already, but I'll go ahead and ask it in case there's anything else you want to add. When the content is highly specialized engineering material or anything highly specialized, in your opinion, what is the best way to get alt text written with-- yeah, what is the best way to get alt text written for highly specialized material?
SVEN MOLTER:
WILL AWAD: Just maybe using a subject matter expert in this area to write the alternative text. Because, I mean, relying on AI, I don't think the AI will be able to provide accurate. Because they don't have the context of the image. I mean, the text is not uploaded, only the image. And the AI will only explain what is the image. But if you have a subject matter expert, as Simon said, it's always worth them taking a look at the image and can use AI just to help them-- put them in the right direction to write alternative text.
WILL AWAD: So my suggestion is to go with a subject matter expert who has a degree in engineering probably and will be able to write alt text for that.
SVEN MOLTER: Thanks. And another question about alt text for Simon. Are you currently using an Elsevier-built tool to generate alt text? And if so, what is the level of accuracy? And is it available as a product for other publishers?
SIMON HOLT: We're not currently using an Elsevier-built AI tool. That's something that maybe we'll consider for the future. And that's as far as I can say about that, really. I think there's a couple of things to say here. One is actually, the building of these tools is pretty complex. And we have some pretty tight deadlines that we need to consider. So if we're going to build a tool, we're certainly not going to rush it.
SIMON HOLT: We're going to do it properly. And that means that it's not surprising that we haven't built one yet. I think second of all, just on AI and alt text in general, I think AI is only as good or bad as the way that you use it. So what we found is we've done loads of experiments with different LLMs and using different companies and what have you. It's not just about the kind of AI.
SIMON HOLT: It's about whatever you put into it. So for us, we don't just put the image. We'll put the two paragraphs around the image. We'll put the book title. We'll put the blurb of the book. We'll put the image caption. And so therefore, we're giving the AI as much information as possible about the image that they're describing. And just like with a human being, if you give me lots of information about the image and then ask me to describe it, I've got much better chance than if you just give me the image without any context.
SIMON HOLT: I think Beth mentioned that alt text is all about context. And that's as true with AI as it is with human beings. So I think that's important to think about when we're considering AI and how it might be used.
SVEN MOLTER: Great. Thanks. I think one of the questions that came to Silverchair a couple of times is an organization goes through an accessibility review, and they have a number of items that they need to remediate. How do they prioritize that work? So do you have any recommendations for how someone might prioritize accessibility work as they're working through accessibility scans?
SVEN MOLTER: Is there an approach you'd recommend?
STACY TUCKER: So for the JAMA Network, what we did was we work on our accessibility conformance report twice a year. And we built requirements based on what we do not conform to in the ACR, which is just built on from the VPAT. The VPAT is the blank template. Once you filled it out, it's the ACR, the Accessibility Conformance Report. So we go through that on a regular basis and write requirements based on what needs to be made accessible.
STACY TUCKER: And from there, we give to Silverchair to t-shirt size that. So then we can go in and create a roadmap. So we've road mapped out the design and the development of these items that don't meet the conformance standards in the WCAG 2.1 AA. And we have those scheduled out from-- we started in third quarter of 2024. And we're going to go to second quarter of 2025 to meet the June 28, 2025 deadline for the EAA.
STACY TUCKER: But that's basically how we're handling changes is starting with our ACR, keeping our ACR updated, using that to build our requirements and going from there.
SVEN MOLTER: Great. And final question for today, beyond compliance, how are we measuring the impact of improved accessibility on audience reach and content engagement? How do we measure?
WILL AWAD: I mean, I always say that as a joke here. If you haven't been sued, then you're good. You're doing a good job. I mean, that's a good measurement. I mean, accessibility-- now as we say, look, there is three things we have to look at. There is the legal requirement, which is the ADA in the US. We have EAA. We have the Equality Act in the UK. And then we have the specification.
WILL AWAD: And we have the requirement. The requirement is we have to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. So we have the legislation. We have the requirement and the specification for the EPUB, which we have the HTML. We have to meet that. So as long as you're following these three steps, I'm sure your content should be accessible.
WILL AWAD: And if you have a website with accessibility statement and just to protect yourself is like a disclaimer to say, look, there might be something. And if you see something is not accessible, please let us know, and we will take care of it. So you avoiding the being sued and your reputation stay intact. So as long as you follow these steps yourself there to make sure that you keep your reputation up and following these guidelines, you should be OK.
WILL AWAD: If you get sued, then that mean you are not following the accessibility regulations here.
SIMON HOLT: I'm going to challenge you for a minute, Will.
WILL AWAD: Go ahead.
SIMON HOLT: Because why not? So I don't disagree. But I'm going to say, we can be more ambitious than that. Not getting sued feels like quite an important, but also a rather low baseline. Actually, it comes back to the why that we started at the beginning and that you talked about so eloquently. Accessibility should be there for whoever needs it, whether it's one person or whether it's 10,000 people.
SIMON HOLT: The reality is, and quite rightly, we don't ask people when they have a disability, whether they read some of our content. We don't ask people when they have a disability, whether they submit a paper to be published. But actually, because we disseminate content in our industry, we want more people to be able to read it. And we want more people to be able to publish with us.
SIMON HOLT: And so therefore, I would say that you measure accessibility in the same way that you measure content growth, whether that's reading or publishing in general. There's not a special category that says accessibility. We're not measuring disabled people separately. Disabled people are and should be an integrated part of our society. And actually as usability by disabled people grows, it means that we have more and more diverse people able to contribute, giving their voices and more and more diverse perspectives.
SIMON HOLT: And therefore, you can't measure all of this quantitatively. But you can measure it qualitatively in terms of, are we hearing from more diverse voices? Are more people able to access our content in terms of reading or publishing with us? And is our content becoming more dynamic so that people can access it in more ways? As I said, seeing it with your eyes, hearing it with your ears, or touching it with your hands.
SIMON HOLT: That's what success looks like to me. And that goes beyond metrics. And it talks about the very purpose of why we do what we do in the scholarly communications industry.
WILL AWAD: I agree. I mean, we should have-- I mean, I haven't heard some reward or who is the best publisher with fully accessible content. We never have this yearly award being done. Maybe that's something we should consider in the next year or so. That, you know, who's the best publisher with fully accessible content?
SIMON HOLT: Well, maybe Silverchair could sponsor it. That would be great.
WILL AWAD: And they have to have Oscars, yeah?
SIMON HOLT: Yeah, right.
SVEN MOLTER: All right, we just thank you so much. I really appreciate that. There's a couple of questions we didn't get to in the chat. We'll see if we can follow up with those afterwards. Simon, Stacy, Will, Beth-- thank you so much for taking the time out of your days to provide such thoughtful feedback and conversation for us here. I know we had a number of people that were really engaged, and we just really, really appreciate your time here today.
SVEN MOLTER: So I will pass it back over to Steph. And, yeah, thank you so much. It's been great to see everyone today. STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE
HANSEN: Yeah.
HANSEN: Thank you, Sven. Thank you again to all our speakers and to all the attendees for the engagement. We will look at the questions that we weren't able to get to. We are looking at putting out some more resources, including follow-ups from this webinar. So stay tuned for that. And then as you'll see on the screen, these are our next two events around research integrity-- pilots and partnerships on April 16 and one around the data revolution-- how to unlock value from your data on May 15.
HANSEN: These are both free webinars. We encourage you to sign up. And, otherwise, thanks again for joining us. Thanks again to our speakers, and have a great rest of your day.
SVEN MOLTER: Thank you.
WILL AWAD: Thank you.
SIMON HOLT: Thanks, all.
WILL AWAD: Thanks, everyone.
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Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
End At:
Embed Size
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You Size - Responsive
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We Size - Responsive
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Picture Overlay Popup
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400 x 225
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512 x 288
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400 x 700
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768 x 1024
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1024 x 512
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1280 x 608
Form Title Cite
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Info
Segments
Related
Thumbnails
Exit Clip Mode
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Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode