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It Doesn’t Just Happen: Accountability in Organization-wide Accessibility and Disability Equity Initiatives
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It Doesn’t Just Happen: Accountability in Organization-wide Accessibility and Disability Equity Initiatives
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Segment:0 .
Thank you, everyone, for coming. Good afternoon. Welcome to our session titled it doesn't just happen accountability and organization wide accessibility and disability equity initiatives. I'm Amanda Rogers, communications, and engagement manager for bio one. And I will be your moderator today. And today on the stage, kind of on the front of the room.
We have a very knowledgeable and talented group who bring with them a wonderfully diverse set of experiences and perspectives from a variety of standpoints in the scholarly publishing industry. First, we have Simon Holt, who is a senior product manager Content Accessibility at Elsevier. Nicola Poser is the director of marketing and sales at the American Mathematical Mathematical Society. I've been stumbling over mathematical all day for whatever reason.
Maxine Aldridge is director of books and journals production for the American Society of Civil Engineers. Karen Stoll Farrell is head of the scholarly communication department at Indiana University Libraries. And casa repeta is an analyst for global outreach and publishing systems at Duke University press. In many organizations, accessibility is often treated as a nice to have feature rather than an integral, integral part of the core work.
This approach can lead to inaccessible systems that exclude individuals with disabilities. So how do we shift that perception and implementation of accessibility so that it becomes a fundamental aspect of all projects and initiatives. And that's the question that we're here today to talk about. And we will start off with Simon without further ado.
Hi, everybody. So it's great to be here. As a manager mentioned. I lead our Content Accessibility efforts here at Elsevier. I thought it was important just to start with a note. If we could just move to the next slide, please. So I wanted to start off. We do know about who this is for. Because actually we talk about being customer focused, but actually, who are we talking about here.
When we're talking about accessibility, we often think about vision impaired people. I'm a visually impaired person myself, but actually accessibility is way more than that. So it's about hearing impaired people. It's about dyslexic people. It's about neurodiverse people, but actually it's about everybody. If we have closed captions, for example, that helps people who are non-native speakers or it helps us understand people who have heavy accents.
It also helps the 75% of young people. Who access videos without sound. If we have our text, for example, for images, then not only does it help people who use screen readers, but also by turning a non text asset into a text asset. By having the Alt text, it makes the image more discoverable, optimize SEO and therefore really helps kind of machine reading.
Machine analysis increases the value of our content. And so therefore when we're thinking about why we're doing it right. There's various arguments about, it's the right thing to do. Obviously, I'm sure you're all aware there's various pieces of legislation like the European Accessibility Act. But actually, this is for me about a business proposition that helps us make the most of the content that we're publishing and reach the biggest possible market.
Next slide, please. Because who are we as publishers? What I've put on here is various pieces of text, which I'm not going to read all of mercifully for you about elsevier's operating model and value proposition. And actually, when I think about accessibility, it all aligns with all of the fundamentals of what we're trying to do here, right. We're trying to disseminate knowledge here.
We're trying to build trusted partnerships with the people who read our content. We're trying to convey information in all the different ways that people learn, and accessibility helps us do that. And so therefore, I think it's very easy to think about accessibility as separate from for publishing whatever we think core publishing is. But actually, to me, it's an integral part of it because if nobody can access your content, if it's not available in a format that everybody can read, what value are we actually adding as publishers here.
So this is why this work is so important to me as an individual, but also should be important to all of us as an industry. So today I'm just going to spend a few moments talking about our approach, what some of the challenges are, and also how we're planning to go about this in the future. I've titled. The presentation today, building the house one story at a time, because actually accessibility is an iterative.
Program of work. There's no magic bullet that will mean right tomorrow. Everything is accessible and we have all the answers. It doesn't work like that. So I'm going to talk a little bit about where we've come from, where we are and where we're going. Next slide, please. So size matters.
I work for Elsevier. Elsevier are by volume, the biggest publisher in the scholarly communications industry, I think. I read a report recently that said something like 70% of all scholarly content last year was published by Elsevier. So we're talking about 2000 books a year, over 600,000 journal articles a year.
We're talking about a big chunk of content here. And so therefore, whilst remediating or making accessible one book or one journal article might be straightforward, doing anything at scale is difficult and complicated because you've got a lot of processes, a lot of stakeholders. So everything that I'm going to talk about today is with that in mind, it's with scale in mind and other people are going to talk about their experiences working at different types of organization.
This is just one perspective. It doesn't mean that this is the only perspective or a better perspective somehow. It's just everything. When I talk about all of this stuff, we need to remember here that we're talking about a lot of content and that comes with challenges around workflows and scale, stakeholders and Yes, cost.
So next slide, please. So I wanted just to give you a little snapshot of all the things that we're doing because it's complicated, because we have so many different work streams. So each one of these little infographics represent a different project within our accessibility program. And I'm not going to go into each one. But the point I wanted to make is it's complicated, right 10 years ago, we really started work on our platforms and the product side of things.
We're now at a stage where ScienceDirect are our platform. Our content platform won the web million award for being one of the most accessible websites on the internet. That's amazing. But it's taken us 10 years to get there. We're now doing work around the content piece, and I think it's fair to say because of new technology like AI because of formats like EPUB that are always evolving and because of the pace of change in terms of policy and governance and legal as well.
This is an ever changing picture. And so our approach to this is that we're doing it in phases. You can see from this infographic we're starting off setting all of these different projects running. And what we're hoping is that over time, we're going to be able to make all of our content accessible. But if we only focused on one of these, it would leave too many gaps.
So that's why we're really trying to take a programmatic approach, an all company approach, if you like. Next slide, please. So I mentioned that we started several years ago. And so I thought it might be helpful just to share a few kind of observations that me and the other people who work on the accessibility team put thought about and put together.
And as you can see here. And again, I'm not going to go through all of them, it's about pilot iterate build, learn, right. I always say that change happens one conversation at a time. And really it's about every day communicating the value of accessibility, how it relates to business performance, how it relates to our value story, our mission and our goals. But also keeping up to date with the technology and really thinking about, OK, how can we make this work in a sustainable way.
So that we keep making our content accessible and that it's not just accessible now, but it's going to be accessible in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. And so these principles really underpin our approach. And these are principles that I would strongly urge you guys to think about. People often come to me and say, well we've not started. This feels overwhelming. The reason I wanted to share this slide is because actually you can start small pilot.
Try a few things, get a few people on board and then move forward from there. It really is a one story at a time. Iterative approach. Next slide, please. So I wanted to give you a snapshot, having explained where we've come from and the fact that. We have over the past year or so been developing this program of accessibility, really focusing initially on the books piece of things because of the legislation, because of the European Accessibility act in particular.
Where do we want to go into the future. And the future is that we're going to continue to iterate. We've started off with books, we're going to move into journals ultimately, in line with the Benetech principles. So Benetech are a kind of a standards body for accessibility and an accrediting body. They talk a lot about born accessible, and we want everything that we publish to be born accessible.
That takes time, though, and that takes iteration of workflows. It takes thinking about how do we remediate stuff with publish before it takes author engagement to explain why we're doing what we're doing, why we're doing it, and how they can help. But it also talks about it's also important to keep engaging with our end users as well, people with accessibility needs, because actually this is what it's about.
You never build a product in the commercial world or the noncommercial world without engaging with end users. And it's important that we do the same here and we continue to do that. And I say that to anybody in our industry who's interested in accessibility. As a disabled person in the disabled community, we have a phrase, nothing about us without us. And actually it's really easy to take the standards and say, well we just conform to these and that's fine actually, unless you're going to really bring your readers in and engage the people who are going to be using your content, you can't be sure that you're going to be doing a good job.
And actually, if you're not doing a good job in helping people why are you doing this. So today we're starting with books. Tomorrow, hopefully we'll be able to expand this through the rest of our content offering. Next slide, please. Final slide. So I often get asked various questions about how are you interacting with authors.
What are you doing about the backlist that's previously published titles. How can I help. Obviously, AI has been a big theme of this year's conference. So I thought that I'd just put up on here a few kind of discussion questions and answers here, which maybe we can come back to in the Q&A. The reality is that we see authors as really important content providers and the experts.
However, we see their role in terms of Alt text. Alt text is technical writing. Let's get suppliers to do the technical writing. They have experts and then we'll get authors to review it and make sure it's right. Anybody who's worked on the editorial publishing side, as I have for 20 years, knows getting a manuscript from an author is a commitment in itself.
Asking them to write 200 text descriptions doesn't seem a great way to make your pub dates, to be honest. Their value is much better. Getting them to review the content that we're creating for the Alt text. In terms of, again, just consistent with our AI policy, I can be a great enabler as a productivity tool, but it's not the thing on its own. It's a good start, but we will always need human beings to validate it.
And again, in terms of the backlist, backfiles, we really want to make sure that everything that we sell whenever it was published is accessible. Clearly we're going to need to do that in a phased way. We have 87,000 titles in the backlist just for books. We probably published 10 times the amount of journals as we do books. We can't do it all at once.
So it's going to have to be phased based on books, based on usage, and based on when things were published and based on subject area. But what we are committed to is that everything will be accessible at the point of need. So somebody approaches us and say, we need an accessible version of x or y, then we're working to put workflows into place to make sure that we can provide that.
All right, enough from me. I've done quite a lot of talking there. I'm going to now hand over to Nicola, who's going to explain what it's like in her world. Thank you, Simon. So I'm the director of marketing and sales at the American Mathematical Society as Amanda mentioned. I also wear a hat as the coordinator of our accessibility working group, which sort of grew out of the role of marketing and sales, because I'm the one that the librarians ask at license renewal time, what are you doing and what does it look like.
So that's why that role came to me as well. And I'm going to talk a little bit about how this works in a society publisher context being embedded within a wider organization as a publishing organization. So alignment with the mission obviously in some ways not that different from the Elsevier mission of promoting research and connecting our community. But we have a very specific community that we're focused on and that is mathematicians.
So we are a deep rather than wide organization. So I won't be talking as much about scale. So we have a different challenge. So again, as Simon also said, not necessarily better or worse, but certainly different. And one of those challenges is to go deep without creating a workflow that is so artisanal that we can't scale it when we need to.
So small blue circle instead of large round orange circle. We, as I mentioned, are more focused publisher embedded specifically in mathematics by mathematicians for mathematicians. So only 80 or 90 fretless titles a year. We have about 4,000 in our backlist and we have several different journals. We have member journals, research journals, translated journals and typo look at that, and 7 partner journals.
So smaller portfolio. So our challenges again are a bit different and tied specifically to the needs of mathematics, which I'm going to talk about in a minute. I can get my notes. So I wanted to share this timeline to give a sense of what I mean by addressing the challenges of going deep into the needs of a specific discipline society.
Publishers have a reputation for moving slowly, but that's not always necessarily due to a lack of resources, and it's certainly not a symptom of an allergy to innovation. It is often due to the need to build in-house expertise. Do some creative problem solving. Math, of course, has particular challenges with accessibility in online content, and particularly dealing with equations and complex graphics and making sure that they're truly accessible and interoperable with assistive technologies.
So the reason I wanted to share this timeline is that when the AMS first started looking at this landscape, they did not see the kinds of tools that they felt like they needed to effectively convert complex mathematics into those types of content formats. So we partnered with Siam. I'm not sure if our friends from Siam are in the room as founding sponsors of mathjax, and since then we have the privilege of working with really talented developers who are also mathematicians in their background and are able to really work deeply on creating conversion tools that work for our content.
So we've spent some time in creating authoring and conversion tools that can handle the source files often in LaTeX, and this has taken quite a bit of time. But as you can also see in the last couple of years, things have accelerated quite a bit. So what is that about. Well, it could be about the European Accessibility Act. And as the marketing and sales person, I would say that it should be about the accessibility of the European Accessibility Act and similar mandates requiring that our content be accessible for people to continue purchasing it.
But it's a little more complex than that. So for the first few years. We'll talk a little bit about this framework. The creation of the conversion tools that we had developed in publications was somewhat under the radar for the larger AMS organization. Our journal math viewer platform emerged, was tested, iterated, improved, and we began developing epubs for some of our books using similar tools.
But in recent years, a few things have happened to increase the visibility of this work. One was the accessibility working group, and that was one of our goals was to increase internal visibility of this work to a shift in the demands from our customers, as mentioned from vague promises to make progress to specific requests and specific mandates and roadmaps. But third and perhaps most importantly in our context as a society was that our governance became engaged with these issues more widely as a result of a memo from the Department of Justice reminding everyone about ADA requirements and posting course content online.
Mathematicians love to post even photos of hand scrawled equations or their chalkboards and things on their course websites, which clearly do not meet any of those accessibility requirements. So we started getting panicked. Questions what can the AMS do to help our membership, not just our publications. So the result was that the toolchain development that had sort of quietly been happening in publications was thrust into the spotlight of the wider organization, and that resulted in some decisions from our leadership and governance to support the scaling, not just of accessible content for our books and journal program, but also to request the creation of user friendly versions of those tools, some of which we have made available open source so that faculty can also take advantage of those conversion tools for their own needs.
That led to resources, and that really is why you see an accelerated timeline. We were able to expand our publishing technical group to support the work we need to do to meet our needs and to also support the wider society. So what questions are we dealing with. I'm going to take these in reverse order because I talked a little bit about how publication tools are being adapted to support the wider society goals, which is the final question here on this slide.
The second question, the need to develop the tools that really work for our content. And then for us, the question also is what is the role of the author. So we are approaching this a little bit differently. Perhaps we see the author as a reader, a member of the society, and certainly a member of the math community. And so for us, we also think author education is really important in helping our authors to understand why this work is important and also to take advantage of all that publishing can offer when we're publishing for the web.
Mathematicians are very print focused. Some of them would still love to give us a PDF ready book here. I made my equations look exactly the way I want them to appear on the page, and so we have to educate them about the need for structured content that can be reformatted and reflowed in ways that work for all readers. We do realize it's a tall order, but our hope is that in the end, we will help educate our authors in a way that will help improve math publishing more widely.
So all of that is a lot of background to come to a concrete case study since we promised you we would give you some concrete things to take with you. So how has the AMS tackled the issue of Alt text. This is a new project for us as well, very much a fretless project, so we are not yet trying to scale it across our backlist certainly, and our goal is to solve it upstream as much as we can.
As part of that author education process. And as part of the authoring process, we know that won't always be possible, but we want to make sure that the text alternative provides useful information and explains the context of why the image or the equation is there and what it's doing. So providing robust our images and equations as robust SVG files with embedded explorable text alternatives. So we can really leverage the source code as much as possible and connect the manuscript to convey the mathematical meaning.
We want to make sure that meaning isn't lost. Because this the author is critical in this approach. We started by working on guidelines that could be shared with our production editors and our authors, as well as our acquisitions editors for those early conversations with prospective book authors in particular, what we learned is that crafting effective guidelines is not easy.
We struggled a lot with the level of detail that made sense for varied levels of experience, providing enough information without being overwhelming. We have a draft that we're testing with our authors to see if we've created something that will actually result in useful text alternatives, whether they be specifically an Alt text in an Alt text field or whether they be a description in the text itself elsewhere that then can be pointed to in that Alt text field for book content.
This is fairly straightforward in terms of embedding it into the workflow. We have an existing production workflow. We sort of know at which point it makes sense to have the conversation about Alt text. It's a little bit trickier with journals when you're going through peer review. Is the Alt text part of the peer review or is it not. So I'm really hoping we might talk a little bit about that question during the Q&A.
And with that, I will hand it to Maxine. Thank you. Hello, everyone. My name is Maxine Eldridge and I'm with the American Society of Civil Engineers. My role is production director. And this afternoon I will take a little bit of time to tell you about our accessibility journey at ASC.
Accessibility is defined in a variety of ways and has many facets. The American Society of Civil Engineers ASC is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, which largely includes accessibility. For more than 10 years over a decade.
ASC accessibility initiatives has included leadership, staff, dedication, and the movement of members of society advancing an inclusive culture commonly known as mosaic. Our mosaic group provides a society with leadership in all matters of diversity, equity and inclusion within the Civil engineering community. It focuses on assessment, accountability and training.
Some recommendations from our mosaic team and ongoing initiatives include careful meeting planning to ensure meetings are held at accessible venues. Global Accessibility awareness of civil engineering communities. Multiple means of representation. That is presenting information in multiple ways, such as visual, audible and presenting for different learning styles.
Excuse me. Mosaic focuses on webinars and closed captioning e-readers when necessary. Some additional recommendations are making sure dietary restrictions are followed and we avoid conflicts with public, religious, and cultural holidays. As we expand the lens of accessibility within ASC.
A recent dedicated staff member was promoted to Director of accessibility and DEI strategies to strengthen our accessibility focus within the publication and standards division. Through this role. A usability study was conducted. This study included stakeholders ranging from internal staff, student members, librarians, authors and editors.
The results from this study gave us a better understanding of how our customers and members viewed and utilized our site and our content. We also discovered accessibility deficiencies and ways to address these deficiencies moving forward. During this study, we requested feedback on the prominence and placement of our accessibility statement on our ASC publishing platform and made necessary adjustments.
Our dedicated staff member, along with our technology team, led the initiative of upgrading our publishing platform. Previously page builder. Now we're on atypon Literatum three. With this platform upgrade. We renewed our VPAT.
Which was in existence for over 10 years. We were able to. Confirm ACS compliance with WCAG, ensuring a 2.1 success criteria with a level AA compliance. Because the EIA is intentional. In all our work with a dedicated accessibility staff, we are able to review our compliances with ADA more frequently.
We're also able to evaluate the act and AODA and encourage pointed conversations across the organization. We are now in the process of evaluating all texts for our journals. Also abstract language translation for some of our journals.
In addition. We recently launched a new publishing platform called Amplify its through high wire. This new digital platform is to publish or civil engineers standards. It features interactive functionality that makes it more accessible for civil engineers and allow users to compare different the difference between editions in real time.
Content for this platform is developed in XML and is published in full text allowing full searchability. Asx's portfolio comprises of 35 scientific journals, which are all published in full text, 50 to 70 books standards conference proceedings annually, and approximately 40,000 papers in our backlist.
As we move forward with our exploration we are embarking on. Experimenting with alternative text for journals. Our process at the moment is to have our composition vendors. Generate our first pass content. Followed by human intervention for copyediting and scientific editing. When necessary to ensure that we present accurate description.
Our final pass is to have our authors and editors review these all texts and provide scientific merit and/or grant approval. This is still in our testing phase, but we're hopeful that with this process, we'll be able to roll this out later on this year. While experimenting with texts. There were a few things that we unfolded.
And so we I consider this pitfalls to avoid unnecessary. We should see all texts as a supplement, not a replacement for content. All text should provide additional context, not duplicate what's already in the caption or the surrounding text. Avoid irrelevant details as much as possible, such as authors, dates, sources, bibliographical information. Avoid interpretation.
All texts should describe what's visible. Not offer subjective interpretations or opinions. Keep all texts brief at all costs. Avoid lengthy description that overwhelms users when necessary. Another piece of accessibility to consider is color blindness.
Color, color, vision color deficiency or color visual deficiency decreases the ability to distinguish certain colors or in some instances, all colors. Our usability study and internal audit identified some common issues that we are now working to correct. We found that most common color blindness are in Reds and greens.
More rare are Black and white. Also rare are some blues and yellows. We're still doing an in-depth study of color blindness, but we are now more aware that when developing websites and web pages, limited color palettes should be used. The more color there are in designs, the more chances there will be to for confusion.
Keeping color basic helps maximize visibility. ASC recognizes that following these guidelines will make our content more accessible for a wider range of people. Thank you for this opportunity to just share a little bit of what we're doing on our side of the fence. I will now turn over to Keisha. Thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone. Just my name is Keisha and I work at Duke University press. My title is analyst for global outreach and publishing systems, and I also co-lead the accessibility working group at Duke University press, and I also volunteer for SSP, and I am leading the accessibility subcommittee, which is part of the Dia committee here at SSP.
So before I move to my presentation, I just want to very quickly say something about Duke University Press. We are academic publisher, University publisher. We publish content in humanities and social science, 150 books per year and around 60 journals. We are a University publishers and we are not a very small University publisher here in the United States, but we have very limited resources.
So we distribute our resources very, very carefully. So I'm very glad to share that. Actually, right now we have two accessibility projects happening at Duke University at the same time. If you asked me two years ago, there will be no projects. Now we have two. So this is a great development for us and great improvement. So the first project is the European Accessibility Act compliance projects, which probably many of you heard about.
This is a business critical project for us because if we are not going to be compliant with the legislation, we wouldn't we wouldn't be we will not be able to offer our products on the European market next year, middle of next year. So there is this project is very important and business critical. As I'm saying, it focuses on accessible formats, Alt text contrasts, foreign language tagging and many other things.
But today this is not the focus of my conversation, of my talk. That is going to be another presentation by Alice billen at OUP press. She's going to be talking about this project. But today I want to talk very briefly about another project that we are having right now at the press, which is external document Accessibility Initiative, which focuses on digital document accessibility. And when I talk about digital documents, I am not talking about the published content.
What we decided to do, we decided that we are going to align digital documents with existing web accessibility standards that the document digital documents that are created by staff and shared with external stakeholders. So external stakeholders, external stakeholders like authors, like librarians, like editors, anybody that we are working with.
So this project is actually a grassroots type of project that was initiated by the Duke University Press accessibility working group that exists at Duke University press. So this project was not proposed by the managers, was not business critical, but the it aligned with the broader equity and inclusion goals. That is, to further press this effort to make our content and materials broadly accessible as part of the larger goal to build an organizational culture of equity, inclusion.
So as I said, what was in scope, the documents that were created by staff, in what format or in PowerPoint format, Excel, or InDesign. So example of those documents where journal style guides or manuscript submission guidelines or anything that we distribute to libraries like brochures or pricing information, we wanted to make sure that those documents are accessible.
So we initiated that project and there were a couple of things that we needed to do to make sure that we are successful and later on we are sustainable. Just very quickly, about out of scope documents. So as I mentioned before, published content was not in the scope, but we also we didn't have control over certain documents like documents that are Duke University, Duke University templates, like something that we used that our human resources use or system generated documents.
Like we work with different vendors. There are certain documents that are generated by those systems. We do not have control over those documents. That is why we put those documents as out of scope. It doesn't mean that we are not communicating with those vendors if we see that those documents are not accessible. But this is about cooperation between the vendors and the future, choosing a vendor that is able to generate accessible documents out of their systems.
So we created we created this external document inventory. So all of the submission guidelines, style guides, price lists, everything that we're sharing with external stakeholders, we put everything into that external document inventory that we created. And this document guided us through basically to understand what documents we have to look at. Maybe we have to remediate them if they are not accessible.
So we wanted to know how many of those documents we will have to review and fix if they are not accessible. But so when we have that input, we worked with a Duke University accessibility office to create guidelines for creating accessible Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. We also created guidelines for a document remediation process.
So we didn't want to. Certain documents were accessible, certain already certain documents were not accessible. But for certain documents we have to recreate them from scratch. But there was a number of documents which we didn't have to recreate. There was a remediation decision tree and maybe with a little bit tweaks, we could have made them accessible.
Those we are very lucky that we have Duke accessibility office. They helped us a lot through that process. So those guidelines are actually available at Duke University, at Duke University press website and also available at the Duke University website and. Probably the most important slide here is the accountability framework that we created around this around this work.
And this is to make sure that we're not doing it just one time, that this is the new workflow that we are going to that we have and we are going to advise, advise our staff and our vendors to. And to make sure that this documents are not only remediated, but there going to be any new documents are going to be created accessible going forward.
So for staff. There were. There were a couple, actually, not couple. There were like 30 people involved in the projects that were working on that inventory document. They were remediating fixing accessibility issues with those documents. But everyone everyone that works at Duke University press is now advised to create if they create a new access, if they create a new document that is then going to be shared with the external stakeholders, they're being advised to use those guidelines to make sure that those documents are being created.
Accessible managers, they support the workflow. So what I mean by that is that they. Train the staff, or at least give them instructions, provide directions to the available resources during the onboarding process. And if possible, they advise staff to take additional trainings if needed. So that they know how to create accessible documents. We also had the face when we included this work into annual performance goals to make sure that if this is not in a people's job description, this is at least within their annual performance goals, this work, especially for that remediation phase and also a very important accountability.
Part of what we do at the press with this digital document, accessibility is the group that we have, which is the accessibility working group that organizes trainings, that assist with remediation, that also is served as a liaison with the accessibility office to make sure that the documents that we use are updated.
So as I said, we're lucky about this because Duke University web accessibility office, they are responsible for making sure that the guidelines are updated. So it's not, in a way on us. We are using their knowledge to make sure that this content is being updated as needed. And also they provide additional trainings for any remediation that is more complex and sometimes they help us with performing compliance assessments as well.
So my recommendation here is to if you are undertaking projects like this, which is also very important because many publishers are focusing on the published content, which is very important, of course, part of our job. But we also have to remember that we are also having we are also using in our work many other documents that we should make sure that they are also accessible, like content that we are sharing with authors, editors, librarians, or with our vendors or even potential employees.
This documents, they also need to be made accessible. So if you have US. So we use Duke University web accessibility office to help us within this process, I recommend to use to reach out to external partners like your vendors, experts that you work with, even with even with maybe University libraries. They might have some accessibility resources and collaborate with them to make sure that this work flows.
Those accountabilities are distributed. So that they are sustainable at the same time. So Thank you so much. I can the document, the inventory document that we created is a very vast document and I'm very happy to if somebody is interested in undertaking this type of project, I will be happy to share that template with you so you can reuse it for within your organization.
Thank you so much. And I will hand it off to Karen. Hi, everybody. I'm Karen Farrell. I am from Indiana University Libraries. So I'm going to talk first really briefly about our setup at IU. So I'm head of our scholarly communications department on the library side.
We also have Indiana University Press, which reports to the libraries. And as of a couple of months ago, we have a new effort called Indiana publishing, which is a collaborative, a number of collaborative projects between my unit and the press. So in talking about accessibility, we're actually talking about not just the library's work and our publishing work, but also some of the press projects.
So from our perspective, one of the fortunate parts about being in an academic library is our mission is generally around education to some pretty extreme degree, which means that we're often all about teaching users how to do it themselves. We don't have all the resources. And so our goal is always to get them to do it.
We picked this up originally around Alt text with some of our open education projects, and as part of those fellowships and in working with instructors, our primary goal was always to get them to do the Alt text themselves. So they go through a training process in which we show them what AI does. We show them how it works, and then we show them how to upload a graph and image whatever and have it produce a first draft of Alt text.
Importantly, it also involves teaching them what Alt text best practices are. So what Alt text is and isn't and what it should and shouldn't be. It's not a perfect process, but in the end that content is theirs. This is a generally around text books that they're creating themselves. And so it requires their expertise to give it that final pass.
So we try to put it in their hands as much as possible. We're actually, while it started with our open Ed projects, that's now expanding into other fields sort of across that Indiana publishing that I was describing. The other place we've been working on it is around our journal publishing. On the library side, we publish about 50 open access journals. All but three of them are in PDF form only.
For a few years, we've been doing XML publishing using a vendor with a couple of them and we want to expand, but we don't have funds for that. One of the biggest challenges with those XML journals is that the XML that we get back still requires a fair bit of touch. It still requires a fair bit of work. So we've been piloting over the past few months using specifically AI to do the reference tagging piece of it.
There were some limitations in the pilot project. Now AI is changing so fast that all of those changes are now changed again. Essentially there's these token limits. That means you can't put as much data in there as you would like. Well, some of those token limits aren't what they were two months ago, when we finished this project. So now we're moving into a new phase and actually planning to expand and thinking through how to plan to spin out XML to some of our other journals because it is actively changing the process for us now that we've sort of worked out the flow of it.
So then you've got the library side. So if any of you are in touch with your libraries around here, we have a very, very new rule that's impacting us, though it's probably impacted most of you for a while. But there's a new rule that just came out last month on the accessibility of web content provided by state and local governments, which at a public as a public institution is what Indiana University is.
It's only been out for a month. We as a large institution have two years to abide by all of those rules. Some smaller institutions or governments have three years. This essentially means that we have to upgrade everything to the WCAG. the WCAG stuff. Starting immediately. We need to be making things available for remediation upon request, which is something we've kind of been doing but not great.
So that's step one. What happens in two years is we have to think through how to make everything accessible that we're really grateful to have the two years for because that describes a whole lot of content. It's not just our licensed materials, it's our digitized collections, it's our archives and repositories. It's all kinds of things.
In a meeting last week, we were trying to think through what does it mean to make a Sanskrit manuscript accessible. What is the accessible version of that manuscript. There are exceptions, of course, written into this new rule, but there's a lot of disagreement and discussion happening around how to define the exceptions. So hopefully over the next two years. Universities will start to figure out what we think of it.
In the meantime, what has also happened for us at IU is that some of the University IT remediation that's been happening with the University IT services is now shifting to the libraries. That wasn't our choice, but that's what we got. So we're now having to think about how to handle those kinds of remediation requests as well. Now we're just working on workflow. We're just thinking about what is the workflow for this remediation request.
Fortunately, the University IT services is going to respond to last minute requests, so they're going to continue to handle anything. That's a student that says this reading is due tomorrow, and I can't access it. You may or may not be surprised at how many requests are very last minute, but the bigger challenge is to try to step back and to think through in our workflow. What does it mean when that happens.
When that request happens, that means there were probably 15 other points earlier in the semester where we could have made it accessible to them. And it didn't happen. The communication didn't happen somewhere along the way. So a lot of what we're trying to do is, again, trying to get out in front of instructors, but also working with the IT services to think about ways that we can get to these instructors and students earlier to one of the things that IT services is handing to us immediately are the larger requests that do come earlier.
So anytime a faculty person says, here's my whole syllabus, this needs to be made accessible, that's going to fall to us to manage. Challenges Yeah. So capacity obviously a huge challenge there. As I mentioned, things like Sanskrit manuscripts, we're not even sure we have a very large music school, so music scores are another one.
That's going to be a big challenge for us to manage. What we have learned that's sort of interesting is the other component of this challenge, which goes back to the instructor. Education is a lot of instructors. Which may or may not be a surprise to anyone. Do things like link to a YouTube video. Instead of actual licensed content. So then and then they say, well, make this accessible.
Well, that's not really our problem. Sorry right. So there's a lot of instruction on our end that we have to do with the faculty. It's also really, really, really common. And this is just a long standing problem for them too, for instructors to put the incorrect link in. So we have proxied links essentially, right, so that folks can log in and then get access to paywalled information.
It's really common for instructors to say go to an Elsevier journal, copy the link to the thing, and then the students aren't logged in when they click on it, so they think they can't get it. So this is like that, but times 100 because they can't get it, so they think it's inaccessible. So it becomes a remediation when it's actually an incorrect link. There's just a lot of pieces coming filtered together.
So again, a lot of this is really about instructor education and about getting to them sort of further in advance. They also, of course, upload PDFs into the learning management system, even though we have licensed accessible content. So instead of linking to that, they stick a PDF in there. So sometimes what seems like again, an accessibility request isn't actually that.
So in terms of looking for solutions, some of the ways that we're hoping to think about this again by stepping back is in making sure we're not touching things multiple times. So there was some recent effort across some of the Big Ten libraries to informally try to figure out how much content do we have in common. And if we built a big sort of pool of not a pool, but sort of started to think through what material are we sharing that's had remediation requests.
What of that material could we actually share back and forth. It turns out there's only 10% overlap. But part of the reason there's only 10% overlap is because we don't put accessibility first in our process. So when people remediate things, they remediate it for the single purpose of whatever that request is. In other words, they're not really making it accessible.
They're just trying to meet an immediate need. So to go wrap us all the way back to the beginning of the hour, the real challenge, I think, for us is to not be thinking so much about what that immediate momentary request is, but how to back up and think about accessibility on a much broader scale how to think about what it means to make material accessible at a sort of universal design for learning level.
So that we're not running into that same document multiple times and trying to figure out how to make it accessible for person and person B all the way to Z. That is it. Thank you. Thank you to our panelists for sharing your experiences and your knowledge. We are getting tight on time.
We only have two minutes, so. Thank you. Yeah, I feel like we probably don't have time for questions for we should do a couple. All right. Does anybody have a question that they'd like to ask. We do have a couple of minutes. So for the accessibility resources or accessibility is big and broad.
And a lot of what you shared was about projects and getting buy in. How do you. Help colleagues drink from the fire hose to understand the complexity and breadth of all the knowledge. A good question. You have to meet people where they're at rather than where you'd like them to be.
You can't use the language of really technical language like VPATs and standards and stuff. You have to say, this is what it means for you and your work. This is what happens if we don't do this, whether that's a legal compliance thing or we're not reaching as many people as we could be thing or we're not taking advantage of the technology thing. It comes back to people's motivations. Why are people in publishing, why are they in the jobs that they're in.
They're in there to disseminate knowledge. They're there to reach academics, and they're also there to make the most of the content that we all publish. And so for me, it's about linking accessibility to the business targets and objectives that we all have, as opposed to making it somehow different or separated from those that I think you bring people along and get people involved.
Anyone else. Yeah, I'm going to take a little different tack and say that. I think sometimes we think of this as a binary issue. Someone has a disability or they don't. I really liked Simon's statistic. About 75% of young people who watch videos with the captions on. If you ask someone, do you. Do you think you have a visual impairment, they might say no.
But when they say, do you ever magnify the font when you're I mean, I do. And so I think also bringing in that this is universal design and it's situational sometimes also, so that can help. Other questions. All right. We don't want to keep you from that glass of wine in the reception, so Thank you for your attention.
Segment:0 .
Thank you, everyone, for coming. Good afternoon. Welcome to our session titled it doesn't just happen accountability and organization wide accessibility and disability equity initiatives. I'm Amanda Rogers, communications, and engagement manager for bio one. And I will be your moderator today. And today on the stage, kind of on the front of the room.
We have a very knowledgeable and talented group who bring with them a wonderfully diverse set of experiences and perspectives from a variety of standpoints in the scholarly publishing industry. First, we have Simon Holt, who is a senior product manager Content Accessibility at Elsevier. Nicola Poser is the director of marketing and sales at the American Mathematical Mathematical Society. I've been stumbling over mathematical all day for whatever reason.
Maxine Aldridge is director of books and journals production for the American Society of Civil Engineers. Karen Stoll Farrell is head of the scholarly communication department at Indiana University Libraries. And casa repeta is an analyst for global outreach and publishing systems at Duke University press. In many organizations, accessibility is often treated as a nice to have feature rather than an integral, integral part of the core work.
This approach can lead to inaccessible systems that exclude individuals with disabilities. So how do we shift that perception and implementation of accessibility so that it becomes a fundamental aspect of all projects and initiatives. And that's the question that we're here today to talk about. And we will start off with Simon without further ado.
Hi, everybody. So it's great to be here. As a manager mentioned. I lead our Content Accessibility efforts here at Elsevier. I thought it was important just to start with a note. If we could just move to the next slide, please. So I wanted to start off. We do know about who this is for. Because actually we talk about being customer focused, but actually, who are we talking about here.
When we're talking about accessibility, we often think about vision impaired people. I'm a visually impaired person myself, but actually accessibility is way more than that. So it's about hearing impaired people. It's about dyslexic people. It's about neurodiverse people, but actually it's about everybody. If we have closed captions, for example, that helps people who are non-native speakers or it helps us understand people who have heavy accents.
It also helps the 75% of young people. Who access videos without sound. If we have our text, for example, for images, then not only does it help people who use screen readers, but also by turning a non text asset into a text asset. By having the Alt text, it makes the image more discoverable, optimize SEO and therefore really helps kind of machine reading.
Machine analysis increases the value of our content. And so therefore when we're thinking about why we're doing it right. There's various arguments about, it's the right thing to do. Obviously, I'm sure you're all aware there's various pieces of legislation like the European Accessibility Act. But actually, this is for me about a business proposition that helps us make the most of the content that we're publishing and reach the biggest possible market.
Next slide, please. Because who are we as publishers? What I've put on here is various pieces of text, which I'm not going to read all of mercifully for you about elsevier's operating model and value proposition. And actually, when I think about accessibility, it all aligns with all of the fundamentals of what we're trying to do here, right. We're trying to disseminate knowledge here.
We're trying to build trusted partnerships with the people who read our content. We're trying to convey information in all the different ways that people learn, and accessibility helps us do that. And so therefore, I think it's very easy to think about accessibility as separate from for publishing whatever we think core publishing is. But actually, to me, it's an integral part of it because if nobody can access your content, if it's not available in a format that everybody can read, what value are we actually adding as publishers here.
So this is why this work is so important to me as an individual, but also should be important to all of us as an industry. So today I'm just going to spend a few moments talking about our approach, what some of the challenges are, and also how we're planning to go about this in the future. I've titled. The presentation today, building the house one story at a time, because actually accessibility is an iterative.
Program of work. There's no magic bullet that will mean right tomorrow. Everything is accessible and we have all the answers. It doesn't work like that. So I'm going to talk a little bit about where we've come from, where we are and where we're going. Next slide, please. So size matters.
I work for Elsevier. Elsevier are by volume, the biggest publisher in the scholarly communications industry, I think. I read a report recently that said something like 70% of all scholarly content last year was published by Elsevier. So we're talking about 2000 books a year, over 600,000 journal articles a year.
We're talking about a big chunk of content here. And so therefore, whilst remediating or making accessible one book or one journal article might be straightforward, doing anything at scale is difficult and complicated because you've got a lot of processes, a lot of stakeholders. So everything that I'm going to talk about today is with that in mind, it's with scale in mind and other people are going to talk about their experiences working at different types of organization.
This is just one perspective. It doesn't mean that this is the only perspective or a better perspective somehow. It's just everything. When I talk about all of this stuff, we need to remember here that we're talking about a lot of content and that comes with challenges around workflows and scale, stakeholders and Yes, cost.
So next slide, please. So I wanted just to give you a little snapshot of all the things that we're doing because it's complicated, because we have so many different work streams. So each one of these little infographics represent a different project within our accessibility program. And I'm not going to go into each one. But the point I wanted to make is it's complicated, right 10 years ago, we really started work on our platforms and the product side of things.
We're now at a stage where ScienceDirect are our platform. Our content platform won the web million award for being one of the most accessible websites on the internet. That's amazing. But it's taken us 10 years to get there. We're now doing work around the content piece, and I think it's fair to say because of new technology like AI because of formats like EPUB that are always evolving and because of the pace of change in terms of policy and governance and legal as well.
This is an ever changing picture. And so our approach to this is that we're doing it in phases. You can see from this infographic we're starting off setting all of these different projects running. And what we're hoping is that over time, we're going to be able to make all of our content accessible. But if we only focused on one of these, it would leave too many gaps.
So that's why we're really trying to take a programmatic approach, an all company approach, if you like. Next slide, please. So I mentioned that we started several years ago. And so I thought it might be helpful just to share a few kind of observations that me and the other people who work on the accessibility team put thought about and put together.
And as you can see here. And again, I'm not going to go through all of them, it's about pilot iterate build, learn, right. I always say that change happens one conversation at a time. And really it's about every day communicating the value of accessibility, how it relates to business performance, how it relates to our value story, our mission and our goals. But also keeping up to date with the technology and really thinking about, OK, how can we make this work in a sustainable way.
So that we keep making our content accessible and that it's not just accessible now, but it's going to be accessible in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. And so these principles really underpin our approach. And these are principles that I would strongly urge you guys to think about. People often come to me and say, well we've not started. This feels overwhelming. The reason I wanted to share this slide is because actually you can start small pilot.
Try a few things, get a few people on board and then move forward from there. It really is a one story at a time. Iterative approach. Next slide, please. So I wanted to give you a snapshot, having explained where we've come from and the fact that. We have over the past year or so been developing this program of accessibility, really focusing initially on the books piece of things because of the legislation, because of the European Accessibility act in particular.
Where do we want to go into the future. And the future is that we're going to continue to iterate. We've started off with books, we're going to move into journals ultimately, in line with the Benetech principles. So Benetech are a kind of a standards body for accessibility and an accrediting body. They talk a lot about born accessible, and we want everything that we publish to be born accessible.
That takes time, though, and that takes iteration of workflows. It takes thinking about how do we remediate stuff with publish before it takes author engagement to explain why we're doing what we're doing, why we're doing it, and how they can help. But it also talks about it's also important to keep engaging with our end users as well, people with accessibility needs, because actually this is what it's about.
You never build a product in the commercial world or the noncommercial world without engaging with end users. And it's important that we do the same here and we continue to do that. And I say that to anybody in our industry who's interested in accessibility. As a disabled person in the disabled community, we have a phrase, nothing about us without us. And actually it's really easy to take the standards and say, well we just conform to these and that's fine actually, unless you're going to really bring your readers in and engage the people who are going to be using your content, you can't be sure that you're going to be doing a good job.
And actually, if you're not doing a good job in helping people why are you doing this. So today we're starting with books. Tomorrow, hopefully we'll be able to expand this through the rest of our content offering. Next slide, please. Final slide. So I often get asked various questions about how are you interacting with authors.
What are you doing about the backlist that's previously published titles. How can I help. Obviously, AI has been a big theme of this year's conference. So I thought that I'd just put up on here a few kind of discussion questions and answers here, which maybe we can come back to in the Q&A. The reality is that we see authors as really important content providers and the experts.
However, we see their role in terms of Alt text. Alt text is technical writing. Let's get suppliers to do the technical writing. They have experts and then we'll get authors to review it and make sure it's right. Anybody who's worked on the editorial publishing side, as I have for 20 years, knows getting a manuscript from an author is a commitment in itself.
Asking them to write 200 text descriptions doesn't seem a great way to make your pub dates, to be honest. Their value is much better. Getting them to review the content that we're creating for the Alt text. In terms of, again, just consistent with our AI policy, I can be a great enabler as a productivity tool, but it's not the thing on its own. It's a good start, but we will always need human beings to validate it.
And again, in terms of the backlist, backfiles, we really want to make sure that everything that we sell whenever it was published is accessible. Clearly we're going to need to do that in a phased way. We have 87,000 titles in the backlist just for books. We probably published 10 times the amount of journals as we do books. We can't do it all at once.
So it's going to have to be phased based on books, based on usage, and based on when things were published and based on subject area. But what we are committed to is that everything will be accessible at the point of need. So somebody approaches us and say, we need an accessible version of x or y, then we're working to put workflows into place to make sure that we can provide that.
All right, enough from me. I've done quite a lot of talking there. I'm going to now hand over to Nicola, who's going to explain what it's like in her world. Thank you, Simon. So I'm the director of marketing and sales at the American Mathematical Society as Amanda mentioned. I also wear a hat as the coordinator of our accessibility working group, which sort of grew out of the role of marketing and sales, because I'm the one that the librarians ask at license renewal time, what are you doing and what does it look like.
So that's why that role came to me as well. And I'm going to talk a little bit about how this works in a society publisher context being embedded within a wider organization as a publishing organization. So alignment with the mission obviously in some ways not that different from the Elsevier mission of promoting research and connecting our community. But we have a very specific community that we're focused on and that is mathematicians.
So we are a deep rather than wide organization. So I won't be talking as much about scale. So we have a different challenge. So again, as Simon also said, not necessarily better or worse, but certainly different. And one of those challenges is to go deep without creating a workflow that is so artisanal that we can't scale it when we need to.
So small blue circle instead of large round orange circle. We, as I mentioned, are more focused publisher embedded specifically in mathematics by mathematicians for mathematicians. So only 80 or 90 fretless titles a year. We have about 4,000 in our backlist and we have several different journals. We have member journals, research journals, translated journals and typo look at that, and 7 partner journals.
So smaller portfolio. So our challenges again are a bit different and tied specifically to the needs of mathematics, which I'm going to talk about in a minute. I can get my notes. So I wanted to share this timeline to give a sense of what I mean by addressing the challenges of going deep into the needs of a specific discipline society.
Publishers have a reputation for moving slowly, but that's not always necessarily due to a lack of resources, and it's certainly not a symptom of an allergy to innovation. It is often due to the need to build in-house expertise. Do some creative problem solving. Math, of course, has particular challenges with accessibility in online content, and particularly dealing with equations and complex graphics and making sure that they're truly accessible and interoperable with assistive technologies.
So the reason I wanted to share this timeline is that when the AMS first started looking at this landscape, they did not see the kinds of tools that they felt like they needed to effectively convert complex mathematics into those types of content formats. So we partnered with Siam. I'm not sure if our friends from Siam are in the room as founding sponsors of mathjax, and since then we have the privilege of working with really talented developers who are also mathematicians in their background and are able to really work deeply on creating conversion tools that work for our content.
So we've spent some time in creating authoring and conversion tools that can handle the source files often in LaTeX, and this has taken quite a bit of time. But as you can also see in the last couple of years, things have accelerated quite a bit. So what is that about. Well, it could be about the European Accessibility Act. And as the marketing and sales person, I would say that it should be about the accessibility of the European Accessibility Act and similar mandates requiring that our content be accessible for people to continue purchasing it.
But it's a little more complex than that. So for the first few years. We'll talk a little bit about this framework. The creation of the conversion tools that we had developed in publications was somewhat under the radar for the larger AMS organization. Our journal math viewer platform emerged, was tested, iterated, improved, and we began developing epubs for some of our books using similar tools.
But in recent years, a few things have happened to increase the visibility of this work. One was the accessibility working group, and that was one of our goals was to increase internal visibility of this work to a shift in the demands from our customers, as mentioned from vague promises to make progress to specific requests and specific mandates and roadmaps. But third and perhaps most importantly in our context as a society was that our governance became engaged with these issues more widely as a result of a memo from the Department of Justice reminding everyone about ADA requirements and posting course content online.
Mathematicians love to post even photos of hand scrawled equations or their chalkboards and things on their course websites, which clearly do not meet any of those accessibility requirements. So we started getting panicked. Questions what can the AMS do to help our membership, not just our publications. So the result was that the toolchain development that had sort of quietly been happening in publications was thrust into the spotlight of the wider organization, and that resulted in some decisions from our leadership and governance to support the scaling, not just of accessible content for our books and journal program, but also to request the creation of user friendly versions of those tools, some of which we have made available open source so that faculty can also take advantage of those conversion tools for their own needs.
That led to resources, and that really is why you see an accelerated timeline. We were able to expand our publishing technical group to support the work we need to do to meet our needs and to also support the wider society. So what questions are we dealing with. I'm going to take these in reverse order because I talked a little bit about how publication tools are being adapted to support the wider society goals, which is the final question here on this slide.
The second question, the need to develop the tools that really work for our content. And then for us, the question also is what is the role of the author. So we are approaching this a little bit differently. Perhaps we see the author as a reader, a member of the society, and certainly a member of the math community. And so for us, we also think author education is really important in helping our authors to understand why this work is important and also to take advantage of all that publishing can offer when we're publishing for the web.
Mathematicians are very print focused. Some of them would still love to give us a PDF ready book here. I made my equations look exactly the way I want them to appear on the page, and so we have to educate them about the need for structured content that can be reformatted and reflowed in ways that work for all readers. We do realize it's a tall order, but our hope is that in the end, we will help educate our authors in a way that will help improve math publishing more widely.
So all of that is a lot of background to come to a concrete case study since we promised you we would give you some concrete things to take with you. So how has the AMS tackled the issue of Alt text. This is a new project for us as well, very much a fretless project, so we are not yet trying to scale it across our backlist certainly, and our goal is to solve it upstream as much as we can.
As part of that author education process. And as part of the authoring process, we know that won't always be possible, but we want to make sure that the text alternative provides useful information and explains the context of why the image or the equation is there and what it's doing. So providing robust our images and equations as robust SVG files with embedded explorable text alternatives. So we can really leverage the source code as much as possible and connect the manuscript to convey the mathematical meaning.
We want to make sure that meaning isn't lost. Because this the author is critical in this approach. We started by working on guidelines that could be shared with our production editors and our authors, as well as our acquisitions editors for those early conversations with prospective book authors in particular, what we learned is that crafting effective guidelines is not easy.
We struggled a lot with the level of detail that made sense for varied levels of experience, providing enough information without being overwhelming. We have a draft that we're testing with our authors to see if we've created something that will actually result in useful text alternatives, whether they be specifically an Alt text in an Alt text field or whether they be a description in the text itself elsewhere that then can be pointed to in that Alt text field for book content.
This is fairly straightforward in terms of embedding it into the workflow. We have an existing production workflow. We sort of know at which point it makes sense to have the conversation about Alt text. It's a little bit trickier with journals when you're going through peer review. Is the Alt text part of the peer review or is it not. So I'm really hoping we might talk a little bit about that question during the Q&A.
And with that, I will hand it to Maxine. Thank you. Hello, everyone. My name is Maxine Eldridge and I'm with the American Society of Civil Engineers. My role is production director. And this afternoon I will take a little bit of time to tell you about our accessibility journey at ASC.
Accessibility is defined in a variety of ways and has many facets. The American Society of Civil Engineers ASC is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, which largely includes accessibility. For more than 10 years over a decade.
ASC accessibility initiatives has included leadership, staff, dedication, and the movement of members of society advancing an inclusive culture commonly known as mosaic. Our mosaic group provides a society with leadership in all matters of diversity, equity and inclusion within the Civil engineering community. It focuses on assessment, accountability and training.
Some recommendations from our mosaic team and ongoing initiatives include careful meeting planning to ensure meetings are held at accessible venues. Global Accessibility awareness of civil engineering communities. Multiple means of representation. That is presenting information in multiple ways, such as visual, audible and presenting for different learning styles.
Excuse me. Mosaic focuses on webinars and closed captioning e-readers when necessary. Some additional recommendations are making sure dietary restrictions are followed and we avoid conflicts with public, religious, and cultural holidays. As we expand the lens of accessibility within ASC.
A recent dedicated staff member was promoted to Director of accessibility and DEI strategies to strengthen our accessibility focus within the publication and standards division. Through this role. A usability study was conducted. This study included stakeholders ranging from internal staff, student members, librarians, authors and editors.
The results from this study gave us a better understanding of how our customers and members viewed and utilized our site and our content. We also discovered accessibility deficiencies and ways to address these deficiencies moving forward. During this study, we requested feedback on the prominence and placement of our accessibility statement on our ASC publishing platform and made necessary adjustments.
Our dedicated staff member, along with our technology team, led the initiative of upgrading our publishing platform. Previously page builder. Now we're on atypon Literatum three. With this platform upgrade. We renewed our VPAT.
Which was in existence for over 10 years. We were able to. Confirm ACS compliance with WCAG, ensuring a 2.1 success criteria with a level AA compliance. Because the EIA is intentional. In all our work with a dedicated accessibility staff, we are able to review our compliances with ADA more frequently.
We're also able to evaluate the act and AODA and encourage pointed conversations across the organization. We are now in the process of evaluating all texts for our journals. Also abstract language translation for some of our journals.
In addition. We recently launched a new publishing platform called Amplify its through high wire. This new digital platform is to publish or civil engineers standards. It features interactive functionality that makes it more accessible for civil engineers and allow users to compare different the difference between editions in real time.
Content for this platform is developed in XML and is published in full text allowing full searchability. Asx's portfolio comprises of 35 scientific journals, which are all published in full text, 50 to 70 books standards conference proceedings annually, and approximately 40,000 papers in our backlist.
As we move forward with our exploration we are embarking on. Experimenting with alternative text for journals. Our process at the moment is to have our composition vendors. Generate our first pass content. Followed by human intervention for copyediting and scientific editing. When necessary to ensure that we present accurate description.
Our final pass is to have our authors and editors review these all texts and provide scientific merit and/or grant approval. This is still in our testing phase, but we're hopeful that with this process, we'll be able to roll this out later on this year. While experimenting with texts. There were a few things that we unfolded.
And so we I consider this pitfalls to avoid unnecessary. We should see all texts as a supplement, not a replacement for content. All text should provide additional context, not duplicate what's already in the caption or the surrounding text. Avoid irrelevant details as much as possible, such as authors, dates, sources, bibliographical information. Avoid interpretation.
All texts should describe what's visible. Not offer subjective interpretations or opinions. Keep all texts brief at all costs. Avoid lengthy description that overwhelms users when necessary. Another piece of accessibility to consider is color blindness.
Color, color, vision color deficiency or color visual deficiency decreases the ability to distinguish certain colors or in some instances, all colors. Our usability study and internal audit identified some common issues that we are now working to correct. We found that most common color blindness are in Reds and greens.
More rare are Black and white. Also rare are some blues and yellows. We're still doing an in-depth study of color blindness, but we are now more aware that when developing websites and web pages, limited color palettes should be used. The more color there are in designs, the more chances there will be to for confusion.
Keeping color basic helps maximize visibility. ASC recognizes that following these guidelines will make our content more accessible for a wider range of people. Thank you for this opportunity to just share a little bit of what we're doing on our side of the fence. I will now turn over to Keisha. Thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone. Just my name is Keisha and I work at Duke University press. My title is analyst for global outreach and publishing systems, and I also co-lead the accessibility working group at Duke University press, and I also volunteer for SSP, and I am leading the accessibility subcommittee, which is part of the Dia committee here at SSP.
So before I move to my presentation, I just want to very quickly say something about Duke University Press. We are academic publisher, University publisher. We publish content in humanities and social science, 150 books per year and around 60 journals. We are a University publishers and we are not a very small University publisher here in the United States, but we have very limited resources.
So we distribute our resources very, very carefully. So I'm very glad to share that. Actually, right now we have two accessibility projects happening at Duke University at the same time. If you asked me two years ago, there will be no projects. Now we have two. So this is a great development for us and great improvement. So the first project is the European Accessibility Act compliance projects, which probably many of you heard about.
This is a business critical project for us because if we are not going to be compliant with the legislation, we wouldn't we wouldn't be we will not be able to offer our products on the European market next year, middle of next year. So there is this project is very important and business critical. As I'm saying, it focuses on accessible formats, Alt text contrasts, foreign language tagging and many other things.
But today this is not the focus of my conversation, of my talk. That is going to be another presentation by Alice billen at OUP press. She's going to be talking about this project. But today I want to talk very briefly about another project that we are having right now at the press, which is external document Accessibility Initiative, which focuses on digital document accessibility. And when I talk about digital documents, I am not talking about the published content.
What we decided to do, we decided that we are going to align digital documents with existing web accessibility standards that the document digital documents that are created by staff and shared with external stakeholders. So external stakeholders, external stakeholders like authors, like librarians, like editors, anybody that we are working with.
So this project is actually a grassroots type of project that was initiated by the Duke University Press accessibility working group that exists at Duke University press. So this project was not proposed by the managers, was not business critical, but the it aligned with the broader equity and inclusion goals. That is, to further press this effort to make our content and materials broadly accessible as part of the larger goal to build an organizational culture of equity, inclusion.
So as I said, what was in scope, the documents that were created by staff, in what format or in PowerPoint format, Excel, or InDesign. So example of those documents where journal style guides or manuscript submission guidelines or anything that we distribute to libraries like brochures or pricing information, we wanted to make sure that those documents are accessible.
So we initiated that project and there were a couple of things that we needed to do to make sure that we are successful and later on we are sustainable. Just very quickly, about out of scope documents. So as I mentioned before, published content was not in the scope, but we also we didn't have control over certain documents like documents that are Duke University, Duke University templates, like something that we used that our human resources use or system generated documents.
Like we work with different vendors. There are certain documents that are generated by those systems. We do not have control over those documents. That is why we put those documents as out of scope. It doesn't mean that we are not communicating with those vendors if we see that those documents are not accessible. But this is about cooperation between the vendors and the future, choosing a vendor that is able to generate accessible documents out of their systems.
So we created we created this external document inventory. So all of the submission guidelines, style guides, price lists, everything that we're sharing with external stakeholders, we put everything into that external document inventory that we created. And this document guided us through basically to understand what documents we have to look at. Maybe we have to remediate them if they are not accessible.
So we wanted to know how many of those documents we will have to review and fix if they are not accessible. But so when we have that input, we worked with a Duke University accessibility office to create guidelines for creating accessible Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. We also created guidelines for a document remediation process.
So we didn't want to. Certain documents were accessible, certain already certain documents were not accessible. But for certain documents we have to recreate them from scratch. But there was a number of documents which we didn't have to recreate. There was a remediation decision tree and maybe with a little bit tweaks, we could have made them accessible.
Those we are very lucky that we have Duke accessibility office. They helped us a lot through that process. So those guidelines are actually available at Duke University, at Duke University press website and also available at the Duke University website and. Probably the most important slide here is the accountability framework that we created around this around this work.
And this is to make sure that we're not doing it just one time, that this is the new workflow that we are going to that we have and we are going to advise, advise our staff and our vendors to. And to make sure that this documents are not only remediated, but there going to be any new documents are going to be created accessible going forward.
So for staff. There were. There were a couple, actually, not couple. There were like 30 people involved in the projects that were working on that inventory document. They were remediating fixing accessibility issues with those documents. But everyone everyone that works at Duke University press is now advised to create if they create a new access, if they create a new document that is then going to be shared with the external stakeholders, they're being advised to use those guidelines to make sure that those documents are being created.
Accessible managers, they support the workflow. So what I mean by that is that they. Train the staff, or at least give them instructions, provide directions to the available resources during the onboarding process. And if possible, they advise staff to take additional trainings if needed. So that they know how to create accessible documents. We also had the face when we included this work into annual performance goals to make sure that if this is not in a people's job description, this is at least within their annual performance goals, this work, especially for that remediation phase and also a very important accountability.
Part of what we do at the press with this digital document, accessibility is the group that we have, which is the accessibility working group that organizes trainings, that assist with remediation, that also is served as a liaison with the accessibility office to make sure that the documents that we use are updated.
So as I said, we're lucky about this because Duke University web accessibility office, they are responsible for making sure that the guidelines are updated. So it's not, in a way on us. We are using their knowledge to make sure that this content is being updated as needed. And also they provide additional trainings for any remediation that is more complex and sometimes they help us with performing compliance assessments as well.
So my recommendation here is to if you are undertaking projects like this, which is also very important because many publishers are focusing on the published content, which is very important, of course, part of our job. But we also have to remember that we are also having we are also using in our work many other documents that we should make sure that they are also accessible, like content that we are sharing with authors, editors, librarians, or with our vendors or even potential employees.
This documents, they also need to be made accessible. So if you have US. So we use Duke University web accessibility office to help us within this process, I recommend to use to reach out to external partners like your vendors, experts that you work with, even with even with maybe University libraries. They might have some accessibility resources and collaborate with them to make sure that this work flows.
Those accountabilities are distributed. So that they are sustainable at the same time. So Thank you so much. I can the document, the inventory document that we created is a very vast document and I'm very happy to if somebody is interested in undertaking this type of project, I will be happy to share that template with you so you can reuse it for within your organization.
Thank you so much. And I will hand it off to Karen. Hi, everybody. I'm Karen Farrell. I am from Indiana University Libraries. So I'm going to talk first really briefly about our setup at IU. So I'm head of our scholarly communications department on the library side.
We also have Indiana University Press, which reports to the libraries. And as of a couple of months ago, we have a new effort called Indiana publishing, which is a collaborative, a number of collaborative projects between my unit and the press. So in talking about accessibility, we're actually talking about not just the library's work and our publishing work, but also some of the press projects.
So from our perspective, one of the fortunate parts about being in an academic library is our mission is generally around education to some pretty extreme degree, which means that we're often all about teaching users how to do it themselves. We don't have all the resources. And so our goal is always to get them to do it.
We picked this up originally around Alt text with some of our open education projects, and as part of those fellowships and in working with instructors, our primary goal was always to get them to do the Alt text themselves. So they go through a training process in which we show them what AI does. We show them how it works, and then we show them how to upload a graph and image whatever and have it produce a first draft of Alt text.
Importantly, it also involves teaching them what Alt text best practices are. So what Alt text is and isn't and what it should and shouldn't be. It's not a perfect process, but in the end that content is theirs. This is a generally around text books that they're creating themselves. And so it requires their expertise to give it that final pass.
So we try to put it in their hands as much as possible. We're actually, while it started with our open Ed projects, that's now expanding into other fields sort of across that Indiana publishing that I was describing. The other place we've been working on it is around our journal publishing. On the library side, we publish about 50 open access journals. All but three of them are in PDF form only.
For a few years, we've been doing XML publishing using a vendor with a couple of them and we want to expand, but we don't have funds for that. One of the biggest challenges with those XML journals is that the XML that we get back still requires a fair bit of touch. It still requires a fair bit of work. So we've been piloting over the past few months using specifically AI to do the reference tagging piece of it.
There were some limitations in the pilot project. Now AI is changing so fast that all of those changes are now changed again. Essentially there's these token limits. That means you can't put as much data in there as you would like. Well, some of those token limits aren't what they were two months ago, when we finished this project. So now we're moving into a new phase and actually planning to expand and thinking through how to plan to spin out XML to some of our other journals because it is actively changing the process for us now that we've sort of worked out the flow of it.
So then you've got the library side. So if any of you are in touch with your libraries around here, we have a very, very new rule that's impacting us, though it's probably impacted most of you for a while. But there's a new rule that just came out last month on the accessibility of web content provided by state and local governments, which at a public as a public institution is what Indiana University is.
It's only been out for a month. We as a large institution have two years to abide by all of those rules. Some smaller institutions or governments have three years. This essentially means that we have to upgrade everything to the WCAG. the WCAG stuff. Starting immediately. We need to be making things available for remediation upon request, which is something we've kind of been doing but not great.
So that's step one. What happens in two years is we have to think through how to make everything accessible that we're really grateful to have the two years for because that describes a whole lot of content. It's not just our licensed materials, it's our digitized collections, it's our archives and repositories. It's all kinds of things.
In a meeting last week, we were trying to think through what does it mean to make a Sanskrit manuscript accessible. What is the accessible version of that manuscript. There are exceptions, of course, written into this new rule, but there's a lot of disagreement and discussion happening around how to define the exceptions. So hopefully over the next two years. Universities will start to figure out what we think of it.
In the meantime, what has also happened for us at IU is that some of the University IT remediation that's been happening with the University IT services is now shifting to the libraries. That wasn't our choice, but that's what we got. So we're now having to think about how to handle those kinds of remediation requests as well. Now we're just working on workflow. We're just thinking about what is the workflow for this remediation request.
Fortunately, the University IT services is going to respond to last minute requests, so they're going to continue to handle anything. That's a student that says this reading is due tomorrow, and I can't access it. You may or may not be surprised at how many requests are very last minute, but the bigger challenge is to try to step back and to think through in our workflow. What does it mean when that happens.
When that request happens, that means there were probably 15 other points earlier in the semester where we could have made it accessible to them. And it didn't happen. The communication didn't happen somewhere along the way. So a lot of what we're trying to do is, again, trying to get out in front of instructors, but also working with the IT services to think about ways that we can get to these instructors and students earlier to one of the things that IT services is handing to us immediately are the larger requests that do come earlier.
So anytime a faculty person says, here's my whole syllabus, this needs to be made accessible, that's going to fall to us to manage. Challenges Yeah. So capacity obviously a huge challenge there. As I mentioned, things like Sanskrit manuscripts, we're not even sure we have a very large music school, so music scores are another one.
That's going to be a big challenge for us to manage. What we have learned that's sort of interesting is the other component of this challenge, which goes back to the instructor. Education is a lot of instructors. Which may or may not be a surprise to anyone. Do things like link to a YouTube video. Instead of actual licensed content. So then and then they say, well, make this accessible.
Well, that's not really our problem. Sorry right. So there's a lot of instruction on our end that we have to do with the faculty. It's also really, really, really common. And this is just a long standing problem for them too, for instructors to put the incorrect link in. So we have proxied links essentially, right, so that folks can log in and then get access to paywalled information.
It's really common for instructors to say go to an Elsevier journal, copy the link to the thing, and then the students aren't logged in when they click on it, so they think they can't get it. So this is like that, but times 100 because they can't get it, so they think it's inaccessible. So it becomes a remediation when it's actually an incorrect link. There's just a lot of pieces coming filtered together.
So again, a lot of this is really about instructor education and about getting to them sort of further in advance. They also, of course, upload PDFs into the learning management system, even though we have licensed accessible content. So instead of linking to that, they stick a PDF in there. So sometimes what seems like again, an accessibility request isn't actually that.
So in terms of looking for solutions, some of the ways that we're hoping to think about this again by stepping back is in making sure we're not touching things multiple times. So there was some recent effort across some of the Big Ten libraries to informally try to figure out how much content do we have in common. And if we built a big sort of pool of not a pool, but sort of started to think through what material are we sharing that's had remediation requests.
What of that material could we actually share back and forth. It turns out there's only 10% overlap. But part of the reason there's only 10% overlap is because we don't put accessibility first in our process. So when people remediate things, they remediate it for the single purpose of whatever that request is. In other words, they're not really making it accessible.
They're just trying to meet an immediate need. So to go wrap us all the way back to the beginning of the hour, the real challenge, I think, for us is to not be thinking so much about what that immediate momentary request is, but how to back up and think about accessibility on a much broader scale how to think about what it means to make material accessible at a sort of universal design for learning level.
So that we're not running into that same document multiple times and trying to figure out how to make it accessible for person and person B all the way to Z. That is it. Thank you. Thank you to our panelists for sharing your experiences and your knowledge. We are getting tight on time.
We only have two minutes, so. Thank you. Yeah, I feel like we probably don't have time for questions for we should do a couple. All right. Does anybody have a question that they'd like to ask. We do have a couple of minutes. So for the accessibility resources or accessibility is big and broad.
And a lot of what you shared was about projects and getting buy in. How do you. Help colleagues drink from the fire hose to understand the complexity and breadth of all the knowledge. A good question. You have to meet people where they're at rather than where you'd like them to be.
You can't use the language of really technical language like VPATs and standards and stuff. You have to say, this is what it means for you and your work. This is what happens if we don't do this, whether that's a legal compliance thing or we're not reaching as many people as we could be thing or we're not taking advantage of the technology thing. It comes back to people's motivations. Why are people in publishing, why are they in the jobs that they're in.
They're in there to disseminate knowledge. They're there to reach academics, and they're also there to make the most of the content that we all publish. And so for me, it's about linking accessibility to the business targets and objectives that we all have, as opposed to making it somehow different or separated from those that I think you bring people along and get people involved.
Anyone else. Yeah, I'm going to take a little different tack and say that. I think sometimes we think of this as a binary issue. Someone has a disability or they don't. I really liked Simon's statistic. About 75% of young people who watch videos with the captions on. If you ask someone, do you. Do you think you have a visual impairment, they might say no.
But when they say, do you ever magnify the font when you're I mean, I do. And so I think also bringing in that this is universal design and it's situational sometimes also, so that can help. Other questions. All right. We don't want to keep you from that glass of wine in the reception, so Thank you for your attention.
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