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Accessibility in the scholarly information space-NISO Plus
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Accessibility in the scholarly information space-NISO Plus
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https://cadmoreoriginalmedia.blob.core.windows.net/c2fc784a-5d40-4e66-a8ce-92e74b4c35ae/Accessibility in the scholarly information space-NISO Plus.mp4?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=DKf0Nb%2BiZ6FQp7oGLigyQQjAJnY6iVYwcDTofnv61XQ%3D&st=2024-11-21T09%3A05%3A04Z&se=2024-11-21T11%3A10%3A04Z&sp=r
Upload Date:
2022-08-26T00:00:00.0000000
Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
[MUSIC PLAYING]
AMANDA WILSON: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our NISO Plus 2022 session, Accessibility in the scholarly information space. My name is Amanda Wilson. I'm with the US National Library of Medicine, and I am delighted to be the moderator for today's session. As a reminder, accessibility of information resources is a topic that's broadly understood but details of the barriers to accessibility are sometimes complicated.
AMANDA WILSON: This session will focus on some of the less discussed problems in making published information accessible, such as license restrictions and also taking a look at some possible solutions to these issues. We have a fantastic lineup of speakers. Anna Lawson, Jamie Axelrod, Bill Kasdorf, and Oliver Rickard will speak to us in that order on various issues around this topic.
AMANDA WILSON: After they've concluded, we look forward to a lively discussion and hopefully identifying some concrete outputs and suggestions for next steps that can possibly be taken after the conference. With that, I'll invite Anna Lawson to begin the presentation.
ANNA LAWSON: OK. So thank you so much, Amanda. And it's a really very great pleasure to be here and to have a chance to talk to you today about this topic, which is so close to my heart. The title of my paper is on the screen, I think, and it is Accessibility of Scholarly Information Space: Perspectives from a Blind Disability Rights Scholar. So you'll have guessed from that, that I'm blind and I'm a screen-reader user.
ANNA LAWSON: So moving to slide three, just an overview of what I'm going to talk about. First of all, who I am, what I do, and how I access information. Second, I'm just going to say a few words about my venture onto a side of publishing which is new to me, which is being involved in editing a new journal, so introducing that journal, which is the International Journal of Disability and Social Justice.
ANNA LAWSON: And then third, I'll just talk about a few examples of types of problem that I have encountered and continue to encounter, which don't tend to be as discussed as many others. And fourth, I'll just say a few words in conclusion. So slide four, please, Jason. So first of all, who I am, what I do, and how I access information.
ANNA LAWSON: And slide five. So that's a picture of me and a picture of my guide dog, my fourth guide dog, who is in the room with me. So I do apologize if you hear any strange noises. It's probably him. So moving on to the next slide, slide six. My job is I'm a professor at the University of Leeds, professor of law.
ANNA LAWSON: And the picture on the screen is of our-- it's the kind of symbol of our university, one of our oldest buildings, which has a very impressive flight of steps leading up to it, which we've had a campaign about the accessibility and inclusiveness of that image for some time. And thankfully, now we have a chairlift. But, yes, so it's a bit more of an inclusive image than it previously was before the chairlift was installed a few years ago.
ANNA LAWSON: So the next slide, slide seven. The Transcription Centre, which is co-funded and run by the Royal National Institute of Blind and partially sighted people and the University of Leeds and it's based in the University of Leeds is the reason why I chose Leeds as a student. So I came to Leeds as a student.
ANNA LAWSON: It was the best support in any UK university that was offered through this Transcription Centre. At that point, I was still in the process of losing my sight. But reading print had become almost impossible for me at that stage. And at that stage, I accessed all my studying through tape, through cassette tape. So the Transcription Centre organized volunteers about four, four in the studios and then others at home, to record material for me and for other visually-impaired and print-impaired students concurrently, which was just completely transformatory to my learning experience and had the obvious impact on my grades.
ANNA LAWSON: So after doing post-graduate work elsewhere, I came back to the University of Leeds as a member of staff, as an academic. And now, all my reading is done electronically via a screen-reader. So the Transcription Centre still transcribes books for me, but I also have an assistant who helps me find and locate and file other electronic recordings, which were already available in accessible formats.
ANNA LAWSON: So slide eight please, Jason. The Centre for Disability Studies. So although I'm a law professor and I'm based in the law school, my area of research is disability, disability equality, human rights and inclusion, and accessibility. And we're lucky in Leeds to have a strong multidisciplinary network of scholars from across the university working on issues relating to disability and social change.
ANNA LAWSON: So I'm currently one of the joint directors of that Centre. Slide nine, please. So that's just a link to my own page and some of the work I do. But it focuses, as I've mentioned, on equality, inclusion, and accessibility. OK. So moving on to slide 10, please, which takes us on to the second section.
ANNA LAWSON: So this is just to say a very few words about this new International Journal of Disability and Social Justice, which, along with my co-director of the Centre for Disability Studies, I co-founded as an editor. So slide 11, please, Jason. The first issue of this journal came out in December, so it's a new baby in the publishing world.
ANNA LAWSON: And slide 12, please. It's published by Pluto Journals, which we're extremely fortunate to be working with such a progressive and imaginative publisher who has such a strong commitment to the values of social justice and inclusion and is willing to experiment and support experiments in order to find ways of opening up access at all sorts of levels.
ANNA LAWSON: It's part of the Pluto Educational Trust, which is a non-profit organization. So slide 13. Accessibility, as I've mentioned, is one of the areas of my research. And it's something I think all of us in the disability studies world take very seriously and want to integrate into everything we do.
ANNA LAWSON: And of course, that includes journal publishing, journal editing. So just a note of some of the things we've been trying to do and we know we haven't got all of them right. It's going to be an ongoing conversation with the readers, with the authors, with the reviewers, with the publishers to try and get as far as we can as a journey really towards tackling the barriers that we know exist to opening up access and inclusion to online publishing.
ANNA LAWSON: So these barriers will probably be familiar to all of you, so I won't spend time on them. But tackling the financial barriers of accessing published material. So that's not just the financial barriers that readers might face, but also the financial barriers that authors might face. And as we all will be aware, open-access has sometimes shifted the financial burden from readers to authors.
ANNA LAWSON: So we're trying to find a model which avoids doing that so the authors don't need to pay either. And this involves membership of a community associated with a journal. A second barrier, communicating content beyond academia. So in disability studies, we don't want our ideas to be limited to other academics. It's really important to us to have conversations with so that our ideas get communicated to as well as us being informed by ideas in the broader world, so amongst disabled people's organizations, families, businesses who are being innovative, people who may not be familiar with lots of the academic technical jargon or have the time or interest in developing that kind of familiarity.
ANNA LAWSON: So alongside the full academic journal articles, we are publishing plain English summaries, which are a bit longer than abstracts and give a fuller understanding of what the article is about, the ideas in that article, the findings to facilitate that kind of communication between academics and non-academics. And we also hope to supplement that with video interviews of authors.
ANNA LAWSON: So as well as publishing open-access in PDF, we're also going to be making our articles available in HTML. And we're also keen to integrate accessibility into everything we do, including the back room processes of editing and reviewing, and that means being open to requests for support and assistance.
ANNA LAWSON: OK. Moving on to section three and slide 14. Some examples of ongoing problems, which I have encountered and continue to encounter. And I should preface this by saying I'm not a technical person. I love technology in terms of what it's opened up, but I like technology to work for me and I don't like spending lots of time conquering it if I could help it.
ANNA LAWSON: Slide 15, please. So the first type of problem I've mentioned here is PDF files. And these, I have found it easier, increasingly easy to access these. But I still do encounter problems. So more and more of them are screen-reader accessible technically than used to be the case. And also, my screen-reader now gives me the option of scanning them, but those scans often end up being very messy.
ANNA LAWSON: It gives you quite messy documents, which can be difficult to navigate. Some of the factors I find particularly difficult concern matching up numbers and text. And I found that particularly problematic in things like statutes, so legislation where you really need to know, is it section 2, subparagraph 1, paragraph C? Which text does the relevant number belong to?
ANNA LAWSON: And often, PDFs separate that out for me, so it's difficult. I have to get somebody else to do the matching up afterwards. Another problem I find is to do with footnotes, that they just turn up in the middle of the text. And it can make it very difficult to-- it'll interrupt the text and make it difficult to read. And law has a lot of footnotes. A second example is e-books.
ANNA LAWSON: So increasingly, books are being made available in electronic format. But often, these are not very accessible despite general assumptions that they are. So often, they're not easy to read, particularly when they have images and things, that there's often no text explaining what the image is. But even the text is sometimes difficult to read.
ANNA LAWSON: Annotating and making notes is extremely difficult, because you can't copy and paste. You can download and print, but that often ends up in PDFs, which then end up in messy scans and sometimes not very accessible ones at all. And there's often a very tight limit on how much of the book you can actually do that to.
ANNA LAWSON: So very often, the fact that it's electronic, it actually makes it harder in some ways. Because instead of transcribing the whole thing, the Transcription Centre would have to get multiple people to print out different copies of the different chapters from the book so that they could have a whole text to work with for making it into an accessible format for blind people, screen-reader users.
ANNA LAWSON: Sometimes, publishers are obliging and will provide an accessible version or a version to work with. But often, they won't because they assume that electronic books are accessible already. So that's a big problem. Electronic journals. Some of the problems I have with these is around page numbering. We have to be able to refer to the particular point that we want to refer to when we're writing.
ANNA LAWSON: We have to include page references. Sometimes, in electronic journals, page numbers, they're not made apparent in a text-based way. They appear as footers or something or even not at all. So they're very difficult to refer to as a blind person, to find and refer to. Finally, this is more of a general thing, behind-the-scenes basis.
ANNA LAWSON: So I find that, very often, there's an assumption not just by publishers but by many people in academia that accessibility is important to students but that staff in different capacities won't be disabled. So although some things that are geared at students might be accessible, if there are things that only staff are expected to access, like grant reviewing systems or online marking systems, accessibility is just not there.
ANNA LAWSON: So to conclude, slide 16, I think it's really important to remember, when we're thinking about open access, who we're opening up access to and that must include disabled people. It's also important to remember that different disabled people will have different access needs and preferences depending on their impairment type perhaps but also depending on their disciplinary expertise.
ANNA LAWSON: Next point is it's really important to integrate and embed accessibility at all phases and all stages, from procurement right to the final end. And to envisage the people who need accessibility not just as being students but also as being disabled staff in all capacities as well. And finally, we're never going to get it completely right, so to make sure that there's always options for people to ask, to let us know of problems, and request help and assistance to access the information in question.
ANNA LAWSON: Thank you very much.
JAMIE AXELROD: Well, thank you, Anna. My name is Jamie Axelrod. I'm the director of Disability Resources at Northern Arizona University. And I'm going to share my screen now and my presentation, which I think you will find we'll follow on really nicely from Anna's presentation, especially in terms of some of those particular things that Anna has pointed out and how we, as a system responsible for creating that access for students and faculty and staff on our campus, do that work.
JAMIE AXELROD: So similar to the Transcription Centre in Leeds. So when we talk about providing access to instructional and research materials in a post-secondary education, I do want to say and acknowledge that, in the last five years, accessibility has been improving. Right? There has been some movement in the publishing world to really make strides around this area and to understand it more clearly.
JAMIE AXELROD: Yet, as Anna just mentioned, not all materials are commercially available in an accessible format. And I do want to point out and highlight that same comment about e-books. Right? So a lot of people have a sense that, just because something is in an electronic format, that it is accessible. And that's simply not the case. The same type of formatting requirements will exist in an e-book that are necessary in a accessible version of what otherwise might be a print material or an electronic file.
JAMIE AXELROD: So those two things don't mean the same, and they do pose additional problems that we need to address. So what makes materials accessible is really important to going in. And we're talking about things like the markup of headers and other formatting features, alternative text to describe images and graphs. Right?
JAMIE AXELROD: So that visual information that is critical to the materials being provided, notification of page breaks, marginalia, things like that, all of those details that we don't always think about when we're considering creating an accessible version or access to the primary text. But in an academic setting, that becomes incredibly important as it's required for the work we do. So in short, the accessible file replicates the structure of the document as well as the content of the document itself.
JAMIE AXELROD: Right? So it's both aspects. As things have progressed, there are issues which still persist. And I promise you Anna and I did not compare notes ahead of time. [CHUCKLING] So my number one issue is still with PDF-based documents. And one thing that we often find, as we are preparing materials for our students, faculty, and staff, is that we will receive electronic versions of materials as one large PDF.
JAMIE AXELROD: Right? It's not broken up into any way in which someone can navigate around it quickly and easily. And we'll need to take that very large PDF and break it up into chapters or sections to make it more usable for the person that we are providing it to. The document is oftentimes not appropriately structured or tagged, so it may be readable by someone who is a very good and skilled screen-reader user.
JAMIE AXELROD: Right? As Anna was just saying, she doesn't want to have to fight with the technology. Not everyone is as technologically inclined. But when a document is not appropriately structured or tagged, for those who don't have a lot of facility, it can be very difficult to get around. And while it may be readable, it's very difficult to navigate without those features.
JAMIE AXELROD: Think about going from chapters or headers or sections. Right? The organization of the file is not represented through those types of markups in any way that's other than visual. Right? So bold text to indicate a new section isn't listed then as a header that can be followed along. It's simply a visual portrayal.
JAMIE AXELROD: Pagination, those page numbers are missing. Or what often happens in those large PDF files that we may receive of a book from a publisher, page one is the cover because this is a file. And so the page numbers don't match up to the text itself. And when a student is being told that, for an activity, they need to read page 120 through 130, if the pagination is incorrect or if they're citing it in research, this is really problematic.
JAMIE AXELROD: Those footnotes and side notes are missing, or they're in the wrong place to be functional and usable and allow the reader to follow along and do the reading appropriately. Formatting, like text wrapping or reading order, is often out of place. So someone who is using assistive technology to read through that article may be jumping around to different places in the article, because the reading order is not the way in which we would read it visually.
JAMIE AXELROD: Those visual elements, pictures, tables, graphs, and charts, those are inserted as images, not as spreadsheets or properly formatted tables, which allow a reader to follow along with the structure and understand the way that that chart or graph is constructed. And then of course, especially in STEM fields or other particular fields, symbols, mathematical symbols, Greek symbols, section symbols for the law, are often not represented appropriately and then not able to be read and accessed appropriately.
JAMIE AXELROD: Once we've worked through, for our students, all of those features, those are things we need to remediate once we get a document so then we can share it, so then we could share it with the student, there is the question of, what happens to all of that work that was done? It's not a minimal amount of work. There's some effort that goes into it. So when we think about distribution or sharing of these types of materials, the truth is that US copyright law through the Chafee Amendment permits the distribution of remediated accessible files to qualified users.
JAMIE AXELROD: And I would say that the Marrakesh Treaty does that internationally as well. However, when institutions like mine receive files directly from a publisher or a third-party service that helps get us connected up with those, the contracts that we need to agree to in receipt of those files prohibit us from sharing any of those remediated files with others.
JAMIE AXELROD: So other institutions are requesting often the very same materials and doing the very same work that we're doing here at Northern Arizona University. And in fact, that prohibition against sharing requires us to request the same book again if another student needs it even in the same year or term or potentially the next term. The contract requires us to make a new request and not use the previously-provided file until express permission is provided.
JAMIE AXELROD: And in some cases, we're asked to destroy the original file and recreate that work again. So only those materials purchased by the college or university or provided to us directly and remediated directly from those materials can be shared with other qualified users or used repeatedly based on that contractual arrangement. So why do we enter these contractual arrangements? Well, a standard term for a class in the US is 16 weeks.
JAMIE AXELROD: And if you want to request from a publishing house or a third party, that can take some time. But the option would be for us to go out and purchase that book. So the slide that's on the screen right now is actually a picture of a book guillotine. We call it "Gillie." And we will use this, when it's necessary, to purchase a physical book and, in this day and age, cut the spine off of that book.
JAMIE AXELROD: So then we have possession of those materials that we purchased and can only do this work once and hopefully then be able to share it with others who need it because we can't for those publisher-provided materials. We also often need to do this with small publishing houses who might tell us, we're happy to send you a file. We'll send it to you in four to six weeks or two months. Well, for us to provide that in a timely manner to the student isn't going to be a helpful or usable or workable experience for anyone, so we may need to go out and again purchase the materials.
JAMIE AXELROD: This next slide are two pictures of our Alternative Format Production Office. I would say much like what Anna was describing is the transcription service at Leeds. There's multiple desks, multiple workstations, where we have a crew of student workers continuously and regularly doing this work, which, again, I remind you, once we do that work, we cannot share that work with others. So most universities around the United States have a similar production facility doing the same work.
JAMIE AXELROD: And as you heard from Anna, at her institution, they're doing the same work there. We know that, in post-secondary education, so many of the materials are the same from institution to institution. Not all of them, but many. So why we are all repeatedly doing the same work is a real conundrum and question for us. And I think Bill is going to provide some follow-up on that.
JAMIE AXELROD: With that, I'll stop sharing my screen and turn it over to Bill.
BILL KASDORF: All right. You should be seeing my screen now. This is my title slide, and it says "FRAME Federating Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Ed: A New Collaborative Framework." And it identifies me as Bill Kasdorf and Principal of Kasdorf & Associates, LLC. I'm a independent publishing consultant. I'm a founding partner of Publishing Technology Partners, and I am the W3C Global Publishing Evangelist.
BILL KASDORF: So for those who can't see my slide, that's what it says. And I will ideally proceed to move ahead here. So my first slide has a picture or the woman looking shocked. And it says "The FRAME origin story." And there's a quotation, "What? You just did all that work remediating that book, and you can't share it?" Precisely the problem that Jamie was talking about. The founder of the FRAME initiative, which I'm going to be describing in this session, is John Unsworth, who is currently Dean of Libraries at the University of Virginia.
BILL KASDORF: But previously, a couple of jobs previously, he was an English professor at Brandeis. And he had a film student majoring in film who was blind. And they had to actually create what are called "audio descriptions," which are also called "video descriptions." Those two terms mean the same thing, which is describing what's on the screen so that that student could basically watch the movies that she had to watch for her class.
BILL KASDORF: So a tremendous amount of work to create that. And then he discovered that those audio descriptions were never going to be shared with anybody else, and he was just horrified that this was the case. So what that led to, there's actually an intermediary IMLS-funded project that was kind of birthing this project and then establishing the FRAME project.
BILL KASDORF: And it's a collaboration between academic libraries, content repositories, technologists, and DSOs. DSOs are Disability Services Offices, what Jamie was just describing to you. So the acronym "FRAME" is "Federated Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education." It's a four-year Mellon-funded project. Actually, it was in two phases, which I'll be describing in the next couple of slides.
BILL KASDORF: We are now nearing the end of the third year of the project. And it basically brings together academic libraries, a number of content repositories, which I'll get into in a second, the disability services offices at those same universities, and the university presses at those same universities. And the idea is to create a repository-- hold on a second here-- to create a repository to provide federated access.
BILL KASDORF: And what I should also say is a "unified search" is the term we're using to metadata and source files and remediated files. And the disability services offices are really critical in this whole project, because they need to have access to retrieve or deposit files. In other words, either get a file that has been remediated or that they need to use to remediate for a student and then to deposit those remediated files so that others can use them.
BILL KASDORF: And the DSO is the party that certifies that the given recipient is a qualified recipient to receive the remediated content. The libraries and DSOs are at seven different universities at this stage in the project. George Mason, Illinois, Northern Arizona, Ohio State, Texas A&M, Vanderbilt, and Virginia. And the repositories are Benetech Bookshare, which you may or may not be familiar with, but it's a huge repository of books that have been made accessible.
BILL KASDORF: They're actually delivered in five different formats, all the books and Bookshare are. And they've got over a million books in that repository. They're a fantastic organization. NISO people may be familiar more familiar than the general public with HathiTrust, which is millions and millions and millions of resources digitized from academic libraries all over the place. The Internet Archive, which, of course, is also the giant custodian of content.
BILL KASDORF: And they basically do manage both public domain and copyrighted content, which they have a process for making sure that they are not violating copyright as people are borrowing texts from the Internet Archive the way they would borrow from a library. And then the repository that we have created in this project based on a Benetech technology called "EMMA," Educational Materials Made Accessible, it's at the University of Virginia.
BILL KASDORF: And it's based on Bookshare. And in the final year of our project, we are also going to be collaborating with Ace, which is Accessible Content ePortal, from the Ontario Council of University Libraries to basically pilot Marrakesh issues. Marrakesh is an international treaty basically that, as Jamie mentioned, provides the same freedom from copyright for exchange of remediated content for qualified individuals that need to get them.
BILL KASDORF: But the stipulations and rules, et cetera, around this differ from country to country. So far, we are all US universities. But in the last phase, we're going to be piloting how this can be made international. So the initial priorities for the project were to basically do what was called an "environmental scan" that revealed this wide misunderstanding of the legal issue.
BILL KASDORF: So DSOs were not exchanging files even when they actually could, because they just basically all think, no, I can't exchange these. And as Jamie pointed out, for many of the files, they're actually right. But it's not a legal issue. It's a contractual issue. That's the obstacle.
BILL KASDORF: And then we convened a group of legal experts in January of 2019 at the ARL in Washington DC on the law and accessible texts. That resulted in a white paper called Reconciling Civil Rights and Copyrights: The Law and Accessible Texts. And by the way, at the end of my slides, there are links to these things that I'm talking about, so you can get those if you want them.
BILL KASDORF: And that initial scan revealed that there really wasn't a metadata standard that was widely used to describe remediated assets and that there's a lot of education needed about accessibility and remediation. So two things are part of our priorities in the FRAME project. So phase one initially focused on books.
BILL KASDORF: As I mentioned, it's built on the Bookshare technology stack. And that's not just the repository itself but also the unified search that enables us to search across all four of the repositories. We needed a metadata model to power that search and also to standardize the information that characterizes how things have been remediated, so I'll give you a look at that in a second.
BILL KASDORF: And this unified search is really powerful. Because right now, when a DSO needs to find a book or a journal article or whatever a student needs that their syllabus requires them to use for their class, it can be a real pain to try to find something, a usable resource, to remediate. So this unified search gives the participants in this program the ability to search with one search string, one search activity.
BILL KASDORF: You're searching across millions and millions of resources in Bookshare, in HathiTrust, in the Internet Archive, and all the remediated things that have been deposited into EMMA. We also had to develop a user interface for depositing the remediated resources. And of course, all of these DSOs in the project actually have a lot of remediated files. So we wanted to get all of those into EMMA in the first place before-- these were done before EMMA, so they didn't have consistent metadata.
BILL KASDORF: They didn't have consistent file organization. And it turns out, Internet Archive had a useful technical process for uploading a batch of files. I have to say, I think the hero of this was Northern Arizona, which is Jamie's organization. I think we got hundreds and hundreds of files from Northern Arizona. Also got lots and lots from Illinois. But anyway, all of the organizations contributed files.
BILL KASDORF: And luckily, we piggybacked on Internet Archive for doing that. And so that first two years also, of course, involved all the initial piloting and feedback from the DSOs, et cetera, more feedback from the DSOs than the libraries at that stage. A quick look at the metadata model. Obviously, we need identifiers, the parties involved; identify the users; identify the items that are being exchanged; public IDs, like ISBNs and DOIs, et cetera; bibliographic metadata; title; a contributor, like authors, publisher, version.
BILL KASDORF: Edition is very important. Because oftentimes, the faculty is requiring the latest edition of a textbook, for example. And so that's critical information for this. The pub date is often useful; series, like a journal; language, et cetera; administrative metadata. Who did the remediation? When was it submitted to EMMA? What source file did they use to remediate?
BILL KASDORF: Where did they get that source file? Did it come from the publisher? Did they buy the book from the bookstore, like Jamie was describing? Did they get it from a source like AccessText Network, et cetera. And that's really important, too. Because currently, if they got it from AccessText, they cannot deposit the file because their contract with that AccessText prohibits it.
BILL KASDORF: But that's not a majority of sources, but it's a very common source. And then describing the remediation. What format, including things like Braille or accessible EPUB or a Word file, et cetera? What's the file type? What features does this thing have? Because it's really useful to know that there are tables to be dealt with in this or there are equations to be dealt with.
BILL KASDORF: Usually, a lot of work for DSOs to make them accessible, because they currently don't often start accessible. Although, frankly, increasingly, with EPUBs, if you've got HTML tables and you've got mathematic equations, you're pretty good to go from an accessibility point of view. What's the text quality? Is this the actual published digital text, or has it been scanned from the print?
BILL KASDORF: And if it's been scanned, has it been proofread and corrected, et cetera? Any remediation comments that a DSO would like to provide and also EPUB accessibility metadata. When we developed this EPUB accessibility metadata, we collaborated with schema.org, which is the huge set of properties and vocabulary for describing content. Basically, it's not a W3C standard.
BILL KASDORF: As a W3C person, I need to be clear about that. But it's integral with web standards and it's run by basically the browsers. It's what makes Google work, for example. And we made sure that the accessibility metadata in an EPUB and the accessibility metadata in Schema data are identical. So that's going to become increasingly important as time goes on.
BILL KASDORF: So for phase two, which we're in right now, we are expanding the scope to include journals and video and audio. This first year, a lot of work has been done to refine that unified search. And I will have to say, it's just spectacular now. It was a little kludgy at the beginning, but it now is just a really nice interface. Because oftentimes, if you're looking for a fairly common book, since you're searching across all four of these repositories, there could be 20, 30, 100 different copies.
BILL KASDORF: HathiTrust often has many multiple copies of works, because some of them are from Michigan libraries. Some of them are from the University of California library. Blah, blah, blah, et cetera. So this unified search now provides appropriate clustering of those titles and lets the user drill down to say, well, I'm looking for a Braille version. Is there a Braille version available?
BILL KASDORF: Because if there is, that's the one they want. They don't need to look at all the other ones, et cetera. So anyway, really good user interface now. What we also need to refine this phase is the deposit of remediated resources. And most importantly, we need to develop a standardized batch upload that's not kind of a kludgy adaptation of Internet Archive's but is consistent with the rest of the EMMA user interface.
BILL KASDORF: We're also integrating two new partners. I mentioned Ace in the second phase. Ohio State's already been involved in the first year of the second phase. And, thanks to NISO, NISO is actually interested in standardizing our metadata model. So that's on the docket for 2022. I hope it's OK for me to say that in NISO Plus, because it's not official.
BILL KASDORF: But that's the expectation, is that we will be making this in a NISO standard. It should be very useful. And a variation of it, because there are things in the metadata model right now that are just specific to this FRAME And EMMA that maybe wouldn't be meaningful outside of that context. But that'll be a fun project to be involved with.
BILL KASDORF: And then ideally, the goal is that, after the second year of the second phase, we will be self-sustaining because we will have created a membership organization. The idea is not getting a remediated file cost a participating university, but the activity of FRAME to be supported by membership dues for organizations, universities joining the project.
BILL KASDORF: And then finally, we're working on an educational program. We're developing a Master of Science course. It's going to be piloted at the University of Illinois. It's in progress at the University of Illinois right now. Its modular course design so that the materials can be used independently. We're releasing materials online for access by not just the current stakeholders but future stakeholders.
BILL KASDORF: And all the materials are going to be published under an open license to encourage reuse. And the goals here are to provide general background on disability in higher education, things like demographics, what kinds of disabilities are there that need to be addressed, what are the challenges, what are the accommodations, explain the work of the DSOs because these folks are heroes and a lot of people don't even realize that they're there, don't realize what they're doing.
BILL KASDORF: As Jamie showed, he's got an office full of people that are working all year round on making content accessible. That, to me, in my work, is so frustrating, because these publications should be accessible in the first place. Little editorializing there, but this work is essential right now. How to use the metadata, documenting the file formats, and techniques for remediation.
BILL KASDORF: Explain the legal framework so that people really understand what they can do and what they can't do. And then also introduce research opportunities. So here are some of the things I've referred to in my talk. And that's me, so you can reach me at kasdorf.bill@gmail.com. And I thank you very much for your attention. Hold on a second. I need to stop sharing.
BILL KASDORF: And turn it over to Oliver.
OLIVER RICKARD: Thanks a lot, Bill. My name's Oliver Rickard. I work for HighWire, so we deliver websites that deliver scholarly content. So it's very important to us that content is delivered in as an accessible way as possible. So in my part of this talk, I'm going to be focusing on the technology side of things, starting with some of the guidelines that we have to adhere to.
OLIVER RICKARD: There's a lot of legal stuff around this, so I always try to cut through some of the legal stuff that you have to worry about, go through some of the challenges, our approach as an organization, and then end with some simple recommendations of how you should be going about accessibility testing if you either are producing a website or maybe you've got a website that you're responsible for.
OLIVER RICKARD: So to start us off, let's go into those guidelines. So there's various standards involved, but the key one is WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. And everything else that I talk about is going to kind of flow back to this. There was a change recently from WCAG 2.0 to WCAG 2.1. Although that happened quite a long time ago, lots of the laws were based on one rather than the latter one.
OLIVER RICKARD: But now, things are certainly all moving on to the later one. And just to give some kind of meat on what this actually means, what is WCAG? How does it work? Basically, the standard is a list of success criteria that we're trying to meet. And every one of these success criterion is mapped to a certain conformance level, A, AA, or AAA.
OLIVER RICKARD: AAA being the highest. So if your accessibility is absolutely amazing and perfect and brilliant, then you will have hit AAA. It's actually really, really hard to do that. And luckily, lots of the laws understand that that's hard. And so I haven't seen a law yet that says you must meet AAA, but it's great that the standard exists at that level so we know what we're aiming for. And again, just to kind of dive down a little bit, give you a sense of what this is.
OLIVER RICKARD: And lots of you will have seen these things before, but just so you know what I'm talking about. Here are some example criteria from WCAG. These ones are all to do with color. We can see a level A one is you're not allowed to use color as the only means of conveying information. The next one up, the AA one, it worries about the contrast of color. So it gives you a contrast ratio that you need to hit.
OLIVER RICKARD: And then the AAA one is an even higher contrast ratio. So these are the kind of things that you'll find in the WCAG standard. So the legal stuff. One of the things here, websites are international. So as someone who produces websites, we care about the whole world. Unfortunately, that means there's loads of different laws and loads of different countries we have to worry around.
OLIVER RICKARD: And they pop up in real-time. So suddenly, something happens and we have to jump to it and deal with it. Section 508 is a US law that's been around for a long time. So it, for a long time now, is something we're trying to hit. There's also a EU version of that, snappy title of "EN 301 549." But then there's some recent things have happened. So in 2020, the UK had a new law, which is around sites meeting WCAG 2.1 AA.
OLIVER RICKARD: And then there's a Canadian law, it's actually an Ontario law, about meeting WCAG 2.0 AA. One of the nice things about all this all of these laws map back to those same guidelines. So as long as you're hitting WCAG 2.1 AA, you're going to be good to go. That's currently what HighWire does, is we just say, OK, we're just going to hit that and then all these laws are catered for.
OLIVER RICKARD: Another thing that's happened recently is this thing called the "VPAT." The "V" stands for "voluntary," so this is a thing that you don't have to do except that lots of people require it, which means you do have to do it. And all this is really is a document that you fill out that explains exactly how your website meets whichever one of these laws or guidelines that you're trying to hit.
OLIVER RICKARD: Again, what we do is we deliver this document at WCAG AA. And then that allows the people, our publishers, who we're working for, to deliver this template out, this document out to their customers and universities, et cetera. So they can prove that they're meeting this guideline and the laws that they need to hit. So these are the challenges, as a technology provider, that we're worrying around.
OLIVER RICKARD: As you can see, the standards involve, laws change. Also, the technology changes. So things are changing the whole time, so it's not the case that you can just make everything accessible and then walk away and think, great. We've done our job. Everything's fine. This is an absolutely continuous process, especially now that it's very, very normal that, in any website, it's not all code built by us.
OLIVER RICKARD: We're using loads and loads of fantastic tools developed by other people. They change all the time as well, so we can't assume that our site is all great and accessible just because it was on day one. Things change. Another challenge is that accessible versions of features can be more expensive, so it's not just that we can choose to do a accessible one or a non-accessible one and it's absolutely fine.
OLIVER RICKARD: There is money sometimes involved and time involved as well, so decisions are being made all the time on that score. And the final one is it is actually really hard to achieve full compliance. So especially with sites that already exist and with things that are changing underneath us, a lot of time goes into this. But it's a hard thing to say that your site is fully, fully compliant, although, of course, that's what we want to do.
OLIVER RICKARD: So those are our challenges. This is our approach, at the moment, as a technology provider. We always do accessibility testing during the site build. So all the way, not just at the end of the site build. But all the way, we're going along, we're testing everything against that WCAG 2.1 AA. We're also testing designs, so designs in terms of color contrast especially.
OLIVER RICKARD: Even before anything is built, we can check them and make sure that they hit the guidelines. We also do regular accessibility testing after things have gone live. So they've gone out there and they're live, but that doesn't mean we're done, as I've explained. So we continue going through those testing processes. And the other thing is we have product roadmaps, our hosting products are being developed year in year out.
OLIVER RICKARD: And a part of that roadmap every single year has to be accessibility. We have to make sure that there is time to do developments, because we know things will change, laws will change, et cetera. So that has to be built in. That's at the product level. But also, we have lots and lots of sites built on, say, each product and each of those is different.
OLIVER RICKARD: They might have different colors, different styles, different content. So as well as ensuring that the product at the platform level is as accessible as possible, we offer a site-specific audit and VPAT service so that a particular publisher can come to us and say, great. I know your product is accessible. But can you please run tests on this specific site and give us the results?
OLIVER RICKARD: So that is available. And then the last point here, which is one I'm going to go into a bit more detail on is much of this is done with automated testing, which is fantastic. So we have things that just run on the site, look at the site, and say, oh, great. This is all great, but you're missing this. You're missing that. These things need to be fixed.
OLIVER RICKARD: And I think there's a bit of a tendency to assume that, if you're automated testing says everything's fine, that you can kind of walk away and say it's all good. The test gives us a big tick, and we're all good. But there's a bit more to it, as I'm going to show you now. So let's do an example. This is just one of those WCAG guidelines. This is one about non-text content, and this is a very common one that comes up a lot.
OLIVER RICKARD: The criterion being all non-text content that is presented to the user has a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose. So non-text content, such as an image. Basic idea here is all images must have alt text. And for those of you who are just-- that term is used a lot. So just to show you what that means in real life, here is a website and here is an image. And if I click on this image, what I'm going to do is pop up the code behind the scenes.
OLIVER RICKARD: And you can see here it says, alt equals-- my eyesight is not as great as it was. "A nurse takes a person's pulse." And that's what we mean by "alt text." It's that bit of text that. It's just in the code behind the website. So that's what we know to mean as "alt text." Flip back to here. So every single image on the site must have alt text so that someone who's using a screen-reader, the screen-reader will read out that alt text instead of showing the image.
OLIVER RICKARD: And so the person using the site will understand that there's an image there and what the purpose of that image is. That's where we start from. Now, we run our automated test. That's great. It's going to tell us there's lots of missing alt text everywhere, because that's very easy for the automated thing to check.
OLIVER RICKARD: We'll just go through all images and say, here's all your missing all texts. Great. So we, as a vendor, will then fix anything that we in control of. So again, going back to here. The content, like this image at the top, is a logo. That's up to us. So we must make sure that, when we build the site, that logo at the top needs to have some alt text and that alt text should be something like "Springer Publishing Company logo," and that's very straightforward.
OLIVER RICKARD: We can do that and move on. And of course, that's the sort of thing we do as we're building the whole site. We'll make sure that all those images that we're in control of as the builder of the site and have that alt text. That's so great. So there might be something that we miss, so we run those automated tests again.
OLIVER RICKARD: And we'll reduce the number of alt text, missing alt text. Fantastic. Next issue is lots of the content, in fact most of it, isn't actually made by us. It is made by our publishers and delivered to us. So as a vendor, we need to make sure that the publisher has a way of defining alt texts for all their images coming through. Two ways that you can do that.
OLIVER RICKARD: One is that lots of the content is always often given to us as XML. So we have mechanisms by which we say, hey, publisher. If your XML has got this bit of stuff in it, we will make sure that ends up on the website as the alt text. Here is an example of how that might work. Also, you might have a CMS that you want to use to put content up. So here, I can actually edit this.
OLIVER RICKARD: Oops. Go back. I skipped the whole thing. I can click here. I can actually edit this image here if I click Edit. And here, you can see how that alt text that I read out earlier is actually being put in. So this is the publisher now. We can come into here, and here it says alternative text.
OLIVER RICKARD: And there is that text that we saw earlier. So this is giving the publisher the controls to put that alt text in or alternative text, to give it its full title there. So that's great. So we can tell the publisher, make sure you give us all the alt text. And they can say, great. We'll do that.
OLIVER RICKARD: Publisher provides alt text. We run automated test again, and we reduce the number of alt text. This is all going very well, very well. However, it's very difficult for publishers to always provide alt text. Or they might have back content, back file that doesn't have alt text for every single image. What do we do here?
OLIVER RICKARD: The automated tests aren't going to be happy. We're going to deliver a VPAT out to the customers that says not all the images have alt text. That sounds bad. So what we do is we actually implemented a system where there's some default alt text. So if the publisher doesn't provide any alt text themselves, we'll fill it in with something. Now, that's not great.
OLIVER RICKARD: In fact, it's pretty bad, but at least we're doing something. That means the automated tests are a little bit happier. However, there's lots of pitfalls here. I'm going to show you one. So run the automated test. We've got zero missing alt text. So this feels good in a way. We've done this default fallback alt text, and the automated tests are really happy.
OLIVER RICKARD: However, if that alt text is-- what we then did, sorry, the better way of describing this is we then ran a manual test. And we had someone who uses a screen-reader as their way of accessing the website to just try and use the site. And so they did that. And they said to us, this default alt text is absolutely counterproductive.
OLIVER RICKARD: It's making my life hell. The reason for this, we go back to here, is we had used alt texts like this. So we thought, well, we don't know what their image is. But hopefully, the file name of the image will be useful and it might be kind of nursetakingpulse.jpeg or something or something that might represent the thing that's been displayed. We thought, actually, that's just at least a basic level of accessibility, that we could get that file name in there.
OLIVER RICKARD: It turns out that we were putting in this long thing here into the alt text. And then what the screen-reader does, when it reads this, is it reads out binary. And then it says SGRWORKS724EE2253 and it just reads out the whole string, letter by letter. And so the person reading the page has to wait like 10 minutes for this thing to go through. Obviously, this is making the site less accessible rather than more accessible.
OLIVER RICKARD: So although our automated test is thinking this is all great, actually things are not great at all. So we come back to here. We, HighWire, say, oh, yeah. Actually, that is really annoying. We're going to fix that to something better, which is what we did. So we reduced that down to just the bit at the end, where it says fix7_1.png. So again, it's not great, but it's not counterproductive.
OLIVER RICKARD: And the automated test saying, yes, great. You've got alt test everywhere and we're not putting in something that's making the reader's life very difficult. So we run manual tests again. Great. We've got alt text is always there, and it's not counterproductive. That's fantastic. But next stage is the alt text is not sufficient to explain meaning of the image.
OLIVER RICKARD: So the issue here, if I come over back to here, is that sometimes we have images which are very complex. And here, we've got one with loads of text in it. If I come down here, we might have one that-- here is an image of a kind of diagram. Again, come down here, here is another image of a diagram. And we could put into the alt text all this information. But as I've just described, when the screen-reader hits that alt text, it starts reading it all out.
OLIVER RICKARD: Now, the user might not want to have to read out all the information about this image at that point. They might want to have the choice of whether to read out all the information in the image or not. So the way that we deal with that is we have something called "long description," and here's an example of this. So here, we've got a table-- or a graph, sorry.
OLIVER RICKARD: And there's lots of information in this graph that we would want to get over to someone who's using a screen-reader. But we don't necessarily want to put that into the alt text, because it means it's going to take ages for them to read all the texts about this graph. We want to give them the choice. The way we do that is we allow the publisher as well as provide an alt text to provide something called a "long desc," a long description.
OLIVER RICKARD: That can go into XML as well and end up on the site. And here, we'll see what that ends up is there's a link underneath called "image description." So then what you can do is the user can get to the point. They can see that there is a long description for this graph. And if they want to, they can click on that. So if I do that here, and that takes you to a page that describes in textual form that graph that you'd see on the page before.
OLIVER RICKARD: So it's another step on from the alt text situation. So if I come back to here, we go provide the long description. Another manual test. Done, at last. So this is just a way of describing two things. One is that the automated test is not necessarily the end of the road. It gets you a lot of the way there, but doing manual tests is a really important addition to that.
OLIVER RICKARD: And, yeah, just because you think you've got alt text in there doesn't mean that things are good. You have to do those manual tests as well afterwards. So to summarize all that stuff up, here, one is, if you're worrying about the law and the guidelines, the thing to think is WCAG 2.1 AA is where it's at. If you're meeting that, you're good to go. Next thing, make sure accessibility is part of your regular processes.
OLIVER RICKARD: Whether you're making a site yourself or someone else is making one for you, you need to make sure that that is ongoing all the time. And then finally, use manual testing on top of the automated testing where you can to really make sure that the site is as accessible as possible. Thank you very much.
AMANDA WILSON: Thank you all again, especially to our speakers Anna Lawson, Jamie Axelrod, Bill Kasdorf, and Oliver Rickard, for your presentations today. We now look forward to questions and active discussion. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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AMANDA WILSON: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our NISO Plus 2022 session, Accessibility in the scholarly information space. My name is Amanda Wilson. I'm with the US National Library of Medicine, and I am delighted to be the moderator for today's session. As a reminder, accessibility of information resources is a topic that's broadly understood but details of the barriers to accessibility are sometimes complicated.
AMANDA WILSON: This session will focus on some of the less discussed problems in making published information accessible, such as license restrictions and also taking a look at some possible solutions to these issues. We have a fantastic lineup of speakers. Anna Lawson, Jamie Axelrod, Bill Kasdorf, and Oliver Rickard will speak to us in that order on various issues around this topic.
AMANDA WILSON: After they've concluded, we look forward to a lively discussion and hopefully identifying some concrete outputs and suggestions for next steps that can possibly be taken after the conference. With that, I'll invite Anna Lawson to begin the presentation.
ANNA LAWSON: OK. So thank you so much, Amanda. And it's a really very great pleasure to be here and to have a chance to talk to you today about this topic, which is so close to my heart. The title of my paper is on the screen, I think, and it is Accessibility of Scholarly Information Space: Perspectives from a Blind Disability Rights Scholar. So you'll have guessed from that, that I'm blind and I'm a screen-reader user.
ANNA LAWSON: So moving to slide three, just an overview of what I'm going to talk about. First of all, who I am, what I do, and how I access information. Second, I'm just going to say a few words about my venture onto a side of publishing which is new to me, which is being involved in editing a new journal, so introducing that journal, which is the International Journal of Disability and Social Justice.
ANNA LAWSON: And then third, I'll just talk about a few examples of types of problem that I have encountered and continue to encounter, which don't tend to be as discussed as many others. And fourth, I'll just say a few words in conclusion. So slide four, please, Jason. So first of all, who I am, what I do, and how I access information.
ANNA LAWSON: And slide five. So that's a picture of me and a picture of my guide dog, my fourth guide dog, who is in the room with me. So I do apologize if you hear any strange noises. It's probably him. So moving on to the next slide, slide six. My job is I'm a professor at the University of Leeds, professor of law.
ANNA LAWSON: And the picture on the screen is of our-- it's the kind of symbol of our university, one of our oldest buildings, which has a very impressive flight of steps leading up to it, which we've had a campaign about the accessibility and inclusiveness of that image for some time. And thankfully, now we have a chairlift. But, yes, so it's a bit more of an inclusive image than it previously was before the chairlift was installed a few years ago.
ANNA LAWSON: So the next slide, slide seven. The Transcription Centre, which is co-funded and run by the Royal National Institute of Blind and partially sighted people and the University of Leeds and it's based in the University of Leeds is the reason why I chose Leeds as a student. So I came to Leeds as a student.
ANNA LAWSON: It was the best support in any UK university that was offered through this Transcription Centre. At that point, I was still in the process of losing my sight. But reading print had become almost impossible for me at that stage. And at that stage, I accessed all my studying through tape, through cassette tape. So the Transcription Centre organized volunteers about four, four in the studios and then others at home, to record material for me and for other visually-impaired and print-impaired students concurrently, which was just completely transformatory to my learning experience and had the obvious impact on my grades.
ANNA LAWSON: So after doing post-graduate work elsewhere, I came back to the University of Leeds as a member of staff, as an academic. And now, all my reading is done electronically via a screen-reader. So the Transcription Centre still transcribes books for me, but I also have an assistant who helps me find and locate and file other electronic recordings, which were already available in accessible formats.
ANNA LAWSON: So slide eight please, Jason. The Centre for Disability Studies. So although I'm a law professor and I'm based in the law school, my area of research is disability, disability equality, human rights and inclusion, and accessibility. And we're lucky in Leeds to have a strong multidisciplinary network of scholars from across the university working on issues relating to disability and social change.
ANNA LAWSON: So I'm currently one of the joint directors of that Centre. Slide nine, please. So that's just a link to my own page and some of the work I do. But it focuses, as I've mentioned, on equality, inclusion, and accessibility. OK. So moving on to slide 10, please, which takes us on to the second section.
ANNA LAWSON: So this is just to say a very few words about this new International Journal of Disability and Social Justice, which, along with my co-director of the Centre for Disability Studies, I co-founded as an editor. So slide 11, please, Jason. The first issue of this journal came out in December, so it's a new baby in the publishing world.
ANNA LAWSON: And slide 12, please. It's published by Pluto Journals, which we're extremely fortunate to be working with such a progressive and imaginative publisher who has such a strong commitment to the values of social justice and inclusion and is willing to experiment and support experiments in order to find ways of opening up access at all sorts of levels.
ANNA LAWSON: It's part of the Pluto Educational Trust, which is a non-profit organization. So slide 13. Accessibility, as I've mentioned, is one of the areas of my research. And it's something I think all of us in the disability studies world take very seriously and want to integrate into everything we do.
ANNA LAWSON: And of course, that includes journal publishing, journal editing. So just a note of some of the things we've been trying to do and we know we haven't got all of them right. It's going to be an ongoing conversation with the readers, with the authors, with the reviewers, with the publishers to try and get as far as we can as a journey really towards tackling the barriers that we know exist to opening up access and inclusion to online publishing.
ANNA LAWSON: So these barriers will probably be familiar to all of you, so I won't spend time on them. But tackling the financial barriers of accessing published material. So that's not just the financial barriers that readers might face, but also the financial barriers that authors might face. And as we all will be aware, open-access has sometimes shifted the financial burden from readers to authors.
ANNA LAWSON: So we're trying to find a model which avoids doing that so the authors don't need to pay either. And this involves membership of a community associated with a journal. A second barrier, communicating content beyond academia. So in disability studies, we don't want our ideas to be limited to other academics. It's really important to us to have conversations with so that our ideas get communicated to as well as us being informed by ideas in the broader world, so amongst disabled people's organizations, families, businesses who are being innovative, people who may not be familiar with lots of the academic technical jargon or have the time or interest in developing that kind of familiarity.
ANNA LAWSON: So alongside the full academic journal articles, we are publishing plain English summaries, which are a bit longer than abstracts and give a fuller understanding of what the article is about, the ideas in that article, the findings to facilitate that kind of communication between academics and non-academics. And we also hope to supplement that with video interviews of authors.
ANNA LAWSON: So as well as publishing open-access in PDF, we're also going to be making our articles available in HTML. And we're also keen to integrate accessibility into everything we do, including the back room processes of editing and reviewing, and that means being open to requests for support and assistance.
ANNA LAWSON: OK. Moving on to section three and slide 14. Some examples of ongoing problems, which I have encountered and continue to encounter. And I should preface this by saying I'm not a technical person. I love technology in terms of what it's opened up, but I like technology to work for me and I don't like spending lots of time conquering it if I could help it.
ANNA LAWSON: Slide 15, please. So the first type of problem I've mentioned here is PDF files. And these, I have found it easier, increasingly easy to access these. But I still do encounter problems. So more and more of them are screen-reader accessible technically than used to be the case. And also, my screen-reader now gives me the option of scanning them, but those scans often end up being very messy.
ANNA LAWSON: It gives you quite messy documents, which can be difficult to navigate. Some of the factors I find particularly difficult concern matching up numbers and text. And I found that particularly problematic in things like statutes, so legislation where you really need to know, is it section 2, subparagraph 1, paragraph C? Which text does the relevant number belong to?
ANNA LAWSON: And often, PDFs separate that out for me, so it's difficult. I have to get somebody else to do the matching up afterwards. Another problem I find is to do with footnotes, that they just turn up in the middle of the text. And it can make it very difficult to-- it'll interrupt the text and make it difficult to read. And law has a lot of footnotes. A second example is e-books.
ANNA LAWSON: So increasingly, books are being made available in electronic format. But often, these are not very accessible despite general assumptions that they are. So often, they're not easy to read, particularly when they have images and things, that there's often no text explaining what the image is. But even the text is sometimes difficult to read.
ANNA LAWSON: Annotating and making notes is extremely difficult, because you can't copy and paste. You can download and print, but that often ends up in PDFs, which then end up in messy scans and sometimes not very accessible ones at all. And there's often a very tight limit on how much of the book you can actually do that to.
ANNA LAWSON: So very often, the fact that it's electronic, it actually makes it harder in some ways. Because instead of transcribing the whole thing, the Transcription Centre would have to get multiple people to print out different copies of the different chapters from the book so that they could have a whole text to work with for making it into an accessible format for blind people, screen-reader users.
ANNA LAWSON: Sometimes, publishers are obliging and will provide an accessible version or a version to work with. But often, they won't because they assume that electronic books are accessible already. So that's a big problem. Electronic journals. Some of the problems I have with these is around page numbering. We have to be able to refer to the particular point that we want to refer to when we're writing.
ANNA LAWSON: We have to include page references. Sometimes, in electronic journals, page numbers, they're not made apparent in a text-based way. They appear as footers or something or even not at all. So they're very difficult to refer to as a blind person, to find and refer to. Finally, this is more of a general thing, behind-the-scenes basis.
ANNA LAWSON: So I find that, very often, there's an assumption not just by publishers but by many people in academia that accessibility is important to students but that staff in different capacities won't be disabled. So although some things that are geared at students might be accessible, if there are things that only staff are expected to access, like grant reviewing systems or online marking systems, accessibility is just not there.
ANNA LAWSON: So to conclude, slide 16, I think it's really important to remember, when we're thinking about open access, who we're opening up access to and that must include disabled people. It's also important to remember that different disabled people will have different access needs and preferences depending on their impairment type perhaps but also depending on their disciplinary expertise.
ANNA LAWSON: Next point is it's really important to integrate and embed accessibility at all phases and all stages, from procurement right to the final end. And to envisage the people who need accessibility not just as being students but also as being disabled staff in all capacities as well. And finally, we're never going to get it completely right, so to make sure that there's always options for people to ask, to let us know of problems, and request help and assistance to access the information in question.
ANNA LAWSON: Thank you very much.
JAMIE AXELROD: Well, thank you, Anna. My name is Jamie Axelrod. I'm the director of Disability Resources at Northern Arizona University. And I'm going to share my screen now and my presentation, which I think you will find we'll follow on really nicely from Anna's presentation, especially in terms of some of those particular things that Anna has pointed out and how we, as a system responsible for creating that access for students and faculty and staff on our campus, do that work.
JAMIE AXELROD: So similar to the Transcription Centre in Leeds. So when we talk about providing access to instructional and research materials in a post-secondary education, I do want to say and acknowledge that, in the last five years, accessibility has been improving. Right? There has been some movement in the publishing world to really make strides around this area and to understand it more clearly.
JAMIE AXELROD: Yet, as Anna just mentioned, not all materials are commercially available in an accessible format. And I do want to point out and highlight that same comment about e-books. Right? So a lot of people have a sense that, just because something is in an electronic format, that it is accessible. And that's simply not the case. The same type of formatting requirements will exist in an e-book that are necessary in a accessible version of what otherwise might be a print material or an electronic file.
JAMIE AXELROD: So those two things don't mean the same, and they do pose additional problems that we need to address. So what makes materials accessible is really important to going in. And we're talking about things like the markup of headers and other formatting features, alternative text to describe images and graphs. Right?
JAMIE AXELROD: So that visual information that is critical to the materials being provided, notification of page breaks, marginalia, things like that, all of those details that we don't always think about when we're considering creating an accessible version or access to the primary text. But in an academic setting, that becomes incredibly important as it's required for the work we do. So in short, the accessible file replicates the structure of the document as well as the content of the document itself.
JAMIE AXELROD: Right? So it's both aspects. As things have progressed, there are issues which still persist. And I promise you Anna and I did not compare notes ahead of time. [CHUCKLING] So my number one issue is still with PDF-based documents. And one thing that we often find, as we are preparing materials for our students, faculty, and staff, is that we will receive electronic versions of materials as one large PDF.
JAMIE AXELROD: Right? It's not broken up into any way in which someone can navigate around it quickly and easily. And we'll need to take that very large PDF and break it up into chapters or sections to make it more usable for the person that we are providing it to. The document is oftentimes not appropriately structured or tagged, so it may be readable by someone who is a very good and skilled screen-reader user.
JAMIE AXELROD: Right? As Anna was just saying, she doesn't want to have to fight with the technology. Not everyone is as technologically inclined. But when a document is not appropriately structured or tagged, for those who don't have a lot of facility, it can be very difficult to get around. And while it may be readable, it's very difficult to navigate without those features.
JAMIE AXELROD: Think about going from chapters or headers or sections. Right? The organization of the file is not represented through those types of markups in any way that's other than visual. Right? So bold text to indicate a new section isn't listed then as a header that can be followed along. It's simply a visual portrayal.
JAMIE AXELROD: Pagination, those page numbers are missing. Or what often happens in those large PDF files that we may receive of a book from a publisher, page one is the cover because this is a file. And so the page numbers don't match up to the text itself. And when a student is being told that, for an activity, they need to read page 120 through 130, if the pagination is incorrect or if they're citing it in research, this is really problematic.
JAMIE AXELROD: Those footnotes and side notes are missing, or they're in the wrong place to be functional and usable and allow the reader to follow along and do the reading appropriately. Formatting, like text wrapping or reading order, is often out of place. So someone who is using assistive technology to read through that article may be jumping around to different places in the article, because the reading order is not the way in which we would read it visually.
JAMIE AXELROD: Those visual elements, pictures, tables, graphs, and charts, those are inserted as images, not as spreadsheets or properly formatted tables, which allow a reader to follow along with the structure and understand the way that that chart or graph is constructed. And then of course, especially in STEM fields or other particular fields, symbols, mathematical symbols, Greek symbols, section symbols for the law, are often not represented appropriately and then not able to be read and accessed appropriately.
JAMIE AXELROD: Once we've worked through, for our students, all of those features, those are things we need to remediate once we get a document so then we can share it, so then we could share it with the student, there is the question of, what happens to all of that work that was done? It's not a minimal amount of work. There's some effort that goes into it. So when we think about distribution or sharing of these types of materials, the truth is that US copyright law through the Chafee Amendment permits the distribution of remediated accessible files to qualified users.
JAMIE AXELROD: And I would say that the Marrakesh Treaty does that internationally as well. However, when institutions like mine receive files directly from a publisher or a third-party service that helps get us connected up with those, the contracts that we need to agree to in receipt of those files prohibit us from sharing any of those remediated files with others.
JAMIE AXELROD: So other institutions are requesting often the very same materials and doing the very same work that we're doing here at Northern Arizona University. And in fact, that prohibition against sharing requires us to request the same book again if another student needs it even in the same year or term or potentially the next term. The contract requires us to make a new request and not use the previously-provided file until express permission is provided.
JAMIE AXELROD: And in some cases, we're asked to destroy the original file and recreate that work again. So only those materials purchased by the college or university or provided to us directly and remediated directly from those materials can be shared with other qualified users or used repeatedly based on that contractual arrangement. So why do we enter these contractual arrangements? Well, a standard term for a class in the US is 16 weeks.
JAMIE AXELROD: And if you want to request from a publishing house or a third party, that can take some time. But the option would be for us to go out and purchase that book. So the slide that's on the screen right now is actually a picture of a book guillotine. We call it "Gillie." And we will use this, when it's necessary, to purchase a physical book and, in this day and age, cut the spine off of that book.
JAMIE AXELROD: So then we have possession of those materials that we purchased and can only do this work once and hopefully then be able to share it with others who need it because we can't for those publisher-provided materials. We also often need to do this with small publishing houses who might tell us, we're happy to send you a file. We'll send it to you in four to six weeks or two months. Well, for us to provide that in a timely manner to the student isn't going to be a helpful or usable or workable experience for anyone, so we may need to go out and again purchase the materials.
JAMIE AXELROD: This next slide are two pictures of our Alternative Format Production Office. I would say much like what Anna was describing is the transcription service at Leeds. There's multiple desks, multiple workstations, where we have a crew of student workers continuously and regularly doing this work, which, again, I remind you, once we do that work, we cannot share that work with others. So most universities around the United States have a similar production facility doing the same work.
JAMIE AXELROD: And as you heard from Anna, at her institution, they're doing the same work there. We know that, in post-secondary education, so many of the materials are the same from institution to institution. Not all of them, but many. So why we are all repeatedly doing the same work is a real conundrum and question for us. And I think Bill is going to provide some follow-up on that.
JAMIE AXELROD: With that, I'll stop sharing my screen and turn it over to Bill.
BILL KASDORF: All right. You should be seeing my screen now. This is my title slide, and it says "FRAME Federating Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Ed: A New Collaborative Framework." And it identifies me as Bill Kasdorf and Principal of Kasdorf & Associates, LLC. I'm a independent publishing consultant. I'm a founding partner of Publishing Technology Partners, and I am the W3C Global Publishing Evangelist.
BILL KASDORF: So for those who can't see my slide, that's what it says. And I will ideally proceed to move ahead here. So my first slide has a picture or the woman looking shocked. And it says "The FRAME origin story." And there's a quotation, "What? You just did all that work remediating that book, and you can't share it?" Precisely the problem that Jamie was talking about. The founder of the FRAME initiative, which I'm going to be describing in this session, is John Unsworth, who is currently Dean of Libraries at the University of Virginia.
BILL KASDORF: But previously, a couple of jobs previously, he was an English professor at Brandeis. And he had a film student majoring in film who was blind. And they had to actually create what are called "audio descriptions," which are also called "video descriptions." Those two terms mean the same thing, which is describing what's on the screen so that that student could basically watch the movies that she had to watch for her class.
BILL KASDORF: So a tremendous amount of work to create that. And then he discovered that those audio descriptions were never going to be shared with anybody else, and he was just horrified that this was the case. So what that led to, there's actually an intermediary IMLS-funded project that was kind of birthing this project and then establishing the FRAME project.
BILL KASDORF: And it's a collaboration between academic libraries, content repositories, technologists, and DSOs. DSOs are Disability Services Offices, what Jamie was just describing to you. So the acronym "FRAME" is "Federated Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education." It's a four-year Mellon-funded project. Actually, it was in two phases, which I'll be describing in the next couple of slides.
BILL KASDORF: We are now nearing the end of the third year of the project. And it basically brings together academic libraries, a number of content repositories, which I'll get into in a second, the disability services offices at those same universities, and the university presses at those same universities. And the idea is to create a repository-- hold on a second here-- to create a repository to provide federated access.
BILL KASDORF: And what I should also say is a "unified search" is the term we're using to metadata and source files and remediated files. And the disability services offices are really critical in this whole project, because they need to have access to retrieve or deposit files. In other words, either get a file that has been remediated or that they need to use to remediate for a student and then to deposit those remediated files so that others can use them.
BILL KASDORF: And the DSO is the party that certifies that the given recipient is a qualified recipient to receive the remediated content. The libraries and DSOs are at seven different universities at this stage in the project. George Mason, Illinois, Northern Arizona, Ohio State, Texas A&M, Vanderbilt, and Virginia. And the repositories are Benetech Bookshare, which you may or may not be familiar with, but it's a huge repository of books that have been made accessible.
BILL KASDORF: They're actually delivered in five different formats, all the books and Bookshare are. And they've got over a million books in that repository. They're a fantastic organization. NISO people may be familiar more familiar than the general public with HathiTrust, which is millions and millions and millions of resources digitized from academic libraries all over the place. The Internet Archive, which, of course, is also the giant custodian of content.
BILL KASDORF: And they basically do manage both public domain and copyrighted content, which they have a process for making sure that they are not violating copyright as people are borrowing texts from the Internet Archive the way they would borrow from a library. And then the repository that we have created in this project based on a Benetech technology called "EMMA," Educational Materials Made Accessible, it's at the University of Virginia.
BILL KASDORF: And it's based on Bookshare. And in the final year of our project, we are also going to be collaborating with Ace, which is Accessible Content ePortal, from the Ontario Council of University Libraries to basically pilot Marrakesh issues. Marrakesh is an international treaty basically that, as Jamie mentioned, provides the same freedom from copyright for exchange of remediated content for qualified individuals that need to get them.
BILL KASDORF: But the stipulations and rules, et cetera, around this differ from country to country. So far, we are all US universities. But in the last phase, we're going to be piloting how this can be made international. So the initial priorities for the project were to basically do what was called an "environmental scan" that revealed this wide misunderstanding of the legal issue.
BILL KASDORF: So DSOs were not exchanging files even when they actually could, because they just basically all think, no, I can't exchange these. And as Jamie pointed out, for many of the files, they're actually right. But it's not a legal issue. It's a contractual issue. That's the obstacle.
BILL KASDORF: And then we convened a group of legal experts in January of 2019 at the ARL in Washington DC on the law and accessible texts. That resulted in a white paper called Reconciling Civil Rights and Copyrights: The Law and Accessible Texts. And by the way, at the end of my slides, there are links to these things that I'm talking about, so you can get those if you want them.
BILL KASDORF: And that initial scan revealed that there really wasn't a metadata standard that was widely used to describe remediated assets and that there's a lot of education needed about accessibility and remediation. So two things are part of our priorities in the FRAME project. So phase one initially focused on books.
BILL KASDORF: As I mentioned, it's built on the Bookshare technology stack. And that's not just the repository itself but also the unified search that enables us to search across all four of the repositories. We needed a metadata model to power that search and also to standardize the information that characterizes how things have been remediated, so I'll give you a look at that in a second.
BILL KASDORF: And this unified search is really powerful. Because right now, when a DSO needs to find a book or a journal article or whatever a student needs that their syllabus requires them to use for their class, it can be a real pain to try to find something, a usable resource, to remediate. So this unified search gives the participants in this program the ability to search with one search string, one search activity.
BILL KASDORF: You're searching across millions and millions of resources in Bookshare, in HathiTrust, in the Internet Archive, and all the remediated things that have been deposited into EMMA. We also had to develop a user interface for depositing the remediated resources. And of course, all of these DSOs in the project actually have a lot of remediated files. So we wanted to get all of those into EMMA in the first place before-- these were done before EMMA, so they didn't have consistent metadata.
BILL KASDORF: They didn't have consistent file organization. And it turns out, Internet Archive had a useful technical process for uploading a batch of files. I have to say, I think the hero of this was Northern Arizona, which is Jamie's organization. I think we got hundreds and hundreds of files from Northern Arizona. Also got lots and lots from Illinois. But anyway, all of the organizations contributed files.
BILL KASDORF: And luckily, we piggybacked on Internet Archive for doing that. And so that first two years also, of course, involved all the initial piloting and feedback from the DSOs, et cetera, more feedback from the DSOs than the libraries at that stage. A quick look at the metadata model. Obviously, we need identifiers, the parties involved; identify the users; identify the items that are being exchanged; public IDs, like ISBNs and DOIs, et cetera; bibliographic metadata; title; a contributor, like authors, publisher, version.
BILL KASDORF: Edition is very important. Because oftentimes, the faculty is requiring the latest edition of a textbook, for example. And so that's critical information for this. The pub date is often useful; series, like a journal; language, et cetera; administrative metadata. Who did the remediation? When was it submitted to EMMA? What source file did they use to remediate?
BILL KASDORF: Where did they get that source file? Did it come from the publisher? Did they buy the book from the bookstore, like Jamie was describing? Did they get it from a source like AccessText Network, et cetera. And that's really important, too. Because currently, if they got it from AccessText, they cannot deposit the file because their contract with that AccessText prohibits it.
BILL KASDORF: But that's not a majority of sources, but it's a very common source. And then describing the remediation. What format, including things like Braille or accessible EPUB or a Word file, et cetera? What's the file type? What features does this thing have? Because it's really useful to know that there are tables to be dealt with in this or there are equations to be dealt with.
BILL KASDORF: Usually, a lot of work for DSOs to make them accessible, because they currently don't often start accessible. Although, frankly, increasingly, with EPUBs, if you've got HTML tables and you've got mathematic equations, you're pretty good to go from an accessibility point of view. What's the text quality? Is this the actual published digital text, or has it been scanned from the print?
BILL KASDORF: And if it's been scanned, has it been proofread and corrected, et cetera? Any remediation comments that a DSO would like to provide and also EPUB accessibility metadata. When we developed this EPUB accessibility metadata, we collaborated with schema.org, which is the huge set of properties and vocabulary for describing content. Basically, it's not a W3C standard.
BILL KASDORF: As a W3C person, I need to be clear about that. But it's integral with web standards and it's run by basically the browsers. It's what makes Google work, for example. And we made sure that the accessibility metadata in an EPUB and the accessibility metadata in Schema data are identical. So that's going to become increasingly important as time goes on.
BILL KASDORF: So for phase two, which we're in right now, we are expanding the scope to include journals and video and audio. This first year, a lot of work has been done to refine that unified search. And I will have to say, it's just spectacular now. It was a little kludgy at the beginning, but it now is just a really nice interface. Because oftentimes, if you're looking for a fairly common book, since you're searching across all four of these repositories, there could be 20, 30, 100 different copies.
BILL KASDORF: HathiTrust often has many multiple copies of works, because some of them are from Michigan libraries. Some of them are from the University of California library. Blah, blah, blah, et cetera. So this unified search now provides appropriate clustering of those titles and lets the user drill down to say, well, I'm looking for a Braille version. Is there a Braille version available?
BILL KASDORF: Because if there is, that's the one they want. They don't need to look at all the other ones, et cetera. So anyway, really good user interface now. What we also need to refine this phase is the deposit of remediated resources. And most importantly, we need to develop a standardized batch upload that's not kind of a kludgy adaptation of Internet Archive's but is consistent with the rest of the EMMA user interface.
BILL KASDORF: We're also integrating two new partners. I mentioned Ace in the second phase. Ohio State's already been involved in the first year of the second phase. And, thanks to NISO, NISO is actually interested in standardizing our metadata model. So that's on the docket for 2022. I hope it's OK for me to say that in NISO Plus, because it's not official.
BILL KASDORF: But that's the expectation, is that we will be making this in a NISO standard. It should be very useful. And a variation of it, because there are things in the metadata model right now that are just specific to this FRAME And EMMA that maybe wouldn't be meaningful outside of that context. But that'll be a fun project to be involved with.
BILL KASDORF: And then ideally, the goal is that, after the second year of the second phase, we will be self-sustaining because we will have created a membership organization. The idea is not getting a remediated file cost a participating university, but the activity of FRAME to be supported by membership dues for organizations, universities joining the project.
BILL KASDORF: And then finally, we're working on an educational program. We're developing a Master of Science course. It's going to be piloted at the University of Illinois. It's in progress at the University of Illinois right now. Its modular course design so that the materials can be used independently. We're releasing materials online for access by not just the current stakeholders but future stakeholders.
BILL KASDORF: And all the materials are going to be published under an open license to encourage reuse. And the goals here are to provide general background on disability in higher education, things like demographics, what kinds of disabilities are there that need to be addressed, what are the challenges, what are the accommodations, explain the work of the DSOs because these folks are heroes and a lot of people don't even realize that they're there, don't realize what they're doing.
BILL KASDORF: As Jamie showed, he's got an office full of people that are working all year round on making content accessible. That, to me, in my work, is so frustrating, because these publications should be accessible in the first place. Little editorializing there, but this work is essential right now. How to use the metadata, documenting the file formats, and techniques for remediation.
BILL KASDORF: Explain the legal framework so that people really understand what they can do and what they can't do. And then also introduce research opportunities. So here are some of the things I've referred to in my talk. And that's me, so you can reach me at kasdorf.bill@gmail.com. And I thank you very much for your attention. Hold on a second. I need to stop sharing.
BILL KASDORF: And turn it over to Oliver.
OLIVER RICKARD: Thanks a lot, Bill. My name's Oliver Rickard. I work for HighWire, so we deliver websites that deliver scholarly content. So it's very important to us that content is delivered in as an accessible way as possible. So in my part of this talk, I'm going to be focusing on the technology side of things, starting with some of the guidelines that we have to adhere to.
OLIVER RICKARD: There's a lot of legal stuff around this, so I always try to cut through some of the legal stuff that you have to worry about, go through some of the challenges, our approach as an organization, and then end with some simple recommendations of how you should be going about accessibility testing if you either are producing a website or maybe you've got a website that you're responsible for.
OLIVER RICKARD: So to start us off, let's go into those guidelines. So there's various standards involved, but the key one is WCAG, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. And everything else that I talk about is going to kind of flow back to this. There was a change recently from WCAG 2.0 to WCAG 2.1. Although that happened quite a long time ago, lots of the laws were based on one rather than the latter one.
OLIVER RICKARD: But now, things are certainly all moving on to the later one. And just to give some kind of meat on what this actually means, what is WCAG? How does it work? Basically, the standard is a list of success criteria that we're trying to meet. And every one of these success criterion is mapped to a certain conformance level, A, AA, or AAA.
OLIVER RICKARD: AAA being the highest. So if your accessibility is absolutely amazing and perfect and brilliant, then you will have hit AAA. It's actually really, really hard to do that. And luckily, lots of the laws understand that that's hard. And so I haven't seen a law yet that says you must meet AAA, but it's great that the standard exists at that level so we know what we're aiming for. And again, just to kind of dive down a little bit, give you a sense of what this is.
OLIVER RICKARD: And lots of you will have seen these things before, but just so you know what I'm talking about. Here are some example criteria from WCAG. These ones are all to do with color. We can see a level A one is you're not allowed to use color as the only means of conveying information. The next one up, the AA one, it worries about the contrast of color. So it gives you a contrast ratio that you need to hit.
OLIVER RICKARD: And then the AAA one is an even higher contrast ratio. So these are the kind of things that you'll find in the WCAG standard. So the legal stuff. One of the things here, websites are international. So as someone who produces websites, we care about the whole world. Unfortunately, that means there's loads of different laws and loads of different countries we have to worry around.
OLIVER RICKARD: And they pop up in real-time. So suddenly, something happens and we have to jump to it and deal with it. Section 508 is a US law that's been around for a long time. So it, for a long time now, is something we're trying to hit. There's also a EU version of that, snappy title of "EN 301 549." But then there's some recent things have happened. So in 2020, the UK had a new law, which is around sites meeting WCAG 2.1 AA.
OLIVER RICKARD: And then there's a Canadian law, it's actually an Ontario law, about meeting WCAG 2.0 AA. One of the nice things about all this all of these laws map back to those same guidelines. So as long as you're hitting WCAG 2.1 AA, you're going to be good to go. That's currently what HighWire does, is we just say, OK, we're just going to hit that and then all these laws are catered for.
OLIVER RICKARD: Another thing that's happened recently is this thing called the "VPAT." The "V" stands for "voluntary," so this is a thing that you don't have to do except that lots of people require it, which means you do have to do it. And all this is really is a document that you fill out that explains exactly how your website meets whichever one of these laws or guidelines that you're trying to hit.
OLIVER RICKARD: Again, what we do is we deliver this document at WCAG AA. And then that allows the people, our publishers, who we're working for, to deliver this template out, this document out to their customers and universities, et cetera. So they can prove that they're meeting this guideline and the laws that they need to hit. So these are the challenges, as a technology provider, that we're worrying around.
OLIVER RICKARD: As you can see, the standards involve, laws change. Also, the technology changes. So things are changing the whole time, so it's not the case that you can just make everything accessible and then walk away and think, great. We've done our job. Everything's fine. This is an absolutely continuous process, especially now that it's very, very normal that, in any website, it's not all code built by us.
OLIVER RICKARD: We're using loads and loads of fantastic tools developed by other people. They change all the time as well, so we can't assume that our site is all great and accessible just because it was on day one. Things change. Another challenge is that accessible versions of features can be more expensive, so it's not just that we can choose to do a accessible one or a non-accessible one and it's absolutely fine.
OLIVER RICKARD: There is money sometimes involved and time involved as well, so decisions are being made all the time on that score. And the final one is it is actually really hard to achieve full compliance. So especially with sites that already exist and with things that are changing underneath us, a lot of time goes into this. But it's a hard thing to say that your site is fully, fully compliant, although, of course, that's what we want to do.
OLIVER RICKARD: So those are our challenges. This is our approach, at the moment, as a technology provider. We always do accessibility testing during the site build. So all the way, not just at the end of the site build. But all the way, we're going along, we're testing everything against that WCAG 2.1 AA. We're also testing designs, so designs in terms of color contrast especially.
OLIVER RICKARD: Even before anything is built, we can check them and make sure that they hit the guidelines. We also do regular accessibility testing after things have gone live. So they've gone out there and they're live, but that doesn't mean we're done, as I've explained. So we continue going through those testing processes. And the other thing is we have product roadmaps, our hosting products are being developed year in year out.
OLIVER RICKARD: And a part of that roadmap every single year has to be accessibility. We have to make sure that there is time to do developments, because we know things will change, laws will change, et cetera. So that has to be built in. That's at the product level. But also, we have lots and lots of sites built on, say, each product and each of those is different.
OLIVER RICKARD: They might have different colors, different styles, different content. So as well as ensuring that the product at the platform level is as accessible as possible, we offer a site-specific audit and VPAT service so that a particular publisher can come to us and say, great. I know your product is accessible. But can you please run tests on this specific site and give us the results?
OLIVER RICKARD: So that is available. And then the last point here, which is one I'm going to go into a bit more detail on is much of this is done with automated testing, which is fantastic. So we have things that just run on the site, look at the site, and say, oh, great. This is all great, but you're missing this. You're missing that. These things need to be fixed.
OLIVER RICKARD: And I think there's a bit of a tendency to assume that, if you're automated testing says everything's fine, that you can kind of walk away and say it's all good. The test gives us a big tick, and we're all good. But there's a bit more to it, as I'm going to show you now. So let's do an example. This is just one of those WCAG guidelines. This is one about non-text content, and this is a very common one that comes up a lot.
OLIVER RICKARD: The criterion being all non-text content that is presented to the user has a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose. So non-text content, such as an image. Basic idea here is all images must have alt text. And for those of you who are just-- that term is used a lot. So just to show you what that means in real life, here is a website and here is an image. And if I click on this image, what I'm going to do is pop up the code behind the scenes.
OLIVER RICKARD: And you can see here it says, alt equals-- my eyesight is not as great as it was. "A nurse takes a person's pulse." And that's what we mean by "alt text." It's that bit of text that. It's just in the code behind the website. So that's what we know to mean as "alt text." Flip back to here. So every single image on the site must have alt text so that someone who's using a screen-reader, the screen-reader will read out that alt text instead of showing the image.
OLIVER RICKARD: And so the person using the site will understand that there's an image there and what the purpose of that image is. That's where we start from. Now, we run our automated test. That's great. It's going to tell us there's lots of missing alt text everywhere, because that's very easy for the automated thing to check.
OLIVER RICKARD: We'll just go through all images and say, here's all your missing all texts. Great. So we, as a vendor, will then fix anything that we in control of. So again, going back to here. The content, like this image at the top, is a logo. That's up to us. So we must make sure that, when we build the site, that logo at the top needs to have some alt text and that alt text should be something like "Springer Publishing Company logo," and that's very straightforward.
OLIVER RICKARD: We can do that and move on. And of course, that's the sort of thing we do as we're building the whole site. We'll make sure that all those images that we're in control of as the builder of the site and have that alt text. That's so great. So there might be something that we miss, so we run those automated tests again.
OLIVER RICKARD: And we'll reduce the number of alt text, missing alt text. Fantastic. Next issue is lots of the content, in fact most of it, isn't actually made by us. It is made by our publishers and delivered to us. So as a vendor, we need to make sure that the publisher has a way of defining alt texts for all their images coming through. Two ways that you can do that.
OLIVER RICKARD: One is that lots of the content is always often given to us as XML. So we have mechanisms by which we say, hey, publisher. If your XML has got this bit of stuff in it, we will make sure that ends up on the website as the alt text. Here is an example of how that might work. Also, you might have a CMS that you want to use to put content up. So here, I can actually edit this.
OLIVER RICKARD: Oops. Go back. I skipped the whole thing. I can click here. I can actually edit this image here if I click Edit. And here, you can see how that alt text that I read out earlier is actually being put in. So this is the publisher now. We can come into here, and here it says alternative text.
OLIVER RICKARD: And there is that text that we saw earlier. So this is giving the publisher the controls to put that alt text in or alternative text, to give it its full title there. So that's great. So we can tell the publisher, make sure you give us all the alt text. And they can say, great. We'll do that.
OLIVER RICKARD: Publisher provides alt text. We run automated test again, and we reduce the number of alt text. This is all going very well, very well. However, it's very difficult for publishers to always provide alt text. Or they might have back content, back file that doesn't have alt text for every single image. What do we do here?
OLIVER RICKARD: The automated tests aren't going to be happy. We're going to deliver a VPAT out to the customers that says not all the images have alt text. That sounds bad. So what we do is we actually implemented a system where there's some default alt text. So if the publisher doesn't provide any alt text themselves, we'll fill it in with something. Now, that's not great.
OLIVER RICKARD: In fact, it's pretty bad, but at least we're doing something. That means the automated tests are a little bit happier. However, there's lots of pitfalls here. I'm going to show you one. So run the automated test. We've got zero missing alt text. So this feels good in a way. We've done this default fallback alt text, and the automated tests are really happy.
OLIVER RICKARD: However, if that alt text is-- what we then did, sorry, the better way of describing this is we then ran a manual test. And we had someone who uses a screen-reader as their way of accessing the website to just try and use the site. And so they did that. And they said to us, this default alt text is absolutely counterproductive.
OLIVER RICKARD: It's making my life hell. The reason for this, we go back to here, is we had used alt texts like this. So we thought, well, we don't know what their image is. But hopefully, the file name of the image will be useful and it might be kind of nursetakingpulse.jpeg or something or something that might represent the thing that's been displayed. We thought, actually, that's just at least a basic level of accessibility, that we could get that file name in there.
OLIVER RICKARD: It turns out that we were putting in this long thing here into the alt text. And then what the screen-reader does, when it reads this, is it reads out binary. And then it says SGRWORKS724EE2253 and it just reads out the whole string, letter by letter. And so the person reading the page has to wait like 10 minutes for this thing to go through. Obviously, this is making the site less accessible rather than more accessible.
OLIVER RICKARD: So although our automated test is thinking this is all great, actually things are not great at all. So we come back to here. We, HighWire, say, oh, yeah. Actually, that is really annoying. We're going to fix that to something better, which is what we did. So we reduced that down to just the bit at the end, where it says fix7_1.png. So again, it's not great, but it's not counterproductive.
OLIVER RICKARD: And the automated test saying, yes, great. You've got alt test everywhere and we're not putting in something that's making the reader's life very difficult. So we run manual tests again. Great. We've got alt text is always there, and it's not counterproductive. That's fantastic. But next stage is the alt text is not sufficient to explain meaning of the image.
OLIVER RICKARD: So the issue here, if I come over back to here, is that sometimes we have images which are very complex. And here, we've got one with loads of text in it. If I come down here, we might have one that-- here is an image of a kind of diagram. Again, come down here, here is another image of a diagram. And we could put into the alt text all this information. But as I've just described, when the screen-reader hits that alt text, it starts reading it all out.
OLIVER RICKARD: Now, the user might not want to have to read out all the information about this image at that point. They might want to have the choice of whether to read out all the information in the image or not. So the way that we deal with that is we have something called "long description," and here's an example of this. So here, we've got a table-- or a graph, sorry.
OLIVER RICKARD: And there's lots of information in this graph that we would want to get over to someone who's using a screen-reader. But we don't necessarily want to put that into the alt text, because it means it's going to take ages for them to read all the texts about this graph. We want to give them the choice. The way we do that is we allow the publisher as well as provide an alt text to provide something called a "long desc," a long description.
OLIVER RICKARD: That can go into XML as well and end up on the site. And here, we'll see what that ends up is there's a link underneath called "image description." So then what you can do is the user can get to the point. They can see that there is a long description for this graph. And if they want to, they can click on that. So if I do that here, and that takes you to a page that describes in textual form that graph that you'd see on the page before.
OLIVER RICKARD: So it's another step on from the alt text situation. So if I come back to here, we go provide the long description. Another manual test. Done, at last. So this is just a way of describing two things. One is that the automated test is not necessarily the end of the road. It gets you a lot of the way there, but doing manual tests is a really important addition to that.
OLIVER RICKARD: And, yeah, just because you think you've got alt text in there doesn't mean that things are good. You have to do those manual tests as well afterwards. So to summarize all that stuff up, here, one is, if you're worrying about the law and the guidelines, the thing to think is WCAG 2.1 AA is where it's at. If you're meeting that, you're good to go. Next thing, make sure accessibility is part of your regular processes.
OLIVER RICKARD: Whether you're making a site yourself or someone else is making one for you, you need to make sure that that is ongoing all the time. And then finally, use manual testing on top of the automated testing where you can to really make sure that the site is as accessible as possible. Thank you very much.
AMANDA WILSON: Thank you all again, especially to our speakers Anna Lawson, Jamie Axelrod, Bill Kasdorf, and Oliver Rickard, for your presentations today. We now look forward to questions and active discussion. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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