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Accessibility Coffee Talk: Policy Meets Practice
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Accessibility Coffee Talk: Policy Meets Practice
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Upload Date:
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Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
But what I do realize is that it's hard to see people. OK, everybody, we are getting started again. If everybody can come back, find your seats, put a pin in those conversations. Don't lose the thread. We'll have more time like that. Very good. It's a little sewing analogy.
Sure Yeah. Thank you. All right. You're going to miss some great stuff if you don't come back. I know we're caffeinating. We're bathroom breaking. Yeah, they need, like, a gavel or something. I know, right?
You know, it's funny, people. I'm like losing people more as the day goes on. It was super easy this morning. People are scattered to the winds. Alrighty, here we go with our 330 panel. OK you're ready. All right and you can do that from here or there, whichever you want.
I'll do it from there. OK. Hi, everybody, and welcome to today's session. On accessibility policy meets practice. I'm really delighted to be joined by various colleagues today. So we've got Neil joining us online. We've got Sean here and we've got letty who is a substitute for Wendy who unfortunately can't make it because of the government shutdown.
Real world impacts of geopolitics. Right so what we've asked letty to do, who is really graciously stood in at the last minute, is just to give a little bit of an intro talk, loosely based on accessibility training course that letty and in Iran in the spring. And once that's done that, I will then come and talk a bit about accessibility legislation. Neil is going to give a demonstration of what a screen reader looks like.
Sean is going to give a really good case study around how this is working, and then we're going to get into some questions that we've prepared, and then also some audience questions. And I suppose the aim of today's session is really to give you an idea of why accessibility is important for you in your institution or at your organization, what the law say and why doing nothing is not an option, and also the impact that having accessible content and accessible product have on all of our on all of our products and really thinking about how this connects, not just with the mission of scholarly publishing.
But actually in terms of how we make a difference out there in the real world. So I'm going to hand over to letty for the time being. But unfortunately for you, you've not heard the last of me quite yet. And Thank you, everyone, for tolerating my seat filling. I am a poor substitute for Wendy Stengel from the Library of Congress.
I will try to draw on what experience I have with libraries, but as you all know, I'm letty Conrad. I am not going to try to replicate Wendy's perspectives, but I do bring you a perspective from my place in the world, which is a product R&D specialist and a part time instructor in information systems design at San Jose State University. And these experiences have brought me to accessibility, compliance and accessibility championship for a number of reasons, really inspired.
What inspired my interest is my prevailing methodology for product research and development is human centered design, and we really cannot develop information, products and services for people without thinking about all people. I approach accessibility through the lens of human centered design, and from that perspective, allow me to set the stage for the panel. First, prepare for a bit of a mindset shift.
This is, for the next hour, an ableism free zone. We do not assume that everyone experiences the world the same way we do. I know this sounds radical, but it's very simple and it's very important for us to take on board. We're going to speak about a lot of practical solutions to making information, products and services accessible. But it all begins with each of us being willing to accept that we do not know the lived experiences of other people.
So please, for the purposes of this panel, try to set aside your worldview for a moment. Consider for a moment the diversity of human existences, many of which we do not understand and may never understand. Ableism produces inaccessible information experiences. It means that members of this community wait until our customers, our patrons, their end users and others complain or notify us that something isn't working or, God forbid, take us to court because something isn't working for certain folks.
Don't assume that who lives with what level of ability. I have heard my colleagues and clients say, I really don't think we have anyone with disabilities coming into our system. And I say, God love you. You are so smart and so Talented on so many levels, but there's no way that accessible information experiences require us all to skill up and develop some empathy.
Develop some empathetic muscles. Organizations need to develop accessibility working groups to pool talent and various expertise from across the teams to address routine accessibility audits, audits, remediation, and user research. And I say all of this thinking about what Maharishi said earlier, we cannot all be experts in everything. Such a beautiful, simple statement. But goodness, we cannot be experts in everything.
And accessibility is one of those initiatives that really calls on us to be collaborative. I know enough about metadata to be dangerous, but I'm not a coder. I'm not a content development expert. I know enough about programming to be dangerous, but I'm not going to go using R and Python, you know, without expert help. So the idea of an accessibility workforce or a task force within your organization, it doesn't have to be a huge group of people, right?
It just needs to be folks across your organization that are pulling the right resources and pulling the right expertise to come together. And it's not just that working group's job, right? It's not just, Oh, we form a task force and then they're in charge. They've got it. It's up to each of us to keep remembering that accessibility is everyone's job.
Just as making information is accessible to those of us who may have all of the necessary faculties that we think we need, we are all only ever temporarily abled. All it takes is an eye infection, a broken hand. What have you. And you're going to be looking for some keyboard controls. You're going to be looking for some voice automation. Right I'm watching colleagues and friends of mine deal with various ailments of aging.
And it's a good reminder. You know, I wish young people of the world could, you know, could have even just an hour VR experience. You know, you may have heard about design groups that use things like age suits so that they can spend a few hours feeling what it is like in your skeleton to be 30 years older than you are. So all of this to say, the purpose of this panel and the purpose of our conversation is for all of us to continue to scale up, for all of us to keep developing new perspectives, loves having new understandings about the impact that we can have on delivering accessible information experiences.
So if that's a good way to kick us off, then I'll hand back to you. That was fab. Thanks, letty. So for those of you who don't know me, my name is Simon Holt, and I head up Content Accessibility efforts at the science publisher Elsevier. I'm a registered blind person, and so this really matters to me personally as well as professionally speaking personally for a minute.
This is the difference between me being able to learn, understand and therefore fulfill my potential. 15% of the world's working age population has a disability. And therefore, when we think about our customer base, those communities that we talk so often about, actually this is making sure that everybody has the opportunity to grow, learn and develop. And so today, what I'm going to do is just take you through a little bit of background, a little bit about the law and what it says, and a little bit about why this is important.
Just to set the scene and build upon what letty said, we can move to the next slide, please. And the next one. So why is this important. So I always like sharing this slide first, mainly because I think when we think about accessibility, I think people tend to think either about wheelchairs or about visually impaired people. And whilst those two groups of people are important, as you can see, there's lots of other groups of people that we need to think about as well.
And Furthermore, when we make our content accessible, what we're doing actually is adding value for everybody, not just those 15% So for, for example, I read recently that 70% of people under 30 access a video once a week without sound. So using the captions, right. If you think about things like the Siri or voice assistants that you get on phones or the remote control on a T.V, these are all things that started off as accessibility aids and have become mainstream.
And actually, when we think about the mission that we have within scholarly communications, accessibility is central to that because it enables multimodal learning, right? People like to learn to read, to understand in different ways. Some people like to read with their eyes. Some people, like me, like to listen with their ears. And some people might even like to touch with their hands. And actually, we've talked quite a lot and surprisingly about AI today.
But the emerging technologies that are coming to the fore within our industry are really allowing us to think about how we can put that knowledge out there in whatever different way the user wants. And I think it's our job, really, as publishers, to think about this and to think about, OK, it's our job to disseminate information as widely as we can so people can learn in their own way.
Right and so therefore, when we're thinking about accessibility, let's talk about a mindset shift before. And the mindset shift that I'm inviting you to take is one from what I'm going to call a charity model, where we talk about accessibility as the right thing to do. More towards an investment and opportunity model, where we're talking about accessibility as a program of work that allows the content that we publish and the platforms in which we publish on to fulfill their potential in terms of access to more users, in terms of greater market reach, in terms of impact.
So, for example, when we're talking about image descriptions, sometimes known as Alt text, what we're doing there is changing a non-text asset, an image into a text asset. What that does, it means that when you have search capabilities like on Google or like on LMS, et cetera, it makes that image more discoverable.
And actually, what are we about as publishers if it isn't about discoverability? So therefore, I think when we're talking about how to approach this, I can only speak personally, but I try to do. So from a purely commercial mindset. Really because actually, yes, this is about our mission. And, you know, we all want to do the right thing, whatever we think the right thing is.
But ultimately, I think this is about thinking about our mission as a publishing industry, expanding reach, expanding impact, and making sure that everybody has the opportunity to publish with us through accessible publication systems, but also to read the fruits of our publication. Because actually, if we didn't have accessible content. That means it's 15% of the world's brains that were missing out on. Next slide, please.
So I wanted now just to talk about the law. And the reason that I'm here to talk about the law is basically because I see the laws that are coming into place right now as real enablers of change. They allow us as a publishing industry, scholarly communications industry, to really reset and say, right, there's some common standards that we're thinking about here. So there was a law that was passed in Europe last year, this earlier this year in June.
And there's a law that's passed, going to be passed in the United States in April next year. Both of them are based on the same set of standards. So the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 standard. A key difference is the American Act, which is the one that's passed in next year, is much more wide ranging. So it includes all what they call web content. That means books and journals and anything else that we publish.
And so therefore, the way, it's also worth saying that the means of enforcement is different too. So in Europe, we have regulators in each government, in each country that may come and knock on your door as a publisher and say, hey, you know, we found x and y not accessible. Sort it out. Otherwise, there's going to be some action in the US. Actually, the burden of enforcement falls upon public authorities.
So that's universities. That's hospitals speaking as a science publisher, that's our customers, right. When they're renewing agreements with us, they're asking us to make sure that we're providing them with accessible content. And if we don't do that, they don't want to renew with us. Right we're already starting to have those conversations. And if they're having those conversations with us, they'll be having those conversations with you guys as well.
I think it's also worth saying in terms of just going back to the mission, how we do this is important as well. So we can talk a bit later about AI and technology and what have you. It's important we think about how we implement accessibility into the publishing process, right. What role do authors have to play. How can we make sure that we're providing accurate metadata, that we're providing accurate videos, video captions, accurate text descriptions.
Because actually, the reason people read our stuff is because they know it to be true. And if we're just ticking boxes and we've got, you know, text descriptions and other accessibility features that we're not verifying that are true, then existentially, that's a problem for us as publishers in terms of trust in our industry. So we not only have to do this as an industry, but we have to get it right.
Next slide, please. So what's the purpose. So the purpose is simply that it's important that everybody, including that 15% talked about earlier is able to learn independently, is able to buy products independently, is able to act independently. It's important that we're all working to the same standards. And it's important that we're all thinking about this in the same way because, you know, in reality, if you're a researcher, it's no good saying, OK, well, I need accessible content and only Elsevier and Springer are accessible, but everybody else isn't accessible, so I'm only able to access their content.
That's no good. We need to be able to make sure everybody has the same opportunity. And so these laws and the reason I'm standing here today is that this is a challenge that we all need to think about as an industry. And the kind of final thing I want to say about the purpose behind these is this is a problem that we're going to tackle together.
So, you know, accessibility is not a competitive sport. There are various industry bodies that several people on this panel and others are engaged in that can help guide you along the way. So please do come with your questions and thoughts and challenges, because actually these are things that we're all thinking about. Next slide, please. So where to start.
And I think this accessibility stuff can feel quite overwhelming right. So I wanted to share here some guidance from the library accessibility alliance. These are a group of extremely influential library consortiums, which as I've said here, hair includes Big Ten, Ivy League, et cetera and I just want to call out a couple of the things that it talks about here. The first one is make sure you have a contact.
So if somebody gets in touch with an accessibility query, make it obvious on your website who to go to, right? As letty said, nobody has all the answers. But actually talking as an end user here, just knowing that somebody at an organization I can talk to, that I'm not going to get a computer says no to say, hey, you know, I need to access x and y and I'm struggling. Please help me.
That means a lot. And that means that you can make progress. Second of all, build a roadmap. You're not going to be able to do everything today or tomorrow, but prioritize and think about, OK, which of your products has the biggest impact which affects the most people. Where are the quick wins and what's going to take a longer period of time. And again, how you do that is by building a working group.
And it may also be engaging some experts as well. And then the third thing that I want to highlight here is this thing at the bottom of ACR. So these are Accessibility Conformance reports. So these are audits of your platforms and of your content basically working out. You know what's going well where the main problems are. And that will inform what you're doing now. And I'd say what we all need to do.
And it's, you know, a journey that we've been on for quite a few years. And I accept people in this room will represent organizations at varying levels of this journey, is just make sure the choices you're making are informed ones. So I'd say that at the beginning if you're not sure where to start. As my great friend Judy Russell, dean of libraries at the University of Florida, says, stop making the situation worse.
Prioritize content that is going forward. Prioritize platforms that is going forward because it's much cheaper and easier to get things right at the beginning than have to remediate everything at the end. So hopefully these bullet points give you some idea of where to start. We're now going to hear from Neil Cudmore who's going to give a demo of.
He's going to show a video about what using a screen reader is like. So it can give you an idea of what it's like for people like Neil and I and the many other people who use a screen reader in order to access content, and the difference between what happens when you get it right and what happens when you get it wrong or you don't do anything at all.
Hi, everyone. My name is Neil gilstrap. I'm the CTO of Canmore media, and today I'm going to give you a very quick demonstration for beginners on how to use a screen reader to judge the accessibility of your website. So to get started, I've come to the NVDA site NVDA access and I'm going to download that. It's a free utility.
I can use that plus a web browser to look at a site. Once you've downloaded it, you're going to go to your website. You're going to turn the screen reader on, and you're going to press the down arrow key to move across the site from top to bottom, left to right. As it reports the screen, you're going to use the down arrow key, not tab. That is very important to distinguish between keyboard accessibility and screen reader accessibility and screen reader.
We press down from there. You will also use the Enter key anytime you want to fill out a form element, or visit a link or click a button. So between down and enter, you have everything you need in order to use a screen reader. The last thing that I would recommend is that for those of you who have not used a screen reader before, the instant you turn it on, it may be overwhelming to you, and it will be until you get used to it, and you need to know how to turn it off very quickly.
The way that you do that with NVDA is you hold down the Insert key and press by default, and then it will pop up a dialog asking you if you want to close it. So I have a website I've put together here. It has had no accessibility work done on it. I'm going to turn on the screen reader, start pressing down and we're going to listen to it. Welcome Acme library Google Chrome window link search notice.
Join us jumped over the image and the announcement at the top link login. I'm just looking at links. I have no indication these are nav menus heading level one. Welcome to Acme library. I did here a heading level one link heading level three. Visit our sponsors. Jump to an advertisement. I no idea what's going on.
No description of the images search No, it just said search. Edit I didn't tell me I was in a form I could fill it out. Button button didn't indicate what it does. That gives you an indication of what it feels like to use a screen reader as you're following along with your eyes on a website that is not designed for with accessibility in mind. So I'm going to go ahead and insert exit NVDA dialog to close in case I'm getting overwhelmed.
And I'm going to switch to the exact same web page, except this time it has work done on it to improve screen reader accessibility. I'm going to turn it back on. Welcome to Acme library, Google Chrome window, Acme library, Acme library website accessibility region. This is the homepage for the Acme library. The Acme library is a full service institutional library. On this page, you will find welcome message advertisements, a search bar to search what I can find on the latest releases.
Bottom link. Librarian out of region. Script links. Region same page link. Skip to important announcement. Skip links visited same page link. Skip to site. Same page link. Skip a welcome message.
Same page link. Skip same page link. Skip to quick search. Visited same page link. Skip to latest releases. List out of region. Acme library home page. Banner landmark. Important library announcement region.
We are closed for the upcoming holiday. Describe to me that there's an important announcement. It's a banner at the top told me the region that I was in, so that I had context about what I'm seeing with my eyes out of region. Website navigation, landmark. Link search, navigation, landmark telling me I'm in a navigation menu and then a link to say search.
So now I can understand that. And I can see that visually on the screen. I could continue to go, but I just wanted to give you a quick introduction and notice the difference about what is being reported. Notice how everything that you see with your eyes and conveying with information the screen reader is now reporting. It is inviting.
It is helpful to use. It is giving someone who cannot see very well an indication of what is actually on the screen. And most importantly, you can follow it with your eyes and make your own judgment call about whether or not your website is being described in a way that is helpful and best for your end users. Thank you. Exit that gives you an idea of what it's like if we get it right, but also what happens if we don't do anything.
And it strikes me that the old saying, if you're not, if you're not actively including, you're probably accidentally excluding. And I think as an industry, we have a responsibility to make sure that we're not accidentally excluding. I'm now going to hand over to Sean, who's going to talk a bit about how ATP is approaching this work.
Thank you. Simon Hello, everyone. I'm Shawn Concannon. I am a solution architect at addepar. If you migrate your website to the Anaplan experience platform, either I or one of my colleagues will help you decide how to run that project, how to meet your requirements, how to customize the platform to meet your needs.
So that's my day to day. And accessibility is a very important part of it. So we often have very stringent requirements that we need to meet When we are building a platform on the experience platform. So before I get into how we manage to improve accessibility on the platform, I want to talk about why we build accessible platforms. We do it because we should.
Because accessibility is a human right. And I think we've gotten into that a little bit here. And we also do it because accessibility improves usability for everyone. So you don't need to have a disability to benefit from accessible websites. Accessible websites have rich metadata that make them discoverable and make them easy to navigate. And so, so that's, that's the altruistic approach.
But there are also business reasons why we build accessible websites. If if you are attempting to sell a subscription to an institution, the institution will require you to attest that your platform is accessible. Right so you need to supply an Accessibility Conformance Report. And that that attests that your platform is accessible.
And that's something that we provide. And that's something that shows that we have met the accessibility requirements that you need. And then there's the law. Simon has gone over the most recent upgrades to accessibility law. So we build accessible platforms because we should and because we have to. So I've been building websites since 2005, but the first time I had a, a stringent requirement, a requirement to meet an accessibility framework was for environmental health perspectives.
We launched this journal on the platform which we called literatum back then in 2018. This cover is from 1972, so it didn't look exactly like that, but the requirement was to build a 100% section 508 compliant platform. This was a US government publication as part of the National Institutes of Health, so they had that requirement at that time. In 2018, 508 compliance would have been WCAG 2.0 and AA.
We got it done almost. We had a close to 100% compliance site, but this project was a wake up call there. There were some notable gaps at that time in our accessibility, and we needed to we realized we needed to rebuild the core of the platform. So the idea is that remediation, as Simon said, remediation is a lot more difficult than starting with an accessible product from the start.
And so that's what we needed to do. We needed to start with an accessible product so that we could build accessible websites. So what do we do. We divided this project into two parts the article page and then every other page of the platform. And so why did we why did we focus on the article page in particular. The article page is the most complex part of a journal platform, and I'm using the article page as a proxy for articles and book chapters.
They work exactly the same way for us. Both the article page and the chapter page use XML. The article page leverages JATS XML. The a book chapter leverages bits XML, and what we did was we rebuilt our parser for XML and the new system is called the XML expression layer. And this is a modular set of XSLT transformations that take the article XML and convert it on the fly into semantic HTML.
And it's the semantic HTML that makes the article page accessible. It's the semantic XML that makes it possible for the screen reader to identify those elements that Neil showed you, and it's semantic XML that makes the article page actually easier for everyone to use. OK, so currently the core of the article page. So the version that we clone when we build a new platform is WCAG 2.2 and AA compliant.
So it's really good. When we clone it and we start building a website, we lose some of that when we start making customizations and then we have to bring it back. But we start from a very accessible place, and that makes building an accessible platform a lot easier. Now we also rebuilt the other templates, those pages that funnel your users from wherever they came into the website to the article page.
So we're talking about the table of contents, the search results, journal landing pages, that list of issues that you have. All of these pages leverage metadata that we got out of JATS, but they generate these pages from the database rather than from actual XML. But these are all the core versions of all of these are now WCAG 2.2 and AA compliant. So a little ahead of where you need to be for accessibility disability compliance.
So our compliant foundation makes it much easier for us to spin off a new website that's going to be accessible for everyone. So fast forward to 2018. We needed to. I'm sorry. Fast forward to 2023. We needed to build a new platform for aip publishing. They had become a multi journal program.
They had a new visual identity, so it was time to rebuild their website. This was a much easier project than the last time around. So we were able to clone an accessible core, and we delivered a section 508 compliant website for them in much less time than we did the last time around. So before I finish prattling on, I want to talk a little bit about content.
The article page that we can generate that is WCAG 2.2 and AA compliant will only be compliant if the metadata that we get is semantically rich. You can see I have a jokey XML snippet. There's a figure and it tells you what the slide is and it has Alt text. And these are things that you need to make content accessible.
If a if the XML has a proper heading hierarchy, if the XML has Alt text for every figure and every table, if the XML uses mathml instead of just typography for equations and for formulas if it has descriptive captions, all of those things will help that particular article page be compliant. Plain language summaries also help. They're not a requirement, but they add they do make a page more usable.
And I think, there's also an idea that they add to impact but they certainly improve accessibility. So that in a nutshell is what we did to enable us to extend accessibility improvements to around 100 publisher platforms over the last, let's say, 5 or six years.
Thanks very much. Sean that was fab. So I'm just going to go through a couple of questions that we talked about. And then obviously open it up to everybody else. So the first question is, how do the panelists feel that emerging technologies can help us make content and user experiences more accessible at scale.
And if the technology works, I'm going to see if Neil wants to take that one First online. Hi Neil, you need to unmute your mic. Of course I do. How's that. We'll just pretend like it didn't happen.
I was going to say in our space, which is a media space, we're dealing primarily with video and audio content. Of course, the advent of AI has been the big rise for us, but ultimately where do we get the most out of tech in terms of being able to help us with accessibility. Is is providing the grunt work of providing something right? Like when I was just looking at that XML, I was like, Yeah, there's some Alt text, there's captions going on.
There's things. Who puts all that information in there. Who does that right. And like, this is what we always get to in the publishing space about where does the metadata come from. How does it get there. Did the author have a chance to review it. How do we know that it's accurate. All the things you've already mentioned.
But being able to plug-in, getting started with an AI, having a review process. And nowadays with videos, of course, you can have AI theoretically scan videos, try to summarize it, try to chapterwise video, which is helpful. Trying to find or mine metadata information I would think is primarily where the gold is, if that makes sense. In my opinion, absolutely.
Sean letty, anything you want to add to what Neil just said. I would add from the kind of user research perspective in particular. And if I didn't say it earlier, let me underscore how important it is for our organizations to be speaking to folks with various levels of ability to be partnering with our patrons, with our clients, to connect to those various communities and to actually test our content and, and products and platforms.
Ux tweak is my favorite usability and user testing platform, in part because they have gone an extra mile to ensure that their testing capabilities are accessible so that we are able to run accessibility tests. But nothing compares to the 1 to 1 in-person, and nothing compares to what Neil demoed for us, which is all of us can download NVDA, NVDA, and give it a try ourselves. And you know, I often talk about user research as sort of putting the goggles on of different communities and different constituents, and that's one great way of putting, you know, goggles on, if you will.
So it's not new tech or emerging tech, but it's important tech. I have NVDA installed on one of the computers in my office. I have a multi-computer office, and when that computer decides to update its software, it starts talking in the middle of the night. And it disturbs my entire family. So I have to remember to turn the sound off on that machine. Just thinking about, because we're a technology company, we think of automated ways to do things.
And when people started thinking about the eaa, which is a year or more before it went into force, one of the most common questions was, what are we going to do about the Alt text for all of our figures and all of our images in our books. It turns out that the eaa is more focused on ebooks than anything else. But we, early on we didn't really know what it was focused on.
And so we thought it was focused on everything. But the thing about automated processes is they're not very good for metadata. You want your metadata to be accurate, and you can only confirm that it's accurate by reading it. A person needs to read it to confirm that it's accurate. So when you're talking about millions of journal articles or millions of pages of books, that's, that's a big that's a big job.
Fortunately, in the case of the eaa, ebooks only need to have that full accessibility, including Alt text for newly published materials. So if your book was published in 2024, you don't have to upgrade it. You should, but you don't. You don't have that legal requirement. You're not exposed. But get making the entire corpus.
I'm going to stop you. I don't think that is legally sound, but is that right. Yeah, that's not true. None of us are lawyers, though. None of us are. None of us are lawyers. Not a lawyer. Not none. But I think that is currently disputed.
So I think I want to caveat that by saying there are some countries in which the law doesn't apply to the backlist. There are some other countries where the backlist is certainly in scope. Sorry to correct you midway through, but I didn't want to give everybody the wrong impression. You know, the eaa has kind of had different interpretations. Yeah so I miss my disclaimer.
Double check, double check. Any advice I give you 100% But but what I was getting at is the task of making the entire corpus of human knowledge accessible is a massive one. And we have to decide. We have to prioritize. We have to decide which content needs to be made accessible right away. I think the best time to start making your content accessible was yesterday.
And then the second best time is right now. Yeah at least to start. So I want to give plenty of time for audience questions. So I'm just going to limit my questions to one more. For the moment. All three of you have worked in the accessible publishing space for a little while now. What has surprised you most. Letty, I'd like to start with you this time that we're still talking about it.
No, I guess it still surprises me that we need to make the case that we need to go through the reasons why it's important. You know, for society legally, business wise, the win-win benefits of search and audio experiences. I'm sort of surprised that we're still making the case, and I'm surprised at how many gaps there still are. I mean, even in Simon, I have such incredible respect for the work you've done in the program you've developed at Elsevier.
But that doesn't mean that Elsevier is 100% perfect, right? So that's important to acknowledge. I think. So that's I guess that's one of my surprises. We we all no other publisher would claim to have all the answers. Right we've just been trying things for a bit longer. Right and we are super happy to Bookshare and learn from everybody else because this is a team sport, all of us.
Sean, do you have anything to add. Yeah, I you know, the thing that surprised me was the business benefits of being accessible, that, you know, making content accessible for everyone is important. We need to do it. But the benefits of doing it improved user experience, improved discoverability, those things are actually, I mean, they're the reasons why people should be jumping at this instead of resisting.
So but I was surprised to learn how specifically useful to everyone accessibility is. Absolutely and Neil, did you have anything you wanted to add to what the other two have just said. I think the thing that surprised me the most over my career was just needing to distinguish between accessibility and usability. I don't I don't make a distinguishment there.
Of course, I'm a software engineer by trade, so I'm always interested in how usable is the thing that I've built or I'm working on. And when we talk about usability, we always talk about if we change the way this looks, if we add a button here that will be more usable, more friendly for our end users. And ultimately, there's no distinguishment, right? Like, all you have to do is just talk about a different user.
How are they using it. And you get there. So to me, I think that's been my overarching lesson is I wish we would just start calling it usability because it's kind of what it is. Yeah for everybody. All right. Whilst I have one more question in the locker, I'd actually like to give it over to you guys because as Heather said correctly earlier on, the questions you guys are going to have are much better than anything I'm going to come up with.
So if you have a question, please could you approach the mic. For those of you who are following the agenda in the app, the timing is a little bit off for this session. This is a full hour, so we've got another few minutes. If you have questions or comments online or in the room. Looks like we got one, right. And if you could just introduce yourself for those online or who don't know you, before you answer your question, ask your question.
That would be great. I'm Ryan Johnson, I'm the head of research services in the Georgetown University library, and I have more of a comment than a question. When we buy materials, our University requires wc three, W3C 2.1, or we have to file for a waiver, and I have an 8 minute spiel I've given to probably many of your sales reps on the essentialness of accessibility.
Because the day will come when the University doesn't approve that waiver, probably next year. And there have been resources we didn't buy, particularly because they didn't meet standards. And we buy in the district with Gallaudet. And if it doesn't meet their standards, we don't buy it because they have very particular needs for that. And so I think it's essential that every publisher meet the standard and make that very public be available, because the day comes when the libraries are going to stop buying.
And that day is probably coming soon. And, you know, we hold that very carefully, very important, because our users, our students have to be able to use it in a lot of our students have disabilities. I mean, you know, I'm clumping about but but that's my issue. But that's a but to getting our students available to the Materials is essential. And if they can't use it we're not going to buy it. So I think that's really, really important.
I just to fill in your point as to the customer. You know, we just we're not going to buy stuff that doesn't, isn't usable by all of our students. And that day is coming very, very soon. So and my dean hates signing those waivers. So thank you. Really appreciate that. Just so you know, I have our pad on speed dial. Are you allowed.
Is there a limit. There isn't a limit. OK, but we have to create. There has to be a justification of why we need that product and what it does. That nothing else can. So we actually have to write a document that explains it's the only thing this is the only thing. And I'll say the one thing we've really had issues with is video.
If you don't have good transcripts, rolling transcripts in your video, you're not you're just failing in your productions. I will just say this. The video products are some of them are just not up to snuff. And it's and the ones that are good are great because even the students who don't have disabilities having that transcript there that they can read and copy and use as a source, it's really, really important.
So Yeah, and I want to say actually video transcripts are a great example of how accessibility is really not just about those with vision impairments or those with mobility impairments, but those with learning disabilities. I have attention, you know, limits various learning disabilities, right. We those whose first language isn't the language that the video is in as well.
Absolutely so even if the video is in English and your first language isn't English, the person might have an accent or something like that, and you might be struggling. And actually it's easier for you to process it by reading what's on the transcript. It's about multimodal learning, meeting people where they're at, and it's searchable and it's repurposing, and it can turn into an audio experience.
I mean, video transcripts are just so incredibly powerful. And I think just talking about the waivers, I think, Ryan, you made a really good point, that the easier this gets in terms of automated and AI technologies, and the more of these laws come into effect, the harder it is going to be to get these waivers right. So therefore, if we want to keep providing content and products to the market, this is a must do.
Really more questions. Hi Jennifer. I want to pick up your point. Sorry about the very broad definition of disabilities. So you know, we talked about visual impairments or other physical difficulties. But Simon I think it was your slide that showed.
Examples of other kinds of disabilities that might not come to mind for people neurodivergence people who can't perceive color, things like that. Can you provide this for anybody. You know, examples of accessibility. Tools or other efforts that help with those folks that people might not think of right away. Yeah, I can start and then I'll pass over to others.
For example, for dyslexia, there are dyslexia friendly fonts that you're able to get hold of or download that help dyslexic people read better along with various solutions that basically, as you're reading the text, changes color. So it makes it easier to keep track of what you're reading because obviously for some people, they lose track very easily halfway through. So that would be one. The other one that I'd mentioned is a lot of these automated podcast creation tools are great, not just for creating summaries for everybody, but again, if you're somebody who really struggles with scite, it's able to explain and summarize what's going on in an article in a very easy, very quick to digest kind of a way.
But I'm sure the others have examples that they'd like to share. You know, well, I guess I'd go back to the transcript, comment again and just say screen reader accessibility is an obvious one for transcripts. So too is the ability to say, download and review that later, print it out so you can be reading it while you're listening and watching.
You can Reflow the text or increase the size again. Translation language translation. There are also information security vulnerabilities that come up sometimes with accessibility. And Neal, I really take your point. The usability versus accessibility. Sometimes it's really hard to tell the difference. And I think about things like if a form label is not clearly communicating to users, like, say you're entering a credit card for a transaction online, you know, e-commerce transaction and the form fields are not labeled correctly or missing labels.
You may put personally sensitive information into the wrong forms that then go into some public social media feed or who knows what. So there's a lot of different elements, I think, to think about with some of these. Neil, do you have anything you want to add. Well, y'all Stole my good ones. OK Yeah. So y'all Stole my good ones with the transcript and the automated summary audio.
A few others that are just sort of like random most, most built in. Most computers now are either come with it or you can download programs just like NVDA. Always be thinking about people that do screen magnification. That is always a big one. And that is generally available. So consider that a screen reader is primarily concerned with folks that really can't see very well at all.
But a lot of people use screen magnification or Zoom in because, you know, eyesight is not as good as it used to be and making sure that things size and fit. So learning about those kinds of tools, or just knowing that your browser can Zoom in is a good one. Well, I guess I could go on and on understanding color contrast ratios. That's always helpful.
Understanding that symbols symbols are a good one. Very interesting one. Just note that not all cultures this is not an accessibility. Straight up usability. Not all cultures use the same symbols to mean stop, play, record, go, enter, exit. Don't even use the same words for them. So another usability accessibility thing. So just there's a million.
The more you put yourself in the shoes of somebody who potentially using your thing, the more you can think about that you probably should be doing. So Yeah. Just just something on symbols in a jazz article, you, you would mark up mathematics with mathml so that you can navigate through it and understand what each symbol says. But that same kind of metadata is necessary for the kinds of symbols that Neil is talking about.
So if you can put a language identifier on that symbol, that's what's going to make that symbol more accessible. We have a big problem with images used in place of text, and that makes the UX much less accessible. And just two quick things before we move on to the next question. One is, don't forget when you're thinking about going back to zooming what Neil was saying, think about it in the context of mobile apps as well as desktop apps, right?
The number of mobile apps have come across that don't work when you Zoom in. Unbelievable second of all, don't underestimate the power of metadata. Right? so metadata is the difference. Accessibility metadata is a difference between somebody buying a product, like a book or a journal article and wasting their money because it's not accessible, because there's no metadata.
It doesn't say that. And knowing what the accessibility features are and then therefore being able to make an informed purchasing choice. And I've got to say, one of the things that I'm quite happy about in this new legislation is a requirement for this, because it will mean I will waste a lot less money on products I then can't use, jus. Right next question over here.
Hey, everyone, this is Tim Lloyd from live lynx. I just had a couple of comments. The first was that we provide counter reporting for about 30 or 40 platforms. We've been doing so for about 08 or 09 years. And in the last month, for the first time ever, we were asked about Section 508 compliance in relation to counter reporting interfaces, which is interesting because they're not publicly accessible.
There's always some sort of access control over them. So for me, that was an indication of a change in approach. And this was a publisher affiliated with a publicly funded institution, and they were updating their legal templates. So I suspect more of us are going to be receiving that sort of response. The other comment was to really, again support Neil's comment about accessibility and usability.
I think we do a lot better as an industry and a community if we took usability more seriously, I don't think enough of us invest in usability. I am utterly delighted that is actually our product experience. Architect and she ushered a major change in how we approached usability as a result of it, which sheds benefits, commercial benefits as well across the board. And one of those is accessibility.
But I think as a community, we need to take usability a lot more seriously. Thanks great. Got a couple over here. We are almost at time. Yeah, I think I'll be very quick because I know we want to hear from Bill, but I have two comments. I can my name is Maryann Callahan and I'm with data conversion laboratory.
Transcripts have absolutely. I've demonstrated proof that it's improved my own website's SEO. So that's great. For years, letty. Same thing we've been talking about accessibility. We offer Accessibility Services. I'm AI the serve work for a service provider.
You know, the biggest thing I hear consistently over the past 15 years is budget for remediation, particularly with backlist. I know many service providers now with AI costs have come down. So revisit, have those conversations, especially when you're talking about remediating remediating a backlist, you know, at scale in a production environment with zero budget, you know, maybe a little budget.
Just revisit that, because I know a lot of us are doing some really interesting things that are very useful. Great last question, Bill. One minute. Bill, this is your challenge. Oh, well, Bill, I wanted to say something about standards. First of all, to point out that I just used the plural. So there are a lot of standards that are applicable here.
I want you to understand that WCAG does not tell you how to code your files. It's not that kind of a standard. It uses what are called success criteria. So say finding talking about that form field WCAG says you have to be able to find it. You have to be able to know what you're supposed to put in there. And you have to be able to know if you filled it out, right and find, et cetera it doesn't tell you how to do any of those things.
It says for a user. They have to be able to do those things. However, there are standards that do tell you those things. First of all, fundamentally HTML. Current HTML is fundamentally the standard that most accessibility is built around. People often say, well, we've now we've got EPUB 3.3.3 and EPUB accessibility 1.1. So those do tell you how to code your books.
You're wicked compliant if you use those standards. But and that includes metadata standards that Simon was talking about. But then people are saying, well, what about my journals. Well, it's maybe easier than you realize because fundamentally they're probably your articles are probably HTML already. So if you've got HTML, if you've got HTML tables, if you've got mathml, you're good. There was a group I was part of this group, and some others in the group here I think were as well in a NISO recommended practice group called JATS for JATS for reuse.
We came out with JATS for our accessibility requirement last year. And that tells you how to use JATS so that it can be converted into accessible HTML properly. So that's your guidance there. And then finally on the metadata side, when we developed the accessibility metadata for EPUB, we did this in collaboration with schema.org so that the schema.org is the metadata standard for the web.
The accessibility metadata in schema.org is identical by design to the accessibility metadata in your epubs. It's the same thing. So it's actually easier than you might think to find how to comply to these things. WCAG tests whether you do or not, but it doesn't actually tell you how to code the files. These other standards are necessary for that.
Thanks, Bill. Great note to end on. Thank you to Jennifer Kemp, who helped organize this panel. Really appreciate all your questions and engagement with this. Please have a quick break before I think our final session of the day back at 4:45 everyone. 345 no. Four 445.
Yeah
Segment:0 .
But what I do realize is that it's hard to see people. OK, everybody, we are getting started again. If everybody can come back, find your seats, put a pin in those conversations. Don't lose the thread. We'll have more time like that. Very good. It's a little sewing analogy.
Sure Yeah. Thank you. All right. You're going to miss some great stuff if you don't come back. I know we're caffeinating. We're bathroom breaking. Yeah, they need, like, a gavel or something. I know, right?
You know, it's funny, people. I'm like losing people more as the day goes on. It was super easy this morning. People are scattered to the winds. Alrighty, here we go with our 330 panel. OK you're ready. All right and you can do that from here or there, whichever you want.
I'll do it from there. OK. Hi, everybody, and welcome to today's session. On accessibility policy meets practice. I'm really delighted to be joined by various colleagues today. So we've got Neil joining us online. We've got Sean here and we've got letty who is a substitute for Wendy who unfortunately can't make it because of the government shutdown.
Real world impacts of geopolitics. Right so what we've asked letty to do, who is really graciously stood in at the last minute, is just to give a little bit of an intro talk, loosely based on accessibility training course that letty and in Iran in the spring. And once that's done that, I will then come and talk a bit about accessibility legislation. Neil is going to give a demonstration of what a screen reader looks like.
Sean is going to give a really good case study around how this is working, and then we're going to get into some questions that we've prepared, and then also some audience questions. And I suppose the aim of today's session is really to give you an idea of why accessibility is important for you in your institution or at your organization, what the law say and why doing nothing is not an option, and also the impact that having accessible content and accessible product have on all of our on all of our products and really thinking about how this connects, not just with the mission of scholarly publishing.
But actually in terms of how we make a difference out there in the real world. So I'm going to hand over to letty for the time being. But unfortunately for you, you've not heard the last of me quite yet. And Thank you, everyone, for tolerating my seat filling. I am a poor substitute for Wendy Stengel from the Library of Congress.
I will try to draw on what experience I have with libraries, but as you all know, I'm letty Conrad. I am not going to try to replicate Wendy's perspectives, but I do bring you a perspective from my place in the world, which is a product R&D specialist and a part time instructor in information systems design at San Jose State University. And these experiences have brought me to accessibility, compliance and accessibility championship for a number of reasons, really inspired.
What inspired my interest is my prevailing methodology for product research and development is human centered design, and we really cannot develop information, products and services for people without thinking about all people. I approach accessibility through the lens of human centered design, and from that perspective, allow me to set the stage for the panel. First, prepare for a bit of a mindset shift.
This is, for the next hour, an ableism free zone. We do not assume that everyone experiences the world the same way we do. I know this sounds radical, but it's very simple and it's very important for us to take on board. We're going to speak about a lot of practical solutions to making information, products and services accessible. But it all begins with each of us being willing to accept that we do not know the lived experiences of other people.
So please, for the purposes of this panel, try to set aside your worldview for a moment. Consider for a moment the diversity of human existences, many of which we do not understand and may never understand. Ableism produces inaccessible information experiences. It means that members of this community wait until our customers, our patrons, their end users and others complain or notify us that something isn't working or, God forbid, take us to court because something isn't working for certain folks.
Don't assume that who lives with what level of ability. I have heard my colleagues and clients say, I really don't think we have anyone with disabilities coming into our system. And I say, God love you. You are so smart and so Talented on so many levels, but there's no way that accessible information experiences require us all to skill up and develop some empathy.
Develop some empathetic muscles. Organizations need to develop accessibility working groups to pool talent and various expertise from across the teams to address routine accessibility audits, audits, remediation, and user research. And I say all of this thinking about what Maharishi said earlier, we cannot all be experts in everything. Such a beautiful, simple statement. But goodness, we cannot be experts in everything.
And accessibility is one of those initiatives that really calls on us to be collaborative. I know enough about metadata to be dangerous, but I'm not a coder. I'm not a content development expert. I know enough about programming to be dangerous, but I'm not going to go using R and Python, you know, without expert help. So the idea of an accessibility workforce or a task force within your organization, it doesn't have to be a huge group of people, right?
It just needs to be folks across your organization that are pulling the right resources and pulling the right expertise to come together. And it's not just that working group's job, right? It's not just, Oh, we form a task force and then they're in charge. They've got it. It's up to each of us to keep remembering that accessibility is everyone's job.
Just as making information is accessible to those of us who may have all of the necessary faculties that we think we need, we are all only ever temporarily abled. All it takes is an eye infection, a broken hand. What have you. And you're going to be looking for some keyboard controls. You're going to be looking for some voice automation. Right I'm watching colleagues and friends of mine deal with various ailments of aging.
And it's a good reminder. You know, I wish young people of the world could, you know, could have even just an hour VR experience. You know, you may have heard about design groups that use things like age suits so that they can spend a few hours feeling what it is like in your skeleton to be 30 years older than you are. So all of this to say, the purpose of this panel and the purpose of our conversation is for all of us to continue to scale up, for all of us to keep developing new perspectives, loves having new understandings about the impact that we can have on delivering accessible information experiences.
So if that's a good way to kick us off, then I'll hand back to you. That was fab. Thanks, letty. So for those of you who don't know me, my name is Simon Holt, and I head up Content Accessibility efforts at the science publisher Elsevier. I'm a registered blind person, and so this really matters to me personally as well as professionally speaking personally for a minute.
This is the difference between me being able to learn, understand and therefore fulfill my potential. 15% of the world's working age population has a disability. And therefore, when we think about our customer base, those communities that we talk so often about, actually this is making sure that everybody has the opportunity to grow, learn and develop. And so today, what I'm going to do is just take you through a little bit of background, a little bit about the law and what it says, and a little bit about why this is important.
Just to set the scene and build upon what letty said, we can move to the next slide, please. And the next one. So why is this important. So I always like sharing this slide first, mainly because I think when we think about accessibility, I think people tend to think either about wheelchairs or about visually impaired people. And whilst those two groups of people are important, as you can see, there's lots of other groups of people that we need to think about as well.
And Furthermore, when we make our content accessible, what we're doing actually is adding value for everybody, not just those 15% So for, for example, I read recently that 70% of people under 30 access a video once a week without sound. So using the captions, right. If you think about things like the Siri or voice assistants that you get on phones or the remote control on a T.V, these are all things that started off as accessibility aids and have become mainstream.
And actually, when we think about the mission that we have within scholarly communications, accessibility is central to that because it enables multimodal learning, right? People like to learn to read, to understand in different ways. Some people like to read with their eyes. Some people, like me, like to listen with their ears. And some people might even like to touch with their hands. And actually, we've talked quite a lot and surprisingly about AI today.
But the emerging technologies that are coming to the fore within our industry are really allowing us to think about how we can put that knowledge out there in whatever different way the user wants. And I think it's our job, really, as publishers, to think about this and to think about, OK, it's our job to disseminate information as widely as we can so people can learn in their own way.
Right and so therefore, when we're thinking about accessibility, let's talk about a mindset shift before. And the mindset shift that I'm inviting you to take is one from what I'm going to call a charity model, where we talk about accessibility as the right thing to do. More towards an investment and opportunity model, where we're talking about accessibility as a program of work that allows the content that we publish and the platforms in which we publish on to fulfill their potential in terms of access to more users, in terms of greater market reach, in terms of impact.
So, for example, when we're talking about image descriptions, sometimes known as Alt text, what we're doing there is changing a non-text asset, an image into a text asset. What that does, it means that when you have search capabilities like on Google or like on LMS, et cetera, it makes that image more discoverable.
And actually, what are we about as publishers if it isn't about discoverability? So therefore, I think when we're talking about how to approach this, I can only speak personally, but I try to do. So from a purely commercial mindset. Really because actually, yes, this is about our mission. And, you know, we all want to do the right thing, whatever we think the right thing is.
But ultimately, I think this is about thinking about our mission as a publishing industry, expanding reach, expanding impact, and making sure that everybody has the opportunity to publish with us through accessible publication systems, but also to read the fruits of our publication. Because actually, if we didn't have accessible content. That means it's 15% of the world's brains that were missing out on. Next slide, please.
So I wanted now just to talk about the law. And the reason that I'm here to talk about the law is basically because I see the laws that are coming into place right now as real enablers of change. They allow us as a publishing industry, scholarly communications industry, to really reset and say, right, there's some common standards that we're thinking about here. So there was a law that was passed in Europe last year, this earlier this year in June.
And there's a law that's passed, going to be passed in the United States in April next year. Both of them are based on the same set of standards. So the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 standard. A key difference is the American Act, which is the one that's passed in next year, is much more wide ranging. So it includes all what they call web content. That means books and journals and anything else that we publish.
And so therefore, the way, it's also worth saying that the means of enforcement is different too. So in Europe, we have regulators in each government, in each country that may come and knock on your door as a publisher and say, hey, you know, we found x and y not accessible. Sort it out. Otherwise, there's going to be some action in the US. Actually, the burden of enforcement falls upon public authorities.
So that's universities. That's hospitals speaking as a science publisher, that's our customers, right. When they're renewing agreements with us, they're asking us to make sure that we're providing them with accessible content. And if we don't do that, they don't want to renew with us. Right we're already starting to have those conversations. And if they're having those conversations with us, they'll be having those conversations with you guys as well.
I think it's also worth saying in terms of just going back to the mission, how we do this is important as well. So we can talk a bit later about AI and technology and what have you. It's important we think about how we implement accessibility into the publishing process, right. What role do authors have to play. How can we make sure that we're providing accurate metadata, that we're providing accurate videos, video captions, accurate text descriptions.
Because actually, the reason people read our stuff is because they know it to be true. And if we're just ticking boxes and we've got, you know, text descriptions and other accessibility features that we're not verifying that are true, then existentially, that's a problem for us as publishers in terms of trust in our industry. So we not only have to do this as an industry, but we have to get it right.
Next slide, please. So what's the purpose. So the purpose is simply that it's important that everybody, including that 15% talked about earlier is able to learn independently, is able to buy products independently, is able to act independently. It's important that we're all working to the same standards. And it's important that we're all thinking about this in the same way because, you know, in reality, if you're a researcher, it's no good saying, OK, well, I need accessible content and only Elsevier and Springer are accessible, but everybody else isn't accessible, so I'm only able to access their content.
That's no good. We need to be able to make sure everybody has the same opportunity. And so these laws and the reason I'm standing here today is that this is a challenge that we all need to think about as an industry. And the kind of final thing I want to say about the purpose behind these is this is a problem that we're going to tackle together.
So, you know, accessibility is not a competitive sport. There are various industry bodies that several people on this panel and others are engaged in that can help guide you along the way. So please do come with your questions and thoughts and challenges, because actually these are things that we're all thinking about. Next slide, please. So where to start.
And I think this accessibility stuff can feel quite overwhelming right. So I wanted to share here some guidance from the library accessibility alliance. These are a group of extremely influential library consortiums, which as I've said here, hair includes Big Ten, Ivy League, et cetera and I just want to call out a couple of the things that it talks about here. The first one is make sure you have a contact.
So if somebody gets in touch with an accessibility query, make it obvious on your website who to go to, right? As letty said, nobody has all the answers. But actually talking as an end user here, just knowing that somebody at an organization I can talk to, that I'm not going to get a computer says no to say, hey, you know, I need to access x and y and I'm struggling. Please help me.
That means a lot. And that means that you can make progress. Second of all, build a roadmap. You're not going to be able to do everything today or tomorrow, but prioritize and think about, OK, which of your products has the biggest impact which affects the most people. Where are the quick wins and what's going to take a longer period of time. And again, how you do that is by building a working group.
And it may also be engaging some experts as well. And then the third thing that I want to highlight here is this thing at the bottom of ACR. So these are Accessibility Conformance reports. So these are audits of your platforms and of your content basically working out. You know what's going well where the main problems are. And that will inform what you're doing now. And I'd say what we all need to do.
And it's, you know, a journey that we've been on for quite a few years. And I accept people in this room will represent organizations at varying levels of this journey, is just make sure the choices you're making are informed ones. So I'd say that at the beginning if you're not sure where to start. As my great friend Judy Russell, dean of libraries at the University of Florida, says, stop making the situation worse.
Prioritize content that is going forward. Prioritize platforms that is going forward because it's much cheaper and easier to get things right at the beginning than have to remediate everything at the end. So hopefully these bullet points give you some idea of where to start. We're now going to hear from Neil Cudmore who's going to give a demo of.
He's going to show a video about what using a screen reader is like. So it can give you an idea of what it's like for people like Neil and I and the many other people who use a screen reader in order to access content, and the difference between what happens when you get it right and what happens when you get it wrong or you don't do anything at all.
Hi, everyone. My name is Neil gilstrap. I'm the CTO of Canmore media, and today I'm going to give you a very quick demonstration for beginners on how to use a screen reader to judge the accessibility of your website. So to get started, I've come to the NVDA site NVDA access and I'm going to download that. It's a free utility.
I can use that plus a web browser to look at a site. Once you've downloaded it, you're going to go to your website. You're going to turn the screen reader on, and you're going to press the down arrow key to move across the site from top to bottom, left to right. As it reports the screen, you're going to use the down arrow key, not tab. That is very important to distinguish between keyboard accessibility and screen reader accessibility and screen reader.
We press down from there. You will also use the Enter key anytime you want to fill out a form element, or visit a link or click a button. So between down and enter, you have everything you need in order to use a screen reader. The last thing that I would recommend is that for those of you who have not used a screen reader before, the instant you turn it on, it may be overwhelming to you, and it will be until you get used to it, and you need to know how to turn it off very quickly.
The way that you do that with NVDA is you hold down the Insert key and press by default, and then it will pop up a dialog asking you if you want to close it. So I have a website I've put together here. It has had no accessibility work done on it. I'm going to turn on the screen reader, start pressing down and we're going to listen to it. Welcome Acme library Google Chrome window link search notice.
Join us jumped over the image and the announcement at the top link login. I'm just looking at links. I have no indication these are nav menus heading level one. Welcome to Acme library. I did here a heading level one link heading level three. Visit our sponsors. Jump to an advertisement. I no idea what's going on.
No description of the images search No, it just said search. Edit I didn't tell me I was in a form I could fill it out. Button button didn't indicate what it does. That gives you an indication of what it feels like to use a screen reader as you're following along with your eyes on a website that is not designed for with accessibility in mind. So I'm going to go ahead and insert exit NVDA dialog to close in case I'm getting overwhelmed.
And I'm going to switch to the exact same web page, except this time it has work done on it to improve screen reader accessibility. I'm going to turn it back on. Welcome to Acme library, Google Chrome window, Acme library, Acme library website accessibility region. This is the homepage for the Acme library. The Acme library is a full service institutional library. On this page, you will find welcome message advertisements, a search bar to search what I can find on the latest releases.
Bottom link. Librarian out of region. Script links. Region same page link. Skip to important announcement. Skip links visited same page link. Skip to site. Same page link. Skip a welcome message.
Same page link. Skip same page link. Skip to quick search. Visited same page link. Skip to latest releases. List out of region. Acme library home page. Banner landmark. Important library announcement region.
We are closed for the upcoming holiday. Describe to me that there's an important announcement. It's a banner at the top told me the region that I was in, so that I had context about what I'm seeing with my eyes out of region. Website navigation, landmark. Link search, navigation, landmark telling me I'm in a navigation menu and then a link to say search.
So now I can understand that. And I can see that visually on the screen. I could continue to go, but I just wanted to give you a quick introduction and notice the difference about what is being reported. Notice how everything that you see with your eyes and conveying with information the screen reader is now reporting. It is inviting.
It is helpful to use. It is giving someone who cannot see very well an indication of what is actually on the screen. And most importantly, you can follow it with your eyes and make your own judgment call about whether or not your website is being described in a way that is helpful and best for your end users. Thank you. Exit that gives you an idea of what it's like if we get it right, but also what happens if we don't do anything.
And it strikes me that the old saying, if you're not, if you're not actively including, you're probably accidentally excluding. And I think as an industry, we have a responsibility to make sure that we're not accidentally excluding. I'm now going to hand over to Sean, who's going to talk a bit about how ATP is approaching this work.
Thank you. Simon Hello, everyone. I'm Shawn Concannon. I am a solution architect at addepar. If you migrate your website to the Anaplan experience platform, either I or one of my colleagues will help you decide how to run that project, how to meet your requirements, how to customize the platform to meet your needs.
So that's my day to day. And accessibility is a very important part of it. So we often have very stringent requirements that we need to meet When we are building a platform on the experience platform. So before I get into how we manage to improve accessibility on the platform, I want to talk about why we build accessible platforms. We do it because we should.
Because accessibility is a human right. And I think we've gotten into that a little bit here. And we also do it because accessibility improves usability for everyone. So you don't need to have a disability to benefit from accessible websites. Accessible websites have rich metadata that make them discoverable and make them easy to navigate. And so, so that's, that's the altruistic approach.
But there are also business reasons why we build accessible websites. If if you are attempting to sell a subscription to an institution, the institution will require you to attest that your platform is accessible. Right so you need to supply an Accessibility Conformance Report. And that that attests that your platform is accessible.
And that's something that we provide. And that's something that shows that we have met the accessibility requirements that you need. And then there's the law. Simon has gone over the most recent upgrades to accessibility law. So we build accessible platforms because we should and because we have to. So I've been building websites since 2005, but the first time I had a, a stringent requirement, a requirement to meet an accessibility framework was for environmental health perspectives.
We launched this journal on the platform which we called literatum back then in 2018. This cover is from 1972, so it didn't look exactly like that, but the requirement was to build a 100% section 508 compliant platform. This was a US government publication as part of the National Institutes of Health, so they had that requirement at that time. In 2018, 508 compliance would have been WCAG 2.0 and AA.
We got it done almost. We had a close to 100% compliance site, but this project was a wake up call there. There were some notable gaps at that time in our accessibility, and we needed to we realized we needed to rebuild the core of the platform. So the idea is that remediation, as Simon said, remediation is a lot more difficult than starting with an accessible product from the start.
And so that's what we needed to do. We needed to start with an accessible product so that we could build accessible websites. So what do we do. We divided this project into two parts the article page and then every other page of the platform. And so why did we why did we focus on the article page in particular. The article page is the most complex part of a journal platform, and I'm using the article page as a proxy for articles and book chapters.
They work exactly the same way for us. Both the article page and the chapter page use XML. The article page leverages JATS XML. The a book chapter leverages bits XML, and what we did was we rebuilt our parser for XML and the new system is called the XML expression layer. And this is a modular set of XSLT transformations that take the article XML and convert it on the fly into semantic HTML.
And it's the semantic HTML that makes the article page accessible. It's the semantic XML that makes it possible for the screen reader to identify those elements that Neil showed you, and it's semantic XML that makes the article page actually easier for everyone to use. OK, so currently the core of the article page. So the version that we clone when we build a new platform is WCAG 2.2 and AA compliant.
So it's really good. When we clone it and we start building a website, we lose some of that when we start making customizations and then we have to bring it back. But we start from a very accessible place, and that makes building an accessible platform a lot easier. Now we also rebuilt the other templates, those pages that funnel your users from wherever they came into the website to the article page.
So we're talking about the table of contents, the search results, journal landing pages, that list of issues that you have. All of these pages leverage metadata that we got out of JATS, but they generate these pages from the database rather than from actual XML. But these are all the core versions of all of these are now WCAG 2.2 and AA compliant. So a little ahead of where you need to be for accessibility disability compliance.
So our compliant foundation makes it much easier for us to spin off a new website that's going to be accessible for everyone. So fast forward to 2018. We needed to. I'm sorry. Fast forward to 2023. We needed to build a new platform for aip publishing. They had become a multi journal program.
They had a new visual identity, so it was time to rebuild their website. This was a much easier project than the last time around. So we were able to clone an accessible core, and we delivered a section 508 compliant website for them in much less time than we did the last time around. So before I finish prattling on, I want to talk a little bit about content.
The article page that we can generate that is WCAG 2.2 and AA compliant will only be compliant if the metadata that we get is semantically rich. You can see I have a jokey XML snippet. There's a figure and it tells you what the slide is and it has Alt text. And these are things that you need to make content accessible.
If a if the XML has a proper heading hierarchy, if the XML has Alt text for every figure and every table, if the XML uses mathml instead of just typography for equations and for formulas if it has descriptive captions, all of those things will help that particular article page be compliant. Plain language summaries also help. They're not a requirement, but they add they do make a page more usable.
And I think, there's also an idea that they add to impact but they certainly improve accessibility. So that in a nutshell is what we did to enable us to extend accessibility improvements to around 100 publisher platforms over the last, let's say, 5 or six years.
Thanks very much. Sean that was fab. So I'm just going to go through a couple of questions that we talked about. And then obviously open it up to everybody else. So the first question is, how do the panelists feel that emerging technologies can help us make content and user experiences more accessible at scale.
And if the technology works, I'm going to see if Neil wants to take that one First online. Hi Neil, you need to unmute your mic. Of course I do. How's that. We'll just pretend like it didn't happen.
I was going to say in our space, which is a media space, we're dealing primarily with video and audio content. Of course, the advent of AI has been the big rise for us, but ultimately where do we get the most out of tech in terms of being able to help us with accessibility. Is is providing the grunt work of providing something right? Like when I was just looking at that XML, I was like, Yeah, there's some Alt text, there's captions going on.
There's things. Who puts all that information in there. Who does that right. And like, this is what we always get to in the publishing space about where does the metadata come from. How does it get there. Did the author have a chance to review it. How do we know that it's accurate. All the things you've already mentioned.
But being able to plug-in, getting started with an AI, having a review process. And nowadays with videos, of course, you can have AI theoretically scan videos, try to summarize it, try to chapterwise video, which is helpful. Trying to find or mine metadata information I would think is primarily where the gold is, if that makes sense. In my opinion, absolutely.
Sean letty, anything you want to add to what Neil just said. I would add from the kind of user research perspective in particular. And if I didn't say it earlier, let me underscore how important it is for our organizations to be speaking to folks with various levels of ability to be partnering with our patrons, with our clients, to connect to those various communities and to actually test our content and, and products and platforms.
Ux tweak is my favorite usability and user testing platform, in part because they have gone an extra mile to ensure that their testing capabilities are accessible so that we are able to run accessibility tests. But nothing compares to the 1 to 1 in-person, and nothing compares to what Neil demoed for us, which is all of us can download NVDA, NVDA, and give it a try ourselves. And you know, I often talk about user research as sort of putting the goggles on of different communities and different constituents, and that's one great way of putting, you know, goggles on, if you will.
So it's not new tech or emerging tech, but it's important tech. I have NVDA installed on one of the computers in my office. I have a multi-computer office, and when that computer decides to update its software, it starts talking in the middle of the night. And it disturbs my entire family. So I have to remember to turn the sound off on that machine. Just thinking about, because we're a technology company, we think of automated ways to do things.
And when people started thinking about the eaa, which is a year or more before it went into force, one of the most common questions was, what are we going to do about the Alt text for all of our figures and all of our images in our books. It turns out that the eaa is more focused on ebooks than anything else. But we, early on we didn't really know what it was focused on.
And so we thought it was focused on everything. But the thing about automated processes is they're not very good for metadata. You want your metadata to be accurate, and you can only confirm that it's accurate by reading it. A person needs to read it to confirm that it's accurate. So when you're talking about millions of journal articles or millions of pages of books, that's, that's a big that's a big job.
Fortunately, in the case of the eaa, ebooks only need to have that full accessibility, including Alt text for newly published materials. So if your book was published in 2024, you don't have to upgrade it. You should, but you don't. You don't have that legal requirement. You're not exposed. But get making the entire corpus.
I'm going to stop you. I don't think that is legally sound, but is that right. Yeah, that's not true. None of us are lawyers, though. None of us are. None of us are lawyers. Not a lawyer. Not none. But I think that is currently disputed.
So I think I want to caveat that by saying there are some countries in which the law doesn't apply to the backlist. There are some other countries where the backlist is certainly in scope. Sorry to correct you midway through, but I didn't want to give everybody the wrong impression. You know, the eaa has kind of had different interpretations. Yeah so I miss my disclaimer.
Double check, double check. Any advice I give you 100% But but what I was getting at is the task of making the entire corpus of human knowledge accessible is a massive one. And we have to decide. We have to prioritize. We have to decide which content needs to be made accessible right away. I think the best time to start making your content accessible was yesterday.
And then the second best time is right now. Yeah at least to start. So I want to give plenty of time for audience questions. So I'm just going to limit my questions to one more. For the moment. All three of you have worked in the accessible publishing space for a little while now. What has surprised you most. Letty, I'd like to start with you this time that we're still talking about it.
No, I guess it still surprises me that we need to make the case that we need to go through the reasons why it's important. You know, for society legally, business wise, the win-win benefits of search and audio experiences. I'm sort of surprised that we're still making the case, and I'm surprised at how many gaps there still are. I mean, even in Simon, I have such incredible respect for the work you've done in the program you've developed at Elsevier.
But that doesn't mean that Elsevier is 100% perfect, right? So that's important to acknowledge. I think. So that's I guess that's one of my surprises. We we all no other publisher would claim to have all the answers. Right we've just been trying things for a bit longer. Right and we are super happy to Bookshare and learn from everybody else because this is a team sport, all of us.
Sean, do you have anything to add. Yeah, I you know, the thing that surprised me was the business benefits of being accessible, that, you know, making content accessible for everyone is important. We need to do it. But the benefits of doing it improved user experience, improved discoverability, those things are actually, I mean, they're the reasons why people should be jumping at this instead of resisting.
So but I was surprised to learn how specifically useful to everyone accessibility is. Absolutely and Neil, did you have anything you wanted to add to what the other two have just said. I think the thing that surprised me the most over my career was just needing to distinguish between accessibility and usability. I don't I don't make a distinguishment there.
Of course, I'm a software engineer by trade, so I'm always interested in how usable is the thing that I've built or I'm working on. And when we talk about usability, we always talk about if we change the way this looks, if we add a button here that will be more usable, more friendly for our end users. And ultimately, there's no distinguishment, right? Like, all you have to do is just talk about a different user.
How are they using it. And you get there. So to me, I think that's been my overarching lesson is I wish we would just start calling it usability because it's kind of what it is. Yeah for everybody. All right. Whilst I have one more question in the locker, I'd actually like to give it over to you guys because as Heather said correctly earlier on, the questions you guys are going to have are much better than anything I'm going to come up with.
So if you have a question, please could you approach the mic. For those of you who are following the agenda in the app, the timing is a little bit off for this session. This is a full hour, so we've got another few minutes. If you have questions or comments online or in the room. Looks like we got one, right. And if you could just introduce yourself for those online or who don't know you, before you answer your question, ask your question.
That would be great. I'm Ryan Johnson, I'm the head of research services in the Georgetown University library, and I have more of a comment than a question. When we buy materials, our University requires wc three, W3C 2.1, or we have to file for a waiver, and I have an 8 minute spiel I've given to probably many of your sales reps on the essentialness of accessibility.
Because the day will come when the University doesn't approve that waiver, probably next year. And there have been resources we didn't buy, particularly because they didn't meet standards. And we buy in the district with Gallaudet. And if it doesn't meet their standards, we don't buy it because they have very particular needs for that. And so I think it's essential that every publisher meet the standard and make that very public be available, because the day comes when the libraries are going to stop buying.
And that day is probably coming soon. And, you know, we hold that very carefully, very important, because our users, our students have to be able to use it in a lot of our students have disabilities. I mean, you know, I'm clumping about but but that's my issue. But that's a but to getting our students available to the Materials is essential. And if they can't use it we're not going to buy it. So I think that's really, really important.
I just to fill in your point as to the customer. You know, we just we're not going to buy stuff that doesn't, isn't usable by all of our students. And that day is coming very, very soon. So and my dean hates signing those waivers. So thank you. Really appreciate that. Just so you know, I have our pad on speed dial. Are you allowed.
Is there a limit. There isn't a limit. OK, but we have to create. There has to be a justification of why we need that product and what it does. That nothing else can. So we actually have to write a document that explains it's the only thing this is the only thing. And I'll say the one thing we've really had issues with is video.
If you don't have good transcripts, rolling transcripts in your video, you're not you're just failing in your productions. I will just say this. The video products are some of them are just not up to snuff. And it's and the ones that are good are great because even the students who don't have disabilities having that transcript there that they can read and copy and use as a source, it's really, really important.
So Yeah, and I want to say actually video transcripts are a great example of how accessibility is really not just about those with vision impairments or those with mobility impairments, but those with learning disabilities. I have attention, you know, limits various learning disabilities, right. We those whose first language isn't the language that the video is in as well.
Absolutely so even if the video is in English and your first language isn't English, the person might have an accent or something like that, and you might be struggling. And actually it's easier for you to process it by reading what's on the transcript. It's about multimodal learning, meeting people where they're at, and it's searchable and it's repurposing, and it can turn into an audio experience.
I mean, video transcripts are just so incredibly powerful. And I think just talking about the waivers, I think, Ryan, you made a really good point, that the easier this gets in terms of automated and AI technologies, and the more of these laws come into effect, the harder it is going to be to get these waivers right. So therefore, if we want to keep providing content and products to the market, this is a must do.
Really more questions. Hi Jennifer. I want to pick up your point. Sorry about the very broad definition of disabilities. So you know, we talked about visual impairments or other physical difficulties. But Simon I think it was your slide that showed.
Examples of other kinds of disabilities that might not come to mind for people neurodivergence people who can't perceive color, things like that. Can you provide this for anybody. You know, examples of accessibility. Tools or other efforts that help with those folks that people might not think of right away. Yeah, I can start and then I'll pass over to others.
For example, for dyslexia, there are dyslexia friendly fonts that you're able to get hold of or download that help dyslexic people read better along with various solutions that basically, as you're reading the text, changes color. So it makes it easier to keep track of what you're reading because obviously for some people, they lose track very easily halfway through. So that would be one. The other one that I'd mentioned is a lot of these automated podcast creation tools are great, not just for creating summaries for everybody, but again, if you're somebody who really struggles with scite, it's able to explain and summarize what's going on in an article in a very easy, very quick to digest kind of a way.
But I'm sure the others have examples that they'd like to share. You know, well, I guess I'd go back to the transcript, comment again and just say screen reader accessibility is an obvious one for transcripts. So too is the ability to say, download and review that later, print it out so you can be reading it while you're listening and watching.
You can Reflow the text or increase the size again. Translation language translation. There are also information security vulnerabilities that come up sometimes with accessibility. And Neal, I really take your point. The usability versus accessibility. Sometimes it's really hard to tell the difference. And I think about things like if a form label is not clearly communicating to users, like, say you're entering a credit card for a transaction online, you know, e-commerce transaction and the form fields are not labeled correctly or missing labels.
You may put personally sensitive information into the wrong forms that then go into some public social media feed or who knows what. So there's a lot of different elements, I think, to think about with some of these. Neil, do you have anything you want to add. Well, y'all Stole my good ones. OK Yeah. So y'all Stole my good ones with the transcript and the automated summary audio.
A few others that are just sort of like random most, most built in. Most computers now are either come with it or you can download programs just like NVDA. Always be thinking about people that do screen magnification. That is always a big one. And that is generally available. So consider that a screen reader is primarily concerned with folks that really can't see very well at all.
But a lot of people use screen magnification or Zoom in because, you know, eyesight is not as good as it used to be and making sure that things size and fit. So learning about those kinds of tools, or just knowing that your browser can Zoom in is a good one. Well, I guess I could go on and on understanding color contrast ratios. That's always helpful.
Understanding that symbols symbols are a good one. Very interesting one. Just note that not all cultures this is not an accessibility. Straight up usability. Not all cultures use the same symbols to mean stop, play, record, go, enter, exit. Don't even use the same words for them. So another usability accessibility thing. So just there's a million.
The more you put yourself in the shoes of somebody who potentially using your thing, the more you can think about that you probably should be doing. So Yeah. Just just something on symbols in a jazz article, you, you would mark up mathematics with mathml so that you can navigate through it and understand what each symbol says. But that same kind of metadata is necessary for the kinds of symbols that Neil is talking about.
So if you can put a language identifier on that symbol, that's what's going to make that symbol more accessible. We have a big problem with images used in place of text, and that makes the UX much less accessible. And just two quick things before we move on to the next question. One is, don't forget when you're thinking about going back to zooming what Neil was saying, think about it in the context of mobile apps as well as desktop apps, right?
The number of mobile apps have come across that don't work when you Zoom in. Unbelievable second of all, don't underestimate the power of metadata. Right? so metadata is the difference. Accessibility metadata is a difference between somebody buying a product, like a book or a journal article and wasting their money because it's not accessible, because there's no metadata.
It doesn't say that. And knowing what the accessibility features are and then therefore being able to make an informed purchasing choice. And I've got to say, one of the things that I'm quite happy about in this new legislation is a requirement for this, because it will mean I will waste a lot less money on products I then can't use, jus. Right next question over here.
Hey, everyone, this is Tim Lloyd from live lynx. I just had a couple of comments. The first was that we provide counter reporting for about 30 or 40 platforms. We've been doing so for about 08 or 09 years. And in the last month, for the first time ever, we were asked about Section 508 compliance in relation to counter reporting interfaces, which is interesting because they're not publicly accessible.
There's always some sort of access control over them. So for me, that was an indication of a change in approach. And this was a publisher affiliated with a publicly funded institution, and they were updating their legal templates. So I suspect more of us are going to be receiving that sort of response. The other comment was to really, again support Neil's comment about accessibility and usability.
I think we do a lot better as an industry and a community if we took usability more seriously, I don't think enough of us invest in usability. I am utterly delighted that is actually our product experience. Architect and she ushered a major change in how we approached usability as a result of it, which sheds benefits, commercial benefits as well across the board. And one of those is accessibility.
But I think as a community, we need to take usability a lot more seriously. Thanks great. Got a couple over here. We are almost at time. Yeah, I think I'll be very quick because I know we want to hear from Bill, but I have two comments. I can my name is Maryann Callahan and I'm with data conversion laboratory.
Transcripts have absolutely. I've demonstrated proof that it's improved my own website's SEO. So that's great. For years, letty. Same thing we've been talking about accessibility. We offer Accessibility Services. I'm AI the serve work for a service provider.
You know, the biggest thing I hear consistently over the past 15 years is budget for remediation, particularly with backlist. I know many service providers now with AI costs have come down. So revisit, have those conversations, especially when you're talking about remediating remediating a backlist, you know, at scale in a production environment with zero budget, you know, maybe a little budget.
Just revisit that, because I know a lot of us are doing some really interesting things that are very useful. Great last question, Bill. One minute. Bill, this is your challenge. Oh, well, Bill, I wanted to say something about standards. First of all, to point out that I just used the plural. So there are a lot of standards that are applicable here.
I want you to understand that WCAG does not tell you how to code your files. It's not that kind of a standard. It uses what are called success criteria. So say finding talking about that form field WCAG says you have to be able to find it. You have to be able to know what you're supposed to put in there. And you have to be able to know if you filled it out, right and find, et cetera it doesn't tell you how to do any of those things.
It says for a user. They have to be able to do those things. However, there are standards that do tell you those things. First of all, fundamentally HTML. Current HTML is fundamentally the standard that most accessibility is built around. People often say, well, we've now we've got EPUB 3.3.3 and EPUB accessibility 1.1. So those do tell you how to code your books.
You're wicked compliant if you use those standards. But and that includes metadata standards that Simon was talking about. But then people are saying, well, what about my journals. Well, it's maybe easier than you realize because fundamentally they're probably your articles are probably HTML already. So if you've got HTML, if you've got HTML tables, if you've got mathml, you're good. There was a group I was part of this group, and some others in the group here I think were as well in a NISO recommended practice group called JATS for JATS for reuse.
We came out with JATS for our accessibility requirement last year. And that tells you how to use JATS so that it can be converted into accessible HTML properly. So that's your guidance there. And then finally on the metadata side, when we developed the accessibility metadata for EPUB, we did this in collaboration with schema.org so that the schema.org is the metadata standard for the web.
The accessibility metadata in schema.org is identical by design to the accessibility metadata in your epubs. It's the same thing. So it's actually easier than you might think to find how to comply to these things. WCAG tests whether you do or not, but it doesn't actually tell you how to code the files. These other standards are necessary for that.
Thanks, Bill. Great note to end on. Thank you to Jennifer Kemp, who helped organize this panel. Really appreciate all your questions and engagement with this. Please have a quick break before I think our final session of the day back at 4:45 everyone. 345 no. Four 445.
Yeah
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