 Let's begin. Let me welcome everybody to the Future Trends forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the forum's creator coast, coast, host, and cat herder. I'll be your guide to the next hour as long as I can manage perfectly acceptable English consonants. I'm really glad to see all of you here today. We have a really, really terrific guest. They have a very, very important topic. All of that is preparation. All of that is preparing the ground so that we bring on stage this week's guest. Not for the first time. Michael is an adventurous sort, deeply experienced in technology, always willing to try things, and about a year, about either one year or two years ago, he participated in a live session of what we successfully blended a conference, an educause conference crowd along with all of you online. Michael is a dear friend, a fantastic podcaster, a really great writer and an expert in, among other things, accessibility and publishing. So let's bring Michael on stage and from rural Wisconsin. Michael, welcome. Thank you for having me. Rural Wisconsin can be a bit of a redundancy as we don't have many large population centers, but yes, I am in out in the country, as they say. Indeed you are, and I'm glad that you've made time for us in the forum. I have all kinds of ways to introduce people. My favorite way is to ask them what they're going to be working on for the next year. So I'm curious. I mean, what's going to be taking up most of your time? What's going to be top of mind? What are the big issues that are most concerning you for the next year? I would say primarily it's going to be the content that we're going to discuss today. How can we as a charity support both the content creators and the educational institutions and readers with more accessible content? There's social justice issues. There's educational issues. There are lots of legal issues, all of which I imagine we'll be touching on today. But that that's really my focus. I was brought to Benetech to help Benetech understand the larger ecosystem about how content gets created and distributed and then to help all of the various players in that ecosystem to understand what Benetech is doing. So that's a lot. It is a lot. It's really really good work. Just one quick question. You mentioned as a charity. Is Benetech actually a charity? So the lines blur between non-profit and charity. So not being a corporate corporation specialist, I suppose non-profit is the more legally binding answer. That makes sense. That makes sense. Thank you. Friends, I have all kinds of questions to bombard poor Michael with about accessibility. I'm going to start off with a couple. But first before I do that, we'll just ask you to start thinking about your own questions and they can cover everything. And if Michael can answer it, he will. If he can't, he'll throw it right back at me and we'll ask the rest of you to help work on it. So think about accessibility as a general issue, but also about how it impacts you and your own work. If you're an instructor, if you're a librarian, a technologist, a student, a trustee, a reporter or how. My first question I wanted to ask Michael is if you could, could you tell us the analogy again of redheads? I love this story. Oh, sure. So as you can imagine, I have to spend a fair amount of my time explaining to audiences who don't spend every minute of their day thinking about individuals with print disabilities. So, Brian, you and I have known each other a long time. You know, my preferred method of communication is storytelling. So when I talk about who is in this market, who are these people who have print disabilities and whether I'm providing services from a library or educational standpoint or governmental standpoint or whether I'm providing content into those same areas, just, you know, who are they? How big is this? What is the market area? So I usually talk about redheads and lefties, right? So there are more blind people in the world than there are people with red hair, OK? So you would ask someone, anywhere they are in this multi bubble ecosystem, would you consciously or unconsciously do things which would prevent you from serving people with red hair? And one would hope the answer would be no. Well, you most likely are doing things consciously or unconsciously to prevent the provision of proper services, fair and equitable services to people who are blind. And when it comes to lefties, there's more people with dyslexia than there are people that are left handed. And so you would ask the same series of questions to address that. So it's just a little me telling a story to help people hold on to, wait a minute, I'm left handed or my cousin has red hair or my cousin has red hair and is left handed or whatever the situation may be. And people start to get a, hey, it could be anybody in the room sort of thing. Anybody I know, anybody I work with, this dyslexic group is much larger. And also it's not easy, nigh on impossible, actually, to identify a person who is dyslexic when you look into an audience. You can generally tell if somebody has left hair, red hair, left hair, good. And you can also generally tell if someone is blind, but it's very difficult to just look into a crowd and say, oh, clearly those three people have dyslexia. So that's just a couple of groups. The that are represented in this category we call individuals with print disabilities. Thank you. And I hope everyone takes that story to heart, especially if you know redheads. The Michael, before I can ask another question, we already have one that has just come up. And this is from a wonderful person who works in canvas, actually, the technology I mean, not the other quality. And this question has to do with faculty. Amanda Rosenfly asks, any thoughts on how to inspire faculty to accessibility, design content for community or computer and mobile learning? If training is available, how do you motivate or require? And how do we check compliance constantly? Right. So that's a that's a minor dissertation for a response, so I'll condense that a little bit. So there there's some very nice tools out there. I understand that you're a canvas administrator, but as an example, Blackboard has a tool called Ally, which allows for some pretty slick conversion from word or whatever it is you're submitting into their tool to get converted into accessibility. I don't know if Canvas has a similar tool. The best way to inspire Kajol, whatever the appropriate verb there with faculty is to share some of those stories I just told you and to for yourself or others in your organization to attend events who are focused on this area. There's a wonderful conference every fall called A-H-G, Accessing Higher Ground, and this is the higher end community. And it's entirely focused on various accessibility issues. Not just blindness, lots of different accessibility issues. And the presentations there are fantastic. And there are a lot of people from community colleges, universities, et cetera, who say, and here's what I do with my faculty. So that's a good resource to go to. And the conference will be coming up again, I believe it's in November. So that's a great place to go. And perhaps you could find some things off of that from previous years to go about that. As far as compliance goes, one of the great things we tech people love about standards is there's lots of them and they're always moving. So compliance on accessibility is also a rolling standard, but it's very clearly delineated in WCAG. So this is a worldwide web consortium. WCAG 2.0 AA is sort of state of the art for online accessibility compliance. And those are available through the W3C. So again, not not a master's thesis, but just a quick response to those things. You'll find in accessing higher ground or in CSUN, CSUN, really good presentations from people who are living it every day on campus. And those people are typically very happy to share birds with feather type things. Thank you for that. For that really, really great answer. I just tweeted out a link to higher ground. So when I put a link to that in the chat as well, there are a few quick comments. People have said that Canvas has an instance of Ally or Canvas supports Ally, but it's expensive. And so they're sharing that as well. And Amanda mentions that they do all these trainings, but faculty don't participate. Any motivational angles? Any motivational angles that we could present? Sure. So let me address the ally point there. That wasn't a product endorsement or anything. I just didn't aware that we've worked with that group. There's some deal. There's a wonderful tool from Daisy, like the flower, Daisy.org, which is international organization called Word to EPUB, which is available at the level of discount price of free. And this will take your Word file and convert it into an EPUB file, and it will be as accessible as the Word file is to the assistive technology community. And that one, as I said, for the low low discount price of free from Daisy.org. As far as motivating factors, obviously, I don't know if it's obvious, but I prefer to stick on these higher order things that those of us who exist in this environment were here to serve a larger purpose, which is the dissemination, sharing and creation of knowledge. And certainly, if we're going to exclude groups of people, we are failing in that purpose. So that's the first area where I tend to work on. And then when you tell that story about there are more people that are dyslexic than are left handed and that they don't self identify, and so you as a professor or whatever level you are in your university to say, well, I don't have those people in my class is meaningless and dismissive. Because you probably did that the statistics would say, yes, you probably do. So share with them the scope and size of individuals with disabilities. And I always list this last because I hope it doesn't come to that. But the lawsuits are coming hard and heavy. Six months doesn't go by where somebody else doesn't get to Duke University. Just got sued in June. I'm not a lawyer or a legal commentator, but based on already settled law, I imagine they're going to lose. L.A. Community College got sued last fall, they lost. So I would imagine you could explain to your professors, do you want to be the reason why we get sued and lost? And, you know, there's a simple enough question that you can ask or perhaps your disability services office can ask as the courses are getting set for the following term, just ask the professor, is all the content in your class fully accessible or born accessible or whatever phrase is comfortable for you? So that's just a survey type question as they submit or get assigned courses and sections just say whatever it is you're going to present to your students, is it fully accessible? Simple question, which should start a meaningful conversation. On the library side, you should be or anybody who's buying content for the university, you should ask everybody who's supplying your content. Is your content third party certified as accessible? Because a lot of content creators will say, yep, we're really good at what we do. We promise and that that's a guy running a garage. We promise is to take good care of your car as opposed to AAA or whoever your independent value or choices. So it's just two easy questions to ask one towards the professor, one towards the people you buy content from to get this conversation moving. Thank you. That's a terrific set of options. And Amanda, thank you very much both for doing that work as well as for giving us this first question. I have a quick question about this, because I want to make sure that everybody everybody participates because this is a rich and sometimes very detailed field. You mentioned word to EPUB as a tool. And so I just tweeted that out from Daisy. The question is why EPUB? Why should we focus on creating content for that particular format? So EPUB is far and away the most accessible, friendly content format. It does things in the field definitions, which far outstrip any other format schema. Also, EPUB is and increasingly becomes more of a language of book data transmission from content provider to bookstore or Amazon or whatever. So from from a keeping the wheels of commerce so content can move effortlessly across institutions and borders and things like that. That's one, but it clearly has the the deepest set of attributes for accessibility and a paper just came out. I'm sorry, I don't have a link yet, but a paper just came out. I believe it was ended up being authored by Daisy with a conversation about this and it wasn't format wars. It was just explaining EPUB as opposed to say using something like PDF, which is sort of inherently inaccessible. It was not PDF's purpose when it got created. And so that's a good discussion topic, a good paper. And again, I apologize. I believe it was published on the 14th, so it should be out there, Brian. And I should have the link, but I don't off the top of my head. I'm sorry, because I'm wearing these headphones, which are on top of my head. So nothing else can come out. Thank you. Thank you for mentioning that. Thank you for answering my basic kindergarten level question. But friends, I'm asking this in part because I want to make sure that all of you feel comfortable asking these questions. Speaking of which, we have a question from the longtime participant in the forum. This is from Doyle Friskney, who says his grandson was born with ocular albinism, legally blind, and three had a brain tumor would be a senior this year. What do you expect the college he tends to provide as support? Well, most colleges and universities in the United States at least have disability services, offices, DSOs, and they have a wide range of technology, both physical and digital, and they're set up to help people with a variety of physical and learning disabilities to help them. So I can't speak to the particular institution because even if you told me what it was, I wouldn't know particularly what their policies are. But there should be an office, perhaps an office with a collective of people who are there specifically to assist. This is another example where when I mentioned those lawsuits before, the lawsuits are typically brought by the students themselves. We have a very different situation in higher ed than in K-12. In K-12, your average 11 year old doesn't understand this is a sense of agency or that they have legal protections or whatever. But by the time they get to college, most most students do. So I would I would hope and I would imagine that the educational institution itself would have a disability services office and they should have a variety of different technologies to support the learning environment. But those questions still hold, you know, ask of the professors. Is all of your content accessible? Ask the university to ask whoever they're buying things from. Are you doing third party certification? Third party certification, Lume's large. Doyle, thank you for sharing that and good luck to the lab. It's a tough semester for just about everybody. But good luck to him in particular. We also have a question from the from Tom Haines in Texas, another longtime friend and supporter of the program, someone who I almost always beam on stage just because I can't get enough of them. Tom, welcome. Oh, gosh, after that introduction. Good morning or good afternoon, actually. So I question them about I spend a lot of time with my students, both from the perspective of of literacy, as well as creation, doing a lot of visual stuff. The web and digital technology supports visual communication in ways that were not possible before. I do things like concept mapping. I'm getting them to go out on the web and find data in a visual format. And their and their final project is to create a website that I teach government that exposes a challenge that they develop over the course of the semester as it relates to government and some strategies for next steps and how to move that challenge forward. It could be everything from like health care, you know, expanding health care coverage to making sure everybody's vote is counted to you name it, there's a whole range of things. And I have concerns because I actually have ally on on cannabis. And, you know, and the visual elements that we use, obviously don't farewell under ally. Now, I mean, of course, I use all texts where possible, but some of the diagrams that end up being constructed can be fairly complex. And I always have to convert them into a graphic file. I'm using stuff like anything from mind node to dry, oh, that are not necessarily directly transferable into, say, canvas as an artifact. And I was wondering, you know, how do you navigate that? I mean, it used to be simpler for me to do the ADA stuff because I was only mainly dealing with text, but I moved fairly decisively in the visual direction. Right. So that's an excellent question. And I applaud you for already putting energy into it and for using a tool like ally. So this is probably, well, page navigation is the most complicated thing when you're trying to provide an equal learning environment for people with print disabilities, because a professor instructor would have people say, I need you to go from page 110 to 130, whatever. Well, if you're using a format, say like PDF as an example, you can't do that because PDF doesn't keep fidelity with the print book where you publish and do that. So that's the number one problem because if I can't even navigate, then what it is you're trying to teach me or show me is irrelevant. The next problem is for people with print disabilities, especially with low vision or no vision, is proper description of things that aren't words. Right. So this could be a picture of the Eiffel Tower. This could be an accounting work where it's a table nested inside of a table. It could be any kind of map or any of the things that you're talking about, right? So all text is the answer to do those proper descriptions and EPUB is the format, which allows you to describe those things up. Now you and I would have to have a sidebar conversation, maybe even pulling in my pals from Ally, which is just fun to say my pals from Ally. But to- Your allies from Ally? As opposed to my enemies from Ally, that doesn't make any sense. So particularly, and I'm happy to do so, Brian's got all my contact details. I'm happy to have a conversation with you about specifically how could you solve this in there? But I can tell you, as somebody who thinks about this every minute of every day, proper alt text and long descriptions for anything that isn't text and delivered in an EPUB format does address this issue. I see it all the time. So specifically on the web, there are a variety of ways to handle that. And again, we could spend a couple hours talking about it. So I offer just conversational services to you, Michael J at benetech.org. And we can try and hash out a particular solution for your particular content and your particular courses. Well, so far it hasn't been an issue. I'm sort of being a little proactive here. And I'm sure that if somebody, I mean, I tend to approach disability as I make it as good as I can and recognize that that's never gonna be 100%. And that if people still are having issues beyond that that I'm available to get them to that next level with whatever tools I can throw as the problem. But I mean, I do have, again, we do a lot of, we do concept mapping and some of the stuff gets fairly complex. I mean, you start talking about all of the different ways in which let's just say something actually fairly simple, separation of powers and checks and balances. If you start diagramming that with the students, you end up with a concept map with lots of different interconnecting lines and texts and stuff like that that is hard to encapsulate in an alt text, you know? And so that's my, you know, if it's a simple picture, yeah, that I can do. But when we're dealing with complex graphics and charts and also within the context of the students themselves produce, you know, they bring in a chart that shows voter participation among people over 65, over 25 years and have to somehow, you know, describe that and so on and so forth. Again, it hasn't really been an issue yet, but it's certainly something that I'm always concerned that we make sure that we can still push the ball forward on some of this stuff because visual learning is an incredibly powerful tool for those who can use it. And that's always the juggling act, right? Should I deny that, you know, in order to, you know, reach out to this population? And, you know, as a government professor, I understand reasonable accommodation pretty well. So I kinda, and I also, I used to be in an apartment where the technology, assistive technology person worked for me. And so she spent 10 years giving me an education on every aspect of all of this stuff, including chopping of books and all the, you know. But, and book, textbooks, by the way, is another issue. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, but I don't wanna take up any more time. I have lots of thoughts on textbooks, but let's see if there are other questions. And again, Michael J. has been at tech.org. Ask me any question you want. We have a lot. Okay, thanks. Tom, thank you. Thank you. I was gonna make a joke about Tom being from Texas and the freeze of reasonable accommodation, but I'm not gonna go there. But we did have a couple of quick follow-up questions. Michael, one was from Sarah San Gregorio, who asks, how does EPUB work with latex? I don't know the answer to that, but I will get an answer and send it to you. Thanks. And Bob, please feel free to email me if you want to connect on that. I'm sorry, that was Sarah San Gregorio. So Sarah, just shoot me a note. Bob Klein asks, you wanted to plus one Tom's question, but for mathematical symbols and graphs. Yeah, so this is no really simplistic, but we only have an hour and so I'm just gonna tell a quick story. If you take the content universe and divide it into two pieces, text and things that aren't text. So anything that isn't text, it's a picture of the eye for a tower, it's Da Vinci's betrubion man, it's an accounting table stacked inside another table, it's E equals MC squared, which is sort of technically text, but if it's an image or a picture of Einstein with it on the board behind him or something like that. So all the things that aren't text all have the same general directional answer, which is why is it there and what does it look like? So the person who's creating this thing needs to be able to answer those two questions by typing out those answers in just text. So there's a picture of the Eiffel Tower here because, because this is a engineering textbook on structural steel and the Eiffel Tower illustrates these points are those points, right? So firstly you need to say it's the Eiffel Tower with a good description about that. And then you need to explain why did the content creator bother to include it, not just in the book, but in this place, right? So the same would be true of a chart, of a graph, of a Venn diagram, of an illustration, whatever it happens to be, right? So in the universe, the overly simplistic universe where there's text and things that aren't text, you need to be able to find a methodology to describe it with text, the thing that isn't text, whatever it is, and you should do your best to describe it as well as possible. And this may sound simplistic, but I encourage you to have somebody almost sit next to you, but of course that's impossible to have somebody also looking at the thing and have them close their eyes and then you read to them what it is you wrote and see if they understand what the thing is that isn't text. Again, these are super simple examples and very straightforward paths to follow because I'm probably the only one on the call who spends all of their waking moments, but not all of most of my waking moments thinking about this. So I'm just trying to give you something you can hold on to and take away and say, okay, I get that. I need to be able to type in enough so that if somebody had their eyes closed and couldn't see whatever this non-text thing is, they would know what it was anyway. That's a real, that's an incredibly elegant way of starting to think about this. Thank you for the question. And Michael, thank you for that really. I mean that as an elegant answer, I just couldn't clarify a lot of stuff. I'm working on my next book and I'm already, you just made me rethink a couple of the graphics I wanted to include and how to use them. But we have more questions. We have more questions and comments just piling in. So I'm gonna bring up Jeff Alderson. Now, Jeff has two things to speak to. One of them is he works for a company that may be able to say more to Bob's question, but he also had an unrelated question of his own. So let me just bring up Bob. Hi guys. Hello, Jeff. Hi there. Thanks for having me up on the stage again. And like you said, I wear many hats. Nothing as epic as the wizard hat that I'm hoping I see again for you around the October 31st timeline. But so my first, just to follow up on what was said earlier about the math accessibility has been some questions about that. So I actually, so in full disclosure, I'm a product manager at MathWorks. My product is actually MathWorks only education technology product. It's called MATLAB Grader. It's an auto grading solution for MATLAB code. And MATLAB, if you're familiar with that in education, it's pretty ubiquitous when it comes to science and engineering data processing and visualization. And so when we talk about accessibility, we have to think about how math symbols, equations, plots, graphs, visualizations are accessible as well. And so when we go through our VPAT for accessibility testing for the learner interfaces and the instructor interfaces, we're really focused on making sure we have all the ARIA labels and everything, not just for the interfaces itself in terms of how you author the content, how it's displayed to the student, but also when the student is doing what if scenarios and iterations on math equations and programming and seeing the output that the output itself also has all the appropriate alt labels and ARIA texts and everything for that as well. And so that's one thing that we're doing pretty consciously. It's also interesting, I put this out there, is definitely ask if you're an instructor or you're an instructional designer looking for technology solutions, definitely look for those VPATs, for those technology solutions, really dig into them, find out what aspects are there because they're not all equal, right? Some people sort of look only at the learner interfaces and not the instructor interfaces or vice versa and you wanna make sure we're clear on what we're looking for or there might be certain significant aspects of the interfaces, right? So if I'm using a math product and there's an exception in the VPAT saying, everything's accessible except for when we render math equations, what's the point, right? So make sure that we scrutinize what people are actually claiming accessibility for. So that's just a little add-on to that conversation. So my other hat, I actually am the board chair for a nonprofit called Waypoint Adventure who does outdoor adventure activities for persons with disabilities in the Greater Boston area. You didn't know that, right? Unless you scrutinize my LinkedIn page. So I think about disability awareness all the time and this question actually came up and I have it because it's sort of this intersecting lines of my worlds, which is if I'm a young adult who's getting ready to go to college and I'm applying to colleges and I haven't gone through this process myself in a while but I guess my question for Michael is, is there an obligation on the part of the university and the application and admissions and first year enrollment process to solicit the disability status of the learner? And if the learner is solicited for their status and does not provide it, does that change the liability or the legal ramifications between the relationship of providing services and accommodations for that student, right? I guess distill it down. Is there any less of a burden on the institution if the student or their advocate or their parent does not advocate for the services at the right point in a certain process? Okay, wow. So I think I should just move to Boston so we could spend more time together because just, wow. I used to run a company up in Burlington. So I used to be when people went places in Metro Boston fairly often. Anyway, so not a lawyer, not offering legal advice or legal opinions, not representing the views of Benetech. What I believe is true, am I caveated enough there, Brian? Works for me too. What I believe is true is the university does not have an obligation to solicit that and or neither does the student have an obligation to pre-offer that information. I also believe it is true in any of those combinations in that truth table matrix. If you're not giving me direct equal treatment to all the other students, then you are in violation of at least ADA. So, and this is why every university that gets sued either immediately settles or loses because either you have a ramp instead of or in addition to stairs or you don't. There's not like a conversation. You can't say, well, these stairs are kind of rampy. That doesn't work like that. So the institution never wins because of the institutions in violation, they're in violation. I'm not a lawyer and I offer no legal opinion on this. I'm just telling you what I have learned. Now on the math stuff, we see a ton of this from the academic and textbook publishers. It is brutal, superscript, subscripts, Latin characters, Greek characters rather. It's a big deal. Now, Benetech happens to have, and I'll drop it in the chat here, Benetech has a project that we're working on called Math Share which attempts to create in an open source and free to use way, a kind of a show your math, show your work kind of environment for students who are attempting math. So that's a thought. There's an excellent group and we meet, I would say, religiously but not very faithfully, lumping those two things together. Once a week called EPUB and higher ed and we are constantly thrashing through how to handle superscripts and all these other kind of things and Daisy's involved, Benetech's involved, some folks who are on advisory panels for the W3C are involved. It's a relatively, it's a wide open group. And if I had that link ready at hand, I'd throw it to you. But it's basically EPUB and higher ed and it's just a community of people who are trying to address any content issue that's going to end up on a higher ed campus. We have campus people, we have publishers, we have software people, we have those of us from the accessibility community, a lot of stuff going on there. So you're welcome to jump in and participate in that as well to handle these issues. I'm definitely gonna check it out. So I think I responded to all the issues you raised, including the wow, I should move to Boston but I'm not going to, it's too hot. Yeah, it's interesting. We're in the Boston area, but it's opportunities for persons with disabilities for equal access, not just on the education front, but learning takes different forms, right? I think the thrust of today was learning in terms of the traditional classroom experience, that organization Waypoint Adventure is trying to create other learning experiences and other outdoor adventure and exploration, physical activity experiences that are more equitable as well, like kayaking, rock climbing, things that you might not expect the person with disability to participate in, but there are accommodations for them. And so it's good to be around people that take that intentionality, that state of mind and look at it from a positive way as opposed to a punitive way, right? You've used a couple of the examples about, I'm only focused on doing this as an instructor because I'm told to, because if I don't we're gonna get sued. Yeah, flip the script, look at how you felt when you graduated and got a credential, everyone should have that experience, everyone should have that, take that perspective and make that part of what you do. And I completely agree with that. And then that's why I list the legal thing as three out of three, but sometimes you have to swing a hammer to get people's attention. The first one is, this is just the appropriate social thing to do. The second one is, why would you ignore this percentage of your students? The third thing is, if you don't follow the first two, you're gonna get sued. The higher tech people are taking it pretty darn seriously. I just saw that there's a new CEO of McMillan Learning and she specifically mentioned her attention to accessibility and actually threw a little love our way at Benetech about how she got recognized and was elevated into that position because McMillan Learning is very good at accessibility. So that's just a variety. And again, all of this stuff and it's Brian's fault because he invited me, but I can talk for an hour on any of these topics. And you were talking about accessibility outside of the educational environment. So nobody will care about this, but me probably, but I'm a cricket fanatic, the sport cricket, which is clearly phenomenal, second most popular sport in the world. And blind cricket is a real thing. I mean, they're entire organizations in places like, well, all over the world. We have some of the balls in the office. If you're sure that you're sure. Yeah, exactly. So it is phenomenal to watch those people swin a bat at a chirping ball and play cricket. It's just so rewarding to see the interest and the excitement and the courage and the enabling technologies to help those people. That's a fantastic. Brian, you thought I couldn't fit cricket in. You thought I couldn't fit cricket in, Brian, but you were right. There's always a way. But thank you, Jeff, for the great work and a great question. And Michael, that's a great answer. I'm already making notes about when we have to bring you back to follow up this conversation. But we have more questions coming, more questions with all kinds. And I want to make sure that people get their turn to swing the bat, I'm trying here. This is one from the wonderful Roxanne Risken who asks about librarians. What's the role of librarians in supporting EPUB for purchasing books and digital assets? Okay, now no one will be shocked now when I open with a story. So my library pedigree, although not by degree, is extensive. I've been working with technologies in the library since 1985. I started with federal government libraries and then university libraries and the old OCLC networks and all those kind of things. That's how I got started in this business in 85. My lovely bride was an outpost librarian when she lived in West by God, Virginia. My eldest son is a public library director. My youngest son, not at this very minute because I told him he had to get off the internet, is currently enrolled at the University of Wisconsin online, getting his MLS. My middle son used to work for a publisher. I'm a personal member of the ALA, et cetera, et cetera. I used to work for Follett and so libraries are my thing, right? So the library has a number, it has incredible power to address this issue. So what I mentioned, those two questions where you would say to your content providers, are you third party certified? That's the number one thing a library can do. Can ask anybody with whom they're doing business, signing contracts, whatever, are you third party certified, accessibility certified? And if not, what is your timeline against which you will be measured and punitive actions will be taken if you don't comply for being third party certified? I can say specifically that EBSCO has been a very aggressive partner of ours. While they don't create a great deal of their own library content, they do have a number of platforms to deliver equal content in the libraries. And I've worked with them extensively. I've done some podcasting with them. I've done some co-presentations at various conferences, including the Charleston Conference on the Book and other webinar kind of things. So the number one thing that a library can do is ask and adjust your acquisition policies to say, are you third party certified? All right, the next thing is to be aware of all the other things we said. As we're supporting instruction, what do we have that's accessible that can help meet the instruction needs over here? To everyone in the university environment, I wanna say this, separate but equal is not equal. So if you have a different path that somebody has to go through to get content, so they have a meaningful learning experience, then I applaud you for putting that effort in, but you're not doing what you should be doing. You should be ensuring on the first day of class, everybody has what they need. Not on the first day of class, they discover there's a resource they can't use, and then they have to go away and wait days, weeks, months until they get the content. So there's this upstream piece where the textbook should or the instructional designer should or the library should ensure everything we have in support of government 155 is already accessible. So that was kind of a long answer, but I hope that's of some use. I hope so too, it was to me. And I loved the way you returned to the team of third party certification. Roxanne, as always, thank you for a great question. In the chat, we had a quick observation from Sarah Sanguario who mentions, she finds that students sometimes don't know what accommodations they can request or that they can ask for them. This may get better as students who get early intervention start coming into higher education. We have another video question that comes in from my colleague and sometimes student at Georgetown University, the splendid, splendid Ryan Downey. Hello, Ryan. Hello, Brian. It's always a pleasure. Thanks for coming. What would you like to bug Michael about? Well, you know, one of the themes that I keep hearing is how important it is to go through and put in alt tags for our visual content and to make sure that everything is accessible. With that small little request, that comes a huge amount of time and resource commitment from the faculty and other educator teams on campus. And so I'm just curious, what sorts of resources or what sorts of tips and techniques do you have to reduce that burden when we're looking, especially in the STEM field or some of these visually content-heavy areas where everything might be visually oriented? So are you talking about visual in the sense of not text or are you talking about visual in the sense of video because that becomes another sort of separate issue? You know, I think you've really started to expand beyond where I was starting this high. If we have a PowerPoint, and I'm just cringing thinking of it, that has 45 slides that are all chart graphs, anatomical. I'm gonna stop you there. I'm gonna stop you there. A PowerPoint with 45 slides, what are you doing, Ryan? Well, no, no, no. I think we have a separate conversation. So how do we work with these faculty? How do we bring them into the fold? How do we make this accessible to everyone and not just have faculty turn away when they're like, no, I don't have time for this? So again, I hate to go back to the law hammer, but it doesn't save anybody. Harvard a few years ago got sued because their online lectures were not closed captioned and it was an enormous, they lost almost immediately and it was an enormous thing that it take down a bunch of content. They had to spend a ton of money in remediation and content and things like that. So as always the case with digital things is just do it properly in the beginning, which is easy for me to say because I don't have to do the work, right? So you can even, believe it or not, in PowerPoint, there are some accessibility features in PowerPoint and you can actually ask PowerPoint, am I accessible? And it'll point out some of the most glaring errors. So that's actually baked in to PowerPoint as a creation device. Working with professors, I would go through those three steps. We're an educational institution. We're here about the creation and sharing and inspiration of knowledge. We should do this so everyone has a chance to absorb it. Second, there are a bunch of people in your class who need this, whether you can tell by looking at them or not and then go ahead and swig the legal hammer if you need to. You hear me give those same answers because that's the way you need to deal with whoever the people that you're dealing with it, right? It's the right thing to do. It's the just fair thing to do. There's an enormous audience which will probably never raise their hand or speak up but still need to be served. And if you don't do those things, you are going to get sued. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely- And some of the bridge courses I did. So how do we bridge that gap with the faculty who are like, how do I take my slides and put them into PowerPoint? How do we get those people who are like, what is Canvas? What is Blackboard? How do I do this digital thing? And so how do we bridge that gap and get them to do it right from the beginning when we're still in the phase of how do I use my mouse to get my pictures into the internet? Yeah, yeah. So I'm talking about space flight and you're talking about fire. So I mean, I understand that the scale on which the audience would be listening, right? So I'll point you back to AHG and some of the sessions from people who are solving that problem every day. And also feel free to reach out directly to me, MichaelJayatbenetech.org. I was born and raised in DC. My nephew just graduated two years ago from Georgetown. So I'm all good there, local home stuff, but not that that helps with your accessibility questions, just making a connection. So reach right out to me and say, here's an example or I'm going to send you a deck. Can you fix it or what would you suggest I do to fix it or whatever? And I will, I'm not going to fix it for you, but I might point you to a resource to say, look, here's the thing or have them read this or you read it and then say to them or whatever, because I promise you, you're not the only person on a college campus that's having this problem. And there are lots of people who are actually having some success with addressing this, shall we say, instructor education issue. And there have been a lot of people going back to the EPUB question. I've had a lot of people even in the disability services office who say, hey, we agree that EPUB is the best format, but we are still working with the books that professors are insisting put on their syllabus that were published in 1999. There is no digital version, let alone an EPUB version. The publisher's not going to do anything about it. So I have to remediate basically in PDF. We're going to buy it, strip the spine, scan the pages into all that crud because there's no other option. So there's no universal option. If the accessibility fairy bonked us over the head while we slept tonight and everything was created perfectly starting tomorrow morning, we have hundreds of years of not created perfectly to deal with still. And the ecosystem, your learning management system, your class registration system, your library management system wouldn't understand the files anyway. So this is one of Zeno's paradox where we're never going to hit the target, we're going to move there or move ever closer. And I realized that there is a gradient on which an individual professor sits. And so I will do what I can, punch a day's age, like I said, but if you want to send me a direct question, go ahead, I'll help. Fantastic, well, thanks so much. Ryan, thank you, thank you. And again, Michael, that's a terrific question from, I love the image of Zeno on this. We have more questions coming and friends, we only have about five minutes left. So I want to make sure everyone gets a chance to share their thoughts. This is one that comes from David Hull at the National University, who mentions that a majority of students in his classes are international students on F1 visa. Would you be able to comment on how digital accessibility is working to support these students? Well, so there are a number of issues here. First is this could be a distance learning issue because maybe they aren't here depending on the visa situation and where they were on the right Tuesday or whatever. So now you're all distance learning which is all primarily digital. So that would be one circumstance that everything we've talked about today, especially the EPUB format goes into helping with accessibility issues for distance learning. The other thing is there are language filled features built right into the EPUB format and we have accessibility shifts about language. So it's not going to be upset if the word Olay is in an English sentence because that's just a term we use in English all the time. If in your work we're suddenly gonna switch into Russian for a paragraph, then the EPUB format will announce that there'll be a language shift into Russian and the assistant technology will know that and then have the user experience be in Russian to help that learner. Now I'm not saying it's gonna translate the whole thing from English to Malay or whatever. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying in this format in EPUB it is where, especially in academic works that you get these language shifts all the time. So that's just a couple of simple examples. I need a more specific problem to speak to a more specific solution but that's a quick response. Well it's a good question. David I'm really glad you brought the International Students which is a topic in a population that is very, very trouble right now. And we have some thanks coming in the chat especially as we come to the end of me. Just Michael, would you be up for a question about learning management systems? Sure. Okay, so this is- You didn't say what I'd be up for answering yet but I'll ask you a question, sure. What is the different from Charles Findlay asked? What support is available to faculty who are differently able to use the LMS? I remember in the past when a person asked for support or accommodation they weren't rehired. So again, not being a lawyer and certainly not being a personnel lawyer that sounds kind of illegal to me. So the ADA is very clear which is anybody and everybody who has a disability needs to be accommodated. Again, that's not a legal opinion. So I don't know the particulars around that that certain case. More and more of software packages which derive a significant portion of their revenue from institutions which spend public funds because this is really where you get hit with ADA violations, are doing a better and better job. Desire to learn as an example. It does an excellent job with accessibility. Canvas does a good job with accessibility. Blackboard, not so much in the Blackboard tool in a raw fashion but with their ally tool are doing it. So the learning management systems in general are pretty good. It starts to break down when you move into some of the open source ones because they don't have necessarily the commercial liability and or they don't have that. I will make or lose the sale motivation as much as the commercial vendors do. So I'm not saying the open source people are bad. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying I don't see the same level of attention in detail and specificity paid by that group of learning management systems as opposed to the others I mentioned. Well, thank you. That's a good question. And we have a couple more follow-up questions and I'll just, we have time for one. This is Bob Klein who's been very patient with me. He says, let's turn the question around. Let's not ask about faculty, but how do we work with students to help them ask for accommodation? Accessibility, disability, part of the American story. And I'd hope to see students prepared to understand it as they leave high school, regardless of the next step. How do you encourage students to do this? Yeah, this is a day long answer, but I'll give it to you in a dramatically compressed fashion. So one of the main problems for students on the first day of college is our public K-12 system does very little to actually help them understand their rights and what should be available to them because the majority of the school districts in America view any of these types of learning challenged groups as additional resource strains, additional funding drains. And so they don't tend to do very much to educate the students or the parents about the house and the what's things that are available out there in the world. They may have a PDF remediation shop and use some data technology like Kurzweil or something like that to at least get some content in front of students very rarely on the first day of class, very rarely in the first month of class, but they'll do that and IEPs and various other programs force the districts to do something about it. But the districts for a broad variety of reasons, I'm not casting shade, I'm just saying the reality of in an organization which is operating serving 55 million people who speak over 100 languages and span coast to coast and border to border, it's out with no central organization is very complicated for K-12 to have a particular thought about these things. So typically these students are again, however separate but equals not equal, they're isolated, they're given whatever the current practices in the district to address this issue and hope for and helped along the way. And then they get to college and they assume that they'll be in the same level of separation and they don't know that they have agency, they have legal rights and that on the first day of school they have the right to have everything available to them, which is why I don't like to talk about the lawsuits but it's not possible to not do it. Every institution who tries to not do it gets sued and loses. And I mentioned Harvard, I mentioned Duke, these are not small community colleges in rural Wisconsin, these are major institutions. And so the best way to educate students at any point is for the institution to talk about something like this as much or as frequently as they talk about rock climbing walls or cafeteria plans or anything else which they view as beneficial for the students. So the fact that we're a welcoming community, whether it's inclusion, racial diversity, varying abilities, all that kind of stuff, this should be part of the program. Because again, the groups impacted here are enormous and you don't automatically know by looking at somebody that they have this disability and they might not even know. I don't know how many benefit, beautiful benefit stories we have of people who were just told they were dumb or lazy or something like that until they were diagnosed with dyslexia and then they started using our bookshare program and they went on to achieve amazing things. We had one student in particular who had that and his mother wouldn't accept that he was dumb because she knew him, so she would read to him. She's doing the dishes, doing the laundry, making dinner. She would read the books to him and he would do fine in school. Then he was diagnosed with dyslexia and he found bookshare. He moved very rapidly up in his class rank, went on to, I believe it was Cornell and now it works for Microsoft and their accessibility program. So that's just one story out of 55 million students. But you find that these people who are working so hard just to try and not get any further behind because they can't keep up. Once they get a tool that allows them sub-level of equal footing, they are already super determined. You're gonna use that tool to great effect. That's a great story and a great answer, Michael, to a terrific question. Bob adds in the chat, we certainly need everyone's talents right now to confront our challenges. In the chat, there's just a ton of thanks for everything you've said today. There's a whole bunch of please for sharing your email. And there's also a whole string of technologies out there. But I have to pause our session because we're past the end of the hour. We blew past the full hour itself. Michael, please, thank you so much. This is inspiring and extremely useful. Do you, what's the best way for people to find you? Is it via email or by going to the Bantech site or to the board accessible link on the bottom left of the screen here? I just, I don't know if it'll come up but I just threw my email in the chat. It's Michael J. Johnson at benetech.org. Ask me any question you want about cricket, about Wisconsin, maybe about some feasibility issues, beards, whatever. I'm happy to help. I am not the guru that Brian says I'm not a guru. I'm not a wizard. I might be like a garden gnome or something. But I do work on this a great deal. And I have access to me internally at Benetech and to the various other associations to which we belong. An incredible amount of information on these topics. And our mission is every book for every reader every day. So if I could help any one of you get a few more books or a few more readers towards that every, every, every, that's a job well done for me. So please let me help you. Thank you. And thank you for helping us for this past hour. Looking forward to bringing you back. Take care, my friend. Don't everyone leave yet though because we have just a point out for next time. Next time we're coming back to discuss HiFlex. We also have sessions coming up on faculty of color and accrediting agencies, accessibility and admissions. If you'd like to keep talking about these issues, please tweet out like some of you've been doing or use our groups in LinkedIn or Facebook or Slack Gen. If you'd like to dive into the past of more than 200 recordings, more than 220 recordings, you can just head to YouTube. Just go to tinyworld.com slash FTF archive. And thank you all for such great, great questions and great resourceful statements and sharing of information. Thank you all for your passion on this really vital, vital topic. Above all, please everyone in this extraordinary time, take care of yourselves. Best of luck in this really weird semester and stay safe. We'll see you online. Bye-bye.