 Welcome to the industry updates and expert perspectives session of the accessible publishing summit in this session will be hearing from a number of individuals who have key information to share from their respective areas of expertise. These presentations and updates will have useful information for everyone was a stake in accessible publishing. Without further ado, I think I'll get started so we could quote unquote bring up a spotlight key Edwards and Deborah Nelson, I'll introduce them. Kate Edwards and Deb Nelson, Deborah Nelson are going to talk a little bit about publishing Kate Edwards is the Executive Director Association of Canadian publishers where she leads the Association's government relations and advocacy program and oversees their communication development and marketing initiatives, and Kate also sits on the boards of even Canada, work in culture and Canada FBM 2021. Kate is presenting together with Deborah Nelson who's the CEO of even Canada, Deborah has over 25 years experience in Canadian publishing and has provided change management services to support sustainable digital implementation at the school district and provincial level across her background includes working with large organizations to help some develop and achieve their strategic plans and to are doing a lot in bringing, you know, getting digital publishing accessible top has it over to you two. Thanks Leah, and good afternoon, everyone or good morning depending on where you are in the country. I'm really pleased to be with you today to share a little bit about what we've been up to since we last were together back in January 2020. I will confess that when I was reviewing my notes from that summit it was quite a surreal experience we were in a different place in so many ways but it's really great to be with you again in this virtual setting and thanks to Nels for making it possible. The big project that we were undertaking at the time and that was completed last spring was a research report that was made possible by Canadian Heritage through the Canada Book Fund and thank you to the Book Fund for their support of that work. Our counterparts in French speaking Canada, the Association Nationale des Etudes de Vivre completed a complimentary report on the French market so that's available to for those interested in Quebec. The report that ACP and E-Bound completed did bring together pre-existing and original research to set the stage for future collective activity, specifically with respect to the accessible publishing initiative that is being spearheaded by CBF, the Canada Book Fund, sorry for the acronym, and our focus was on the English speaking market in Canada. So it included gathering the information, the perspectives of various stakeholder groups, many of whom are participating in the summit. In doing that work, a primary motivation and consideration was to ensure that the experience and input from people with print disabilities underpinned that report but also the recommendations for any projects that will be undertaken coming out of that study. It really was meant to set forward looking and action oriented initiatives. I do want to highlight a component of the report on which Nels conducted on our behalf, which was a report called How Do You Read, which was based, it was essentially a market research study based on focus groups and a survey of readers who use accessible and that has become really important for us as publishers but also I think has useful insights for our partners in library and retail. So thank you to Nels for their partnership on that work and to everyone who took part in sharing their experiences and opinions. But Deb is going to talk a little bit about where we've, what we've done with the findings but the, the, the three main components of the report if anyone hasn't seen it. It includes a landscape review which is essentially a snapshot of where the industry was in in spring 2020 with respect to the production and distribution of accessible books. It looks at standards and certification and how internationally recognized programs could be implemented in Canada. And then finally an awareness and training implement which suggests strategies for buildings support for the production discovery and distribution of accessible books. Among the various stakeholders and and links in the book supply chain and related sectors. So that's sort of the past what's what's happened in the last year and Deborah is now going to update you on how we're responding to the recommendations and findings of that study. Great. Thank you Kate. Can everybody hear me. I'm gonna. Great. Um, again, my name is Deborah Nelson. I'm the CEO of you bound. Most of you, I've had the pleasure of meeting. If it wasn't last year was certainly in the previous number of years, as Kate said, I'm going to talk about the landscape research report and sort of the go forward strategy. The landscape research report took about six months of intensive work to gather all the information in the three areas Kate had just mentioned. There was a 200 page report and had 108 recommendations on how to proceed which at first seemed quite daunting, but upon reflection and analysis. Most of the recommendations fell into four categories, two of which were aimed at publishers as they move forward to creating accessible content. And the other two were aimed at our two types of vendors which are librarians and retail vendors, and starting a conversation around, you know, awareness and understanding of the ecosystem and the information that needs to flow through their, their portals so to speak, so that the accessible content that the publishers develop are discoverable, and can either be borrowed or purchased. For the purpose of today, I'm going to be talking about the first two recommendations the ones that focus on publisher support, because those are the ones that you bound and ACP are taking an active role in. So, the first recommendation from publishers was they really were asking consistently for a clear set of accessibility standards, and a certification process that would ensure adherence to those standards. They wanted to make sure that everybody was going to be producing to the same quality and that their content would be searchable. So to support this recommendation, you bound with the generous support of the Canada Book Fund is going to be piloting a Bennett Benetech certification process. So over the course of the next nine months starting in April so from April through to December, we will be receiving training for a handful of certifiers from Benetech. We will then work with 20 volunteer publishers over the course of those that nine months, the publishers all being on different places on the continuum some just starting their accessibility journey, some almost reaching their destination. We will then get get bring people bring publishers all to the same place where their content is certifiable, and then we will send it off to our Bennett Tech trainers to make sure that those standards are being here too. And at the end of this because it's a pilot the whole goal is to do two things. One is to assess what the user experience was whether this process really provided support for the publishers in the way that they needed it. At the time that they needed it, acknowledging that most publishers have unique workflows. So it's going to be sort of, you know, analyzing and rating user experience. If it is an experience that the publishers recommend was a good one, we will even until then assess sort of the cost and the time associated with scaling this nationally. So we as a community can make a decision within the next, you know, 10 months whether or not this is a process that we'd like to continue. The second set of recommendations that we heard consistently from publishers was to create an online centralized portal for Canadian publishers where they can find online support when they want it and when they need it. So we heard long stories of the overwhelming process of, you know, Googling how to achieve this goal when trying to create accessible content and getting hundreds of hits and from different countries and different languages all of them sort of, you know, working towards the same goal but doing it in different ways. So in response to making access to this information, a one-stop shop eBound, again, with the generous donations from the Canada Book Fund, is going to be developed, is going to develop an online portal that includes best practice resources and professional development materials for publishers. We will work closely with publishers to tag those assets to make sure that they will appear in the way that responds to what publishers are asking for. So it'll have a little bit of artificial intelligence attached to it. One of our key partners working on this element of our work, of course, is going to be males who will be assessing all the contents that is housed in this platform to make sure that it is of the highest quality and that it does align with our overall standards. This work will actually kind of map on to exactly the same timelines. It'll happen from April through to the end of December of 2021. I got that right. We will then go into beta taste testing with publishers, probably for the first quarter of 2022, and then hopefully make small tweaks and have a launch sometime in 2020. Again, this will only be useful for publishers. If we are lucky enough to get your voice at the table, I know you're very busy, but we will be reaching out to you, asking for you to complete yet another survey, and hopefully speak to us and help keep us on the right track as we go through trying to build these supports for you. I know as we set up front, we are not in a position to answer any questions right now because of time, but I am around for the next couple of days and available through email all the time. And I just want to say that I look forward to working with you all and learning with you all over the course of the next couple of days. Thank you Kate and Deborah. Yeah, we're looking forward to doing a lot of that work or helping along and it should be really interesting there's a lot to do but a lot of dedicated people to do it so it's pretty cool. I'm now going to pass the torch over to Daniela Levy-Pinto of NELS and Lori Davidson of CELA. Just give an introduction to them briefly. We heard from Daniela earlier but I didn't introduce her at that time. So Daniela Levy-Pinto is an expert in accessibility including digital technology and livable spaces. She has been a user of assistive technologies for more than two decades in her different roles in academic and professional settings. She's the project coordinator with the National Network with NELS where she works to promote and inform a paradigm shift towards born accessibility and inclusive design. And she also holds a PhD in political science from the University of Toronto. And Lori Davidson is the executive director of the Center for Equitable Library Access or CELA and she's passionate about building an accessible landscape for all. She has more than 20 years of experience working as a librarian and a technologist in a variety of settings and I'm excited to hear from the pair of them. Pass it over, thank you. Thanks Leah. I'll start out. Daniela and I are going to kind of tag team back and forth on our speaking notes today. So in terms of an industry update on alternate format production and libraries, we pulled together some information to touch on libraries and to touch on alternate format production but lots of conversations that contribute to this landscape. Other groups that also are a part of this discussion. So organizations such as CELA and NELS, we've solidified at our places as necessary public service for public libraries and related stakeholders to ensure equitable access to reading for people with print disabilities in Canada. I just to note that there are other related organizations in Canada that provide accessible reading services. These are folks that work with the K to 12 sector in the post secondary sectors such as Arrow and Ontario and PRCBI and BC and many others. There is also our French counterpart in Quebec, the BANQ, which also provides accessible reading services to their users with print disabilities. And as I think we've heard the statistic, there's probably more than 3 million people in Canada who have print disabilities, yet still there's only about 93, approximately 93% of published content is still not available in accessible format. So all of this movement towards accessible publishing, born accessible publishing is really important to create that equitable reading landscape but to acknowledge that there is still a great deal of work to be done to get that published content into accessible format. And much of the work that CELA and NELS organizations like ourselves do, it's made possible by the exception in the Canada's Copyright Act, which allows for the production of materials and accessible format for people with print disabilities. The Copyright Act uses the term perceptual disabilities and it basically includes three areas that they outline those with vision impairment or vision loss, physical disability that results from the physical disability that results in the inability to hold a conventional book, and also learning or cognitive disabilities such as dyslexia. So these are the, and each of these kinds of disabilities create different sorts of needs on the part of the user with regards to content format, sort of the reading device or assistive technology that they use. And our goal is to create that accessible reading landscape for all of our diverse needs of users. I'm not going to hand it over to Daniella and she'll talk a little bit about specifically where NELS is working in this area, and then I'll do a bit of an overview of CELA's work in this area and then we'll talk about some of the current work that is underway. Daniella. Thank you, Laurie. So I will talk a little bit about what NELS is doing. First of all, first and foremost, NELS creates and maintains a repository of accessible books, both e-books and audio books. And very importantly, NELS is an advocate for an accessible reading landscape. And our team, the NELS team includes a broad range of people with different print disabilities, including blindness, low vision and dyslexia, learning disabilities. They advise publishers and librarians and technology vendors to prevent barriers to content. And through different initiatives working with different stakeholders, NELS provides education for librarians, publishers, technology vendors about what needs to be done to ensure that content and services are accessible for a truly inclusive and equitable landscape. NELS also consults with publishers to help them identify the work required to create content that is accessible. We are also working with publishers to improve accessibility of audio books. And this includes looking into text and audio synchronization as well. We are testing the accessibility of reading applications, websites and platforms, and developing guidelines and tools to streamline production of accessible formats. And of course, we convene the Accessible Publishing Summit. So we are doing a lot of work in this area. And now I'll pass it on to Laurie to talk about what CELA is doing in this area. So, you know, our overarching goal is to ensure that public libraries are able to provide access to reading materials for people with print disabilities that are inclusive, barrier free and equitable. So to that end, you know, we offer an ever expanding collection of close to, we have now close to 900,000 accessible books, newspapers and magazines. We also produce accessible content through our partnership with CNIB. And this includes human-narrated audio, human transcribed braille, print braille children's books and accessible e-text. We also provide a range of delivery options for our variety of users that includes digital delivery of zip files and we also have a direct-to-player service. But we also do hard copy circulation of print braille and also provide embossed braille on demand to our users as well as distributing audiobooks on CDs. We provide training and support to libraries and users and we also work closely on form partnerships with our publishers, distributors, and we also work with the other libraries around the world that serve people with print disabilities. And we're really working with the Benefit of the Marrakesh Treaty to begin to share collections across borders. So Daniela is now going to talk about some of the areas of work in terms of building that accessible reading landscape. So for an accessible and equitable reading landscape, many pieces need to be in place. The momentum around the born accessible initiatives and the work that is currently being done in Canada by ACP, eBound, different publisher associations, and of course independent publishers is very exciting and necessary. Accessibility in libraries is also very important as mainstream libraries work to ensure that mainstream services are accessible both digital and physical. And both NELS and SILA can support these areas of work through our expertise background and networks. Over the past year, NELS and SILA have been working in a number of projects funded through heritage thanks to the Canada Book Fund. I will just mention a few of them here. So NELS worked with the Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association to assess publisher files and look into publishers workflows to identify the work they need to do to produce accessible eBooks. NELS is also working with the Book Association, sorry Association of Book Publishers of BC to build a collection of accessible content. This is BC content. As Kate from ACP mentioned a bit earlier, NELS undertook the Landscape Review project. How do you read? This was in collaboration with SILA to look at the reading needs, preferences and habits of people with disabilities in Canada. And out of this study, there came several recommendations to inform the strategy for an accessible reading landscape to ensure that publishers and public libraries have all the information they need to better serve readers with disabilities. We did this through national survey and focus groups and we obtained information about knowledge about technology, comfort with technology and demographics that are key to inform the next pieces. NELS and SILA also collaborated in the awareness and training strategy for public libraries in Canada project, which explored training needs among, well, in public libraries in Canada, in particular to ensure that they can add content that is accessible at all stages of the workflow, including procurement processes, acquisition, cataloging, of course, any needs for training staff and awareness among public librarians. As a result of this project, as we identified the needs, NELS and SILA are now beginning a collaborative project also funded thanks to the Canada Book Fund to create a consolidated nationwide library resource center to focus on creating awareness and training needs for librarians and to ensure that they have all the information and resources they need for acquiring and procuring digital content that is accessible in addition to the platforms to find this content. So all the work, all this work is being done, but there is a lot of other work that needs to be done to ensure an equitable and accessible reading ecosystem for all the work needs to be done and I will start mentioning some of the specific pieces and ways in which NELS and SILA are contributing to this and will continue to contribute to this and why it is essential to have these organizations for an equitable reading landscape. So NELS and SILA provide access to all content that is not accessible. Only a fraction of content is currently made accessible. Of course, there is an increase in the availability of content being accessible by independent Canadian publishers, some new titles for sure, and some backlist titles, but there is content that will most likely never become accessible commercially or commercially available in an accessible format. This includes content, well, backlist titles, but also content from some international and multinational publishers. So NELS and SILA continue to ensure that readers have access to this content and that there are no gaps, especially with some formats that our users need, specifically Braille and daisy format. So NELS and SILA continue to provide and deliver these formats. Also, NELS and SILA provide expertise, as I was mentioning earlier, and these expertise are essential for to ensure that the reading landscape continues to be equitable. Building and maintaining such a landscape requires ongoing assessments, evaluation, training and awareness among all the different stakeholders including publishers, content developers, librarians, and NELS and SILA organizations like these are critical to ensure that the focus on accessibility is sustained and the services are indeed accessible. That nothing will be falling through the cracks and to ensure the focus on accessibility is ongoing and continuing. I will now pass it on to Laurie to talk about other areas. Thanks, Daniela. I'll just finish up quickly and I know we're, I want to make sure that we don't take up too much time here. So just to identify three other areas that I think are really critical to be thinking about in this landscape as industry based production of accessible material also happens. One is our ability, Canada's ability to participate in the Marrakesh Treaty to not only make materials from other countries available to our readers but also for Canada to be able to offer our accessible materials to people with print disabilities worldwide. I think it's also really important to acknowledge that we are organizations that provide support and services to people with print disabilities, many who face economic and social barriers. And so we really need to make sure that we continue to offer format choice based on the needs of the individual in order to build an equitable reading ecosystem and this choice can be related to the format of the material. It can be to the specific nature of a person's print disability and inability to learn new technology or lack of comfort with technology, limited financial means and also poor internet connectivity or no connectivity at all. And we also need to make sure that all of the reading systems and tools are also accessible and that is a whole other part of the conversation that also still needs a lot of work in order to make sure that the entire ecosystem for reading is accessible. So just to conclude, I'll say that I think both of us are excited obviously to be here at the summit and for taking all of the important conversations. And of course equitable access to a reading landscape is our cornerstone. And we want to do this in collaboration with all of our stakeholders and partners. So thank you. Thank you so much. And Laurie. Yeah, there's a lot of exciting work going on with Nelson. And I look forward to hearing about it in the rooms in the next couple of days. Next up, we're going to hear about standards current standards from Wendy Reed. Wendy is the accessibility and publishing standards lead at Rakuten Kobo where she leads the company wide accessibility efforts and adoption of new technical standards. She's also the chair of the working group chair of the audio books working group and editor of the audio books specification at the W3C and rumor has it sometimes she even sleeps. I'm going to pass it on to you, Wendy, so we can hear about standards. Thank you. Thanks Leah. Thank you everyone for allowing me to join you today and talk a little bit about standards. 2020 was a wild year for any number of reasons, but it was also really big year for standards. Two major things happened in 2020. The first one was the publication of the audio books recommendation which is W3C speak for a full standard of specification. Both audio books and publication manifest were published by the publishing working group at the end of 2020 in November. And this means that both of these specifications have been tested and vetted by multiple implementers to prove that they work in the real world. With audio books being published. It's now last year I think we spoke a lot about oh it'll be so good when audio books gets published. Now it's implementation. Now it's real. And so now the next phase is looking for more and more companies publishers, distributors and reading systems to implement this specification. And to get feedback on it. As Leah mentioned I'm still the chair of the audio books working group and the role of the working group now has shifted from developing a specification to maintaining a specification. And this means that we're looking for, you know, maybe some features that we missed in the first round, or bugs that have come up when you, you know when multiple people start implementing something that's often where you find cases that you've missed. And so this working group has been formed just to make sure that we keep on top of the spec and keep it modern and keep it working for our community at large. The other really big news that came last year was the formation of the EPUB working group. The EPUB three working group was formed to do a couple of things. Some of them are bit, bit difficult to, you know, kind of contextualize but one thing about EPUB is that it's never been a web standard. Web standards like HTML or CSS are well known and have been tested and vetted over a long period of time. And the publishing community joined W3C. They, EPUB came with them, but we never made EPUB a web standard. So with the formation of the EPUB working group, that is what we are doing. We are taking EPUB and running it through the process that the W3C has developed to bring web standards to to the public. And a lot of that, it's a lot of process. A lot of it is about testing, which is something we've never done with EPUB before. We've never tested it against the reading systems and user agents that use it. Accessibility is a really major part, making sure that we're as accessible as possible for all users and that the format doesn't present any accessibility challenges. We've never done any internationalization. All of these things that we've never had to do with EPUB before, we now have to do as a working group. So testing is the biggest part and the thing that we're working on right now. Testing will allow us to understand features within EPUB that don't work or maybe have never been implemented. It's really key for us to understand the interoperability problem that many people complain about with EPUB reading systems where you open an EPUB on one platform and it works completely differently on a different platform. So we're hoping to kind of smooth out some of those rough edges by testing and understanding how those features are implemented. Most of what we can do is around the refinement of language and that's a lot and that's much of what you'll see in EPUB 3.3, which is the temporary version name that we've given it. It'll still be EPUB 3. It'll always work regardless of if your EPUB was produced today or five years ago, but we want to make these small changes to kind of bring EPUB even closer to the future that we want for it. Another important revision that we'll be making as a working group is updating the accessibility for EPUB specification. Anyone who's seen this, it's been around for a while and it's still a very valuable document, but one thing that we want to do in the next year or so is actually update it to reflect the requirements of the European Accessibility Act as well as some other legislation that has either already been enacted or is coming down the pipe. We want to make sure that publishers that are in these jurisdictions can use the EPUB accessibility specification to help them meet those requirements and to understand what they need to do. So you'll see those revisions very soon. They're actually coming out probably in the next couple of weeks and we're really just trying to make sure that all of the specifications meet the requirements that people need to meet legally. Some other fun things that we are also working on in the standard space is we are investigating what can be done about fixed layout accessibility. This likely won't become an official specification, more likely to become something like a best practices document, but we do know that it's a big problem, especially with publishers who maybe publish image heavy content like comics or cookbooks. We want to make sure that that content can be as accessible as possible, even within the constraints of the format. And the last really exciting thing that I hope everyone here takes away is that we've reformed and revived the publishing community group. The publishing community group is the public facing side of the standards effort. If anyone can join you do not need to be a member of the W3C and that group is focused on all things publishing technology. It could be EPUB, it could be publishing on the web, it could be audio books. It could be your crazy new idea that you've, you want to try out, but you need some technical minds on it. Where everyone is welcome. We're also working on things like documentation, so publishing new docs to help people build better EPUBs, as well as just resources for more, you know, for more people to understand the intricacies of EPUB, as well as other publishing standards. And it's a place where you can go to ask questions and provide feedback. And we'll make sure to share links to all that stuff in the chat. But that is the major update for the standards landscape right now. A lot of things are going on. We never stop. And we do occasionally sleep though. And we look forward to all of your feedback and implementation. Thank you so much Wendy. I'm actually going to, I'll create a document in the Google Drive that I've shared with everyone called standards related links or something like that and then if you want to toss them in there. I'll set you up that just so we're trying to keep things in one place. Yeah, thank you. There's a lot going on there. It's cool. Now we are going to hear from Daisy's Sarah Hilderly, who's going to tell us about the exciting happenings at Daisy. Sarah worked in publishing in the United Kingdom for many years before taking the lead on the World Intellectual Properties Organization project enabling technologies. She's the author of accessible publishing best practices guidelines for publishers, as well as many other resources on the accessible books consortium website. After that Sarah took on the role of community engagements at the IDPF, which I can't remember what that stands for, but that's okay. But which included running EPUB zone until the integration with the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C. She now works at the Daisy Consortium and at Inclusive Publishing. And she's passionate about accessible publishing and a great advocate for accessibility within publishing. And she is delighted to have it a bit. So thank you, Sarah. Pass it over. Thanks, Leah. Hello everyone. It's so nice to be here amongst so many familiar faces, but for those of you I haven't met before. It's a pleasure to be with you. And I hope I look forward to happier times when we can all meet in person. But like you, I'm sure I miss not being able to have a face to face summit this year, but I am really delighted that we've got this opportunity to reconnect with each other. Update everyone on what's new and learn from the experiences of this esteemed group. So I just like to thank Leah and her team at Nels for organizing such a tremendous event. So I'd like to use my brief time with you here today just to let you know how Daisy can connect you to and involve you in our various initiatives and how you can benefit from the wide variety of activities that we managed to find ourselves involved in. Most people here are familiar with the work of the Daisy consortium and inclusive publishing. And if you need further information I urge you to spend some time looking at our websites and seeing for yourselves how wide our reach has become. Daisy has been leading standards and good practice in accessible digital publications for over 20 years. And we're active in many countries providing guidance training technical development work and accessibility news and information, creating a hub where everyone can find out and learn about accessibility within their own environment. I'm going to mention a few, a number of resources, this during this brief session, and Leah has really kindly created a Daisy page in the summit Google Drive, for which I think you will have the link. And you'll be able to find those website links and resources that I'm going to be talking about this afternoon, together with my contact details so if you want to ask me any questions, or if you need more information do please just get in touch. So this year you would have seen that in response to our annual seasonal survey and the global pandemic, we began a webinar series, and we've been overwhelmed by the success of this program, which focuses on a wide variety of accessibility topics and ranges from workshop style events to discussion channels, and more traditional presentation sessions. You can access all of these webinars on our sites where you can listen to them on YouTube, access to transcripts or slides or read the general overview that I've written for each session. These webinars are continuing this year. And if you'd like to be involved in any of these do let us know we'd love to talk to you about your ideas and different angles. And it's in initiatives all over the world and it's exciting to see so much progress being made here in Canada, your commitment to accessible publishing is super impressive and we were excited to do to award the 2020 Daisy Award for accessibility to the Department of Canadian Heritage in recognition of the huge impact they've had on the world of accessibility. I'm pleased to put you in touch with colleagues in Europe who are looking forward to the European Accessibility Act that Wendy just mentioned, and colleagues in Australia who are working hard to progress accessible publishing in their markets. But these are not the only countries who are making headway and we see it as our role to keep you all informed of progress in all markets and to make sure that the myriad of exciting projects don't overlap with each other. The Inclusive Publishing website and newsletter keeps everyone up to date with the latest news, innovations, and gossip, and has become a go to site for many in the know. The Daisy Consortium is contracted to work on many projects internationally, both technical and high level. Our amazing team of developers, Marisa, Roman, Matt, Daniel have given you the ace by Daisy and smart tools for EPUB accessibility which is as you know an important element of the GCA protocol. The Daisy Knowledge Base, the go to place for technical advice, updates in the maintenance of EPUB check and the new and its new website, and word to EPUB the easy to use tool that will convert a word document into an accessible EPUB three file, which has been hugely popular this year in the higher ed space as you can imagine. This is to name a few of the other product, just a few of the many projects that they get involved in. Our technical teams also contribute to the standards work and we're proud to play a significant part in many of the activities within the EPUB W3C publishing groups that Wendy just described. EPUB 3.3 the accessibility 1.0 spec now an ISO standard, the audio spec that we've heard from Wendy about and many others. And to complement this activity, the Daisy consortium produced a white paper in 2020, encouraging the use of born accessible EPUB 3 part files for corporate government and university publications and documents. This important piece of work recognizes the work of the publishing industry in embracing EPUB 3 as their format of choice for ebooks and digital publishing and focuses on how this same approach should be used for all types of digital content, both online and offline. And the link for that is in the document that Leah has posted in the chat. This white paper has been well received in many areas and we encourage you all to promote it where you can within your markets. Let's get the word out even further. We continue to test the accessibility of reading systems via EPUB test.org, and we publish detailed results as well as a roundup of findings on inclusive publishing apps are evaluated using the protocol published at EPUB test.org, We are collaborating with people with reading disabilities, accessibility experts and reading system developers. It's an open effort with the test process described on the website and more than 70 volunteer testers with different reading disabilities collaborate in the testing effort. The most recent update was last month. It includes contracted consultancy projects and training services internationally, such as workflow advice and consultancy expert advice on the accessibility of your content, technical troubleshooting, how to include standards to improve the accessibility of your published material, for future proofing, sorry, future proofing the accessibility of your content and tailor made training solutions for your in-house and third party teams. We're proud to be involved in the work of YPOS Accessible Books Consultium and the work of the various stakeholders within the new European Accessibility Act legislation, providing networking opportunities for countries in this region will enable all groups to work together on a collaborative approach to producing mainstream accessible material in accordance with the EEAA, and I imagine we'll be hearing more about that from Christina in a moment. Inclusive publishing originally a Google funded initiative has grown since its inception into an international resource of news articles, guidance and information on all aspects of accessibility for our industry. The IPP program has grown steadily since it began a few years ago, sorry, I should say the inclusive publishing partner program, and we encourage you to take a look at the areas you can benefit from, from by joining its growing ranks. We'd love to welcome you to this group and the links again are in the document. So this is just a taster of what we've been up to, there's a whole lot more that I could talk about, but I wanted to give you an impression of the work that we do, and our latest developments and projects. There's always more that can be said but do please look at the websites and keep us in contact with the work that you're doing. The newsletter that we produce the inclusive publishing is a monthly update for the industry on what is going on, and we'd love to be able to report on the good work that you're all doing here. That's it for me thank you for having me here today and I hope you enjoy the rest of the summit. Thank you so much Sarah that was excellent yeah I love the inclusive publishing newsletter. I always learn a lot of exciting things that are happening so definitely keep Sarah and inclusive publishing up to date. I'm going to keep this train moving. We're going to hear from Christina. I'm from Italy next from Fondazione LIA. Just to introduce her Christina is the Secretary General of the LIA Foundation, and which was created in 2014 by the Italian Publishers Association in collaboration with the Italian Union of the blind individually impaired. Hi, I'm Leah, but I'm Leah so it's tricky. Leah promotes the development of an accessible publishing. It's like well digital publishing ecosystem promotes the principle of foreign accessibility and supports publishers and all other actors in the publishing value chain we're willing to embrace accessibility through consultancy and training activities. I'm also the board of the European Digital Reading Lab and co-chair of the W3C's digital publishing business group and invited expert on the automation and documentation part of the international standards organization. So I'll pass it over to you Christina thank you so much for being here. It's really a pleasure. I see a lot of friends in the attendees. I'm very sorry we cannot come in Canada. Last year at this time we supposed to take a flight and to come and visit some people in Canada so we really miss it and we hope next year we can do it in presence. Let me ask you information about the foundation. We are a foundation that is a quite strange organization because it started from the publishing industry and since the beginning start working very closely with Italian blind union. So it's quite unusual in the world that this kind of organization collaborate so strictly. And then in recent year we also included the Italian Dyslexics Association and we also work and have as a member the most important Italian specialist organization providing services for the production of textbook. So it's the most important library for blind. We started working on the accessibility quite long ago in 2006, in 2006 with a small project with the DECON and FEP. At that time the situation was very different from now. The relationship between publishing industry and blind organization and special organization were quite difficult. There was a discussion on the Marrakesh Treaty that was quite tough at that time. And there was a difficult to understand each other. There was a lack of knowledge between the workflows, the process was different and the format also were different. It was before the definition of the new EPUB standard that arrived in 2010 and the inclusion of the accessibility feature in the standard that came out with EPUB 3 in 2011. We launched our services of certification and training for the publisher in 2011 and we work immediately on the concept of Born Accessible and especially on mainstreaming the Born Accessible content. Because Born Accessible is one part, but I think that the most important thing is mainstream the Born Accessible publication is the traditional distribution channel. In the meantime, what happened is big changes in the legislation framework at international level. In 2013 the Marrakesh Treaty was signed and in 2016 the Marrakesh Treaty was enforced and implemented in the National Administration. At the same time, other legislation that are not based on exception like the Marrakesh Treaty, but asked the publishing industry to be directly involved in the production and distribution of accessible content was implemented in many different places. In 2019 the European Accessibility Act was implemented and now is under the process of implementation in the different national legislation in Europe. And the European Act require that all the accessibility, all the value chain become accessible. That means that all the digital publications should be created in Born Accessible ways except some kind of formal like comics, art books and complex books. But require that all the value chain, that means distributor, aggregators, website, platform, reading solution, metadata should be accessible. And so it's really very important. The similar legislation has been approved in Japan recently in Brazil where is required for example that all the textbook have a digital accessible version. So I think that the legislation is really very important. And it's a strong push. But I also believe that it's important for the publishing industry to move towards accessibility because there are also some business opportunities. Accessibility means higher quality means to reach new possible customer base means also to provide higher satisfaction to your customer. When we started the process in Italy, we explained the publisher that producing accessible e-books was providing better quality e-books for everybody. And now we have on board more 76 publishers that represent more than the 80% of the trade market. So almost all the e-books that are published in Italy are now published in the trade that means fiction and fiction title in an accessible form. We see a growing awareness at an international level. Some publishing houses are moving quite fast and they are very good early adopters. Aschette in France started producing all the accessible e-books in fiction. I know that we have Macmillan learning with us and they also have moved very quickly and in a very good way to produce accessible content in higher education. I see in Italy, for example, many other organizations, we are now working with some big educational publisher and also with academic publisher, not only on the production of accessible content, but also on the audit and production of accessible platform to deliver the content to the student and to make their accessible website. What I think it's also very important and we see it emerging widely internationally is a stronger collaboration between publishers, specialist organizations and organizations represented with visually impaired people. We recently have a meeting with FEP, that is the Federation of European Publishers with the European Black Union as a European Disability Forum to work collaboratively on the implementation at national level of the European accessibility art. We have listened Wendy, the standard are available and the standard will continue to work in an accessibility, so we have no problem in that area, we need to find a way to implement it in a correct way. What I think are the challenges now are the fact that the publishing industry is more or less aware, we have a lot of work to do in the other part of the value chain. I don't think that bookstore, for example, are so aware that they need to be accessible. They are not so easy that the metadata should flow in a current way and so the end user should know when she buys the content that they are accessible and the specific feature. I think that it's important also to create awareness and knowledge in the people with disability that digital content may be a big opportunity and not all of them are technical experts. I think it's important also to work in this field and I think the work that the nurse is doing is very, very important. I see some risk for the small, medium organization that have different workflow that have less funding to move on accessibility and I think that the work done in Canada with a big funding from the government to support the changes is very important and should be, let's say, exported also in other countries. I also think that it will be very, very important to work collaborative in the implementation because it's important to avoid divergent interpretation of the standard or divergent procedure for verifying the content. What's the future then? I think that what it's important in the future is to work to create a more easier production of accessible publication, so I think we need to work on probably new tools or tools integrated in the traditional publishing workflow that may speed up the adoption from also small, medium organization. I think that there are some promising possibility coming from artificial intelligence that can be, for example, used in some areas. And I also see the audio growth, another big opportunity for the publishing industry, especially for some people with disability. The other thing I think it will be important, we spoke a lot about visual impaired people. I think all the legislation requires that printing impaired people should be in, should be able to access the content. I believe that dyslexia, especially in the educational world, it's really, really very important. And so I think we need to start also addressing more in detail the need of these people. Thank you very much. If you want to have information about the Accessibility Act and the implementation, we have prepared a paper. I can send a link and so it can be shared with all of you. It's freely downloadable. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Christina. Yeah, I think you've touched on a lot of things that are that are on everyone's minds and it's great to have your perspective here in your history with accessible publishing so thank you and yeah if you want to share the link or share something with me and I can get it onto the Google Drive, whatever's easiest. So, last but not least we're going to hear from Sarah Maze who's the manager of support for organizations for the Canada Book Fund. The support for organizations component of the Canada Book Fund provides federal funding for collective projects that benefit the Canadian book industry through the Department of Canadian Heritage. I don't think too much of your talk here. So I do an introduction but starting in 2019, the Canada Book Fund also began delivering an investment by the government of Canada of 22.8 million over five years for the accessible digital books initiative, which supports the sustainable production and distribution of accessible digital ebooks and audio books by Canadian independent publishers, and it's a big part of why we're all here today so thanks for coming Sarah and take it away. Thank you very much. So, I won't get into the background on the initiative because I was in my bio, but I would like to acknowledge the important role of our colleagues at Employment and Social Development Canada, who have played a critical role, both in the past and currently in terms of advancing this work as well. Thanks. So my name is Sarah Maze I work with a team at the Department of Canadian Heritage in the Canada Book Fund and we deliver funding for collective projects. We also have a component of our program that delivers funding directly to independent publishers and I'll talk about both sides of that in terms of the funding that we're delivering for accessible accessibility. The project presented at the summit last year, we were just starting to announce funding decisions on our first intakes of projects. We were in year one, and sort of wrapping up year one. Now, where we're at is we're ending your two. What we've done in the last couple in the last two years is we've completed seven funding intakes so two for collective projects. So those could be projects that are supporting publishers in a particular region that are for service organizations that are working with publishers or that are in some other part of the value chain, and also national projects like some of the ones that were mentioned today. We've also done two funding intakes for audio book production, and we've at this point closed three intakes for business development, which is for projects for individual publishers and it may be for business development or internships. So that's sort of where where we're at currently. We started reflecting on the last year in preparing to provide you for enough and update obviously we had to think about the, the pandemic. So, in a broader sense the pandemic has put a lot of pressure on the Canadian publishing industry as it has done on publishing industries worldwide, but it's also highlighted some new market opportunities for digital books. And we think that both of these factors will impact the initiative going forward. This is the Accessible Digital Books initiative. It has caused some delays in some of the projects that were approved both for individual publishers and collective projects. But thanks to some of some extraordinary work both from some of the associations that I work with, and also an individual publishing companies, we are expecting a significant number of projects to be completed by the end of March 2021. As the Canada Book Fund moves into the third fiscal year of the Accessible Digital Books initiative, we're in the position to learn and adjust based on the results to date and also evolving market conditions for publishers so we'll have a good sense of what some of the results of the projects that have been funded to date will be. It also means that more resources and lessons learned are starting to be shared with publishers and more accessible books are being made available in the Canadian market, and both of those are very important for the success of the initiative. In terms of lessons learned in the past several years, I don't think we would have anticipated when we started working on this initiative that we would end up here in a place where production support is actually happening on parallel tracks for different formats. So we're providing both through our funding calls for audio book production direct support for audio book production by publishers, and also more indirect support for integrating accessibility into ebook, ebook workflows in a born accessible way through business development for publishers but also through collective projects and we expect that that will continue. One of the subjects that came up quite a bit I think in the last year's summit, and it's certainly been a subject of discussion in some of the conversations that we've had with industry over the last year and internally within the program is around the idea of capacity building being critical to the long term legacy of the initiative. And I fund professional development in my regular projects but I think there's an opportunity with the Accessible Digital Books Initiative to think about capacity building in new ways. One of the things that I committed to at the end of the summit last year for the program was that we would go back and start having some conversations with publishing schools. Those conversations have started. Certainly there were some delays due to the pandemic, but we have started those conversations and I'm hopeful to continue those conversations as we move forward in the next couple of months. And that is also an area of projects coming from publishing schools is one area that we identified in the most recent call for proposals for collective projects. Another lesson learned and that perhaps links to both of the previous ones is that there is a competing benefit in terms of the Accessible Digital Books Initiative between immediate production support and conversion. So projects that are focused on converting books that are already published and available in the Canadian market. So the benefit there obviously is more accessible books for Canadians in the short term. Versus integrating born accessible practices into the industry. So the longer term benefits of it for accessible publisher publishing that will ideally live beyond the five years of the Accessible Digital Books Initiative. And a lot of the conversations that we've had within the program are how to find ways to maintain a balance between those two competing benefits to have some real and tangible outcomes for Canadian readers now. But also also work on the longer term benefits of integrating accessible publishing. In terms of next steps. My program support for organizations recently launched a third call for collective projects. They're open until the end of May. So there's a lot of time for organizations to come and speak to us about potential projects to work on their application for projects that are currently underway to wrap up in the next iteration or the next step to to be developed. But I'm also available to discuss throughout the summit if there are any questions. I am we're very lucky because of the virtual format to have a number of my colleagues here as well. And I see others from Canadian heritage in the next couple of days and we're certainly all available if you have any questions or you can also reach out to the program directly. And we're always willing to set up a call and have a conversation about a project that might be under development and consideration. There was a recent deadline for business planning and internship projects for individual publishers was which was at the end of January. So that component of the program support for publishers will start to be looking at the next wave of public of business development projects within individual publishing companies. And we are currently also beginning planning for another call for audio book production in summer 2021. So stay tuned for that. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Sarah. That's excellent. And I just wanted to mention that I'm going to add a link to the call to the comprehensive list of summit links document that I've shared with with everyone. I'm trying to keep things updated in there. I also wanted to mention that, you know, thinking back to the first talk from from Kate and Deborah I've added the the accessible publishing research project report to that Google Drive. So if you wanted to go check it out the Google Drive is accessible publishing.ca slash APS 2021 dash drive. And you can find all kinds of things in there. So I really appreciate everyone coming today and thank you to the speakers for your excellent updates I think that all they helped ground us in where we're at and sets the set the scene for to talk about where we're going in the next couple of days. That is about it for today. And we're going to leave the zoom open for a little bit so if people want to linger you're free to but I think I can say that you're all free to go for today and we'll be back here tomorrow morning for another excellent day. And if anyone has any questions or anything. I'm here. Thank you all for coming. See you tomorrow.