 Okay, so welcome to the audio books working group room. We are going to start with a panel and we have a number of expert panelists today. I am going to be moderating my name is Jessica Albert, and I'm the digital and art director ECW press, which is an indie press in Toronto Canada. And I helped launch the audio book program and ECW in 2016 until our audio work work was large enough to warrant its own department. And I also run our accessibility program, and I'm still involved in the audio firm and accessibility perspective and from and metadata and distribution perspective. We have a great panel of experts all of whom have had the pleasure of work within some way. So I, it's just a road, riches here with these panelists, I'm going to have you all introduce yourselves. And I'd like to start with Wendy. Hi everyone, my name is Wendy read I am the accessibility and publishing standards lead at rackett and cobo. I am also chair of the audio books working group and the e pub working group for the W3C because I don't have spare time. And I come to audio books from helping cobo implement back several years ago now but then also writing the being the editor of the audio book specification and approaching it from a standards point of view. Thank you so much Wendy Danny can you speak next. My name is Danny Ferris I'm the accessibility developer with Nels and it is an honor to be with all of you today. I apologize to those of you who were at the first session because you have more of me to listen to I feel very bad for you, but thank you for coming nevertheless. Thanks Danny, and I'm going to pass it to Leah next please. I'm Leah Klein Hems. I am the audio book manager at ECW press I work with Jessica. I had up the production part of making the audio books, which means I work on around 100 titles a year and we try to make all of those accessible as we can. Thank you. And can we hear from Robert next please. Sure. I'm Robert Gordon. I'm senior manager of audio publishing and business and business development with beyond print, which is a renamed version of CNIB library, formerly known as accessible publishing. And we produce in the daisy format 2.02. And we do a lot of a lot of books that baseline of the 600 a year. Excellent. Thanks Robert. And lastly we have Pamela. Hello, my name is Pamela Hart and I'm the audio book recording projects coordinator for Nels. I'm actually fairly new to audio books I have 20 years in audio as an audio engineer and various different fields but audio books is like a new and happy change for me. And I do come from a big movement of work in social justice and that is, I see a lot of like wonderful nuances and intersections with creating audio books and so I'm loving bringing that into the production and the production work that I do with Nels. Thanks everyone. I'd like to get started right away because we only have 30 minutes before we move on to the working session of the time slot so I'm going to start by asking Wendy who you if you were here yesterday. You may have heard her speak about the audio book specification and her standards recap. And I would love to ask you Wendy how the audio book standard is impacting accessibility right now. It's kind of, we're still in those like early days of seeing the audio book specification get rolled out the audio book specification, once implemented fully across publishers, distributors and retailers and readings, listening systems, I haven't come up with a good word for that yet. Across the the ecosystem, we're going to see increased accessibility across the board in by ensuring that publishers and content creators of all kinds really are providing that information, the navigational information that the spec allows you to now finally incorporate things like transcripts or alternative format media directly in the file itself. There's a lot of promise to see increased accessibility for audio books beyond just seeing audio books as the audio alternative of a print book or a digital book. So we're still early there's a lot of, we've seen some implementations, Google playbooks for instance, Calibria reader thorium. They all support the audio books format. And we also now have distributors that are starting to show interest like vital source, but we just need to see more and more integration into the ecosystem and as that happens. I'm really hoping that what we'll really see is the replacement of current in market audio books with this new format, so that from the user perspective, the change is pretty seamless. And there's just an overall better experience. Thanks. It's, I find the audio book specification so exciting. And I love to hear you talk about it. Does anyone else have any thoughts on the specification or those really when this is Wendy's kind of area, but if, if anyone has anything else before I move on please speak up. But if not, I'd like to throw the next question over to Leah, who can speak from a publisher's perspective. How are you as a publishing house, trying to build accessibility into your audio books. So, when we produce an audio book with the intention of making it accessible. The first thing we want to do is an accessibility assessment. And this is something we do when we're making an ECW front list book into an audio book or when we're producing something on behalf of another publisher. And what we've basically developed is a document that allows us to walk through step by step and check off all the things we're looking for that we need to adjust to make more accessible. So what we do is we're looking for images we're looking for charts for graphs footnotes and notes anything like that that either wouldn't be read in the same order that it's placed in the print book, or we need to insert different texts like descriptive text to make it accessible for readers of all kinds. And after creating this chart that basically lists everywhere there's something inaccessible or something that needs to change in the book, we then either do it ourselves or send it to the publisher depending on who's making the book. We have them literally remove those elements from the PDF and insert the descriptive text so that nothing can be missed along the way. And this allows the narrator when they go into the booth to read the book exactly out loud as you would experience that as a seeing reader. And so that the audio book can be completely enjoyed and consumed in exactly the way that the print book would be. And we try to cover as everything within the book in so far as we are able. And that includes doing things like reading all the end notes and all the footnote. And all those other elements that people don't necessarily think of or don't think to include, or haven't thought to include in the past when making audio book. And so that's typically how we approach accessibility. It usually involves mostly a lot of prep work, and a lot of just working with narrators to encourage them to be part of this important work and encourage them to be open to recording things like end notes and footnotes and work citation. And, but it's something that publishers are getting more and more used to it's becoming a more accepted part of audio book production and something we're really passionate about continuing to do. I mean, I know the answer to this but just to clarify you're doing this on behalf of multiple publishers, not just on behalf of ECW press of this and you're working with trade publishers so what are the types of. What are the types of books that other publishers are bringing to you right now to build these kind of futures in. Really we get brought all kinds of books, we work with publishers from all across Canada, and, and we work with them to implement these things and we basically have a document that walks them through the multiple different options for how they can implement these changes. And that might include so for example if someone brings me a heavy nonfiction book that's a biography of someone's life, and it includes copious footnotes. And we have to talk about you know are these are these citation footnotes or are these adding to the text. And so do we want to include them in line with the text or do we want to put them at the end of the chapter, or do we want to put them at the end of the book. And so we might work with a publisher to do a nonfiction books like that. Also there's literary fiction that includes elements people don't always think about that. Sometimes in the text they'll say something like Bob drew a picture and then the author may have literally inserted a picture into that So we have to think of a way to naturally include that while keeping to accessibility standards but also making it flow in a way that doesn't interrupt or change the author's intent in that passage. Thank you. I'd love to throw the same question over to Danny. And if you could let us know what kind of features you're seeing built into audio books or not built into audio books right now. Sure. So one thing that I always stress is the content of audio books is by definition accessible and this trips up a lot of producers because I think well it's audio so we don't really need to worry too much about that. But just because the content is audible doesn't mean that the audio book itself itself can be easily found opened navigated listen to or read in order and those are the five key things. So as far as your basic fiction audio book goes that the new standard addresses so that that's what I'm really excited about. And that's what I'm really anticipating this new standard addressing. Another thing on the topic of inline elements or elements being included in the reading order that are typically found at the end of the book, such as end notes in that case or inline such as image descriptions is skibbability. And just very briefly this allows reading systems to identify certain types of passages such as a footnote or an image description and reading systems that support it can skip over that information to preserve the regular reading order. The readers have selected that option, or they can read it along with the rest of the narrative, even if it's included in a separate track of the narration, and then there's an option to skip that if it's something that isn't of interest to that particular reader so it provides a much more fluid and customized reading experience that up until the few months ago simply has not been available in your typical audio book. That's one of the things that I'm really excited about. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, that's really interesting to hear that because it's a stark contrast with the kind of books that Leah you're making your, you know, you're building these features in, which is amazing. But it is sort of a, I will say standard audio book in that it's a folder of MP3s or a folder of audio files. And that's what, as the trade publishers have the power to produce in house, where, which you may be building those features in but you're not providing the power and agency to the user to skip that content if there's an inline description. It's there but now you can't skip it. Exactly and skip ability has been offered in alternate format books ever since their digital inception, but to have that option available in mainstream publications. Now, is really exciting. It is one step closer to avoiding this need to produce an alternate format title and instead have it born accessible in the in the audio arena so it's pretty cool. Absolutely. Yeah, I have to say that sounds amazing it would definitely be I think what everyone what ideally want and it's great that we're moving towards that. Pamela, do you have anything from your perspective working on audio books for nails that I think it feels like maybe you bridge the gap a little bit between what a trade publisher can produce and and perhaps formats that are more accessible. Sorry you're not you're still muted Pamela. Thank you. I did a little laugh. I was like, Oh, am I bridging trying. I think I think I want to think I want to highlight clearly what Danny said that agency is the words that to me feels the most important is like how do we still agency in the creations of these audio books with the reader so that folks can read these books with the same amount of agency that somebody with the who's visually reading a print book so if you if you if you don't want to read the footnotes if you want to read the footnotes if you don't look at the picture if you want to look at the picture if you however you want to do if you want to go straight to the end and then back to the front like that's your right and it's also your right to to to get all the information that is out there so I mean I see this happening so much as yesterday I was working with a narrator who's blind and he sent me his the book that he was working on working from to the right and it had no images in it and then when I went to the E Pub that I had to work from it had images in it, but he didn't even know, you know, and that makes me feel so creeped out that like that it wasn't even available for him to know that there was something missing like I think that's it kind of that's really problematic coming from kind of an agency perspective. So in terms of bridging and formats. What what we're doing it now is right now is looking at it looking at every book individually and assessing what format is going to be the most successful for that book so for example with children's picture books right now we're producing an E Pub three and enhanced a pub so that we can have audio, we can have skippable image descriptions, we can have text that is highlight as it's moving along. And we can still have the visual images in the book and that that to us is like the most right now is like the most successful format for a children's picture book to be accessible and then for like fiction books for example we're doing both in an MP3 like loose folder as well as always a Daisy. Similarly to Danny I'm really excited about the new audiobook standard and we're like just start trying to stay on top of that and research that and hopefully be producing in that because it, it's really a wonderful move philosophically as well as practically to fuse accessibility into audio access into into what into audio book production. This sort of leads into the questions that I'd like to continue talking about and Robert I'd love to hear from your perspective, as we haven't heard from you yet. I mentioned a few things here, ways that we're tackling content to ensure that we're recording all of the different parts but if you could talk a little bit about what you, you guys over at the NAB always aim to include in an audio book and perhaps have a little bit about how you tackle descriptions for images as well. Sure. I'll do the, what do we include first and then can spin into image description. So, we pretty much record, we're going to include everything that's in the print version of the book. So, even things that may not be on the radar for aesthetic reasons like say a table contents may not be on the radar of a commercial publisher but then an index, which actually has numbers on it. I don't know that it would really work in a commercial audio book situation because a daisy book is built with pages. So you can actually use the index in the same way that print person is using it. But when I say that we're including everything we're including everything but it's all in discrete sections that can be skipped over because of the daisy format. I don't know if you want to follow up on that but I could go to the image description. My one question would be for a trade publisher or publishing house. If they're producing their own audio books and they want to make it available to you so that you can turn it into a daisy book for your patrons. Do you think that means you'd recommend they make sure that they are recording or do you do you just take on the act of recording supplemental material like bibliographies and things like that. Well, we wouldn't for CELA CELA purchases books from say Blackstone, and we do not do remediation on that to a very limited resources. Not really videos but really what you're looking at is six staff members including myself in Toronto and two full time staff members and some contractors in Montreal. Most of our workforces volunteers because of the number and COVID is will probably come to that at the end. It's very difficult for us to meet this baseline 600 required books for CELA each year so when CELA is making a purchase of a Blackstone book. RIS department is going to do what I call a daisification making up a word. It basically puts a daisy veneer on the existing audio files now imagine that the last chapter in the book also included the bibliography just for some reason. It's not going to be separated into its own section or anything like that it's an automated process and it's just part of the ingestion process that goes on when we take on a book from a commercial publisher. At this point we have not been hired to do back matter for a publisher. We're actually up until really recently we're forced back into doing human narrated back matter and happily we're back using a synth engine. It's a modification of Amazon's Polly it needs a little bit more work to be able to handle multiple languages that will show up and create much any history book. But the time the years that we actually had humans narrating back matter I can tell you that this is a very taxing on a human narrator. It's exhausting to sit and read and God help your web addresses. All of this stuff doesn't flow the way pros or normal sentences flow. I much prefer it to be synthesized. But we work with what we got and we try to cover a lot of ground with the resources we have available. Hope that answers. Yeah, it does. And if you could. Yeah, just give us some ideas of best practices and anyone else here because I know a lot of you guys are experts on this subject for image descriptions by replacing images with spoken descriptions. Hugely rich subject. I'm going to dance around a couple of things I don't want to take up too much time because I really, I think this is something that everybody. Could find a way to incorporate this into their into the projects. I'll tell you that because our work in in CNIB long predates the Ben Attack diagram center and the guidelines that are laid out there that we actually have also our own methods of image description which we've developed over the course of time. We incorporate the very useful guidelines from the, from the diagram center. There's a there's a tonal quality that we try to include if you're doing an image description for a young person's book. The language really should be tuned to that audience. We. It isn't sparse, but it is, it is elemental to the way that we do image description. One of the situations is when you have an author who will work with you get them aware of the of the guidelines of image description, and then you actually have the same voice the author voice that is part of the image descriptions. So, I just to tell you the way we do it and it probably isn't an easily transmissible over to commercial. Okay, I'd like to use the one refer to the example that was mentioned previously where there's book there's paragraphs or pros and image shows up and I don't know whether it was a decorative purely decorative image or it could have been an image conveying meaning. And then it is followed by pros. So, when the text is finished. And get just before the image will go producers know there is an image of a boy with a bicycle, and he is looking up at the star. And then we go end of producers know it functions like a bracket. So that's our way of doing it it is, it is like showing an editor's hand. Right, so it's, it does break the spell. The same narrator who is doing the book is also reading those we script all of those things ahead of time and all of that text and scripting is all presented to the to the reader at the same time. Now, the more ambitious is when you get into things like graphic novels, which are awesome. And I remember in conversation yesterday there was talk of comic books. There's a lot of great things that can be done. I'm going to just tell you a couple of ones. See, with the producers note move, we wouldn't really use that in a graphic novel. One of the ones that we worked on recently are our transcription of Laura Dean keeps breaking up with me which is quite popular graphic novel. We did that with multiple voices, and that kind of a production it fits it well, and you can without having the same person doing a lot of characters you can you can make that work very well. You can also have one voice doing the descriptions and other voice voicing the characters. Okay, now there's a project that I'm very excited about that will need to deliver for June. There's a book by Vivian Chong called Dancing at 10 dancing after 10, and the book is very interesting to me because it's, it's a book that's getting a lot of kudos to but Vivian was a fine art student at U of T. She had a terrible reaction to I be proven went into a kind of toxic shark and lost her vision. Now her will and her artistic drive led her to overcome these these, you know, these these new situations and she produced this excellent graphic novel with the work that she was doing with drawing worked over a little bit more by another another She already had an eye to doing this as an audio book. And when she came to us she had presented us basically a script, which has image descriptions but it also has. I don't know how to describe it other than to say it's like an internal voice of the, the, you know, the omniscient narrator, kind of describing the emotional states of the images. I've seen that she originally presented to us also has sound effects and a lot of things I don't know whether we're going to be able to pull off, but it's the kind of thing to go you want to get really ambitious. This is what they do. So, image descriptions. I'm saying it's a bit of a frontier but it's a frontier that's already got roads and buildings and clear, you know, clearly at the rest of us can build around. A book by book approach is really important in a lot of these different features. Does anyone else have any thoughts about images and ways that you've, you've seen images included in in accessible audio books. I can speak to it just a little bit. I love working with images it's like a very nuanced area of audio books. So, one of the, one of the things that Robert was saying, the way that we kind of talk about it is the images that are like part of the primary text in images like you need those images described to kind of move along so that would be like children's books but also in some like adult fiction to you might see that and then you have images that are kind of there as an addition, like supplementary so we, you know, if it's, if it's part of the primary story or part of the primary text and we would do similar to what Robert saying where it would be like producers note, and then have the description in line and if it was or like I said in the children's books we have a whole different approach, but, and then for supplementary information will, this is just an MP3 format because obviously in Daisy you have so much more navigation but to give some navigation to an MP3 format. We'll then keep it as close to the chapter as possible I think this is what you guys do at ECW as well like so right next to chapter one to be like chapter one images, and then you would have the descriptions in there. The only other thing that I really wanted to add is that, like Robert said like working with the author is really ideal and awesome to try and keep that tone consistent and then also thinking about working with the author or folks that can represent particular language cultural language that is appropriate to the images so being careful not to create like a dissonance with the image descriptions and the primary text so that's one of the like of the few projects that we have it now is working with underrepresented voices, making sure that when we're producing books by indigenous authors that the right language is being used to describe those images and if you're not working with the author then you do need to really make the effort to make sure through those communities that the correct language is being used so it gets complicated and nuanced for sure but it's definitely an important part of like the add-ons that we're that we're putting into these into these productions you know that are like you said like the hand that's kind of coming in making sure that hand is like, you know, has the right perspective has the right information. And this ties into a thing that we talked about at Summit a lot which is a born accessible workflow right, you know if this work is done at the stage of acquisition at the stage of substantive edit, and the author and editor can work together on this kind of perspective of this experience in the book and considering it right from the start I think that that's that's one of the ultimate goals. So if there are people who are listening to this who are working in trade publishing publishing houses, you know, bringing this this stuff back, all the way back to the process so that it's not left to as an afterthought or as something that happens with a specialist, like some of our panelists here. It's something that just is intrinsically built into the book is is a really wonderful takeaway I think from this. If anyone has anything else I do want to push a little bit into our session time because I think I would really love to hear from you guys about challenges which was the sort of the last thing I wanted to touch on we did speak about reading systems already at the top. Any, any other sort of, I know that having so many different reading systems that people or listening systems as they say that people may be experiencing the book on is is presents challenges for creating the content which we've talked about. I wonder if anyone has any thoughts on what we can do about that challenge. I think one thing is actually, it was one of the thoughts we had when we started working on the audiobook specification was not was the fragmentation that was taking place at literally every part of the the ecosystem like every publisher had had their own workflow for producing audiobooks be they be that in house or with a studio, every distributor had their own method for packaging and distributing and providing metadata for their audio books, every library retailer system, you know all the archives and the black stones and Cobos and audibles the world everybody had their own way to do something. And that fell even as far down as listening systems reading systems, you know, you, there's common features you know you've got your play pause buttons but then there's additional features like sleep timers and communication, and it's a lot of the every reading system that I found everyone that I've used we did a lot of like market research, played around with a lot of reading systems. They all kind of work the same but it seems to be more driven by. Okay, what does users, what do users want and what is everyone else doing, and they're, but there's also differences and how they operate, which was very interesting and so one thing when this is, it's like well if we can present a common list of features that this specification enables. That means that a listening system or user user agent in the parlance of specification writing a user agent has a fairly predictable set of things that you know to do. If it if you're providing table of contents. I need to provide a navigation. If you're providing audio I need to provide play pause skip functionality if I'm providing if the formats providing text or other formats like HTML. I probably need a way to display that. But because it hasn't been present before every system has kind of come up with its own feature set, and or has stolen them from or borrowed or you know greatest artists, great artist deal from other examples in the market so what I'm really hoping for is as more people move to this kind of standardized format will see listening agents like user agents. Getting more creative with features and adding new features but then also those features being duplicated across different systems that I, I know as a content creator that when I put a transcript in my audio book or I put and notes, or I put images. I know that a reader of mine on Kobo a reader of mine using thorium and a reader of mine using audible are going to have the exact same experience or pretty close. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely and I mean, when publishing we know how to do this we've done it already with E pub right it's the same thing just a different format. Yeah, I find it interesting working from on the audio metadata perspective that so many of the vendors that I distribute you don't even want a table of contents they don't want to know the names of the chapters are they just. It's just 12345 and even where you can supply a table of contents very few require it so it. We, in some ways have a long way to go and yet we're making so much progress at the same time. Lastly on challenges I'd love to hear from any of you on the financial challenges and maybe I'll throw this to Leah first to talk about financial challenges from a trade publishing perspective. So, um, there's always going to be financial challenges when it comes to doing something new, trying to get something going and perhaps, like at least from a trade perspective, what is a still developing industry. And so, you know, going to another publisher and saying there's this great new format. You know, it's starting to gain traction in Canada, and you should spend $10,000 on this audio book you know that's a really hard thing to convince the publisher, who year to year is just trying to get by how do you convince them to take that risk. And how do you do it in good conscience, and not just be trying to to make money until that publisher no longer exists that no one would do that. And so, and so it becomes a matter of, you know, we have these wonderful opportunities like financial support from the government that provide, you know, for the past kind of the timelines a little messed up but basically since since last year. There's been some funding available to make accessible audio books and that's what has allowed so many Canadian publishers, not only to start making their catalog available in audio, but to specifically be doing it with an eye for accessibility, and putting the onus on them to report and say, not only did I make an audio book which is inherently accessible, but here's how I took that a step further. I think that, you know, when we frame challenges from a perspective of not just the challenge but also like what's the potential solution, and how can we make this into a positive or how can we move forward, and speaking also to to Wendy's point. I think that, you know, from a production perspective it really is all about communication, and it really is all about like, not keeping it close to the chest, not making it a secret, you know, from talking to a multinational publisher or from talking to an indie press with three employees. I'm going to share the same resources with them and the same amount of information because the more people doing this, the more we can succeed and reduce those financial barriers. Thank you that's really, that's a wonderful way to look at it. Does anyone else want to jump in and talk about financial challenges. I'm in a different world than commercial publishing, but it's not super different because we still have to, we still have to meet our budget. When I mentioned that we see an IB library is now beyond print it's a social enterprise now, and our primary client is seal up. We also have clients that are commercial publishers, and I look at that as multiple win situation because firstly we're able to help to guide them with in what is usually their their beginning steps towards making accessible books. I absolutely echo what Adam said in the previous session please render us redundant. The move for us to be a social enterprise was so that we could be self sufficient. And at least in the case of CNIB CNIB funds could also be used for other things, like independent living skills advocacy. There's so many other ways that this money could be spent and I also see that by the mainstream including this you're also increasing your market share. And then the one that I think will appeal to everybody here is recognize that if Canada doesn't do it itself, there won't be as many of these books available on the world market, because we're going to get steamed rolled by other, other more aggressive, you know, commercial operations. Yeah, thank you Robert that's a great point. We've already pushed over by nine minutes does anyone have any concluding any last thoughts anything else that they didn't get to say today. I just add a little bit about finances that is maybe like maybe interesting for folks that coming from it like an audio engineering background I think it's really fascinating at how much how inflated that industry can be because of like a lot of like the hold that the tech industry can have over the information that they, that they aren't transparent with. And so I would kind of just want to like blow that open a little bit and talk about how affordable recording equipment is now and how affordable it is to record in home at like quite a high studio level. And just to note that we at Nels are recording almost in what we record recording entirely from home I'm sending out equipment, small kits that cost $400 tops that's including a device to record on to some, you know, send or $800 including the device or $400 if not sending out to folks giving them a few training sessions and they're able to record at a studio level with some support from me along the way. And that's a really cool thing to just kind of blow out in terms of supporting like small, small publishers in self producing that this like this this studio world that's kind of like Beatles world of the studio environment that doesn't exist anymore equipment is made to be equipment is being made to record at home like this microphone that I have here it's just a USB plugged right into my computer. That's it. That's really easy to plug that baby right in. That's a great point and I mean of course this is something that has come up more in the last year since our previous summit. And it will continue of course now now that we were pushed in that direction. I think it's of course going to continue in that direction. Okay, if anyone if no one else has any final thoughts. Thank you so much to all of our panelists and also to Wendy's cats for coming today and and sharing your thoughts with us. Yeah, you guys, it just amazing amazing group of people here. The session continues until the end of the day I believe. So, the panel portion is over. I can move on now into to talking about the kind of things that we've sort of gotten the ball rolling on here in the panel. And if you have any questions for any of the panelists I believe they're going to be in this session for the rest of this. This time block so thank you again everyone.