 Mae'r ffordd yn gweithio'n gweithio gael ei gaelio i'w ddechrau'r gwleidydd, Elean Orderson, gyda'r ddisguadau yw'r ddigital oesio yn y ddechrau'r ddisguadau ar gyfer y Ddaeth Gwyrd Gweithgwrth. Felly ar gyfer y gweithio ar gyfer y gweithgwrth archifol, mae'n ddiddordeb yn ymddangos i ddweud a'r ffordd i ddiddorol i gaelios cyd-dweith. Felly ar y gweithgiadau, Elean oedd yn dweud yn gweithgwrth gynghwyl pethau ymgyrchu'r cynhyrchu o gyflawniol, ychydigion gyda y ferfynedig yma, ychydigion yng Nghaerdydd, a'r LLU. Yn yr y ddiwg, Eleyn wedi'u meddwl i'r cyffredinol, ydych chi'n cyfrifio cyllidolodau, a'r cyfrifio'r gyffredinol o'r cyflym, ychydigion fydd o'r cyfrifio'r eu pad a'r ddau'u meddwl i'r cyffredinol. Yn y gweithio'r gwaith, Eleyn gweithio'r cyfrifio'r cyffredinol ac yn ei wneud yn y bwysig i ddeudio i ddeudio i gweithio i ddeudio'r adreu ac yn ymgyrch ar y ddeudio'r ysgol o'r llerwngau i'r bwysig i ddeudio'r ddeudio i gael allu o'r bobl yn ymgyrchau'r archifolau Felly, dylech chi'n cymhwyl, rydyn ni'n fawr yn canu i'r Elin, yw ddweud i gael y pethau ar y ddeudio. Hefyd hi, mae'r gwybod yma'n Elin Oerdson. Rydyn ni'n gweithio digitali ymgyrchai'r cyfnoddau a gwahanol about a research project. I'm just about to complete as part of the collaborative professional fellowship scheme with the National Archives and RLUK. So I'm going to start by just talking a little bit about the education and outreach department that I'm part of at the National Archives. So we produce and deliver educational resources, experiences and workshops both on-site and online aimed at educators, students, young people and community groups and a key driving force behind our work is to take the historical holdings of the National Archives which consists of about a thousand years of government records and use them to teach our audiences about history. So to do this we have to find different ways of making these archival documents engaging and understandable for a really broad range of audiences and on the screen you can see some examples of different ways that members of my team do this. So workshops, outreach activities and online resources. So one audience group that we have had less experience with and that I have had less experience with is blind and visually impaired audiences and that's why I submitted this project to the fellowship scheme and for those who are not familiar with the scheme it's a year-long research project. So I've spent a year researching this under the mentorship of Eleanor Agandolfi and Anna Abbas and the question that my project has been guided by is how do we make archives not just like technically accessible but also fun and engaging for visually impaired audiences. So as someone who is working in the online team I have been aware of the technical accessibility requirements that we have to follow but I wanted to go beyond this kind of checklist to see how we could more directly address and understand the needs of this audience group. So on the slide you can see some questions that I went into this project asking so you know how do we better understand these audiences needs, how can we go beyond just meeting requirements and what opportunities can this increased level of understanding give us and some outcomes from the project including the creation of a workshop for blind and visually impaired students and I'm going to go into a bit more detail about that later on in the presentation. But I just wanted to start with talking a bit about why I wanted to pursue this particular project on top of the kind of inherent value in addressing the needs of everyone who visits us and the first reason is because of one of our organisational aims which is to be the inclusive archive. It's part of our stated goals as national archives to be available for every person that we serve and that everyone has a right to access what we hold and to experience us through what we do. So on top of that there are some legal requirements of course that we have to buy by and I know that there are people from around the world who are watching so you know there will be different legal requirements for this in different countries but for us it is the public sector bodies accessibility regulations from 2018 which builds on the 2010 Equality Act and this for example requires us to adhere to WCAG 2.2 AA standards which is a really technical term but essentially this is kind of the base level of web accessibility requirements that can be found online. Happy to answer questions about that afterwards but I won't go into too much detail now and then finally there is the kind of statistical background of this audience group that highlights how important it is to address it so in the UK over 2 million people live with sight loss and 20% will live with sight loss in their lifetime and then for my department specifically the school audience there are over 25,000 children with visually impairment in the UK age zero to 16 and then an additional 15,000 aged 17 to 25 and behind these numbers of course is also studies collected by the Royal National Institute of the Blind that show that children who are visually impaired have lower educational attainment than children without a special educational need and progression of young people with visual impairments beyond education is not on par with fully sighted young people and there's a large well-being gap as well due to you know living in a world that is not accessible so these statistics highlight the importance of making sure that the educational resources we provide for example can be enjoyed equally by visually impaired students as well so when I started with this research project this is what I set as my number one guiding principle to prioritize research through conversation and collaboration rather than just reading for example or attending training and that's firstly because this research focuses on an audience group that I'm not a part of and that has lived experience that I can never fully understand no matter how much I research so I knew from the start that I needed to actually talk to people who are visually impaired and people who work with visually impaired people closely so that they can tell me what is actually needed and the second reason that you might discover as I go along is that this field of accessibility relies heavily on a lot of different technologies that are designed to improve accessibility and these technologies there's a lot of them they have a lot of different levels of usefulness and they evolve very fast so it can be hard to figure out what you actually need there are some very expensive technologies out there that are incredibly impressive but might not be necessary for your organization's needs for example so talking to people who work with these technologies has been one of the best ways to evaluate their usefulness and to figure out which one's best suited my department's needs okay so who have I talked to I've put like a big list of people on the screen that have lent me their time and expertise and I'm not going to go through go through all of them but I hope that they show kind of the breadth of people with experiences different organizations different institutions that exist within this field of accessibility so for example I talked to the Disabled People's Archive in Manchester and the image on screen actually comes from their collections which represents a community view of disability histories as opposed to for example the National Archives which represents a government view and they spoke to me for example about the importance of representation of disabled people's voices and needs within the archive sector and having disabled people themselves involved in representing the stories that can be found in these collections and then Southampton site for example is an example of a charity for visually impaired people there's probably have one in your local area as well and they were fantastic to speak to because they had a not just expertise but also a repository of different technologies that can be used for accessibility needs another person on screen here is Hugh Alexander who specializes in old text which is a term that means visual descriptions for online images and so for anyone who is creating online content and putting it online that's a really foundational kind of accessibility need is to create alternative text for those images that can be read out by a screen reader and some big names on here like the Royal National Institute of the Blind, Tommels-Pochlinton Trust these are big institutions in the UK that work with this issue and there's also online communities like Ally International Ally User Group, ATATN and these are kind of communities of professionals who work with accessibility and share tips and they are great resources if you want to get into this area. I'm also going to quickly go through some of the trainings and certifications I've done because last time I presented about this I got a lot of questions about that so the international association of accessibility professionals has some of the most intensive training you'll find in this area they offer certifications in accessibility that require you to recertify every so often every few years based on how much work you've done with accessibility in the meantime and the certification I got is called I'm not going to read out the whole thing but it's CPACC it's a foundational certification that gives you kind of a base level competency and disability access as a whole and you do have to study for a multiple choice exam if you want to do this training there is more like low stakes training I guess that can be found in from organizations like the RNIB ability net is a good one and then charities like Southampton site for example will usually offer training sometimes for your organization and then finally if you're launching a new digital or online website or application then there are WCAG compliance testers out there that can make sure that it is compliant for those accessibility requirements again happy to answer questions about any of that later okay so I'm going to also go through some of the basics to know about the barriers faced by people who are visually impaired and if you already have experience in this area or if you are visually impaired yourself then I will be going through information you already know probably so bear with me on that but just so that we're all on the same page here so the first thing to know is that visual impairments is like an umbrella category visual disabilities includes a lot of different things so you might initially picture someone who is fully blind but the majority of visually impaired people do have some vision so from blind people who can see some light or colors to people with low vision who might need the help of a magnifier to see for example and this category also includes people with cerebral visual impairment which is most common amongst young children in this very new area that's still being studied and people who are colorblind as well and now in terms of barriers most barriers can be summed up by information that is communicated only through visual means with no audio or tactile alternatives and I'll give some examples that are more common but there's an infinite number of examples of barriers that can be faced but so for example there is a lack of visual descriptions such as alternative text for websites which I mentioned earlier or if you have an image that is a key part of a presentation to not describe that image there is a lack of transcripts or audio descriptions for videos the lack of digital transcripts or OCR transcription or braille versions of printed materials and just to elaborate quickly on that so printed materials can for example be sent as a digital transcript to someone who has a screen reader ahead of time for example or you can make OCR technology available and that essentially is a technology that creates a transcript of a printed text and if the person that's a braille user having a braille version of a printed text another barrier is websites and applications that are not keyboard accessible or set up for screen readers navigational barriers is a big category but essentially anything that makes it hard for visually impaired people to physically move around an area and a classic example might be a lack of noise for a green light at a crossing for example and then for people with low vision as I mentioned before having the lack of access to magnification so for example websites that don't work with magnification software or there are no magnifiers available at a library for example and then color contrast issues essentially means that the contrast between two colors is not strong enough to distinguish if you have low vision like light text on a light background is an extreme example of that and then for people who are colorblind there are issues with information only being communicated through color and finally I just want to bring up the idea of incidental learning so incidental learning is information that we process through our senses without realizing it and so for sighted people in a world built for sighted people a lot of our incidental learning comes from what we can see so for visually impaired people that lack of incidental visual learning is not always compensated for so in we have this is just something to be aware of especially in educational settings with younger people for example they might not be aware we can't assume that they might know the exact same things as a sighted student for example and just to quickly touch on the color contrast issue that I mentioned so on screen I have a big grid that essentially is a matrix a color contrast matrix for the national archives brand colors that I put together based on a code that was kindly generated for me by Matthew D pros from the University of Southampton who works with accessibility there and I put his website on the screen MatthewDProse.github.io and if you want to make sure that the color contrast of your text and the background color that the text is on passes accessibility standards I recommend the website whocanuse.com very easy to use website and it gives you an idea of if they would pass the highest accessibility standard or just similar ones okay so technologies because after learning about the field of accessibility for visually impaired people I wanted to then explore the different technologies that I might want to acquire for my department to help us you know be more accessible so I'm going to touch on some of those but first I want to just show a quick clip of from a youtuber called Molly Burke who's great and check out the full video on her on her channel but I think it if if you've never seen a screen reader and use for example it can just give you an idea of how like simple technologies like iPhones are set up for accessibility so I'm just going to play a little bit of that and hopefully the sound will work let me know if it doesn't so basically here's my iPhone and all Apple products it's an amazing company they've dedicated themselves to making sure that every single product they release is fully accessible to the blind straight out of the box no extra costs so if you have any of these products here at home like the apple watch the macbook the ipad the iphone or an ipod anything else if you have that at home and you go into your settings you'll find general accessibility and then something called voiceover don't turn voiceover on unless you've looked up how to turn it off although actually I think now you can do it with Siri so I think if you have Siri you can actually say Siri turn on voiceover or Siri turn off voiceover and it'll do it for you so you can kind of like play around with it too at home and check out how you can do things but I'll just give you a quick show so of course this is the rose gold and white iphone 6s I love it and so I just have the finger that's like the best part it's already talking okay I got it all right so basically this is like my home page I have all my apps and I just so I just move my finger across the screen and it reads me what's under my finger now for example if I want to go to my phone I double tap on my screen and this is why okay so I'm not going to play the whole clip but um later on in the clip she mentions for example that she prefers to use her iphone for because it has a touchscreen rather than her laptop which she finds a bit more cumbersome to use via the keyboard and so this is just an example to show that for a lot of visually impaired people um just like sighted people you know a simple iphone or or ipad is the only technology that we might use in our day-to-day lives um and I bring that up because there's a lot of specialized equipment that I'm going to go through and visually impaired people are not automatically knowledgeable about all of that specialized equipment that exists so obviously they will require instructions on using something that they have never used before okay so when I visited Southampton site and asked them about what technologies I should be looking at their recommendation to me was if I can only acquire one piece of technology it should be an electronic magnifier and they said that this is because the like I said the majority of visually impaired people um do not fall into the completely blind category um and that percentage goes down even further when looking at young people so arguably electronic magnifiers could have the broadest application so they are essentially magnifying tools that display that magnification on a digital screen and they also provide controls for color contrast zoom and brightness they're generally easy to use they're easy to introduce during a one-off session even for someone who has never used one before and they can come relatively cheap compared to other technologies so for example a simple handheld version can cost around 100 to 300 pounds so I arranged for my department to acquire an electronic magnifier I was really lucky I found one that was unused that another department had purchased years ago um on the uh which is I've put an image up on the screen but essentially it's got quite a big monitor compared to a smaller handheld one and we have successfully trialed it in an on-site workshop that had a class with just one visually impaired student in the class and my colleague Alice who was teaching the workshop and I found that the best way to introduce it to the student was in a way that didn't draw too much attention so Alice invited the table she sat at to look at the documents through the magnifier and her friends were more than happy to use the magnifier alongside her to do the tasks during the workshop and she used the contrast tools to be able to read the text on the you know old manuscript the archival document that they were looking at okay so another piece of technology that I have looked at is a tactile tablet this one is called the feel if tablet this is one example of a range of products that incorporates some form of tactility um into a tablet device this one has small bumps all over its surface that buzz slightly under your fingers as you click and move around the screen it also comes with an integrated screen reader as well as ready-made games that are completely non-visuals and you can upload your own upload your own images in games and I'll just show a quick I like to hope what that might look like Spain France Germany Belgium United Kingdom yeah so hopefully the sound worked but basically someone moving their finger across a map and it reads out the different countries as they go over it um and this is uh really really impressive technology what what I found was that the downside of this tech is that it's very expensive so it's difficult to incorporate for just one single visually impaired student in a class as compared to the electronic magnifier which was much easier and it was too expensive for us to get one each for a whole class of visually impaired students um but it's very good to be aware that it exists because it has a lot of potential exciting uses so finally I explored the world of tactile images and models you've probably have seen tactile models around like smaller versions of large objects so you might have visited a building that has a smaller version of the building inside that you can feel what the building looks like um and tactile paving is I haven't looked too much into this because it's more exhibition design but uh which it's essentially a flooring that includes tactile features to make it easier to navigate by a cane um I visited the the welcome collection did this in in their recent exhibition milk I was shown around that exhibition um and then finally tactile images now this is what I um what kind of caught my attention the most because they uh most of our archival records are two-dimensional so tactile images essentially take two-dimensional images and make them touchable um and they have a very long history so I put an image on the left here of a tactile map of the united kingdom in our collection that came from an asylum for the blind in 1839 the very old um and this map might not be as useful as the tactile images we have today so I put on the right a tactile image of one of our documents showing the destruction left by the great fire of London um by George Rhodes and I'm going to touch on him in a sec um but yeah there's an art to tactile images so they cannot just be one-to-one reproductions of a two-dimensional image they need to be modified and simplified to be readable for someone touching it um and if you're interested in this there are organizations that you can pay to produce tactile images um such as the RNIB um or you can even acquire actually a specialized printer and paper and software and you can produce them yourself um this is like an example of a software that can produce tactile images um okay so this brings me to the final part of my presentation I'm going to kind of discuss a workshop that brings all of this these things that I've been talking about together and unfortunately I can't tell you how the actual workshop went because it's not happening until Monday at the 18th of March but it will be a totally new experiment for us so it'll be very exciting to see how it goes so it's an all day workshop for a group of visually impaired students coming down from New College Worcester which is a specialist school um and it will be about 12 students from year eight and nine and 70% of them will be braille users and the workshop will introduce them to four different stories from our collection that align with what they're learning at school and they will be introduced first to a tactile version of the document then they will receive a mystery bag of sensory items that evoke the subject matter of the document like sound items, smell items, items that you can feel then they're going to get context for the document using sheets that we're going to have in both large print and in braille then they will get to touch the actual document that they've been studying and they'll do a presentation about the document that they've become specialists on and then finally they're going to get to touch original documents that were touched by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I and so this workshop has really been an exercise in collaboration so here are the external parties that are involved in preparing this workshop and it's really based on a collaboration I formed with George Rhodes who is Digital Accessibility Team Lead at the University of Westminster and is completing a PhD on 3D printed tactile images and his research focuses on how tactile images can be improved further and be easier to produce and to read and so as part of our collaboration he's producing tactile versions of five of our documents that will be used during the workshop and then be placed on our website for anyone with a 3D printer to download and use and then secondly I've been working with Jeanette Normaton-Ary who is Head of History at New College Worcester and has decades of experience teaching visually impaired students and in fact she was part of a previous National Archives Project prisoner 4099 in 2007 which is great and she has been organizing for her students to come down obviously but she's also been an invaluable help in giving feedback on the models as well and then finally Kate Elizabeth Antolach is a teacher who is both experienced in teaching at mainstream schools and visually impaired schools and she has lived experience as she is blind herself and a braille user as well so we have been lucky enough to have her come on board as a consultant for us which has been really invaluable in helping us prepare for the workshop and then I have to mention the people internally who are involved because I'm definitely not the only one who has been preparing this so Hannah Carter Education Manager will be delivering the workshop and Rachel Hillman has been preparing that workshop together with Hannah. Claire Horry, my line manager has also been working with me on this collaboration from the start and Elspeth MacGregor has supported us and then Alice Middlemiss and I think also her colleague Ellie Quick will be giving a repository tour taking the students through our repositories before the workshop and then Natalie Brown and Sarah Petter from Collection Care have helped us with some document samples that the students will be able to touch to get an idea of the archives and also they along with some other people from their team Helen Mayer and Katarina Williams have helped us do a touching assessment of the documents to see how much the students will be able to touch them so yeah I just wanted to give everyone their geo on that because it has been an amazing collaborative experience and I just want to show some examples of the tactile versions of these documents as well so these are each of the documents that the students will explore so this is a tutor document from 1567 and the tactile version there on the right. We have this John Blanks weight slip this one is quite interesting because it's text based mainly and so it'll be interesting to see how this one was requested specifically by the school so it'll be interesting to see how the students react to feeling the calligraphy. Then this I love this one because it has all these tiny houses and bridges and stuff but it's a map illustrating a land dispute in about 1450 and then this is an engraving showing the Peter Lou massacre in 1819 and this is the draft form on the right you can see the software that's being used to create that 3d printed version. Okay so time to finish off so just returning to the outcomes and aims of the projects. The next steps will be kind of evaluating how successful the workshop is so we're going to have a feedback form that will be used for that evaluation and collect data throughout the workshop on how effective these tactile versions are for the students and hopefully that workshop will then be able to be trialed with other groups of students as well and a lot of what I've gone over here today I will also summarize in a toolkit that I'll be putting together for people who are working with kind of collections in archives for example who want to make a start in making them accessible and don't have the knowledge to know where to begin really um and yeah so just to end since this is an exercising conversation from the start I by no means am an expert in this topic so I want to kick off the Q&A by asking if you have any particular experiences or challenges you think would be interesting for others to hear about or for me to hear about pop them in the chat and I will very happily read them yeah thank you very much everyone thank you so much Ellen that was such an interesting and thought provoking talk and it's been so wonderful to hear about your fantastic project and how well it's been progressing um so yeah so I'll open the floor to questions from the audience now um so you've got a question for Ellen if you could put in the Q&A function at the bottom and that's when I will monitor these and then we'll read them out to Ellen on your behalf um so yeah put in the Q&A function run in the chat that'll be brilliant and we've already got lots of questions for you Ellen so I'll get started um so the first I've got here is from Ruth Gard so it's a question about consultants and your kind of collaborations so she asked um did you pay consultants with the lived experience who worked on this project and perhaps you could also perhaps expand more about your collaboration strategies within this yeah sure thing so um yeah it depends on uh the the consultant that I mentioned for the project yes has been paid for her lived experience absolutely um other collaborators are doing it as an unpaid thing because it's mutually beneficial um so with my collaboration with George Rhodes for example is um you know mutually beneficial for both of us and then uh as I was seeking information uh some people were paid and some were not depending on how they kind of collaborate or depending on how the interview kind of came about or um how me talking to them came about but the consultant specifically absolutely was very important to to pay her yeah yeah thank you so much um so our next question is from Ruth at the University of Reading Collections and she got a question that goes feedback from students working with our collections is that dyslexic students who rely on screen readers and other software may also share the barriers in accessing text in the archives and may benefit from digital transcriptions um so they wondered whether you'd found cases where the needs of visually impaired users might overlap with other stakeholders I mean absolutely and uh I think one of the one of the concepts that I was introduced to when I was first starting to look into this was that this idea of universal design which um is a kind of concept that comes up in accessibility fields sometimes but it's the idea that instead of having something that is not accessible at the start and accessibility features are kind of added to it then instead it's kind of broadly accessible to not just one group from the start but to like a lot of different groups and one of the ideas behind that is that if something is accessible for one group then it's usually it holds benefit for people who are not maybe directly part of that group and that can be people who have disability needs that overlap like definitely people who have dyslexia and this is not something that I researched heavily during this time but I have definitely heard that um screen readers for example are one of the tools used by people with dyslexia but also people who are who don't have a disability need um or an access need can also you know benefit from making something that is accessible so I think the idea of changing accessibility from being something that we have to kind of force or we have to add instead of it's like a feature and it's an opportunity yeah. So now I've got a question from Rachel Brown who asks is it expensive to attain tactile images of documents? Well as I mentioned we are not paying for these ones very luckily because we've formed this collaboration the RNIB um and actually Sarah you have sourced tactile images from the RNIB before so you're probably better to answer this question actually yeah I mean yeah in my in my past life I worked with the National Trust and yeah sourced some tactile images from the RNIB which they do have a cost attached but definitely if you're in the UK they were very open to collaboration to talking about your own budgets and your own needs and so I found them really useful to fit in within my own project budget and working around the small pot of money that I had getting the most out of it. So yes so it is it is an expensive definitely a worthwhile investment and yeah the people I worked with were extremely accommodating with my small budget and really produced really fantastic results. So yes so thanks Ellen double one on that. So yeah so I've got another question from Ree from the University of Reading Collections um so they ask did you explore OCR and audio transcriptions at all in your work? So I didn't get a chance to look into this too much um I only had a year unfortunately so I was kind of really trying to focus on technologies that I saw would be like very readily integrate integratable but I really do want to explore OCR technology a bit more um and the university mentors that I um that I had especially Eleanor I know she has a lot of experience with OCR technology so I can't give you too much personal experience with that unfortunately I haven't used it ever um so yeah I just know that it exists I know it's very helpful but um yeah can't give any personal experience with OCR technology yeah great thank you then we've got a question from Erin Delaney um he goes in terms of producing a 3d printed tactile version of a document how does producing the design for a the 3d printed piece actually work so does someone have to design it or can software be used to generate it from the original image and what kind of role is involved in designing this i is a graphic designer needed to be on board for this? A graphic designer does not need to be on board and I have not been producing these 3d printed images myself so um George would be much better to answer this question but he does do both designing and kind of generating so I know that he starts with an automatically generated um image but that needs to that cannot stop there like first of all it needs to be smoothed out like when you first generate it it can be very jagged very like the textures are not great and I know he does so much work in um you know simplifying the image making it readable and we had like a really long session with um Jeanette from New College Worcester where we basically went through each model and she was like they won't be able to understand what that is um you know they will be able to understand that so um and we still don't know how efficient these will be because we still haven't done workshop yet but yeah so it's not just an automatically generated thing it does require a lot of work and you need to really think about what do you want to communicate with this image because what you want to what do you want them to learn about it what you want them to take in about it that will change how you design it so for example for the Great Fire of London map that I briefly showed it's a really really detailed map but we said you know we need to show that the fact that this big area was destroyed by the fire that's the main thing that they need to learn and so that's what how it was oriented how the creation of that tactile version was oriented yeah so hopefully that answered the question yes that really actually leads into our next question from Rosie about kind of the requirements of the tactile images and kind of the inf she asked kind of what information do you hope the students can learn from like the different shapes and textures so whether there's anything else you want to add on on that yeah um yeah so the texture thing is interesting I think traditionally a lot of tactile images use different patterns to differentiate different parts of an image so for example you might use stripes or dots to represent that you know this is one section of the image like say you have a woman wearing a dress you might use one texture for the dress and one and something else for her face or something like that to show that you know these are different things in the image so we are not quite going that route because this 3d printing technology like George is developing it as we as we speak kind of as part of his PhD so he's experimenting with using textures that might be a bit more naturalistic so using grass texture where there is supposed to be grass is things like that in terms of what we want the students to pick up from these images they are becoming specialists in the images so actually for these ones we do want them to pick up quite a broad range of things and quite a broad range of details not all the details obviously but we want them to get a good idea of why this document is important what kind of histories it shows and that kind of stuff so yeah so we have included as many details as we can in the tactile versions and it'll be very interesting to see which of those details are readable and which are not. Definitely it's really exciting your workshop on Monday to test all these all these ideas out so the next question is from Ali Ohergan from Queen's University Belfast which first says thank you for such an interesting talk Ellen and then she's asking about what the turnaround time is for accommodating a request to consult a tactile image and can you say a bit more about the technology used for this anything else to add on that yeah so it's 3d printed I can't give too much of an insight into the technology aspect because I did not personally produce them but what I can say is that traditional tactile images that you might get from the RNIB for example are not generally 3d printed so they I mentioned that you can acquire for example a printer and specialized paper and the way that this works is that it's a special kind of paper that reacts with ink in order to create small kind of swellings in the paper and this creates like raised images essentially and so you would use a software to create an image that is kind of readable as you as I've been talking about and then you print it and the paper kind of is raised up by this ink I can't remember the exact name of the paper I think it's swole paper or something like that but there you can buy this you can have a google online and yeah so 3d printing is not the traditional material for these kind of things and I believe the RNIB does not use 3d printing as for the turnaround time Sarah you might be able to answer this from the RNIB because I have not ordered personally from the RNIB before what the turnaround time is for me definitely I would give it at least a couple of months if you can just to prepare like the design to make sure that it is that for me that is what we needed yeah yeah I would say from my experience it was the designing time that took up the most time kind of sending off the we had photographs come back as the accessible images and then talking a lot of that and then the actual printing time was quite quick but the designing did take exactly yeah at least yeah a nice month yeah yeah no system that if you have a printer that you have actually acquired for your organization the printing would I don't think it would take long at all like I think it would be immediate yeah really good to have so the next question is from Lara Moon who asks are there any free technologies you would recommend for us to them to look into providing as they have very limited resources yeah I mean I don't know exactly where you're at in your kind of accessibility journey um so I would probably start by looking at um how accessible your kind of digital content already is like I would always recommend that if you want to make things accessible the first thing you can do is to make sure that those base level requirements are already met so things like being able to produce good alternative text things like testing your website with a screen reader like screen readers come built in to basically any technology that we have so like the microsoft one is called narrator for example those kind of things are completely free and they're super easy to do I will give a warning about free accessibility checkers because they I wouldn't like rely on them as a reliable indicator as to whether something is accessible or not because they only catch about 50 to 60 percent of accessibility issues in a website so being able to learn to do really basic manual testing so for example switch on your screen reader do some keyboard testing and make sure that your images all have visual descriptions and alternative text that is like a base level that you can do with any kind of online presence you have and in terms of on-site things if you don't have the money to do like an electronic magnifier you can have magnifying glasses they're not free but they are much cheaper you can kind of look at how your offerings are structured like how are your workshops structured do they are they built from the ground up for a sighted audience and it's so how can you kind of change that around I do it is really difficult when things are built as not accessible from the ground up and adding accessibility features on to them but yeah I think those are the kind of very base level free things that you can do immediately um I know I didn't mention any technologies there are no I wouldn't say there's like a free technology out there that I would like really recommend but a lot of the stuff you can do now are free and it's just about like basic learning very basic stuff yeah thank you that's yeah really really practical advice there um so our next questions from Florence who wants to hear more about the conservation testing that you mentioned um they're interested particularly in hearing about the non-specially created original archive items users were invited or are going to be invited to explore by touch and the considerations there as this is more achievable for some archives who can't afford to get tactile images produced and so perhaps if you want to talk a little bit about that so sorry the question was about the archival materials those yes about basically about the conservation testing that happened this morning actually and about kind of how how um yeah archives who can't afford tactile images kind of the ways you approached involving collection care in testing archive materials and getting that safe touch for those archives and anyone out there who can't afford to commission tactile images when they want to do these types of workshops um I mean I'm very lucky to have a very enthusiastic collection care department that Sarah is part of um who are very open to kind of you know allowing things to be touched more by visually impaired audiences for example and Sarah you are the one who actually was part of doing the assessment from collection cares I don't know if you want to add something before I kind of continue on answering this yeah I mean I would say the assessment kind of came about because working with Ellen um a phenarchive obviously our documents are handled by the reading room users but it's that repetitive touch that can cause damage to our archival documents and we usually don't recommend touch on kind of media so texts kind of painted surfaces anything that's a bit more vulnerable we recommend that it's not touch and but because touch is so important to Ellen's Ellen's workshop and these students and really engaging with these documents um we brought some of our conservators in to see what ways we could encourage kind of safe handling for this audience in these circumstances where could we allow touch more broadly across the documents so the students could get a real feel of a true feel of this of these texts um without causing damage and so we're going to do it fully more on a something we're hoping to look into um this year we're going to really excited to kind of collaboratively work with education on this to kind of assess our documents assess the workshops we offer and with audiences like blind and visually impaired students kind of how we can facilitate this handling of the documents in a really safe safe way but ensure that equity of um access to our collections yeah and just to add to that as well if you want to engage visually impaired audiences and you can't do like actual tactile objects and if most of your objects are two-dimensional um they're still things to feel about those objects that can tell you a lot about them so like different materials you know that kind of thing is something that we will be highlighting for the students so they will start the workshop by exploring different types of archival materials and then they will actually get to feel those materials on the original documents and the other thing if you don't have actual like tactile versions which is like um a luxury obviously visual descriptions so i mentioned this earlier that that's one of the base level things you can do it's completely free there there's guides out there and how to do good visual descriptions um a lot of those guides focus on um alternative text that is SEO oriented so it might be more focused on you know keep it within 120 characters you don't have to do that especially not if you're like doing an in-person workshop um you just be very specific with your visual descriptions you don't have to describe everything that's under describe the things that you want to communicate um there's also guides out there um i don't have the link in my presentation unfortunately i'm happy to share but there's guides out there for creating visual descriptions for complex images as well like um really detailed images or diagrams and graphs and stuff like that so even if you don't have a tactile version the power of a visual description of a really good visual description is one of the foundational kind of accessibility tools that you have in your toolbox brilliant thanks Ellen um so you've got about eight minutes left if anyone has any last minute questions please do send them into the q and a i will take this opportunity to ask a question of my own for Ellen um so you mentioned in your presentation you're going to include kind of sensory materials in your workshop and i'm kind of this is an area i'm really interested in kind of especially kind of the tactile the sounds and the smells you said you're going to include i wonder whether you kind of could expand a bit more on this and let us know what materials you're going to have in this workshop yeah sure and sound and smell are both tools that um our onsite teaching team have incorporated in their previous workshops as well but essentially uh for the sound we have uh purchased these dog sound buttons that people use to speak to their dogs um but we're not using them for that basically you don't record some sound onto it and then when you press the button that sound will play so yesterday we had great fun recording ourselves as kind of Peterloo protesters or an argument about land ownership for the map so creating these kind of sound clues about what the document means and then in terms of sense we are including kind of smell pots um that we are not using artificial smells um because we've used those in the past and they can sometimes be a bit overpowering so instead we're trialling using smell pots that have actual grass in them for example that can you know get out of grass smell that again will give the clue about you know this document might have something to do with land or with pastures things like that so it'll be exciting to see how well those incorporations of sound and smell go I will say um it's one thing that our consultant kind of told us to really warn about was you know warn about the fact that you know you're going to be using sounds and smells and also you're going to be touching certain things that you might not be prepared to touch because that can be a bit like shocking or uncomfortable for some people so we're definitely going to incorporate those kind of warnings um for example in the first part of our workshop they'll be exploring fluffy rats um soft toy rats because that's part of the national archives origin story and so we definitely have to warn them about that otherwise there might be some Kate was like they might freak out if they just feel like a fluffy rat so yeah oh yes yeah I think you need that bit of bit of context to get them get them going be aware of the sensory sensitivities um oh we've got a couple of questions they've just come in and we've got five minutes left so I think we can get through them um so the first question is from Anna Briggs who asks are there volunteer organisations that not only do voice recordings of novels etc for visually impaired people but also might read and record archive documents for smaller archives with limited funds do you know of any volunteer organisations that would do this that would be amazing I have never heard of that um the standard organisation in the UK at least that does this kind of service is called vocal eyes so um vocal and then EYES um I think that yeah that's what they're called um they do charge I haven't I have not heard unfortunately of a volunteer organisation that does this um they might exist um have a look you might be able to do something if it's very short voice recording you could potentially do it in house um you don't necessarily need a professional for it if you're recording a transcript for something for example but yes unfortunately I don't have any volunteer organisations that do that but good question that is a really good question we'll see see what's out there oh yeah someone posted the link to vocal eyes in the chat thanks oh thank you and then I got a question which might well be our last from Andy Corrigan who asks will you be publishing all of this summer where you're done and perhaps I'll add on to that kind of sum up perhaps where where's your kind of next steps where's your ambitions with this following on from this projector yeah I will be publishing um a toolkit um I'm not I'm going to kind of aim this similarly to have done this presentation as an introduction to people who want to not not as any kind of official best practice guide because I don't have the expertise for that but someone if someone wants to incorporate more accessibility a kind of toolkit that can sum up you know how much different things cost what are the easiest things you can do um yeah so I definitely will be publishing that on the National Archives website probably um we'll also be publishing a blog I think in April on the National Archives website saying how the the workshop went if you want to see how it goes