 So hello, everyone. Welcome to the publishing education panel discussion, which I'm very excited about. My name is Nick Hilton. I work for Coach House Books. I'm the digital and distribution manager there. I've been there for a couple of years and also just a bit of context. I have taught the production, which is public the product content management production side of publishing at Centennial College. And I am also doing Mohawk colleges right now accessible media program, which has been very fun for me. So it's just a better context in terms of my connection my experience in talking about publishing and education. So, if I can just have everyone on the panel just take a quick minute, just to say who you are and where you're from, we don't have a lot of time for a lot of background but if you can just go with that and of course full bios are available for everyone. I think would you mind starting. Sure. I'm Monique Manjion. I work at book net during the day and then after hours I teach digital publishing and production at Ryerson University's publishing program. I've been teaching for about four years so that is what we do there. Thank you. Suzanne would you mind going next. Not at all as Suzanne Norman, I teach in the publishing program at SFU, and I work closely with industry on various events. One of them is trying to get more accessibility into our courses in our publishing courses. Thank you. And Jillian or I see your name is Jill on the screen I'm not sure what you prefer. Yes, I'm Jill. I'm from the SFU printed digital and minor program as a student. Great. Thank you. And last but not least Karen. Karen McCall, Carl and communications. I have over 20 years in digital accessibility. I'm an advocate for a global inclusive education standard and I'm part time faculty at Mohawk colleges accessible media production program. Thank you. Karen was actually my instructor on a course that I have just finished so this is a very different context that we are meeting. But I know her from there so as Leah mentioned this is going to be a 30 minute panel discussion. But at 30 minutes, there's no time. Well, we are not. We have an incorporated question and answer period for this 30 minute panel discussion just because of course the working sessions after once we formally transition into that time, I can become question and answers and lots of open discussion. So, thank you very much everyone for joining and we will dive in on that note. I do have a list of questions but hopefully the conversation can just be free flowing but to start us off. I will ask maybe each person could take the take a moment to answer this question from an experience and context, what is currently. If we can hear what is currently included in the curriculum as a teacher or what you believe is included in the curriculum. And that would probably open up to also what is not included in the curriculum. Monique, would you like to start? No, that's okay. So in my sort of courses curriculum we're really focused specifically on developing EPUB in a born accessible way so we kind of make the assumption that most of our students are coming from a non technical background. A lot of our students are like me, former English majors. So we have not taken computer science and maybe don't have a background in code. So we kind of start from that point and then work towards building fully accessible EPUB three by the end of the course. So that's sort of the scope. I don't take accessibility out and like separate it as its own block my sort of desire is to just pretend building excessively is just how it's supposed to be because I believe that that's true. It sort of becomes the framework on which you build your skills in code and in EPUB specifically. I would say what's missing from what we do in this course is any coverage of onyx metadata and the way that that can be used to communicate accessibility. Because we have a limited amount of time in the semester there hasn't been a ton of time for that so that's that's where I see the biggest miss opportunity in the curriculum of my course currently. Great, thank you. Maybe we can hear from SFU from from both perspectives Suzanne if you wanted to start. I'm kind of looking at it from both perspectives because we have a Center for Accessible Learning Cal at SFU which is supposed to help facilitate students, students with accessibility concerns. They're supposed to help facilitate them in in the classroom and so Jill can speak to that a little bit more. Jill has been my student for a number of courses now. So she can talk a little bit about the needs and the lack of lack of response I think from from Cal I'll be candid. We, we as instructors we get information from them saying you have a student in your class that has accessibility concerns and it's a cumbersome and really convoluted process to be able to make the things needed to get them into place. On the other side of it, in teaching publishing courses, we really have not done a good job at up to this point. We have started it's unlike Monique, where you've built in things and they're not separate blocks. We have been doing separate blocks as a kind of an add on and it's not good enough. So what what we've proposed is building a completely new course on accessible publishing. But looking at it from a whole bunch of perspectives, not just from the ebook or the creation of books and content, but looking at accessible issues from all across the board. So peer reviews and journal articles how to make communications more accessible across the publishing aspects of the university. So, and from there we hope to build out a few more courses and have them in specific streams. That first course is in development. And Jill will be working on it with us, as well as Laura Brady. One of the things we did do this past year in one of my undergrad courses, the book publishing process was to bring in Laura to speak with the students to get them to work on a couple of projects. I think we hired her to do an entire module or lecture, based on her experience so we're building from that and we hope to do much better with with our work. I hope Jill talks a little bit about her experience in the design course to do with Natalie Daniel, and I think Jill has been a catalyst for us and sadly took that to help us be a little bit more aware of what we need to do. Yeah, the, when Laura came and talked to our class that was pretty much the only accessible publishing topic there was throughout any of my publishing classes, unfortunately. But I've like throughout my classes and with different program or different assignment. I kind of brought components of accessibility into them. So like she's done is saying I took a graphic design course. I think a couple years ago now, and the whole process was like designing our own book and me with a visual assistant. We found ways to make like tactile diagrams and to show tactically different fonts that I can choose and different layouts we made those all tactile. That was more through our creative process not like through the school so much. I think it's definitely improving with accessibility in the publishing program. And I'm really excited to see it move forward, especially being as far as I know one of the only visually impaired students in the publishing program. But like Suzanne mentioned with the Center for Accessible Learning, I have to go through them to get all of my materials converted into accessible formats for all my classes, but they go through a second hand party in the library. So it's like a big roundabout thing to get my materials. So that's a big accessibility issue. Yeah. Thank you both for your different for it's so nice to have it two sides of the perspective of education in terms of student and an instructor Karen I'm wondering if you want to add anything about your feelings or experience but what's currently included in curriculum, or what is missing. Well, the whole push for my piece of a global inclusive education standard is to have an international standard that has a baseline for accessibility. So that when any student in primary education puts their hands on a computer they're just automatically creating things that are accessible. Other people have mentioned it's not an add on it's not. You need to make this special it's just this is how we create content this is how we create multimedia this is how we create buildings this is how we create documents. We see a big opportunity for both primary and tertiary education, having leadership roles at the moment, especially with, you know what we've seen in in terms of coven at being able to say we now know how much digital content including textbooks and and journal materials and library material are not accessible. So how can we as leaders who are creating the teachers that publishing people the multimedia people, how can we start just incorporating and training our faculties on creating things that are accessible from the start. And if we do that, then once we get into like a few years down the road into tertiary education, we can focus on the enhancements for the publishing tools. Instead of having to have everybody go back to kind of the basics and and look at you know this is how you create an accessible document or this is how you create accessible content. So my approach is based on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals goal 4.5 is to have inclusive education. By 2030 the problem is, everyone has a different definition of what inclusive education is which is why I want to get people together and say, you know, as a global community we need to discover and identify exactly what we're talking about. Because of digital accessibility. It means, as soon as we start using computers, we're creating things that are accessible doesn't matter whether it's digital, like print or building plans or maps or whatever we're creating it's just accessible. Right. So I'm wondering like what are the challenges maybe we can talk about the challenges both in first publishing specific programs and getting accessibility built into the curriculum but also, like in general because what we're talking about right here is, and I agree with you of course that everyone should be getting accessibility practices and teaching it but what I can I can think of 20 challenges already of course I'm sure everyone else here can as well. The first and foremost is that everyone who is teaching on whatever level whatever subject needs to have that skill set themselves in order to teach it. So perhaps we can start talking about that Suzanne I see you want to say something to jump right in. I just want to ask Karen a question actually. And so with the standards because I look at places like BISG right or book net places where you build standards and you get industry buy in and so it just happens like E pub standards took quite a while to get everybody to buy into those. Could it be something like that that you envision so that an industry led organization or association or co up group would actually be the driving force. I guess within the publishing industry, not specifically within the educational industry but to make books more universally accessible and as you say from like born accessible. And in terms of in terms of publishing it, it would probably have to be industry led, but again with the bigger picture if we're also approaching this from the educational standpoint, having both entities working together so that they're not working at odds with each other and as a as a global community we're not developing an inclusive education standard that then has excluded publishers from participating and saying this is what's possible this is what we can do this is how as a global community we can break down some of the barriers that the goal of what I'm looking at is to make sure that any, any person who wants an education has access to an education on an equal footing. So access to textbooks and in speaking at conferences this is one of the biggest problems is getting textbooks that are accessible and looking at some of the comments from the panelists before. I am getting asked a lot of times now how can I how can I know when I'm going into to a template that it's accessible. I don't want to start working on a template that I've downloaded only to find out it's not accessible and I have to fix it. How do I know if I'm ordering a textbook online that it's accessible. And before that it was how do I know if I'm registering for a class that the class is accessible that everything that's being used in the classroom is accessible, whether it's the textbooks or the applications that teachers bring in or the learning management system. So there are a lot of layers and and Nick I have I have encountered probably your 20 challenges and more but that what I want is to start people talking on the same page instead of everybody's on a different page defining things differently and not talking to each other. If I could just add one thing, I guess the different. There are two different things happening because we're, we're teaching publishing students to enter the publishing industry, and to have the skills and to have that base knowledge of just making everything accessible from the beginning. And then there's the other side of the people using the books. So I guess from a person who teaches publishing, I would love to see and I would be happy to work on pushing some of the associations like the ISG, or booknet to make these standards just practice. So when you teach publishing, just like you teach EPUB, you would teach accessibility. And I think that's what I would love to see happen from that perspective. As someone who has a visual disability and uses a screen reader, I, and having to do research for for book, book chapters that I contribute to or other things, just the sheer amount of inaccessible content that I have to work around in order to be productive. You know, I can spend a month just trying to get a few articles accessible enough to start skimming through and realize that there's nothing really there that that is a value to what I'm trying to research. So it is very frustrating, which is another reason I'm approaching things this way is is it's kind of selfish. I need to have access. I need to have accessible digital content. Of course. Yeah, and I can speak from that as well. Just like being fully blind and all the accessible technology that I use like screen readers and like within like getting materials in time to be prepared for classes one thing but also like within our publishing courses. You know, different types of binding and like margin, big sizes and different books, big sizes, but like I can only imagine what those look like, like it'd be nice to have some kind of tactile materials and implemented for that. So then I'm not just guessing like half understanding. Like making those tactile materials takes time that we don't have throughout a semester to always make or have ready. So there's a lot of frustration behind just like getting materials available in the right amount of time as well. That's a big issue. Absolutely. I think, when Nick mentioned challenges, my, the biggest challenge I face every semester is that I only have students for a limited time I have 12 or 13 weeks, if there's a reading week in there. To deliver the whole course and also make sure everyone has the supports they need to succeed in the course. And, and there can be really unforeseen challenges. I'm lucky in that the course I teach has been developed with the distance learning department to be fully accessible and available in an online format, but even recently like Chromebooks for example can't run the software that I use to deliver the course. And as more and more students are using Chromebooks as their home computers, and don't have access right now due to the pandemic to on campus libraries and computer labs to access non Chromebook computers. You know halfway through the semester someone will be like oh my Chromebook can't operate this program. And I'm like scrambling to find a Chromebook version of this specific script, and nobody has one, and then I have to learn how to write one in the middle of a semester. And the kind of thing can be really complicated. And then the timeline becomes a different challenge as well when you're trying to think of, you know there's, if this is the one course they have that covers accessibility in any significant way. Unlike some of the other programs like SFU, the Ryerson program students can kind of take courses piecemeal they don't have to take the full publishing program if they don't want to. And they're taking only my course and my course is an elective. If that's the only place they're going to learn about accessibility, I have 13 weeks to not only teach them how to learn to code but also why accessibility matters and all the ways that can impact the rest of the publishing process. Because I don't know for sure that other instructors are going to be covering that content in the areas of the publishing process that they touch in their courses. And that that's just a very short amount of time to try to drive home this kind of big sort of cross industry accessibility need and, and to kind of drive it home enough that I can hope that they'll ask the right questions and the courses that I don't teach and kind of help those instructors find their way to making their content address the accessibility challenge and rise to that occasion as well. And we have the same problem just trying to teach accessible word and PowerPoint, because you'll have people with max you'll have in, of course, different tools different location for things. And I mean, even in the, in the PDF there, there are slight differences. And, and my course is three weeks. So, oh my God. Yeah, I know, I have to, I have a very intensive course I can say. But, and the whole issue of Chromebooks brings up another issue in talking about reading systems. One of the things that is emerging now is that in the Microsoft ecosystem you have narrator, and it works really well with native Microsoft products but doesn't play so well with things that students might need in terms of other applications and I'm not thinking of the ones that instructors just find on the Internet and think it's a good idea to put into the course and it's the same with Chromebooks. So, those of us who use adaptive technology will have a screen reader we may have screen magnification software. And because it is more generic and private sector, it tends to work with more applications. So, when we're looking at narrator, for example, in the Microsoft ecosystem. We don't read PDFs it because that's an Adobe product and you know heaven help them if they cross pollinate. So, we end up having to balance in our heads. Keyboard commands for the operating system keyboard commands for the word processing system and any other tool that we're using keyboard commands for the Internet keyboard commands for PDF documents. And then you have different commands for for Google Docs and different commands for open office and and so if we're trying to optimize our, our productivity and if people are using different applications we're stuck in in ecosystems or reading systems where we can't use our adaptive technology we're forced to learn different adaptive technology, and I can tell you it gets very confusing because you're so used to using specific keyboard commands or having access to specific tools. And then all of a sudden you're in a different ecosystem, and you don't have access to it. So, in talking even about reading systems for for public publishers, making sure that yes you may have your own on board tools for accessibility. But you also need to include the hooks so that those of us who are using mainstream adaptive technology can use our technology to access that that content. Can I ask a question. I'm sorry I just, this is such a great experience to live to hear what's going on. I'm curious when you were saying that your distance and department work with you to create your course and to make it born accessible. Was that something that you had to initiate or does Ryerson when new courses are developed are they all developed now as born accessible. Yeah, they do have in the distance department of a whole team working on accessibility. I believe, mainly driven by the AODA requirements for Ontario trying to make sure that all the new courses that come online are meeting that sort of threshold for accessibility. I was particularly aggressive and making sure that my course could be delivered, not only fully accessibly but also fully asynchronously because a kind of different aspect of accessibility is like the accessibility of time. And being able to serve students who want to be able to do a course that they could work on at five or six in the morning if that's the time they have available. And so part of that meant making sure that everything was available in a text based format so that people didn't have to watch a video recording of a lecture. Or kind of engage with like a lot of visual material I wanted to make sure that everything, everything could be fully accessible through first people who need like sort of a raw text version of all the content so that it could be access through different adaptive technology. And also, you know, I feel like part of it too is if my course is about publishing accessible material you kind of have to walk the walk on that. And it would have been really embarrassing if my course was not accessible. I was just curious, like so that's for your distance and courses of course we're all teaching remotely now. And this blend of what's the distance and course and what's a regular course that's being taught remotely. There, there's no requirements that our courses be built accessible. And I want to correct that. Do you know if the courses the backlist of courses are being redeveloped to be accessible, or is that I think the pandemic was a lucky accident and that it's forcing people to develop their courses for online delivery so I think. So the pandemic has been terrible for lots of reasons I think it did inspire a lot of those courses that had been developed before the accessibility requirements were set up by the distance learning department that now they're going back and starting to address that in a more fulsome way. So a lot of the other courses are more lecture focused in their online delivery. And depending on the material that might be just as accessible because learning to code is such a different process than, you know, learning about becoming a literary agent. I felt that the more asynchronous material delivery was just a better fit for the type of material I'm trying to teach. But yeah, the pandemic has, I think, been great for the development of distance learning and people kind of acknowledging the problems in those course delivery methods. But I think there's still probably a lot to be done to bring all the courses up to up to that level and I'm kind of grappling with what the accessibility of my course will look like the next time I deliver it in person and how I can improve that experience as well to make sure that my in classroom students can have the same accessible experience that my online students have right now. Thank you. Time flies when you're having fun. We just have a few more minutes left of the more formal panel discussion. I was wondering before, and of course, this conversation will continue which I'm very excited about in the working session component of it. But in the last couple of minutes, I'm just wondering if we can talk about future future land, which is always dreamy and perfect and wonderful. I was wondering if we could each the panelists give our thoughts from your experience, either as a student or teaching what you think what you hope the perfect, either program or specific course, or as a student enrolling in a course. Like, what, what is the perfect scenario like what what is the dream goal here, because I've heard I, I personally just to start it for a quick second, and my experience teaching at Centennial, I, I hope for Centennial's future and other similar programs that I guess the question is like should there be a course in on the program level that is specific to accessibility overall where we're imposed like talking about the values of accessibility the importance of it. And then, of course, every course like there's an editing class there's a production class as a design class acquisitions, and should all of those classes then be teaching an accessibility component as well or should it be one specific accessibility course that is in the same way that we do the editing and production. That's on the program level. I'm just wondering if we can hear from each panelist in our last couple of minutes, what sort of your dream scenario is either enrolling in a program or class or teaching one. Yeah, I can go. I, if I could have what so what I want to see is basically kind of a bit of both of what you said so like, I would love to see a course all designed around accessible publishing and like how to program those into like different accessibility courses and like if there could be some kind of simulation showing what it's like to as a reader with a print disability. I would love to see a course specifically around accessible publishing, but I also think that in the different courses of like editing design, etc. like I would also love to see accessible components built into those courses as well, I would love to see that happen. I guess to add to Jill, and well the first thing we are doing and it's now brought to the Dean's level for the funding is to create that one course about accessible publishing, which I mentioned at the top, and that will be something that's going to be, it'll be part of our publishing program, but it will touch on topics that are applicable across all faculties. So, if a student in health science, for example, wants to know how to make their materials or, you know, to publish things that are accessible born accessible, then they can take this course and learn fundamentals. But on top of that, we also need to build in components in each of the courses to make sure that they are one accessible to all students and to that the curriculum itself the content itself is teaching best practices and accessibility. So our first job is to build that course. And in conjunction with that we're also revisiting all of the publishing courses to make sure that they will be more inclusive. So it's working, we're doing that. You're in future one one token. My wildest dream for education both in digital accessible publishing and just education and publishing overall. I think there needs to be more mid career type professional development for professionals who need to be educated there's so many established professionals in publishing who don't know anything about accessibility and aren't thinking about it. And we can't just like wait for them all to get through their careers and retire before accessible publishing starts at the beginning. So I would like to see more opportunities for that kind of development. I would also like to see more career opportunities and accessible publishing for students. I have students producing professional level work every semester. And there's maybe if they're lucky, like three jobs to apply for in the next six months. And that's really hard for them to keep those skills sharp and stay passionate about this sector like kind of sector of the industry when there's just very few places for them to go and I know what the Canada book fund accessible digital books funding that that has improved and there are more students with careers one of my former students is here so that's exciting for me. I think those are kind of my two big dreams and then also to see accessible content and the impact of accessible publishing brought through all the rest of the courses in the program so that students in all in all areas learn about creating accessible content and then take that into whatever department or career path they move forward with in publishing because it shouldn't just be the digital book publishers who care about this. So why don't we all get together and create a few online pro D courses and they're, you know, offered through, because we're all remote, you could bring in people from Ryerson's and tell me all and whatever else you meet in the online space and do some pro D stuff. Yeah. I'm encouraged by what I've seen just in accidentally in the last six months. I'm publishing from the textbook part from the alternate text production side of things, having contact with students and universities who are trying to get things accessible not necessarily from the publishing side so I'm looking at the software. And there was an in design plus accessibility summit that they didn't think was going to have a lot of people interested, and they were overwhelmed by the number of people from all stages of in design skills who were interested in creating accessible content from from in design. I attended a couple of meetups from just because the topic was interesting. And there are groups of people who are involved in publishing and using in design and graphic design and that who are learning on their own and how to create accessible content. And then they get together in the meetups and they all share information they're not always politically correct and they they sometimes use profanity but they're, they're learning and they're sharing. The grassroots desire to learn about accessibility and how to produce accessible content is growing. I was encouraged again in the the original panel for the for this afternoon that students with without disabilities seem to be discovering tools that they can use to access information in a different way. And one of the things I advocate is tool for task not tool for disability. So there are times when I'll use screen magnification there's times when I use screen readers there's times when I use voice recognition so just having discussions around inclusion in all of the aspects that you were talking about the supply chain management, the, the retail the creation of the digital content, just to keep that thread flowing through all parts of publishing I think is is important so that people don't lose track of it. Absolutely. Well, on that note, I just, I want to thank all of you panelists Monique, Suzanne, Joe and Karen for participating and having this great conversation, I really value your individual perspectives and I think that we have kickstarted what will be a great working session. So I'm going to just stop recording.