 I'm now going to pass it over to Daniela Levy-Pinto of NELS who's going to be moderating the multi-stakeholder panel. Just a quick logistical note while she's going to moderate the panel, I'll help with the Q&A at the end. So please save your questions to the end and then we'll take them at that time. We'll ask you to probably raise your hand or put the questions in the chat and then I'll share them as we go through. So thanks everyone for being here and Daniela, I'll pass it over to you. Excellent. Thank you Lea, welcome everyone to the second day of our summit. I'm very excited to moderate the panel, the multi-stakeholder panel. I will begin by introducing all our panelists and then we'll briefly talk about the structure. So all our panelists can speak about accessibility and inclusion across the ecosystem, including book production, publishing and creation, distribution, remediation, copyright at the Marcus Treaty, experience of the reader, metadata and much more. So I'll begin introducing our panelists. First we have Adam Wilton. Adam is a program manager with the Accessible Resource Center BC and the Provincial Resource Center for the visually impaired. His background is as a teacher for the visually inspired students and an orientation and mobility specialists. Avnish Tseng, who heads strategy and operations at the Daisy Consortium, and is a member of the advisory advisory board of the World Wide Web Consortium. He has more than 15 years experience in developing of technology for accessible publishing and reading, and he's a key driver of efforts for a world wide inclusive publishing ecosystem. Avnish, thanks for being here. Thanks to the magic of the internet. Next we have Nelson, very own Danny Farris. Danny works as an accessibility developer to design applications to make accessible publishing easier. Hi Danny. Next we have Laura Brady, the director of cross media at Anansi and Roundwood, in addition to being a self-proclaimed accessibility BC body full-time. We're so happy to have you here Laura. Then we have Noah Jenner. He is the leader at BookNet Canada, where he orchestrates a skilled team of technical and policy-oriented client-focused staff to provide new data management services and supply chain solutions for the Canadian publishing library and retail sectors. Hi Noah. And last but not least we have Victoria Owen. Victoria is an information and policy scholar practitioner in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, as well as chair of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations Copyright Committee. Victoria is also on the board of the World Intellectual Property Organization Accessible Books Consortium. Thank you for joining us Victoria. And of course my name is Daniela Levy Pinto and I am with Nelson. So now for the structure of the panel, everyone can speak from their perspectives. The panel section will last 45 minutes. There are a couple of questions, more general questions to hear from everyone. And some other questions are aimed for some panelists, but of course everyone will have an opportunity to contribute. I suspect that much of the conversation will flow organically. I am totally blind, so it will be a bit, it may be a bit challenging to read kind of faces via Zoom. But I will also try to monitor the race hand function and Leah will be assisting with moderating the QA for the chat. So let's get started with the questions and the first general question. From your perspective, what is the most important advance in accessible publishing in the last year? Let's start with Avnish. Hello everyone. It's an honor to be with such a great panel here. Coming to the question, since we are this session is mainly about the supply chain, looking from the global perspective, a couple of things which are really becoming a driver. I would like to name firstly the European Accessibility Act, the European Accessibility Directive, which will be applicable to all the products and services which will be sold in Europe from 2025. And member states have to implement the law before June 2022. The great thing is that it is not only applicable to the European publishing industry, but to everyone who wants to sell their publications or the products in Europe. And what sets it apart is that it is not only focused on the content, it is focused on different parts of the supply chain. Obviously, on the e-books, it is also focused on the websites of the seller. It also focuses on the metadata, also on the support services provided by the industry, and also on the e-readers. So it provides the functional requirements for all the different nodes of the supply chain. Apart from this, I think the Canadian Government's initiative of supporting the inclusive publishing industry is also one of the big motivators. I think these are the two big motivators of the last one or one and a half years, and at the beginning of this millennium, these two things have put the momentum really for the accessibility and the inclusive publishing. Thank you. Thank you, Avnish. And absolutely, that's a great way to start thinking about all this and how it will have an impact. Laura, would you like to offer your perspective? Happy to. I would also like to say I'm really delighted to be here and to see such a dream team of big brains working on the issues at play in these few days of conversation. It's really such a treat to be able to contribute and to listen in on what's happening. So to wrap up on what Avnish just said, I would say that one of the key things, you know, we're all doing our work, making our e-books as accessible as possible, working on the tools, working on education, working on helping publishers. But the key piece of the puzzle in my opinion is the metadata and the link to exposing that metadata to vendors. And there's been a lot of work on that in the past year. It's really getting close to making these books that we work so hard on more discoverable by the people who need access to the metadata that describes them. It feels to me like that is a key piece and there's been tons of progress and it's really nice to see. And a lot of that progress wouldn't be possible with some of this department of Canadian heritage money, but it is happening in various places all around the world, including in Avnish's accessibility tax task force, which is a part of the W3C's e-club working group. There's a lot of work going on in various places and it's great. Thank you, Laura. Noah. Thanks, Daniela. Thanks for having me. I'll pick up on a couple of things that other people have already touched on, but I think they're really, really important and I just, I think it's worth stressing them. You know, obviously BookNet's really interested in this metadata and discoverability piece and really think that that's important for driving the whole supply chain for accessible books. I'm really interested in that. I think some things happen this year, both in the accessibility space itself and then externally that are going to impact hopefully in a good way going forward, the accessibility. I think that a few people that are here today were on a BISG, that's the U.S. Standards Body call last week where Charles Lapierre shared a document on how reading systems, discoverability platforms, more discoverability platforms and e-commerce platforms can be really important. I think it was metadata. I thought it was a great document. It's the first time I'd seen that document. It's something we've been working on a long, long time, so picking up where Laura was just going, I think, and Avis was talking about, you know, getting this stuff now at the forefront of the consumer's mind is one thing. It's really, really important. The consumer and reader mind is huge, hugely important so that we can take advantage of all the hard work that people are doing. What I wanted to mention is the pandemic that we're currently going through and the impact it's having on our supply chains and our consumer behavior and our reader behavior is hugely, hugely important. Perhaps not just in negative ways but in positive ways too. We've seen a refocus by a lot of publishers and supply chain back on digital a little bit because we saw digital consumption grow dramatically over the last year because in North America and in Canada specifically stores and libraries were often closed for physical acquisition of materials and so digital material jumped to the fore again and this maybe gives us a focus back on digital that never really completely left but an investment, a path to an investment in digital that could include accessibility as a huge component of it. So I think that has a huge part of this as well. Wonderful. Thank you, Noah. And yeah, there's there's lots, lots to unpack there and certainly the pandemic has had an interesting impact and to continue to be explored. Thank you. Would you like to offer your perspective. Thank you. Good morning. Afternoon everyone and it really is an honor to be here so thank you for inviting me. As we work with various publishers across Canada. We have a chance to see firsthand what publishers are producing these days and what their books look like as they're going to production and distribution and one of the things that struck me over this past year is the adoption of EPUB Street. So many of the publishers and even several that we worked with in the past have moved to producing EPUB three and not just that but they're actually starting to adopt the accessibility features that we've been recommending in our work. Including semantic vocabulary for instance and even accessibility metadata in many cases so that's been really exciting for me to see as we look at individual files from individual publishers and just looking at the reports that we're producing and congratulating them on really adopting a lot of this stuff that has taken a long time. Because of the workflow the publishers have and the timelines that they operate under, but it is so neat to see that starting to come so that's been really exciting for me to say. Thank you Danny. And last but not least, Victoria what's your perspective here. Well, thank you very much and I too am delighted to be here and so happy to see so many old friends and to meet new people who are involved in this and I really want to join Laura Brady's group of accessible to people. It's a great time. Everybody's welcome. Yeah, I think the Canada book find is one of the things that stands out to me as a real great boom this this year I think it's it brings makes accessible publishing. It brings it to the fore. It makes you realize that you know government the government of Canada and the taxpayers really are behind our supporting this, and the money is being spent to support Canadian publishers and to get our you know, Canadian this Canadian story made accessible. So I think that is really to me one of the top things for the in the past year. I agree with me to the EU accessibility directed is also a powerful initiative and will drive. Certainly a lot of a lot of big move over to accessible publishing. And the, the other thing that we're working on it's not the publishing it's tangential to publishing because we're associated with libraries is the whole work on metadata. So, getting that sorted out so we can the discoverability happens and and the standards we established those standards so that everybody describes their materials in the same way so that it's really much more interoperable. So, I think those are, are some really great initiatives that I think are advancing very well in their own in their own their own timescale because work on standards everybody knows that it's slow process, but so important. Thank you. Thank you, Victoria, and absolutely all the hard work for accessible publishing has to be discovered and that's that's instrumental so please keep those conversations happening and it is it is very exciting work to see. It's Adam. I'm delighted to join you all today from the traditional unseated territory the Musqueam sale of tooth and Coast Salish peoples here in Vancouver British Columbia. I just wanted to start by by saying that you know it's then to kind of build no on what you mentioned around the pandemic. I have seen and I know it's almost cliche at this point to mention silver linings to to what we've experienced but in the K to 12 sector, something that we've noticed is just a general increase of awareness of accessibility of learning materials for students who are learning who perhaps previously weren't relying on, you know, text to speech or highlighting functionality are now finding that that's something that they need to be successful when learning in virtual environments. And so the, the, the push to virtual learning has has highlighted, I think for many educators, the, the need for designing with inclusion in mind from the outset. So one thing that I would point to in terms of development from the last year or maybe the last couple of years would be tools like the word to EPUB plugin from the Daisy consortium that has made a huge difference in terms of providing educators with toolkit with with another tool for their tool kits for producing, you know, EPUB right from their own materials and recognizing that educators are both content creators and consumers, albeit, you know, indirectly via students of learning materials. And so tools tools that that work to that serve to increase awareness and also demand for accessible materials on the part of educators and stakeholders at kind of school district and provincial levels makes a makes a big difference in terms of the demand that we see in the alternate format sector for not only alternate format. Sorry, specifically produced alternate format materials, but also just learning materials for all students that are designed with with accessibility in mind. Thank you Adam and absolutely the tools are certainly essential for for this work. Excellent so in terms of the supply chain. How is accessibility preserved throughout the entire supply chain and in particular, perhaps after you could start what advances have you noticed in the past year in this area. Yeah, sure. Yeah. You know, I have all of us know that initial in the initial days when we started working on accessibility of publications. The focus was more on the content accessibility I'm talking about decade ago kind of story, but slowly, everyone realized that producing an accessible, having an accessible reading experience for publication is very different than a website or maybe an audio or full text full audio Daisy book, because the publications go through the long long supply chain. No matter you have done your best efforts in making your content accessible. What if your aggregator is not supporting accessibility. What if your retailer is not having the accessible website, your retailer is not able to show the accessibility metadata and your user is not able to identify, which is accessible publication. What if the DRM used by your distributor is blocking the accessibility. And finally, what if your reading system is not supporting accessibility. You can see that accessibility can break at at any point in the supply chain. And we have to preserve accessibility throughout the supply chain. To overcome this challenge, Daisy consortium started the accessibility baseline project way back in 2016, thanks to the Google impact challenge, which made it possible. We worked on standards we worked on the accessibility checking tools like is we worked on the metadata and also worked on the accessibility testing of the reading system. Let me take the different nodes one by one, starting from the content. Obviously, standards are very important. If you are producing accessible EPUB three EPUB accessibility standard is going to follow. If you're using accessible PDF, you may be using the PDF UA ISO 14289. But anyways, the standards are the starting point. And I remember in 2016 when I was co-leading the EPUB accessibility version 1.0, at that time, publishers were finding it difficult even to put all text. And we have to relax the requirement for them little bit so that they are able to meet EPUB accessibility 1.0. And now, when we are working on EPUB accessibility 1.1, people are the publishers are now making the advanced features like extended descriptions like MathML. And they are pushing us to have level AA as the norm. Just see how far we have come, how far the publishing industry has come in three or four years. The tools like accessibility checker for EPUB is by Daisy. This has been incorporated in the publisher's supply chain. And you know, now we are also seeing the retailers and the distributors that they are also incorporating the accessibility checkers like is in their supply chain. They already use EPUB check in their ingestion system and they are adding is there so that the basic accessibility can be tested while they ingest the publications. Now let's move to the metadata piece from the content and the ingestion. We are working on user experience guide for displaying accessibility metadata in publishing community group, which some of the panelists already mentioned. I think this is one of the other breakthrough. There are two objectives behind this. Number one, we know that the accessibility metadata is machine readable. Even if you will show it to the users, they will not be able to understand it. So we need to provide guidance to the retailers to the distributors how to display the accessibility metadata in a user friendly way. The second objective is long term. You know, all of us know that there are many, many metadata formats. So no matter which underlying metadata format is used, the user should get the same accessibility information. And this can only be achieved by harmonizing different metadata formats. So over the last one year, we have harmonized the accessibility data of schema.org with Onyx. Many new cores have been added to Onyx. Thanks to Charles, Madeleine, Rigorio and Matt Garish for helping us in all this work. And of course, thanks to George also. I forget George because he's always with me in these efforts. And the next step would be to expand the harmonization to the other metadata formats. And let's see the impact. The two big players, VitalSource and Red Shell have already started using these guidelines. And now they are presenting the accessibility metadata to the users in a user friendly way, enabling many users to identify the accessible publications. Another challenge was DRM system. I would not like to take the name, but in earlier days, the DRM systems used to block accessibility. But over the last two, three years, we are witnessing the solutions like LCP from EDR lab, which is a production system that is friendly to accessibility. And the good thing is that this specification is already submitted to ISO for international standardization. So these are also the great initiatives on the protection side, which was a blocker earlier. And obviously on the reading system side, we are seeing a lot of improvements. In DAZ, we started an initiative for accessibility testing of reading systems on the EPUB test.org. And I would also like to applause the efforts, the parallel efforts of NELS for testing the reading systems which are used in Canada. Due to all these efforts, we can see tremendous progress. In 2017, VitalSource became the first reading system which was able to meet the minimum accessibility requirements. But now if you visit the EPUB test.org, you will see that Thorium, VitalSource, RedShelf, WildStreamReader are leading the accessibility. And there are many more reading systems who are catching up really fast. So these are the huge improvements that we are looking at in the supply chain over the last two or three years. Thank you. Thank you, Avnish. This is wonderful, indeed a lot of improvements and great work being done. So drawing on what Avnish just shared with all of us, I would like to perhaps for no one this question would be for you. I would like to know if the Canadian market is ready to support an accessible publishing landscape, producing born accessible from content from the perspective of metadata, discoverability, distribution, etc. Thanks, Daniel. So yes and no, we're heading there. Those are the easy answers. The more I guess the more detailed answer is there's still a lot of work to be done in that in that regard. You know, I think that, you know, some of the work that Avnish was just talking about about harmonizing the metadata and using standards. Those are all hugely important for our for everywhere for the supply chain in Canada as well in there that, you know, they're they're big, big, big issues. And so, as it stands now, I don't know of many outside of NELS and CELA platforms, and, and related platforms that show the accessibility information in the Canadian landscape and the way Avnish was talking about. The vital source does an excellent job, a really excellent job of exposing the accessibility. It should be what everyone I think should be working towards. And that's our hope, I think. I think that by standardizing some of the discoverable metadata around ebooks. We'll go a long way to this and that's what we've been working on what book that's been working on and promoting and trying to get people to to look at. When we look through our metadata, we have over almost 5 million metadata records 4 million right metadata records in our database. And I do scan through there every so often to see what accessibility is being provided for the digital works. Last year, when I looked, there was almost none. We almost had no onyx related metadata related to accessibility on 4 million titles. So that's a little shocking it was a little shocking to me even last year. I re-ran my query just before this meeting, and there were 6000 titles that had some accessibility metadata tied to them on the onyx record. So that we know there's way more out there than that so that's a little bit of a problem but 6000 is way better than none that would kind of had a year ago so a little over a year ago. But that's a little bit of a of the issue I think too is a chicken and egg thing. You know people we know people are producing good accessible books, we're pretty sure they are. But they are not describing them in a way that we can take advantage of that in all cases and so that will go once we can get that on under control that will go a long way to helping the discoverability platforms and the e-commerce platforms and the library platforms that are doing this. It was hard to make the case when there was very little data to actually show now there's getting to be a point where there's getting to be a lot of data to show and good quality data too. That's the other thing it has to it has to be usable and describable in the ways that Anisha was talking about so I think there's still work to be done. I know in our business to business platforms were just about to start adding access accessibility display on the titles that libraries and retailers use on our platform. So they'll be able to filter on on different accessibility criteria on the digital books that we do and we'd like to see other people do that 49 shelf here in Canada should do that as well at some point they will get the data from us as well so. And then it becomes the larger platforms. Some of the reading platforms Kobo Amazon library platforms like overdrive hoopla and others 3M need to start exposing this data to and I'm not sure. I know that there's talks with all of those platforms to do this we've been involved in some of those talks. So I know that people are working on it but again I think it's a little bit of the chicken and the egg thing. There has to be enough to show to make it make the case of doing that on the distribution side I think. Canada has a little bit of a maybe a leg up I'm not sure if that's the right way to say it but the ebound is a huge player here for us and on the distribution side. They're very involved in this as we know I don't have a serious today talking in some other groups. You know they're heavily involved in the distribution of this they're heavily involved in promoting accessibility and working directly with the publishers to get accessible born accessible books and born accessible into their workflows. So the distribution piece I think is there to the for the most part. I think it's making sure we have the data the information correctly described in a way that can be consumed and then sharing it and promoting it through the discoverability platforms and that the commerce and library platforms are the key are the key pieces we still need to work on a lot as well as just continuing to develop the content itself, which other people are going to talk about I assume. I think that all of those things are important, but you know I think we are heading in the right direction. It just, it takes time, it takes more time than it should but it does take time, but I do think, you know, I'm buoyed by that by that amount of work that I'm seeing out there so that's that's really good and just underlying data the amount of data we're seeing like that is a huge increase from almost zero to 6000 so and that we're we're not getting everything that's mostly just trade focused it's not educational. Other people talk about it's mostly what what will be considered to be consumer direct or library direct so on the trade side. I think that's so we're heading in the right direction Daniela. Thank you. Thank you know I. Yeah, a lot of work is being done and I hear what you're saying about the platforms. Yeah, the content is one thing the platforms is are another and very importantly from libraries as well so. Thank you so much for sharing your perspective. I'm mindful of the time so let's move on to the next question. This is mostly directed to Danny. So, what, from your perspective Danny, the reading systems developers need to tackle in order to improve accessibility of their products and what key improvements would you recommend for them as both a developer and a user of reading systems Thanks Daniela. What I, what I was thinking of here is from the end user's perspective, and the thing with developing accessible applications is nine times that attend if not higher it doesn't take really any extra work to produce an accessible application. And the longer developers hold out before adding that layer of accessibility to their applications, the more complex it becomes to implement it. So, whenever I have the honor of chatting with someone who is thinking of developing something I'm always saying, but let's talk about a foundation that we can produce that's accessible now, because certainly there's this app is successful you're going to want to add it and it's much better to do it at the beginning. Anyway, reading supposed to be enjoyable. So the reading system interface should be to readers want to be able to easily and quickly open a book, find their place and read it to the end. So that means a clean interface, preferably with shortcut keys to activate key options. There's a clear list of titles to choose from, and a simple and accessible mechanism to navigate the book. And perhaps, above all, a feature to read to the end of the book is key for all readers. And that last one has such an impact because so many people are especially with non or sorry especially with fiction titles. They just want to just read a book for pleasure they just want to read through it. So, the read to end feature if properly implemented has tremendous and profound impact on not only visually impaired or blind readers who want to read the book audibly, but also for those with other cognitive challenges because a good reading can highlight those words as they're being narrated so it allows them to track the book easier visually as well. So, those are my recommendations to developers to focus on to keep the interface clean to make it easy to activate options with shortcut keys, and to have a really solid read to end feature those are the three things that I look for, and aren't particularly onerous to implement in most cases. Thank you, Danny, and to think about this from the start, and not later. Exactly. Excellent. So, the next question is for Adam. Adam as someone who works in the K 12 sector. What do you think would be the impact of a publishing world where accessibility is the norm. Yeah, for that question. And to answer it, I'm actually just going to take a step back to look at some of what the alternate format community has presented to this summit in past years. You know I see my colleague and friend Bob Minnery up in my little line of images there. And in previous years Bob and Bob and I have implored publishers at this summit to send us into our next career as captains in the Florida Everglades because you because if publishers are producing digital accessible born accessible materials, then you know there would be, you know, perhaps less of a requirement for there to be an alternate format sector. Well, we know now, and we knew then, however that you know some degree of remediation will always be necessary because of the very specific access profiles that we see for among our learners in K 12 and the post secondary but in kind of directly to directly answer your question, Daniela. It would mean that the alternate format sector if we had kind of a more born accessible approach to educational publishing in K 12 and post secondary. It would mean that the alternate format sector would not need to be as focused on based on what I would just call generally like baseline accessibility for educational materials and so in that way, we would be able to focus on more specific cases of specific access access profiles of learners so for example, if a student who required non visual access to an e pub that contained music content. You know that's something that the alternate they'll format sector has the expertise to be able to to address. But with a more born accessible approach, we would not we would not we would be producing more direct specialized as meeting more specialized needs as opposed to kind of broader access requirements for the entire or close to the entire population of students with print or perceptual disabilities. I wanted to Danny you mentioned this with this idea of, you know, things need to be appealing as well. And that's something that we've really started to note in the format sector, alternate format sector as well is that providing materials that are just that meet students accessibility and access requirements are not necessarily that's not necessarily the whole story. They also need to be appealing as well. So, you know, we've kind of shifted from from kind of timely, equitable access to, you know, timely, equitable and appealing access to learning materials for students with print or perceptual disabilities. Finally, I'll just mention that the, you know, in addition to kind of the shift in the proportion of users that we serve in a born accessible environment. It would also be incredibly helpful for for us at the of the old formats level. If, you know, more discoverable like like I've never mentioned in early on, more, and you as well know, you know, more greater discovery of metadata would mean that the alternate format producer would have a better sense of the accessibility features and functionality that were included in a particular title. And so that would be far more efficient for us in terms of evaluating whether or not we either have a legal mandate to produce, or if it's needed by the students, or if our production is needed by the student at all. And so, yeah, greater discoverability would be would be hugely helpful there. And the, the last thing that I'll say is, you know, the in this move towards the greater demand for accessible digital accessible formats. So the work done by Nels with you know evaluating reading systems online resources like those from from Benetech and inclusive publishing. These are hugely helpful because what these do is speak directly to educators and to administrators in the sector, who can then start to look for accessibility features and functionality in the kind of curriculum, the curriculum implementation and procurement materials. Thank you. I have lots of interesting thoughts and absolutely discoverability is becoming, I mean, you just highlighted more reasons why it matters so much to have more access and reduce obligation of efforts and thank you this is a great, this is great. And this question would be for Laura. So, from your perspective Laura what would you recommend to publishers that are maybe just starting to dip their toes into accessibility as someone who is really so knowledgeable and has been driving this. Well, I would say, take baby steps. Some of the publishers are here have already done some of that work but in general, especially for like indie Canadian publishers where they have six employees and every employee does four or five jobs. Baby steps are really critical to making any progress in this space. One of the most important things I think a publisher can do it sort of happen to happen to naturally at the publisher that I work for but to be more explicit about change towards inclusivity when it comes to accessibility and and being more explicit about that might be might take the form of appointing accessibility advocate somebody who works in house, who's always thinking about accessibility and brings those concerns to acquisition meetings and production meetings and marketing meetings, and thinks about accessibility for the company in a way and brings up those concerns regularly and maybe goes for extended training about how to fold those kinds of concerns into nearly everything you do. It should be a part of nearly every decision that's made at a publishing house and having an accessibility advocate makes that more real and more palpable. And also means that it's in everybody's face on the regular. I think I annoy my coworkers a little bit, but I'm okay with that. I would also say like do things like change your workflow by introducing a new script or trying a new tool. Get started with accessibility metadata like just start go to the daisy knowledge base which is very good explains this stuff very well and start putting schema doc org metadata into your e pubs and put effort into how you use on it to describe your books. Once you start doing that it just snowballs and you can see that you can describe your books more fully in a lot of ways. It kind of ripples out to all kinds of parts of the publishing process, but you know, coming to terms with accessibility metadata is critical, I think to moving forward, but also take advantage of the department of Canadian heritage in independent Canadian services can apply for funding for tech internships, and then they can use those tech interns to write image descriptions to work on the accessibility of the back lift to be an accessibility advocate to help reforming production workflows to finding new tools that will work for your specific publishing company. There's lots of things that can be done with a tech intern. What we're using, we have a tech internship right now going on at a Nancy it's just about wrapped up actually. And that person only worked on the backlist so they were working on moving things from the pub to the pub three and then shining at the accessibility of those books. We also the tech intern in conjunction with the cross media assistant who's here today and we'll talk about some of that work later match and we, we work to get our workflow certified by Ben attack. That took some attention and time and some iterations and back and forth with them. I think the certification process, whether or not. I think the certification process is really worthwhile in and of itself partly because you send books back and forth to Ben attack, and you get feedback on what's a little bit off about what you're doing and how to improve it. And there's always something to be learned in that process I think it's really valuable. So, ultimately what I think publishers should be doing is taking baby steps all the time to get towards a more fully accessible publishing workflow at whatever form that takes I would strongly suggest you should start with an accessibility advocate. Thank you Laura that's that's wonderful. Baby steps. I love it. It's something everyone can do at least something that will be already built in and think about accessibility at all stages. So the next question will be for Victoria. So how does the Marrakesh Treaty impact people's access ability, ability to access books, and in particular, what remains to be done in Canada to realize the promise of the Marrakesh Treaty. Well, thank you for that. Important question. The Marrakesh Treaty has had a really important impact. I think everybody here would know, but one of the impotences from that arose out of the Marrakesh Treaty was it gave the opportunity to a lot of countries to update their copyright law and add this provision. Well, Canada had this provision but we made it in some ways it was in many ways it was really improved. It is the fastest moving treaty at Waipo so it is a it's a record and it you know it was it was responding to a human rights need for access to reading for a part of everybody's society people in every in every society. Another benefit to it is it increased the access in all the Marrakesh countries. So, other people have touched on this but it's allowed. It allows for cross border exchange which is really good so it removed the costly process of clearing those rights with with with even with in some countries, not in Canada, but in some countries of clearing rights in your own country to to produce that material so that made it that made more. Books accessible and the other part of that is that it it minimized the duplication so that not in you can coordinate your production so not every country would reproduce the same book and so that it helps avoid that that other practice of duplication of materials. So those efforts and expenses can be channeled into the production of more accessible books. It also raised the profile I think for people like for people like us who are involved in this. We're really quite aware of it but I think the profile of the Marrakesh treaty really was able to raise and highlight the situation with the book family and allow countries to take some really positive steps to address to address that book family so I think that the first part of that the question was how does it impact. How does the Marrakesh treaty impact. I think it's a far reaching impact. And then what remains to be done. I think we're all grappling with that I think similar to publishers libraries are trying to implement accessibility and the Marrakesh treaty is really that that tool that it's a policy tool that allows us to provide that access and to facilitate the access. So the implementation on the ground so we have the policy tool, which is wonderful which is the foundational piece. But now we have to do it on the ground. And this really echoes what a lot of other people have said here is the metadata, we have to that metadata piece is fundamental. So accessible metadata and getting it to, you know, there's a lot of work that's done, but there's still a lot of work that remains. So that that part is, is, is ahead of us. I'm leading a project, a Canada US project for on with research libraries to implement the Marrakesh treaty so the test out to put in place the mechanisms and to test out that cross border exchange, because both Canada and the United States had sufficient legislation before Marrakesh to produce the materials in our own country but Marrakesh allowed us to do this across the border. So we're trying to do to put this in practice so we come up against the metadata issue and for Canada and fewer than 10 other countries of the 106 Marrakesh treaty countries. So we have another problem so what I where I'm working is with research library so what we're trying to do with those research libraries with many of them have the same library services platform. So they're already, there's a compatibility that's already built in the exchanging those materials. But when you look at the Canada US product Canada US exchange. The question in our Marrakesh treaty implementation legislation of commercial availability check and the United States does not have that. So, when you look at that so you, I mean there's some, there's a fundamental flaw in that to begin with, because, you know, you look at if the United States doesn't think that their industry is impeded by a commercial availability test. It really probably isn't there. I mean we have it at the vestige from earlier legislation, but it is an impediment, and it's an impediment for the equitable use of those systems so if you're forcing people with print to say this ability to step out of the mainstream system because you have this condition that isn't adding a lot of value because we all know that we all know any of us who have toiled in accessible book production so I've worked at CNIB for over 10 years so we, you know we produce materials if it's available commercially in an accessible format, nobody is going to invest the resources in making it accessible. So, so when you look at the delta there, it's really insignificant and to force, you know customization of library systems at that level to accommodate that it's a hard return on investment, and it's going to be a hard time to ask to work with American research libraries to put the to spend money to do this to get your system to talk to less than, like, I, you know the other countries are are some of them are very small countries so they wouldn't be doing robust exchange with them. So those are some of the challenges that remain for us, but you know, this is the, we can see what we can do about changing policy but we have to operate in the policy framework that we do have now. So those are some of the challenges I think that that that are are remaining for us to really fulfill the promise of the Marrakesh treaty. Thank you so much Victoria, certainly a lot of important discussion here that should continue at the summit. We are at the hour and I want to make sure that people in the audience have time for asking questions. I just to close the section of the panel. I would like to ask everyone just for one or two topics or conversations that from your perspective, we should have in the summit to advance the conversation so one or two topics at them. Let's start with you. Oh, sorry, Daniela. I'm sorry, I lost you for a little bit there. Can you repeat the question. Yeah, just, I just want to hear from all the panelists, one or two topics of conversation that you think we should have at the summit to to ensure that we continue advancing towards accessible publishing. Oh, thank you Daniela. Education for me in terms of what what's available to what's available to content creators at various points in the supply chain, and also just how we can raise the awareness of accessible publishing and the need for born digital design among all those like among consumers as well because I think a big part of it as well is knowing what to ask for and and and what consumers should be insisting on, in terms of their, their efficient, equitable, meaningful and appealing access to content. Thank you, Adam. Abnish. Okay. Everything is flight and is important so it's difficult to pinpoint, I would say it depends on the different countries, which is the thing with which are the gap areas where they need to work on from the from the global perspective I would say that institutionalizing accessibility in the policies of not only governments but also in the companies as Laura said throughout the hierarchy is something very important. Another observation that I have. I want to make the producers of accessible the alternate content have a very important role to play in the born accessible movement. I am seeing that people are getting the publications from the publishers, they are recreating it in the EPUB and the Daisy format. This is all good, but you know this is the same thing that we are doing for last 100 years. So I think the alternate performance producer should step up and they should work with the publishers, because publishers are not accessibility experts, but accessibility expert lies with the alternate content producers. So both of them should work together, exchange the knowledge and keep the production, the reproduction of the accessible books at the back burner only do when it's really required and help the publishers in making the publication born accessible. Thank you. Oh, you're muted. Hello, there you go. Sorry, I don't know how that happened any one or two topics that we should talk about. Thank you. This is neat to look forward to next year. A session on new tools, apps or accessible reading systems I think could be really neat development is always ongoing on many different fronts. And if everyone's kept surprised at what's going on, we can move forward faster without duplicating work. It's incredible how often a new tool will come across my desk or someone will point out something that is being widely developed that I'm not even aware of. And it's exciting, but I think it would be really neat to share that so that everyone's aware of it. It could also be fun to hold a session on how to actually use assistive technology. So anyone who is interested or producing applications or publications could learn to to test that accessibility themselves and I think that has two fronts very quickly if they want to know how accessible something they've produced is knowing how to test that could be neat, but also from a development standpoint, when I work hard on something. I am excited to see that actually deployed to see the application working the way it's anticipated. And if publishers or developers had a way of taking their accessibility features for a test drive. I think it could really build some excitement on on wanting to advance that and actually seeing it perform properly. Thank you, Danny. And very mindful of the time. Laura, do you have one north one topic that you think we should cover at the summit. The only thing I will say quickly is that I want to make sure that we're always listening to people with a lived experience of a print disability, and that those kinds of conversations should always be centered at an event like this. Thank you Laura. I'll be really fast. I think that this might not come as a surprise coming from book make Canada. I think it'd be really good to have some successful business cases some successful business stories of people or platforms that have been introduced accessibility born accessible or accessibility focus. And we all know that there's a cultural society will need for this material but business speak sometimes. And so is there a dollar value or a success value we can put on the other side of some of these stories and I think going forward. We will see that and I think that can really amplify our messages. Thank you Noah and Victoria. Anything you would like to add. Because so many of us are in our toiling in the field of metadata. I wonder if some kind of a concept map session on on metadata so that we know all the different areas where they touch where they overlap. I think that would be enormously helpful. Wonderful. Thank you, and I'm sure the conversations will continue so now let's do q amp a and Leah will help moderate for checking the chat. Definitely. Thanks everyone for planning next year summer for me I really appreciate that and thanks for sharing what you have so far. So if anyone has any questions for our five panelists you can feel free to use their hand raised feature or throw something in the chat and I will share it. Okay. Hi everyone. I wanted to ask Laura question Hi Laura. You were saying. I've been watching what you're doing at a Nancy and it's fantastic. And I think, you know, great to be emulated. You say this morning certification processes worthwhile that publishers need accessibility advocates. The question to you is, given that the scale of most publishers commercial publishers in Canada is so much smaller than in other countries. What do you see a sort of a minimum viable organization that can move forward at least in some of the directions that you've been able to move forward. Really great question. What I think is that even the teeniest publishers in this country are supported by organizations like the Association of Canadian publishers, the literary press group, ebound. I'm less familiar with the supports in the French language market but I know that they're very similar, if not even better. There are a lot of original organizations like the obpo and the organization that Heidi heads in BC, and sas books and the, you know, there are, there are loads of publisher support organizations across this country. And they can do a lot of the heavy lifting for these teeny tiny publishers in a way for the smaller publishers, whose output is 1020 30 books a year, that's even more manageable and even easier to hit targets. You have the knowledge in house and so that's where you have to lean on the support organizations. And that's where that's what I think is key to making like real advances in accessibility and accessible publishing, especially at the indie level. Does that answer your question. Sure it does. Thank you. Thank you so much. I think I saw raised hand from Christina of la. Hi Christina. Hi. Thank you very much. It was really interesting. I just want not to make a question but just provide some information about the fact that we in Italy with the foundation have already some experience in the metadata distribution. We create the metadata in line with our certification process. So when we certify a title we also produce the metadata and we distribute them along the value chain, and in an automated way. If you need any help on that, we will be more than happy and the metadata distributed also for the publisher or for any retailer who want them. And they are, we also work to automatize the description in a friendly way. So, every title has the same description. We don't have different description so it's also easy for them to understand which are the requirements. So if you need any help, we will be more than happy to work with you. Thank you. Excellent to hear. Excuse me, sorry. You've got another raised hand from Melissa Haken of Denmark. Hi everyone. Thank you. So, I work at Denmark. So Denmark is an ebook and audio distributor based in Quebec, Canada. And, but we also develop an e landing solution. And right now we are looking at best practices as to how to display the accessibility metadata in the e landing solution interface. And it's a big question for us because we don't really know right now what the best practices are like should we implement filters for the users or should it be more of a tags that we should add to the books or on the ebook distribution side we already have the metadata and we already give them to the vendors, but on the e landing solutions. And we are a little bit more lost. So I guess we would have many questions on that. So, I have just placed a link to the guidance document for just playing accessibility metadata. Oh, thank you. A very good document. A good starting point. Perfect. Thanks. Awesome. I've got a raise hand from Lars of Calibrio reader hi Lars. Can you hear me. Yeah. Very good. So, yeah, first of all, to, to do more, but just a quick note that you can actually ask for accessibility method so you can actually even warn users when they are opening or reading a book. I can explain more about that later. So anyway, the question was, have you, I understand that it's a huge effort involved in adding accessibility metadata to two books, especially to, to a huge backlist of books. So, but I, for years, I've been kind of championing the idea to, to crowd source accessibility metadata. It doesn't need to be of, it can be like categorized as community sourced metadata, but it would be a very good starting point, I think. Have you ever considered this if you have, then it would be super interesting to hear what you have discussed. So that was a question for everybody actually. And from book net standpoint. No, but I like the idea. We just started set up for that in the way we acquire metadata we really looked at the publishers to provide the metadata because they're the ones that should speak about their books. They have the institutional knowledge and, and the people that are involved in it, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't be done at a different level at an aggregator level or, or at a platform level. And I know that that's done for non accessibility information through platforms like library thing and stuff like that. So we're planning to promote it to, to like by resource and radium guys and everybody that we implement common set of features in all reading systems. So that readers can actually engage in this effort. So, let's make it happen. Yay. Please continue the conversation in that working session. We are at 15 after the hour. Are there any more. Yeah, there's a few questions in the chat but yeah this is I just want to throw in a logistical comment here so 1115 was technically the end of the session 1115 my time. And if anyone needs to go I know it's very late for a niche it's okay if you need to take off but there I think maybe we'll take, we can quickly go through these two or three questions from the chat. And then we'll free people in preparation for the next session so the first one I have is a question from Charles lapierre of Ben attack for Danny. Danny, you mentioned the read to end feature that is that considered the same as a read aloud feature that we're seeing in a number of reading systems. Yes, exactly. So, oftentimes, there will be two ways to read a book with AT, either with the, say the screen readers feature where you can read to the end and that almost in all cases just reads to the end of the document which is usually the chapter. It's less than an ideal solution because then when the chapter finishes you need to advance to the next chapter with with the keyboard before you can read the next one so it really is a very poor solution so what we like to see is a read loud feature that will read to the end of the book. So it'll start at chapter one and when that finishes and the reading system will advance to the next document and keep reading it automatically. Nice and speedy so then there was a question from Catherine Kelly of the Nova Scotia public library system question for Victoria are any public libraries being involved in the conversations with post secondary libraries around sharing resources. Thanks Catherine yes, there are so. So, I'm working as a visiting program officer with the Canadian Association of Research Library and the American counterpart the Association of Research Libraries and in those research libraries in among that group is the New York public library which is a research library. We're interested in working with us. So we're working with research institutions in Canada in the United States and also for Canada because we're a bilingual country. We are also hoping to involve the bibliotech the Archive National Library and have been in contact with Melanie who's he's also here, but yes we are. It's very important that we're that there's that it isn't as inclusive as possible. So public libraries are very much in our, our thoughts. I've got one. I said I take the three more. So Bob maybe if you could, you could talk about that in the slack or in the chat or in the, in the upcoming conversations, or Bob Gibson but I do have a question from Bob Minnery of arrow. I mean, how, how do you have me imagine alternate format producers working with publishers, especially educational publishers. Are you looking at publishers like hiring transcribers or having a process for consultation in the workflow. I was coming from the perspective of having the knowledge exchange, the consultancy kind of arrangement. I've seen that publishers want to make their publications accessible, but they lack behind in the knowledge. On the other hand, the alternate content producers they have a lot of knowledge knowledge of accessibility. They, the alternate content producers can really help the publishers in improving their workflows in helping them understand how to write a standard descriptions or text, help them in understanding the user needs. And you know, most of the publishing industry, I'm not talking about very small publishers, but medium size and the big publishers they depend on the workflow. If you fix the workflow, then a lot of problems get fixed in the process itself. So what I was talking about consultancy exchange of knowledge, and maybe certification, if someone wants to step up to that level. Thank you. All right. All right, thank you. Thank you, everyone. This has been a fabulous panel and I know there's, you know, probably some more outstanding questions but hopefully will be, you know, you can talk about them through the next working sessions of the summit. So we do have a break time now until 1130 if people want to make their way back here for 1130 that I'm going to give instructions about moving into the first round of working sessions. So yeah, thanks to the panel. Thanks, Daniela. Thanks, everyone. We'll be back in a few. Thank you.