 All right, Megan, it's still just setting it up, but I think you should be able to take over and do what you need to do in a second there. So the first live session today is the industry updates and expert perspectives, which is a series of updates from some key stakeholders. We've convened this panel of industry experts as the information that they have and that they will share will be relevant to almost everyone attending the summit and people who are attending live. As I said, this session will be live streamed and everything will be uploaded and recorded and shared to YouTube later. After the updates, we'll hold the EPUB accessibility demonstrations and these will be in the main room with a break between them. And then we'll be ending the day with the user perspectives panel. One note is that today is probably actually going to go until quarter after, one Pacific I think for Eastern instead of ending right on the hour. It's just two action packs, so we had to get that happening. And that's exciting there. So now we're officially live streaming, so I want to welcome people who are tuning in via the live stream. Welcome to the first live stream public session of the Accessible Publishing Summit. You'll notice that the chat is disabled and so we don't really have the, we don't have a mechanism for taking any Q&A from the live stream people, but you're welcome to email us apsummit at accessiblepublishing.ca if you have questions or comments, feel free to send those in by email and we'll get to them as we are able. And that is what's going on there. So I'm going to get started with the session and that should leave us plenty of time for the break after. So without further ado, welcome. As I said, it's the industry updates and expert perspective session. And first up, we're going to hear from Deborah Nelson of eBound. She's the CEO of eBound Canada, and she's going to update us on the exciting projects going on at eBound and in the kind of the publishing world. Thank you for coming, Deb. Great. Thank you, Leah. Can you hear me OK? Yes. Great. Good morning, everyone, and thank you, Danielle and Leah, for giving eBound time on the agenda this morning. As Leah suggested, I am going to update the audience on two really exciting projects that eBound is focusing on, both of which are aimed at supporting publishers as they go through the process of creating and selling and marketing accessible content. Both of these projects are in response to the Landscape Research Report that was conducted by ACP and which results were published in the spring of 2020. And the two projects I'm going to speak to today about are the Accessible Publishing Learning Network and the Benetech certification program that eBound is offering. I would also like to start off by thanking DCH for making both of these projects possible. I'm going to start with the Accessible Publishing Learning Network, which is a project that is in response to publisher research that said there is so much wonderful information about how to actually create accessible workflow, but it's an overwhelming and daunting process to decide where to go, how to filter. So the Accessible Publishing Learning Network, O is an acronym, the APLN, is going to have two parts. The first part is going to be a content library, and this library is aimed at people who are just beginning their accessibility journey and developing accessible content. It is original Canadian content that's been developed by Nels, thank you, in particular Leah, and has a consistent format. It is for people who are anywhere on the continuum being curious about what accessibility means and why it's so critical, all the way until how do I implement and QA my now accessible content? So that content library is going to be available this spring, it's highly searchable, and the second part of this project is going to be a community hub. The community hub will have a librarian that will act very similarly to a bricks and mortar librarian, where a patron, or in this case, it could be a publishing staff member, says I'm really trying to find out information today about this, and the librarian will connect that person with the specific information that's needed. So that sort of curation and connection piece will be a really critical one, but the research also said that Canadian publishers want to form to speak to each other, speak to each other about their journey around creating accessible content, exchange information, showing samples, sorry, showing samples of the work they're doing, and in some cases offer mentorship. So that aspect of the APLN will be piloted with volunteer publishers. Hopefully we'll have publishers that volunteer to work with us on this in probably June or July. So stay tuned. We will be hearing lots more about this as we get closer to kick off. The second project that we are working on is we're just wrapping up a pilot of a Benetech certification program. And what that programs and goal is, offering accreditation to publishers that need a globally acceptable certified standard. And eBound has been really, really lucky to partner with Benetech. Charles and Michael, and I know a lot of the Benetech staff are on this call today, who've been incredibly patient, incredibly flexible as we take the Benetech certification program and customize it for Canadian context and Canadian needs. So the process of the certification includes two phases. The first phase is a volunteer publisher would submit content to NELS. NELS would audit the submitted content and provide customized feedback in the form of conversations and reports on how to make the content more accessible. Once that chewing and froing results in publisher content achieving a certain level of accessibility standards, they will then move on to an arms length team of Benetech certifiers who will start the process from scratch, audit entire content. And once the Benetech certification standards have been reached, then certification is awarded. It's a really customized back and forth process that works around publishers' needs and timelines. We are hoping to be implementing, we've submitted an application to implement this program nationally, which will include supporting publishers who are interested in certification until the end of March 2024. So I know this was a really quick overview, but if anybody is interested in finding out more, please remember these are both needs-based services. We need volunteers and please reach out and find out what we can do to help you work towards this end goal of all Canadian content being accessible. Thank you. Thank you so much, Deb. That was an excellent overview and some exciting projects that NELS is really working hard on and it's been a lot of fun. I wanted to quickly mention that we do have a Google Drive for Summit kind of materials. I've added the Accessible Publishing Research Project of ACP and eBound there. The quick access to it is accessible publishing.ca slash aps-drive. So feel free to check out all kinds of fun things in there. We're now going to hear the realm of alternate format production and libraries from Daniela Levy-Pinto, the manager of NELS who we met before, Lori Davidson, the executive director for the Center for Equitable Library Access, and Melanie Juma, the Direct Chief Study Connection Universale de Bibliothèque des Archives Nationale du Quebec. So I'm going to hand it over to this exciting team. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks. Thanks, Leah. Can everyone hear me OK? Yeah, great. So my name is Lori Davidson. I'm coming to you today from Vancouver, which is on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples. Very pleased to be here today. So our quick presentation, we'll start with myself talking about some issues and challenges from CELA's perspective, the Center for Equitable Library Access. Melanie from the INQ will talk about similar services in Quebec, and then finally Daniela who will talk about some challenges from NELS's perspective. And I think it's important to note that all of the issues that we talk about affect all of our organizations in one way or another. And we collaborate together too as a group, and we look forward to future discussions with the stakeholders. So the first thing I wanted to talk about is actually the title of the session, which is Alternate Format Production and Libraries. And I just want to say that as organizations with a view towards the future, we are more than just alternate format producers. And I really think with the paradigm of the born accessible publishing movement and reframing what we do with an eye towards the future, that really we're organizations that are about providing equitable and accessible reading services to users across Canada. So obviously, alternate format production is a piece of what we do. And traditionally, it has been a big piece of what CELA has done in terms of creating documents in an alternate format because users with print disabilities couldn't read a traditional print published book. However, it is an expensive, time-consuming, resource intensive process for us to do it, this creation of alternate format. So we don't want to do it if we don't have to. And so this is what's so exciting, so wonderful, about the born accessible movement is that if we can get accessible material at source from publishers directly without having to create an alternate format ourselves, it benefits everyone. However, this does not mean that our work goes away. And as organizations, just because there is a born accessible format, that does not ensure equitable access to reading. And so this is where I'd like to speak to just a few challenges right now. I'm going to identify two of them, which I think are really important conversations to have as we work towards this future of an equitable reading ecosystem. And it's about balancing industry-led transition to accessible books against the importance of ensuring equitable access to reading as a public good. So challenge one, the first one, is safeguarding format choice. Format choice may include many different things, physical delivery of your materials, digital delivery of your materials. It could be the form that your reading material comes in. In CELIS case, we have many users who still rely on audiobooks on CD or in Boss Braille. We are piloting a new project where we're sending out low-cost audiobook players. Physical delivery is still a really important part of how people receive materials. Digital delivery is also really important. And what I want to highlight here is the ability to digitally download a book and use it in a reader or device of choice is critical. And that's why I'm going to bring up right here. I think an issue that really needs to be discussed is about DRM and security issues and recognizing that this can provide a significant accessibility barrier as well. So there are lots that needs to be unpacked here, but I just wanted to bring it up. I think publishers, organizations, such as ourselves and public libraries need to have that discussion. The second challenge I want to talk about is providing access to content through the Marrakesh Treaty. So the Marrakesh Treaty is an international treaty that allows for the exchange of accessible format material between countries to people with print disabilities worldwide, really exciting. Came into force in 2016. All of our organizations participate in that. I know we've got folks here on the call too from ABC. And as we look to a vision of the future, I do think we need to talk about this relationship between the published commercial accessible content coming out of this born accessible paradigm and the alternate format production that we do is organizations. So currently we can only exchange material through the Marrakesh Treaty if we've created that alternate format version ourselves. But we really need to look at how this is going to exist within this new model that we're going towards the born accessible publishing from industry and what that means for exchange, international exchange through the Marrakesh Treaty. And I think that's really important around Canada's national commitment to Marrakesh as well. So with that, I'm now going to hand it over to Melody. Thank you, Laurie. Hello, everyone. So BA&Q offers access to reading to Quebecers with a print disability through the Service Québécois du Livre Adapté, or SQLE, which is the Quebec Adapted Book Service. We are encouraged by the progress made over the past year. The production of accessible materials is well underway and some publishers are beginning to provide us with the titles they produce for the benefit of our patrons. But this new reality raises a number of challenges that we are working on. It is essential to ensure that content and platform are fully accessible. That's important that the licensing models are adapted. It's important to work with our three organizations to make sure that the choice of formats is appropriate for readers. It is also essential that the metadata is accessible on accessibility features are available and accurate. And in this regard, BA&Q is working closely with Canadian and American research libraries. We're working to improve display in library catalogs and this work is part of a pilot project to implement the Marrakech Treaty in Canada and the United States. We might or we need to examine how the Marrakech Treaty will coexist with the dissemination of commercially available, born accessible materials. Both initiatives are intended to achieve the same goal which is to improve access to reading for people with print disabilities, but there are still a few legal issues that need to be sorted out. And finally, we're really excited at BA&Q because we're working on the new version of the SQLA catalog and it will be available in just a few weeks. And this will improve access to reading by making it easier to access our collections and might be making more accessible formats available including EPUB 3 and other digital formats. That's a very exciting project. I hand it over to Daniela. Thank you so much, Melanie. So Nails creates accessible books for people who need formats other than print and works with public libraries in Canada to make them available. The services that Nails provides are built on the principle of equitable access to reading for all people in Canada. Nails builds capacity by employing people with lived experience of print disability, including blindness, low vision, and dyslexia. So all of these are essential pieces for Nails. Now in the past year, Nails continued its support for equitable reading by, among other things, working directly with publishers to help them create books that are born accessible, testing library, commercial and reading applications, creating digital literacy resources for users, providing accessible COVID-19 information and of course, organizing the summit. Nails was honored to receive the Accessible Books Consortium International Excellence Award in the initiatives category for this ongoing work. And Nails has, among other projects, we are co-leading the Public Library Accessibility Resource Center project with SILA to make sure that libraries, our services are accessible for everyone. Now it is very important to remember accessible publishing and the born accessible paradigm, they're meant to increase access for a group of readers that has been traditionally disadvantaged. Recognizing that there are different circumstances for these readers, readers with print disabilities, it is very important also to understand and address the additional challenges that this group faces and also potential implications for this group of born accessible content. Flexibility and format choice are necessary for full accessibility. Readers should be able to read and access content using the technology they need and in the format of their choice. DRM, as Lori mentioned, poses barriers because it impedes, it prevents readers from accessing content in the platform of their choice and also prevents readers from adjusting the presentation of the content to suit their reading needs. Work, of course, remains to be done to ensure that all platforms are fully accessible and also that books that are accessible can be actually discovered by users who need them. So, including accurate accessibility, including accurate accessibility metadata is essential here. Much of the work and much of the conversation is about the commercial titles being available but it is imperative to remember that this is about equitable reading and we must ensure that this equitable piece remains. Policies and programs should take into account the different circumstances of people with print disabilities. For example, library services would need to revise licensing and lending models. To take into account that readers with print disabilities can only read print and it's not a choice for most of them. So placing them in the same waiting list or in the same queue without other readers would not result in equity, it would result in longer times for everyone. And to conclude, I would like to reiterate that CLA, BA, NQ and NELs are all integral to ensuring that people in Canada with print disabilities can access published content using the technology they need. Equitable reading remains our cornerstone and we will continue working together towards that goal. And finally, I would like to reiterate the need to keep thinking about the equitable piece. It's access to information and I encourage you to keep this in mind in the next few days as you go to take part in conversations at the summit. I remember that accessibility is collective responsibility and something to be done at every step. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Lori, Daniela and Melanie. Yeah, the title Alternate Format Production Libraries, I think that's kind of a holdover from the first summits when NELs was really focused on alternate format production but it really has grown from there. So I appreciate you mentioning that Lori because it is about so much more. Thanks again and now we're gonna move on to the next industry update expert perspective which will be from Wendy Reed who's the accessibility and publishing standard leads at Rakuten Kobo and the chair of the EPUB 3 Working Group and Audio Books Working Group at the W3C and Rachel Comerford who's the senior director of accessibility outreach and communication at McMillan Learning. They're gonna be talking to us about what's going on in the fun world of standards. I'll pass it over to you and I believe Rachel's got some slides so stay tuned, exciting. Hello. Hopefully my screen is visible. My name is Rachel Comerford. I'm the senior director of accessibility outreach and communication at McMillan Learning. My pronouns are she, her and I'm a white woman in her late 30s with a long brown hair and a ponytail. I wear glasses and I'm wearing an extremely fuzzy pink sweater. So I'm here to give you an update on what's happening with standards in the industry aside from the W3C and then I'll turn it over to Wendy The first thing that I wanted to tell you all about was that BISG and BookNet are working together to revise the joint guide to metadata best practices. The update gives an opportunity to provide recommendations that will help senders and receivers communicate about accessibility. Most notably, this is through Code List 196 which is the accessibility metadata code list. In addition to BISG, we have a workflow committee. I understand that the chair of that committee is just fantastic, it's me. We're updating or we updated the field guide to fonts in eBooks and added content about accessibility there. We've also are working on updating the field guide to fixed layout eBooks and have additional content about accessibility in that guide as well. And then later this year, we're planning on releasing a new field guide which is the best practices guide for audio books. The rights committee at BISG has been working on the development of a guide to imprints and their current owners. The summary might be useful for anyone that's looking to secure rights, especially if one imprint is now owned by somebody else, especially if they're trying to create an accessible ePub. And then there is no timeline for that just yet but they're looking at a working draft to be published later this year. Then finally at BISG, the subject code committee, this is not specifically accessibility related but they are looking at several categories for review and updates that includes antiques and collectibles, literary criticism, literary collections, poetry and drama, comic and graphic novels, religion, philosophy, law and performing arts. And if anyone wants to submit a new or updated code using the, they can use an online forum that's accessible on the BISG website. And I also provide the link to a survey monkey. I can share these slides with Leah and hopefully there's a way to share it with all of you. At IMS Global, there is an Accessibility Innovation and Leadership Network. They're working on creating a rubric for assessing the accessibility policies and programs of ed tech suppliers. And this is to fit in with the work that's being done by the trusted ed apps vetting initiative. That's a mouth. It's supposed to affect the customer and the supplier side. And the rubric is intended to be used as a supplement to existing accessibility conformance documentation that's available. It covers content, software, resources, tools, training within organizations and more. You're welcome to reach out if you have any questions about that. I can put you in touch with the IMS chair. Just to note that it's not intended to replace any existing documentation and it's also not intended to be a statement on overall accessibility conformance to standards. At IPTC, the International Press Telecommunications Council, we have a new photo metadata standard. This one's particularly exciting I think. It includes two new properties that's alt text for accessibility and extended description for accessibility, which means that some form of alt text can travel in the metadata of images as they're being used across different platforms. This was released on November 4th in 2021 and I've provided a link to the photo metadata standard specification for anyone that's interested. And then finally, my own standard, please don't use accessibility overlays and toolbars. They're horrible. And that's it. I will pass it on to Wendy now. I don't know how I'm going to follow that up. Hi everyone. My name is Wendy Reid. I am the accessibility and publishing standards lead at Brackett and Kobo, as well as the chair of the EPUB 3 and audio books working group for W3C. And today I'm going to give a short update on what we've been up to as a W3C. I'm going to be mainly talking today about EPUB 3 because that is where most of the work has been happening for the last two years. What we are mainly working on is an update to the EPUB 3 specification that we are calling EPUB 3.3. The idea behind the standard is to update it and to bring it to official web standard status, the W3C, which means that it's going through the W3C process, which is never done before. What this really means is that the standard is being reviewed by external experts, particularly in the areas of accessibility, internationalization, security and privacy and architecture. Architecture being the architecture of the web and how we fit into that. This process also means that we are writing tests for the EPUB 3 standard for the first time. These tests look very different from some tests we might have seen in the past. This is only against the content of the specification, not the content that the specification facilitates. We are also doing some deep dives in areas of the specification that have been neglected or untouched since 2011 when it was written. The most important addition that was actually just made is that we have recently written an entire security and privacy section for both EPUB 3 content and EPUB 3 reading systems with some new normative specifications around the privacy, particularly in terms of scripting and local storage. We are also updating the EPUB accessibility document. It will be updated to version 1.1. The specific updates are not huge, but they are to better align the document with the EU accessibility act requirements and help content creators to meet those requirements and make more accessible EPUBs. If you haven't looked at the document in a while, you'll notice a couple of major updates. One of them is that we've actually split the EPUB specification into two parts. It used to be a single document that covered every single part of anything to do with EPUB. It is now two documents, one we call core, which addresses the requirements in our own content documents, so EPUB files. And the other document is the reading systems document and this specifically targets the user agent or reading system and the requirements for those particular systems. The benefits for this included a lot of clarification of the relationship between content and the user agent, but also finding areas that were unclear within the document once we split it out. So it's nice to do a little bit of cleanup. We are also writing a lot of tests. Tests in this context mean any time that there's like a statement in EPUB, like you must do this or you should be doing that, we are testing it to make sure that it is actually true and can be done. The tests actually allow us to determine what features are under-implemented, which will be good to know for future work we do in the publishing space. Tests also provide an overview of how well certain features are supported in the EPUB standard. So you'll probably see some interesting results from that. Additional to our updates to the core specifications and the documents around there, we are actually doing a little bit of fun extra work. One of these areas is the fixed layout accessibility task force. This, the goal of this task force is to write best practices and documentation for accessible fixed layout content. And we're also exploring ways of improving fixed layout accessibility more long term because as we've discovered in the group, it is really difficult to make fixed layout accessible, nearing impossible without some possible technological changes. So we are exploring that now and we're hoping to write some documentation very soon. Some of it is already available, but it's not finalized yet. One of the other areas we're looking at is what we call virtual locators. We are looking at the addressability problem in EPUB, meaning can we build an automated way to provide page numbers? It is still very up in the air right now, but we have a couple of use cases and are hoping to have some documentation available very soon to talk about our weird side project. The accessibility task force was the group responsible for the updates to the EPUB accessibility documents. This work is primarily complete. So I will provide links to all the things I've mentioned, but anyone is welcome to review the document and take a look at it. Those are the updates for EPUB. I will also very quickly mention audiobooks because audiobooks are important too. The audiobook specification is we're planning to actually do an update as well as a couple of issues that have come in my internet connection is unstable. I'm gonna turn my video off. But this, so the audiobooks will be updated this year. More news to come on that once it is available. Thank you so much, Wendy. Was that it or are you frozen again? That is everything. Okay, perfect. I just wanted to make sure. Yeah, sorry about the internet connection. I sent you a link by Slack right at that time, right at that second. So I think it's my fault. I confused your computer. But thanks to you both. That's a lot of work, a lot of exciting work. So I definitely wanna see all kinds of links. Wendy, that's what I said you will link for was a document where you can pop some links. Yeah, it sounds like you guys will have lots of information to discuss during the working session. So everyone get excited to talk to these two smarties. Thank you so much. So let it keep this going. Next up we're gonna be hearing from Sarah Hilderly of the Daisy Consortium and Inclusive Publishing. She's gonna tell us about all the exciting things going on at Daisy. They do so much work and amazing work in the accessible publishing landscape. So pass it over to you, Sarah. Thank you. Thank you, Leah. Hello, everyone. My name is Sarah Hilderly and I work for the Daisy Consortium where I manage Inclusive Publishing which is an international news and inflammation hub on all things accessibility. So for those of you who aren't aware the Daisy Consortium is a global consortium of organizations committed to a common vision and mission which pulls and coordinates resources to deliver worldwide change. Our vision is for people to have equal access to information and knowledge regardless of ability. And our mission is to develop global solutions for accessible publishing and reading in partnership with civil society, publishing and technology industries, standards, bodies and governments. So I've been asked to give a brief update of what we've been up to and I shall endeavor to give you the whistle-stop tool version and I encourage you to explore all of these projects further via our two websites, Daisy.org and InclusivePublishing.org and I will provide all the links that I speak about in my short presentation into Leah's Google Drive document. So we've been busy. I'd like to start by mentioning our extremely popular and free webinar series which we started during lockdown and which has grown from strength to strength. These hour-long webinars have covered a vast number of topics and we've been blessed with a plethora of expert presenters to guide you all through their given subjects. All the webinars are available for you to watch again and again together with an overview, access to the slide decks, a transcription and a list of resources for you to explore these topics further. So please do take a look at Daisy.org forward slash webinar hyphen series where there is bound to be something of interest for you and your colleagues. In addition to keeping in contact with our members and readers via this series, we've also been involved in many different projects worldwide, including work in Europe, in readiness for the European Accessibility Act. Daisy has been proud to host the European Inclusive Publishing Forum, enabling conversation and collaboration between countries and resulting in a wonderful collection of pooled resources, including a set of ongoing case studies which consider the different approaches being taken in various markets. This groundbreaking legislation will affect publishers worldwide. So do please dive in and find out what's been going on and I shall post the link to those resources that are available for everybody. To compliment these activities, Daisy's also been integral in the project work to map the EPUB Accessibility Specification 1.1, which Wendy referred to to the requirements of the European Accessibility Act. In other standards work, 2021 saw the release of the user guide to displaying accessibility metadata in which we were pleased to play an integral developmental role. This simple and easy to follow guide assists the user in making sure that their content is discoverable by those with accessibility access requirements. There are still many publishers doing all the good work and not telling people about it. So we hope that this guide convinces you to take the plunge. Onyx CodeList 196 is really not that scary. Work continues on the tools and solutions which are so important to our members and friends. These include ACE by Daisy, ACE Smart, the Daisy Knowledge Base, EPUB Check, Word to EPUB and EPUB Test, name but a few. Our developers are always busy and with their expert skills and knowledge, we've been able to support and assist many publishers. If you aren't aware of some of these tools and solutions, then do please check them out on daisy.org and get in touch if you have any questions because they're game changers. Inclusive Publishing runs a partnership program to collaborate and assist others on their accessibility journeys. Nels is one of our very valued partners in this initiative. We've been thrilled to welcome seven new organizations to this group in 2021 and this growing network of partners come from all sectors of the publishing industry, affording us a closer connection with you all. So if you'd like to know more about this program and how we can support each other, then do please email me, shildily at inclusivepublishing.org. At Inclusive Publishing, we've been very lucky to work with some top quality authors this year and their contributions and submissions have ensured that our hub is one of the go-to places for accessible publishing information. From event reports to opinion pieces, we try to cover most major advances in accessibility and we want to hear from new voices with new thoughts and suggestions as to how we can all progress. I do just want to mention here the Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which happens on the third Thursday in May every year and for which we publish a Publishers Toolkit encouraging you all to take part in events, sorry, whether from home or in the office. So I'd love to report on record activities this year now that we are hopefully getting back to some semblance of normal. There's so much more to tell you but I think I'm running out of time. I do just want to make sure that you're all subscribers to our Inclusive Publishing newsletter which is a monthly update on everything you need to know and a lot more besides. And thank you for your time and I hope you enjoy the rest of the summit this week. Thanks, Leah. Thank you so much, Sarah. Yeah, Daisy's always doing such great work and it's cool to be working with you. It's been a pleasure to have you on the steering committee for the summit as well. That's perfect. So next up, we've got a few areas left. The next one is education and remediation. We're gonna hear from Adam Wilton who's the program manager of the Provincial Resource Center for the Visually Impaired and Bob Minnery who's the manager for the Alternate Educational Resources Ontario. They're also co-chairs of the Canadian Association of Educational Resources, the Centers for Alternate Format Materials. And yeah, they're gonna tell us about education and remediation. Thank you so much. Great, thank you so much, Leah. And can you see my slides? Yes. Wonderful. So thanks so much for having us and for the opportunity to share what we've been thinking about in the educational Alternate Format community. Bob and I are here representing, as Leah mentioned, the Canadian Association of Educational Resource Centers for Alternate Format Materials or CARE. I'm joining you today from the traditional and unceded territory of the Musclean, Slewa-Tooth and Squamish nations. I grateful acknowledge that I live, work, play, research and share knowledge from these ancestral lands. Pictured is the Vancouver BC skyline with the North Shore mountains in the background and the emblems of the three nations are superimposed on the slide. So our first area, in the Alternate Formats community we're closely following the development of accessibility standards in provincial legislation that are devoted specifically to the education sector. The AODA is Ontario's provincial accessibility legislation first enacted in 2005. Recently, kindergarten through grade 12 specific standards have been proposed and public feedback sought on a set of initial recommendations. In British Columbia, the accessible BC Act was passed into law this past year and committee work is now underway to develop standards within the legislation. With education identified as one of these focal areas. We welcome these developments and we'll work to understand how mandates within provincial accessibility legislation interact with existing provisions in the Federal Copyright Act which enable the production of Alternate Format materials. Okay, shifting to a one size fits one approach. As publishers continue to prioritize equitable access to their work through the born accessible movement the educational Alternate Format community sees itself as shifting towards a one size fits one orientation with respect to production. Here one size fits one refers to the greater tailoring of Alternate Format materials to the unique access profile of individual learners both in terms of the functionality of the materials themselves and its interaction with access technology. On the slide is a fictitious scatter plot to illustrate this point created by the Inclusive Design Resource Center at OCAD University in Toronto. The dots on the scatter plot represent students. The distance between the dots represents the relative difference between students access profiles. Most dots are clustered close to the center of the plot and are surrounded by a green ring. These are students who can access learning materials in the format in which it is provided by the classroom teacher or instructor. Moving outwards, the dots are further apart and fewer in number. These are surrounded by a blue concentric ring. These represent print disabled students who can access some of these learning materials but require access technology and a degree of remediation to the original materials to be able to access them. Further out are dots that are very far apart and even fewer in number. These are print disabled students who cannot access learning without the provision of Alternate Format materials. Currently, the educational Alternate Format community is producing materials for both students in the blue and orange rings with more available directly from publishers. We envision a time when students in the green, blue and orange rings will be able to use these materials with some students in the orange ring requiring more bespoke one-size-fits-one solutions. In this future, the resources and expertise of the Alternate Format community will be focused on these solutions rather than on the entire community of print disabled learners. And with that, I will turn it over to my good colleague, Bob Minnering. Thank you very much, Adam. Before I begin, I'd like to let you know that I'm coming from a beautiful Bramford, Ontario. And I want to acknowledge the traditional Tata territory of the Haudenosaunee and the Anishinaabe and this nations and this territory is covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and directly adjacent to the Haldeman Treaty territory. And my role today is to provide you a snapshot of how time and the timely delivery of accessible educational material is a crucial element in determining this excessive students from kindergarten all the way to post-doctor. It goes without saying that we are producing these materials to standard in the media required by the student and employing the one-size-fits-one approach that Adam alluded to. Now, in an ideal world, the alternate format production centers like Arrow in our case or PRCVI and Adams and the other production centers in care would receive our requests in April to have them ready for September. Again, that's the ideal world. But the reality for education production centers is that we receive the bulk of our requests in late August or early September. So why is that? Well, the reasons may be that the professor wasn't hired until late August and that book list wasn't determined or couldn't be determined until the professor was hired or it could be that a new book was introduced into the curriculum or a new topic is simply chosen by a teacher. Regardless, our centers must now receive the orders. So what do we do? We determine if we have an existing copy. If we have an existing copy, do we have it in the correct medium? And if we don't, we then have to check to see if another center has a copy. And again, we check that through care and it's a plug for care. The reason we do this, it saves on production time and it also saves on production center resources. And if not, then we have to either decide to produce it internally and use or use an external vendor. So we're doing this for every request that's coming in and it's being done in every province. And everyone needs something to be in front of their student by September the fifth from kindergarten to post-doctorate across the country. So what we do and what we're forced to do to ensure that each student receives material is work with the school advisor to produce to a syllabus to create agreed upon timelines to ensure the material for week one arrives on or before week one and then hope that everything goes as planned to do the same thing again the next week for the students moving here for the next week. And we could have problems like students moving to a new school or changing courses. So that's like, cause that's what students do. If I was going to use an analogy, imagine being in a pizzeria where pizzeria, it's called the publishing pizzeria and everyone else around you is sitting with a 12 piece pie. Our clientele is getting us getting the pie one slice at a time and everything has to work perfect to make sure they have a wonderful dining experience. So what we're hoping for and what we're hoping for the outcome of our conversations today is that and what we envision is that educational publishers can resolve all or most of the alternate format issues that Adam alluded to in the blue circle. So then we can service and do the work required to ensure the one size fit one service delivery timelines remain equitable and useful for those students too. Adam, do you have anything to, as an endpoint that you'd like to add? Can't hear you Adam. Just to thank you, Bob. No, just to reiterate the points around the importance of upcoming legislation and the move that we see with great optimism towards being able to produce more one size fits one rather than for all or most of our students with print disabilities in K-12 and post-secondary. And I'm not even gonna try to tap the pizzeria analogy. So appreciate the time. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Bob and Adam. And yeah, I think people should be able to eat a bite from every single slice if that's the way they wanna eat the pizza. I like that analogy. And I'm excited about the Accessible BC Act. Hopefully there's some good work that comes out of that with those committees and it's an exciting space. And yeah, that's been a really important one. So thank you two for sharing. Next up, we're gonna talk public libraries, specifically a project that Nels and Sela and other organizations have been working on. We're going to hear from Raina Hadsey, the executive director of the British Columbia Library Association and Sharon Day, the director of branch services and collections at the Edmonton Public Library. And they will speak to public libraries on the PARC project. Thank you so much. So I'm gonna start us off. For those who don't know me, I'm Raina Hadsey. I'm she, her. And I'm joining you as a settler on the unceded and traditional lens of the Laquungen speaking people, specifically the Songies and Esquimalt First Nations who are still here today. And I am the executive director of the BC Library Association. I also worked as a librarian in public libraries for the past 20 years. And you may know me from a short one year stint as the executive director of Sela as well, which is where I really got passionate about this work. So I'm excited to be here to talk about some of the work being done to improve accessibility in libraries, along with my amazing colleague Sharon who is gonna start us off. So over to you, Sharon. Great, thank you, Raina. Can you hear me? I was having technical difficulty earlier. Excellent. I'm glad. And I was a little bit nervous the whole time about whether or not you'd be able to hear me. So good morning, afternoon, wherever you are. My name is Sharon Day. I am the director of branch services and collections at the Empton Public Library. And I will begin by acknowledging that the Empton Public Library is in Treaty Six territory and together we acknowledge all the many First Nations Métis in Inuit whose footsteps have marked these lands for centuries. So today, just giving a very quick overview of the Public Library Accessibility Resource Centre, henceforth known as PARC. The project is in collaboration with Nelson Sela and also with partnership with eBound. So PARC is founded by the government of Canada Department of Canadian Heritage through the Canada Book Fund. And we're very thankful for that support because without that, which we would not be able to be doing what we're doing. So Sela and NELs have a very specific role. These are people who have print disabilities as defined in the copyright exemptions. However, there are many people who don't qualify under those exemptions or who have other diverse needs. So Sela and NELs joined forces to build a National Library Accessibility Resource Centre, it's a mouthful, on accessibility, awareness and training for public library staff. So the goals of this work is the creation of this advisory committee, which is comprised of 12 members from all kinds of libraries, large and small, urban and rural, all kinds, and to help ensure the availability, procurement and delivery of accessible books and content for across the country. We engage with library staff to develop awareness and training and accessibility. So the advisory committee includes library staff from all kinds of different work, so that compare everything from frontline staff to the accessibility levels of like within departments and everybody's providing that input and that informed a survey, accessibility resources, website, training resource creation and that also included learning outcomes. So why? Why does Plox exist? Plox exists because there was an identified need for consolidated accessible library resources that are focused on awareness training for library staff. So why libraries, you might ask? Essentially because libraries are publicly funded community hubs that serve as key conduits for information and equity for everyone, but also because first, libraries buy books and we make them freely available to everybody. Secondly, we play a key role in ensuring access to information to everyone, everybody in society, particularly those who are economically disadvantaged. And lastly, we meet needs that aren't always met or almost never met through commercial solutions. So with that being said, I'm gonna pass it up over to Reina to give you a quick overview of what we've done so far and what's on the horizon. So since most of us are librarians, we're all about information. So we started by going out and getting some information. The project leads from Sela and Nell's conducted a survey focusing on what library staff currently know about accessibility in their libraries and what they want to know more about. We wanted to better understand their information needs around the accessibility of the services they currently offer and then use that data to plan and design training resources for library staff to improve the accessibility of the services and collections of their libraries by improving staff knowledge and capacity. So as Sharon mentioned, there are many parts of libraries that people don't see or think about and not everybody is a librarian working on a front desk. So one of the goals was to reach staff from all different levels and areas of libraries. So from library directors, librarians, library technicians, the people who have the books, the people who do IT, people who do marketing and communications and all other staff. Because we know that every piece of what everyone does leads into the accessibility or lack of accessibility of our services. The goal was to receive feedback from between 250 and 500 respondents. Luckily, library people love survey and so we got 577 responses from all provinces and territories and from staff working in all library areas. And what we found is probably not a huge surprise to anyone. There were significant knowledge gaps. So some key ones that we identified, 77% of respondents indicated their library website is not accessible or they don't know if it's accessible. 72% of responses showed a lack of awareness about metadata fields and to what extent their library catalog or library search is accessible. And 50% exhibited a lack of understanding or indicated a lack of accessible search capabilities in their library. So it was very clear from those responses that there's a need for foundational knowledge about accessibility in libraries for library workers. And obviously libraries can do a lot better than they have been doing up until now. So the other good thing we found though was that library workers really want to do better. 87% of respondents said they believe that this training around accessibility should be part of public library training, including educating library staff on all types of disabilities and how to best create an inclusive library. And 65% of respondents said that they felt that training on accessibility is necessary for their work. Clark believes it's essential to have training resources created by users with lived experience. So based on the survey responses from library workers, the first training module developed by the project team, including people with lived experience of print disability is called accessibility and disability training. And it helps create that foundation people told us they need. It was already offered once as a webinar and I can tell you as someone who attended that it was great and also been a lot of attendees, which was exciting to see. People didn't only indicate on a survey that they wanted this knowledge, but they actually followed up and tried to gain it. That module and future modules are being hosted on the Library Accessibility Resource Center website, which I think maybe Leah posted a link or Rhian. And it will host the things that are created as part of this. Also hosts a selection of curated external resources broken down by different areas of library service and library positions. Again, to try to make sure that people have information they need. So what comes next, because we've just made a start, we have big and they include advocating with library leaders to make accessibility a priority, including it in their strategic planning and dedicating resources, including staff time for training. We know if we can get the leaders that makes a big impact on the industry as a whole. We're gonna be advocating with conference planning bodies, association interest groups and others about the importance of accessibility training and the ongoing need for including sessions on accessibility in their planning and events. We'll be consulting and working with people with print disabilities to ensure their expertise is being fully utilized and we're going in the right direction. We'll be developing and delivering training sessions that include more specialized training for specific roles. So we know foundation is important, but it only gets you so far. We need to go deeper. And we'll be working with libraries, library consortia and government bodies to ensure accessibility is included in the procurement process. We'll be evaluating training outcomes and efficacy of supports, ensuring continued funding to deliver the training and ensure the maintenance and currency of training and supports remains maintained. Developing evaluation frameworks for the training and for the supports created. So there's lots of exciting work to do and hopefully you will see and hear about the changes in your libraries as this starts taking effect. Well, that's excellent. Thank you both so much. Yeah, it's definitely accessibility is gonna, it takes everyone from book production all the way to libraries to distribution. So it's exciting to, this project is really cool. I hope everyone checks out those sites and stays tuned because it's going to produce some interesting things. Maybe one year we'll have an accessible library summit. Just kidding. This is enough work planning. All right, so thanks again to Reina and Sharon. And now we're gonna have a last but not the least, we have Sarah Mays, the manager of special projects at the Canada Book Fund. And she's gonna take us through kind of what's going on at the Canada Book Fund and the Department of Eating Heritage at that area. Thanks so much for coming, Sarah, nice to see you. Thank you, it's great to be here. I want to acknowledge that I am providing this update from Ottawa, which is built at the unceded Algonquin and Anishinaabe territory. So I'm the manager of special projects with the Canada Book Fund. And amongst my responsibilities, I'm responsible for funding for collective projects under the Accessible Digital Books Initiative. This is a five-year federal investment that was announced in 2019 and delivered from the Canada Book Fund. It was $22.8 million over five years to support sustainable production and distribution of accessible digital books by Canadian independent book publishers. We provide support through two program components, support for publishers, which provides funding directly to individual publishing companies. And for accessibility, we provide support for audio book production and also for business planning and internship projects that happen within individual companies. And we also provide funding for larger-scale collective projects with industry associations and other organizations that support the work in different regions in Canada, in different language markets in Canada, through a variety of different project types. We've just completed our third funding cycle in that five years, and we're moving into calls for fourth-year funding. If we look back at terms of what we saw this year, I will say that we saw an increase in audio book funding requests and approvals for individual publishers. We had 80 projects that were approved over the last year for audio book production. That component of the program has taken something of an incremental approach in terms of working with publishers that are moving into audio book production. And in the past year, we introduced a new requirements that an accessible version be produced with a supporting checklist tool for publishers. This checklist was developed in collaboration with library organizations, many of which will be here at the summit this week, as well as industry experts. The next call for accessible audio books will be launched in the next one to two weeks with an early April deadline. One of the objectives of our program this year is to work to get decisions on funding out earlier to publishers so that audio book production can start earlier. We've heard from both publishers and many of the audio book organizations that have been working with them that that's critical and that it's very difficult sometimes to get the audio books produced late in our fiscal year. In terms of collective or broad-based projects, this year we continue to fund projects that are developing resources for publishers and working on capacity building within the Canadian publishing industry. But we also saw an increase in larger projects that are directly supporting accessible production, as well as that are exploring or putting in place infrastructure for marketing and discoverability. Again, we had a mix of organizations we know well and newer organizations that are either already engaged in accessible publishing or interested in moving into that work. And we continue to see a lot of partnerships between organizations that are working in different language markets or that are working in different points in the publishing process and continue to see a lot of involvement of library organizations in that work as well, which is great. We expect to see the trend toward larger projects, particularly in the area of marketing and discoverability to continue as we move into the last two years of the initiative, especially with a growing number of accessible Canadian books that we expect will be available over the next year as a result of support for publisher certification, which was a workflow which was discussed earlier, collective e-book conversion of different regional collections or other book collections within Canada, as well as support for audio book production. On the collective project side, we opened our special call for projects in this coming fiscal year this week and the deadline is the end of March. As always, we welcome conversations with organizations that are considering submitting a project or for funding, especially newer organizations that may have questions about timing or eligibility or how to prepare a project budget. We are certainly available in the program and we will be here as well during the summit. Looking forward in terms of the bigger picture, as the Canada Book Fund moves towards the final two years of this initiative, we're starting to reflect on how accessible publishing will fit into our program or not after the five years, what that could look like and where the needs might be. So some of the key questions that we're asking or we're starting to ask are what progress do we expect Canadian publishers will have made in accessible publishing? What progress do we expect will have been made on reading platforms and in libraries to support discoverability and access to these books. And where do we fit into that bigger picture once this five-year investment is over? What role might the program play or not in supporting this work going forward? The next few days for us at the summit are an important part of that process. Our team is here, as always, to listen and learn from the experts that are doing the work. I wanted to mention in particular that this year our team at the summit also includes Fanny Lalonde, who is our new director. Many of you may have met Julie Fairweather. She has moved to a new position and we have a new director joining us at the summit this year. And as much as we will be here in present and listening at the summit, I also wanted to mention that we welcome the opportunity to hear from you after the summit. Your views on what is working and what is not working in accessible publishing in Canada from your perspective in the field are extremely helpful to us. And please don't hesitate to reach out to me during the next three days or afterwards. We would certainly welcome the opportunity to speak with you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sarah. And yeah, it's great to have you and your team here. I think a few people are on the slack so you can bug them on there if you want to or there's other ways to contact them. Yeah, it's really exciting. We're at the end of that, well, not at the end. There's still two years left, but I know how time flies. So I am excited what that is gonna look like for the Canada Book Fund after this program is over. Well, that is it for industry updates. So I wanna thank all of our speakers. I'm so happy that you could all take the time to tell us what's going on in your areas. I think this is such a valuable part of the summit, even though it's only a few minutes per person, but you'll all be here for the next few days. So you can reach out to them. We don't have time for an official Q&A for this session. We're actually gonna go to break, but as I said, everyone will be around. I'm going to stop the live stream. Hello, YouTube live streamers. I'm gonna stop the live stream now. We're gonna resume it at quarter to the hour, unless you're in Newfoundland, then I guess it'll be quarter after the hour. And that's as vague as I'll be with the time because we're all in different time zones. But let's all take a break, walk around and get some water. It's a big, long day on the computer, but we'll be coming back in 17 minutes. And we will be starting into the EPUB accessibility demonstrations. So thanks everyone, and we'll see you in a few. Enjoy these sweet tunes.