 Okay. You made the game. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, everyone, for your patience this morning. As I was just saying to some of our presenters, it takes a lot of coordination to organize a fully inclusive event. And sadly, the technology is not where we wish it was at the moment, so it took us a few minutes more this morning. So just a quick announcement, a brief note about accessibility of this morning's webinar. ReadyTalk is providing us with live captions to this webinar, so participants who are using this service will open both the captioning page and the standard webcast page, and the captioning URL will be shared with all of you via chat box at the beginning of the webcast. We also promoted this during our webinar promotion. So good morning, and welcome to Working Together Research Libraries and Publishers on the Value of Inclusive Learning Resources. This is an accessibility webinar to foster library publisher collaboration on inclusive learning resources and to start a very important dialogue. During this webinar, we'll have five speakers including myself. We'll hear from Steven Spong, who is a librarian at OCAD University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. We'll hear from Laura Wood, Director of Tisch Library at Tufts University. We'll hear from Kim Brewster, who is a publisher and group product manager of the Higher Education Division for McGraw-Hill Education. And Robin Seaman, who is a Director of Content Acquisition at Benetech. Lastly, I will also deliver a few slides. I am Katya Periasowska, and I am the Visiting Program Officer for the Accessibility and Universal Design Working Group with the Association of Research Libraries. Each speaker has been asked to briefly introduce themselves at the beginning of their presentation. So in this webinar, each one of us will cover unique topics related to libraries and accessibility covering the following areas. We'll first start by looking at the legal frameworks on national and international level. We'll look at obligations and opportunities for publishers. We'll look at obligations and opportunities for research libraries, collaborative projects, and future next steps for research libraries. At this point, I'm going to hand a microphone over to Steven Spong, who will talk about legal framework. Okay, so good morning, and thank you for attending the webinar today. My name is Steven Spong, and I am a librarian at the Ontario College of Art and Design University of Toronto. I have a Dr. from Muscatall Law School and a Master's in Information from the University of Toronto. My interest in accessibility issues stem from both the professional and personal standpoint as I have a serious bilateral hearing loss from childhood, and I wanted to thank ARL for inviting me to speak today as I'm always happy to advocate on behalf of accessibility. So today I will be conducting a brief summary of some key legal frameworks that pertain to accessibility in Canada, the United States, and internationally. I am going to start with the Marrakesh Treaty, which is formally and rather descriptively known as the Marrakesh Treaty to facilitate access to published works by visually impaired persons and persons with spread disabilities. I will then move on to Ontario's Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act and then wrap up with a few words on the happy trust decision and the Americans with Disabilities Act. So the Marrakesh Treaty is a treaty that was signed to Marrakesh, Morocco on June 28, 2013, and it is intended to address the issue that is a lack of accessible material for users who are not only blind but who are unable to physically hold or manipulate a book or who have learning disabilities. This is an important distinction. As I have a glance, the treaty appears to be solely limited to blind users and I think that it's fair to say that there may be a latent perception that this is the case. It is not, and it is instead quite a bit broader. Given that at the moment it is thought that only 7% of published books are available in accessible formats, it is necessary that wherever possible a broader definition of accessibility be applied in order to try and close these gaps. The basic framework of the treaty is to create an exception to copyright in order to allow the creation of works that are accessible to users to require it. It also allows for the import and export of these works. So the Marrakesh Treaty is administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization which is more commonly referred to as WIPO. And from a copyright point of view the treaty is significant as it is the first international treaty that focuses on users' rights as opposed to creators' rights. This distinction highlights why there was resistance to the treaty from publishers in the film industry. The latter was successful in ensuring that audio-visual materials such as films do not fall under the definition of works under the treaty. In terms of what is covered, there is text-related illustration and audio formats, and so this includes audio books. In terms of the creation and delivery of accessible material, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, otherwise known as IFLA, was instrumental in lobbying to include libraries as an authorized body to undertake these tasks. The downside to all of this work however is that the treaty, while it has been signed, has not yet gone into effect and actually has a long way to go in order to cross that threshold. In order for the treaty to come into effect, 20 countries have to ratify it, and current ratifications total stands at 6, and this includes Uruguay, the United Arab Emirates, Mali, Paraguay, India, and El Salvador. Canada did not even sign it, which is particularly odd given that it played a significant role in the horse trading necessary to actually get a deal in the first place. Well, the United States did sign it in October of 2013, that was a decision that came from the White House. It's a two-thirds majority in the Senate, which given the current climate in Washington which suggests that the ratification is probably a long way off. In Canada's case, much of the language and frameworks that would be necessary for ratification of the treaty already exist due to the extensive updating of recuperate laws in 2012, which makes our recalcitrance even more puzzling. So now I'm going to move on to the AODA. So the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, which is more commonly known as AODA, was introduced in Ontario in 2005, but the regulation where the majority of the acts of substance is located was not released until 2011. This regulation is referred to as the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation, and it covers all of the obligations that are required to ensure accessibility across a wide array of businesses and not just libraries. Fortunately, the requirements are being rolled out gradually with the first set of obligations coming into effect on January 1st of 2012, and additional applications roll out on January 1st and will continue to do so until 2025. Unlike the Americans with Disabilities Act, which takes a more reactive approach to accessibility, the AODA is prescriptive. While there have not been any substantial comparative analyses of these to be sub-legislation, which is a situation I hope to rectify, if I were to highlight a single way in which they are operationally divergent, this reactive to prescriptive distinction would probably be the biggest difference between the two. While the AODA is a wide range of obligations, the ones that have the greatest impact on libraries relate to the provision of accessible material upon request. January 1st of this year saw the introduction of the obligation to provide upon request the provision or arrangement of accessible material to users. While there have been some discussions surrounding the wording in the regulations such as what constitutes a timely manner, the end result is still pretty clear. If somebody walks into your library and requests something in an accessible format, you need to provide it to them. There are some exceptions regarding archival and cinematographic works, but for the majority of the material, it does need to be provided. This definitely has an impact for publishers as the legislation states that the libraries are either to provide or arrange for accessible formats. I think it's easy to infer that arranging a copy would imply involving publishers. However, the caveat in section 12, subsection 1, subsection B of the regulation that states that the material should be provided at a, quote, cost more than regular costs also puts libraries in a tight spot. Should publishers try to leverage the requirement into additional revenue streams that are over and above what a conventional text would cost. Particularly when it's reasonable to assume that for recent current texts that are digitally born, they would have ready access to files that are compatible with screen readers. Legacy titles are a bit trickier since there are more costs associated with the conversion to accessible formats. It might make sense in these cases to go with an in-house or a social solution and the latter has been the case in Ontario. Bear in mind that all of these decisions and processes are occurring under the timely manner countdown and there are no easy answers to these issues, but it really is an area that is ripe for policy development and the creation of best practices. While the U of D is a dense piece of legislation that can actually spend this whole hour dissecting, I just want to briefly point to section 17 of the regulation which points at organizations that are producers of textbooks and other learning materials are required to provide accessible material institutions. The deadline for textbooks has passed this past January and other resources are in 2020. Unfortunately, there's a bit of cognitive dissonance with regard to publishers and libraries at the moment because the deadlines for compliance in various areas are different for private and public bodies. I expect as time goes on this will subside as everybody gets on the same page. Finally, I want to mention that the U of D is hardly an isolated piece of legislation in Canada. The province of Manukoba passed the Accessibility for Manukobans Act in 2013 and Nova Scotia is in public consultation phase for accessibility legislation which will probably be passed later this year or early next year. So there really is continued growth in the area of accessibility in Canada. I want to finish up by saying a few additional words about the Happy Cursed Decision and its relationship with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Last year's Happy Cursed Decision was enormously significant on a number of levels particularly as regards creation and provision of accessible material. I have reproduced a couple of key quotes from the lower court's Justice Bayer. While the Happy Cursed Decision was largely considered a victory for transformative use, which it certainly was, the significance of the victory for the creation of accessible text was also tremendous. Given that the Happy Cursed is creating an enormous database for screen reader-ready material, the loss of that resource would really have been quite devastating. It's also worth noting that Justice Bayer talks about the ideals espoused by ADA as opposed to compliance with specific requirements under the ADA. And this really is the juncture where the ADA and the AODA perhaps run parallel without ever fully meeting. As I mentioned previously, the ADA is not as prescriptive as the AODA when it comes to accessible materials in the educational sphere. While the creation and provision of accessible material is occurring in the United States, it is not as originally bound to legislative requirements for here in Ontario. However, and this is where things start to get a bit murky, the Happy Cursed Decision gives a stronger copyright foundation upon which the creation of accessible text can rest. We don't have a firmly established doctrine of transformative use in Canadian copyright law. And while our copyright legislation does discuss accessible material, it is not wholly clear the extent to which inhibition is a framework for the creation and dissemination of these materials. Even the way that our constitutional framework is set up, copyright law would trump AODA if there was a direct conflict that arose through litigation. And so there really has yet to be a fully fleshed out comparison of American and Canadian approaches to accessible materials or at least that I'm aware of. But as I hope I've made clear, there really is much to be discussed. And this scenario that I'm hoping to shift further light on moving forward is I am currently in the process of publishing a paper on the relationship between the AODA and the Canadian Copyright Act. And further to that I'm also working on a paper that will examine and contrast American and Canadian accessibility legislation and practices. So I'm going to stop there and so thank you very much for your time. Hi everyone. Thank you Stephen for getting us started. And I want to thank Katya and ARL for the invitation to join you today. My name is Laura Wood and I am the director of Tisch Library at Tufts University. I want to start with a disclaimer because I certainly am not an expert on these issues. Like many of you I'm trying to understand the landscape in several respects. I'm trying to understand it in terms of legal obligations of our schools in terms of meeting growing student needs and in terms of our professional values as librarians to provide access to content. I have a lot to learn but I'm delighted we're getting a little closer to a day when our universities may not panic if students disclose disabilities and when our university education is readily achievable for a more diverse student body. And I should also add that my comments and my slides, I'm using a US perspective and an academic library context because that's what I know so less familiar with the Canadian context. So with that said, if the ADA is from 1990, why is this suddenly so urgent? So one factor is that electronic information technologies or EITs are creating major new challenges but on top of that an increasing number of students with a wide range of accommodation requests are enrolling in our schools. Many of our schools have waited for enrolled students to materialize rather than prepare in advance and so they're scrambling to provide accommodations. Not surprisingly, students are encountering significant barriers and they're reaching out to advocacy organizations for support. Advocacy organizations have been very effective in the US in moving the federal government into action via the Office of Civil Rights, the Department of Education and the Department of Justice. Between 2009 and 2014, there have been over 7 complaints which have led to legal settlements with universities. By looking at those settlements, we can observe that particular issues are coming up again and again. This repetition in the settlement documents allows us to identify a set of emerging standards for our institutions. The settlements also make it clear that accessibility is a university-wide responsibility. The Office of Civil Rights is now initiating compliance reviews in the federal offices to verify the existence of policies and perhaps more importantly, to monitor compliance with those policies. At most colleges and universities, at least the ones I've been inquiring about, the staff responsible for providing accommodations and services are not in the library. As dedicated as those staff may be, they need allies and assistance from other units like the library and IT to be effective. This may not be until a specific issue comes up that the library is approached. The more we've done proactively, the better prepared will be to meet the needs of entering students. It's generally more effective to make things accessible in the first place than to try to accommodate in a reactive mode or to retrofit things. So to be proactive, we have to pay attention to procurement. Research libraries procure numerous formats. There's eBooks, journals, databases, software, hardware, services, and so on. And we work with external contractors as well to create databases, to create websites and other services. Accessible procurement is defined as a thought process that involves determining what is required for a product or service to be accessible and either finding ways to procure something that meets those requirements or documenting why this is not possible and what will be done if an accessible alternative is requested. Documentation is very important in this context as libraries are beginning to plan for accessibility audits. One approach is to develop a checklist of procurement considerations and provide assessment tools to help library staff determine how accessible a product is, what to test for, and how to communicate our own requirements to vendors or service providers. It's pretty important to keep in mind that US universities are responsible for the accessibility of all these things, not just our own digital platforms but the platforms and products of third-party providers. Therefore, it's only by holding our institutions accountable that federal agencies can place any pressure on the market for better products. Like it or not, we are stuck in the middle. So how do we find out if our content is accessible? The first way is we ask publishers. Vendors may or may not be knowledgeable about accessibility but in many ways it's up to us to create market pressure for them to be responsive. Anytime you are considering a new product, you can ask the vendor for a VPAT. The Voluntary Product Accessibility Template Form or VPAT is a template vendors can use to describe how their products meet accessibility guidelines. The link on this page is to the Information Technology Industry Council webpage where you can learn about VPAT's benefits and its limitations. Providing vendors with this link can also help them understand and complete a VPAT and I understand these slides will be available in at least one if not more format after the webinar. The second approach is we ask our users. Just as we do with other library issues, we need mechanisms for user feedback, both anecdotal and systematic. Can users find avenues to provide error reports? Can you develop processes for more focused user testing? In my opinion, coordinating feedback mechanisms with your Office for Disability Services is highly recommended. And thirdly, we can conduct our own evaluations. Ultimately, it will require that we develop a capacity to do our own evaluations, whether by developing in-house assessment capacity or using contracted services. In-house assessment means building a team of reviewers with the time and expertise to confirm or deny vendors' claims. Your University's IT or Disability Services Department may already have this capacity to some extent, but chances are it won't meet the needs of the library. Contracting services to conduct evaluations means outsourcing those reviews to a testing company and that there are quite a number that do this and I believe that's a growing area. A couple more comments about the VPATs. Smaller vendors and newer ones may not be aware of VPATs, so libraries can really help by encouraging them to complete them and that will then help other libraries as they evaluate products as well. Keep in mind that some vendors may complete a VPAT that declares significant limitations to the level of accessibility. They have to declare it, but they don't necessarily have to meet full accessibility guidelines. So the existence of a VPAT is not sufficient. For example, make sure that the VPAT is for the version of the product you're buying, such as with software. You need to make sure it's the right one. What if accessible procurement is not possible? So this is a very real concern, especially when faculty need specific content for their students and that happens to us all the time. Considerations will depend on what a library is looking to procure. However, documenting procurement decisions is important and likely will grow in importance, especially as it relates to accessibility compliance. In this early stage, it's not likely that many institutions or departments are concerning themselves with this kind of paperwork, but down the line we may need to be able to explain why we decided to purchase items that don't make accessibility standards. This means that your institution is responsible for documenting why an accessible format may not have been an option. This documentation will also help you with vendor assessment when making future partnership or procurement decisions. So if a product doesn't meet required standards, you can document steps taken to test accountability. You can document communication which had taken place between your institution and the vendor whose product is not accessible. And you can begin documenting a plan for obtaining an alternative format if one is requested. You may also want to consider communicating limitations back to faculty or other community members so that awareness of these concerns may increase. They certainly are uneven on my campus and so that kind of outreach is something we also may need to be attentive to. For digital resources, there are two important accessibility considerations. The accessibility of the file itself and platform specific considerations. Platform considerations include things like text equivalent for any graphical elements, keyboard navigation, proper labeling, and so on. This list is not nearly exhaustive, but it does give you an idea of some of the issues at stake. The WAVE tool linked here will assist you in evaluating websites. And if you're looking for video content, the PEAT resource may be helpful in evaluating video. Some organizations that may help with staff training include AHEAD, which is the Association for Higher Education and Disability, and AFIN, which stands for Access Technology Higher Education Network. I also recommend that through the W3.org website, you can find considerable resources for education as well as for standards. When purchasing, we are really determining what level of accessibility is required or what level of inaccessibility will be tolerated at your organization. And you'll need to decide if the interface of the content is not sufficiently accessible, if it's available on another platform, or if it could be locally loaded. If neither an alternative platform or local loading is an option, other options should be considered for making things accessible upon request. This may include but isn't limited to conversion-ready accessible formats provided by the vendor or digitization of a print copy. The bottom line is that both the content and the platform need to be fully accessible. When it comes to licensing resources, these are just two examples of how organizations can include accessibility in our licensed resources in the languages for our licenses. This is the text from Okol and the text from the CRL live license model, which was recently updated. It's possible that you or your colleagues have been using this or similar language in licenses for some time now, which would be terrific. And if so, it may be time to begin verifying compliance with our own license terms and checking up on these issues. When accessible, while accessible procurement is the ideal, the reality is that most of our institutions are resorting to reformatting and other means of accommodating accessibility requests. It can be a significant challenge for schools to meet these requests, especially for larger volumes of materials. Frequently, a disability service office is responsible, but let's assume for today that it's your library's job. The first thing that a library would do is try to establish if born digital accessible formats are available from the publisher directly, and if so, how quickly they are able to provide this material. Dealing with accessibility requests can often mean working on a very tight timeframe, so it's important to know who to contact at given publishing house and understand how quickly a request can be accommodated. If the publisher can't meet your timeframe, the library likely digitizes the material into an accessible format, unless of course you're outsourcing it. The nature of accessibility requests and the wide spectrum of disabilities means that even if material is digitized or digital copy comes from the publisher, the file may still need additional reformatting. Images, formulas, and special features may not meet your accommodation requirements, for example, and there are a wide variety of other reasons why additional work is very frequently needed. The languages used in the settlement documents is very specific. A person with a disability is afforded the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as a person without a disability. The person must be able to obtain the information as fully, equally, and independently as a person without a disability. So if our students can only use resources with mediation, if they have to wait until tomorrow morning for help. If they have to navigate a thoroughly different online experience in the accessible version, then we are a far way from providing accessibility according to the standards from the Office of Civil Rights. This is why universal design is so vital. If we build accessibility in at the beginning, there are many advantages down the line that might be unexpected. A simple example of this might be for any of you on the line who have ever navigated sidewalks with a baby stroller. You can thank the ADA for all those curb cutouts, and there are many, many other reasons why accessible content will have other advantages for us down the line. It's my hope that we're actually making a cultural shift. I've learned that this can be described as a shift from the medical model to the environmental model. The person is not the problem. The problem we have is that the environment is not designed for the diversity of needs that we have. Before I sign off, I'd like to share some information about a planning project I hope will materialize in the near future, but I'm still waiting on final word for funding. Each of our institutions is meeting accessibility needs in some isolation. The reformatted materials made to meet your accommodation requests are being stored somewhere on your campus. It's a growing library that needs management. What if we could help our disability services staff with the management of the files they create for students, and enable them more sharing of those files between institutions? The recent legal opinions from the Haughty Trust case makes the timing very good for further action in this area. In partnership with colleagues at Brandeis University, Haughty Trust and Haughty Trust Research Center, the University of Illinois and the organization AHEAD, which is the Association for Higher Education and Disability, we hope to study and design infrastructure for shared repository services. And this is again looking at a US focus. After the initial research phase, we will be looking for volunteers from the library community to join working groups and think through what is needed to leverage our collective work. If it sounds like something you'd be interested in, please send me a note at this email address. If I have your name in contact, I can provide you with project updates in the future. Thanks for listening. Good morning. My name is Kim Brewster. I have worked in both legal and academic publishing for 24 years at Butterworths, Lexis, Nexus, and McGraw Hill Education. I'm currently a publisher and group product manager in the Higher Education Division. I manage 14 disciplines. More importantly and specific to today, I'm the chair of our Corporate Accessibility Committee which was formed in 2011. We have members from all divisions in Canada and we work in three separate subcommittees. We concentrate on product transformation of both our print and digital content, web accessibility of all our websites and platforms, and organizational compliance for internal and external processes for our internal and external customers and our physical environment. I'd like to talk a little bit about as a publisher, specifically in Canada, how we work as a partner. We have three main partners right now. First of all, we're working with campus disability offices. So students and instructors who require accessible files are requested to do so through their disability or accessibility offices on campus. We deal directly with those offices through our website links and supply any needed materials as they're requested. In specific instances, we may work directly with library representatives and or IT as needed. Our second partner is the ADA Committee in the U.S., so our partner at McGraw Hill Education in the U.S. We utilize and adopt solutions and processes as relevant for us. Our requirements are different in Canada. We're a little bit ahead of where they are in the U.S., but it makes sense for us to work together so that we're not recreating the wheel. So along with the U.S., we are aligning with and also aiming for the WCAG AA guidelines rather than in Canada the AODA requirements and in the U.S. the ADA requirements. What we found as we started working through a few years ago is that the WCAG requirements tend to be more advanced in technology. So some of the legislation as it's implemented and before it's implemented is the technology is going out of date. So we are aligning with WCAG along with the U.S. We also in Canada partner with the government of Ontario, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, and four other main publishers on the Arrow Initiative. For those not familiar, that's the Alternate Education Resources of Ontario. It's a web-based repository and through that all the publishers and all of the schools who are members of Arrow can ensure that digital copies of textbooks can be requested by students downloaded by publishers and converted to whichever format is needed. It's then stored and transferred to the disability offices at these institutions as they ask for them. It's a very secure environment and as each product is loaded it allows for a much quicker turnaround time. So since 2010 this has been a great project that we're hoping will go national. All of the Ontario Colleges and Universities I believe are now enrolled and it's a great way to prevent barriers right from the beginning because we now as a publisher proactively load all of our titles at the beginning of the year into the Arrow database. If I can ask someone to move the slide. Thank you, my controls aren't working. I just wanted to give a quick screenshot of what as a publisher we have done for our corporate accessibility site. Rather than clicking through all of the different screens, this is the main screen which lists what our commitment to accessibility as a company is. What our technology accessibility is for our platforms. How to report accessibility issues are all on this main screen. The next screen is accessible file requests and that's where the disability or accessibility office is on campus. Sorry, go back to the slide before. That's where they request the files directly through this link. We also list our accessibility plan which talks about how we interact with internal and external customers. What our commitment to training and our physical building environment. Our policies are listed here. We have some additional resources and we also have a feedback screen so that anyone who requests additional information or needs to point out something that we haven't seen yet, that's the screen. That's on our public facing website. We also have an internal accessibility site that we use internally and then we have a third site that we have launched through our connect platform. So anyone who is using our online technology there is also an accessibility site through the technology. To the next slide please. Thank you. So as a publisher when we talk about what content that we produce is affected by the bank requirements, if you start to look through all of the content that we produce, every piece of content that McGraw Hill produces is affected by the AODA. So not just our print products, our textbooks but our websites, all of our technology platforms, instructor supplements such as PowerPoints, test banks, instructor's manual, student supplements such as videos and DVDs, flash animations, our interactive assignments that we use for assessment online. Any of the PDFs that are downloadable or Excel files for example in an accounting book, every piece of content that we produce we need to look at accessibility. Next slide please. Thank you. So I'll talk when I get to the next slide about the specific publisher requirements I believe Steven touched on them earlier in the presentation today. But we look at our priorities at McGraw Hill as not only do we have to meet the legislative requirements but our big priority internally is that we need to improve the user experience. So most of our content is now accessible and it meets the legal requirements but is it easy to use? As Laura talked about it needs to be an equal opportunity for every student, for every customer. So do we always have an elegant solution for accessibility? Not always. The example I would point out here is that for some of our online products we have captioned videos for all of our new online products starting in 2014 but in order to view the captions video you need an extra click and that takes you out to a different screen. So we do have an accessible solution but for a student who requires that caption video they're having a different experience and we believe that the user experience needs to be the same for all students and that's what we're working towards. That is our priority. In order to do this we need to interact more and in a better way with our primary user, the consumer and that is the student. We have long relied on feedback from our customer which is the instructor but the consumer of the good is the student. The instructors rightly have a strong voice and advocacy for the students but what we're hearing is that we need to hear direct feedback, unfiltered. Not through the instructor's eyes of this is what we think our students need but from the students as the front end users telling us directly this is what we need, this is what is not working. So to that end we've been working directly with the students in testing our products which is where we get into roadblocks. We see with new technologies such as our adaptive learning or learn smart technology or our smart book adaptive e-books there's complications with programming and also with some interaction with assistive technologies. So this is where we're concentrating on making our products better. The example I give here is our e-books as of 2018 are all accessible. The content is tagged you know to not get into the whole technical side of it they are accessible files but if you access them through the platform one of the first things that could happen is a pop-up that tells you if there's any schedule of maintenance that's going to happen on this platform. For a visually impaired user the screen reader cannot read that pop-up so although the text that they could get to is completely accessible they can't get to the text if the pop-up is there. So these are the kind of technologies that we're struggling with because we don't always have complete control over the development of the platform. So we're working together with the US and with vendors and developers to try and get past these roadblocks. Next slide please. So how do our products comply? We consider student auxiliaries which are for us the videos and DVDs. We consider those part of our core product. So in accordance with the requirements anything that has produced in 2014 and forward is produced in an accessible fashion. All of the videos are captioned and the e-books are accessible. Moving forward we know that instructors, test banks, and power points are required for January 2020. We're beginning that process now so we've started to add tags to test bank questions. We are adding and looking at new programming for multiple choice questions and interactive questions for students. We're looking at how to make PowerPoints accessible although right now they're only for instructors. Some instructors share them with their students and so we want them to be accessible for everyone. So the guidelines that we're looking at now again not an exhaustive list but a short list of providing text equivalence is right off the top. So we provide alt tags on all of our images and long descriptions so that screen readers can read any images, figures, tables that are set within the e-book. Synchronizing multimedia so we have captions and transcripts for all videos and whether that is a separate video that is viewed in class or a video that is an embedded asset within an e-book, everything is captioned. One of our newer things is to looking towards not relying on color because what we realize when we started doing some testing with students is that someone who's color blind can't see if an arrow is green or red. So using the word stop rather than a red button. Something that sounds simple but we're looking at the design and color overall. We're using proper WCAG markup and style sheets so that our web pages are not readable because of the way they're formatted but they're readable because of the way that we have produced the content. The tables as I mentioned before need to be tagged but we also need to have meaningful row and column headers so that a screen reader can read the data properly. The one thing that's a bit more challenging for us as a publisher is the uniformity of web content that we link to our textbooks. Because we can't control external material, we have to limit the number of internal links that lead to material that may not be considered accessible. So we may have a list of links that link out to a YouTube video. Is the YouTube video captioned? Is it captioned properly? We can't control that so we're trying to limit the amount of material that we link out to. We're converting anything from flash to HTML5 which really helps with accessibility features on mobile devices. And we're looking at content such as the drag and drop question which is terrific interactive content but as we have discovered it cannot be made accessible. So we're looking at different ways of creating question forms that are accessible. We are also looking at tagging test questions and author training going forward. Enhancing our technology platforms. How best to serve mobility purposes. We are currently conducting quarterly audits of every website on our server to identify and correct issues as we go along. Next slide please. Thank you. Reasonable accommodation is something that was mentioned previously today and it's a question of the Ontario Library Association on a panel that came up about what does reasonable accommodation or time frame mean to a publisher? As a company for us reasonable accommodation means helping every student and instructor who asks. It isn't a question of do we help in the situation or don't we? We do. The answer is we do. So for every text we offer accessible PDFs and just to be clear we do not charge for providing any accessible files. That was the legal requirement for January 15, 2015 but most publishers have been offering the PDF files for about 8 years. I think the technology is a lot stronger and through a database like Arrow it's a lot quicker but we now supply within 48 hours of the request if the product has already been proactively loaded into the database and those PDFs can be used to create any alternate format or they can be used as is as a native PDF they can be used through the screen reader. The caveat here is that we do get requests for US products. We cannot store for privacy and permissions reasons. We cannot store those files here so when we get requests for US products we have to forward it to our US office and that can take up to 7 days but it's typically 4 to 5 days. From January 2014 forward every product that we create is accessible because we offer a digital product with every text. As I mentioned all new web content and internet websites we are conforming with WCAG and that was as of January 2014. There are still some stumbling blocks that we are working with. We're looking at solutions and equations, chemistry, problematic solutions, we're looking at universal design. Bottom line it's about customer needs so if one customer needs it then probably another customer will as well so if it's an older edition we go ahead and convert it. No questions asked if someone needs it we do it. Just the bottom line our message from a Braille Hill is that we don't like to see accessibility as a mandate. It's not the cost of doing business or responsibility and our goal is to go beyond compliance to look at it as an opportunity to reach all of our customers. So we don't look at as an add-on to product development. It's now part of the process from the beginning so that we are building products in an accessible way from the onset that will fit every customer. Not just an add-on, a bolt-on at the end to make this an accessible product. I think it's a fundamental shift in thinking and an opportunity for us to be a better corporate partner and part of the positive and proactive community of accessibility. Thank you. Great. This is Robin Seaman at Benetech. I'm the director of content acquisition and I work with the publishing community to support our Bookshare initiative. Oh, let's see here. I have to manage the slides. That's me. And Benetech is a technology nonprofit in Palo Alto, California. It has initiatives in global literacy of which Bookshare is the largest. It also has initiatives in human rights and the environment and a variety of other social ventures. Bookshare is the largest library in the world of digital books for people with print disabilities. We have 350,000 members, 330,000 books in our collection, and we work with over 500 publishers who donate their digital files to Bookshare. We started under a copyright law that allowed us to scan books without publisher permission and to make them available to US people with print disabilities defined as blindness, low vision, severe dyslexia, or other learning disabilities or mobility impairments that prevent somebody from being able to hold a book or turn the page. When I joined seven years ago, I started working with the publishing community and sent them to support our social mission by donating their digital files and saving us the time and the cost of doing the conversion work to an accessible format. And we've been really well received domestically and internationally. What publisher donated files allows us to do is to get the books out simultaneously as they're available to the peers of people with print disabilities so that when a new Harry Potter comes out, it's instantly available through Bookshare at 12.01 a.m. And we also are able with publisher permission to distribute outside the US internationally. And we have members in 60 countries around the world. And we have a very large initiative in Canada with the CNIB and with CELA, which I see that Michael is on the call today, Michael Saccone, who is our partner at CELA. Through this partnership, Canadians with print disabilities get free memberships to Bookshare and access to about 230,000 digital files that we have rights to distribute in Canada thanks to publisher permissions. I'm going to go really fast here. So I think we're all hearing a lot about born digital. Our mantra at Benetech is born accessible. And we coined this phrase and we are delighted to sort of see it going viral throughout the industry. We work with everybody, not just publishers, but everybody in the publishing ecosystem to try and help them make sure that their content is born accessible. We have an R&D center called Diagram that creates tools and guidelines and processes that we freely give away to publishers so that they can transform their workflows to ensure that their content is created more accessible from the get-go. Okay. We think we really saw a tipping point last year. Obviously EPUB 3, the born accessible movement really started taking off last year. And the Association of American Publishers in the U.S. in the fall of 2013 launched an EPUB 3 implementation project to try to really move publishers forward quickly and adopt an EPUB 3. One thing that we contributed to that effort and which has been widely picked up in the industry is a very simple document of top tips for accessible EPUB 3 that's available on our website, which I can give you a link to. And everyone has found it a refreshingly clear distillation of what are the basic 10, 12 tips you need to know to create accessible content. The tipping point we see reflected in major announcements happening regularly and widely committing to go to provide alt text for all its front-list ongoing Pearson, having an accessibility champion who basically pulls people, 50 people from across the company for twice weekly meetings about accessibility. Harper Collins O'Reilly's Shet in 2014 migrating to EPUB 3, it's a very different landscape than it was seven years ago. And this is also reflected in the incredible number of initiatives going on right now in the US and internationally. In the US, the book industry study group's accessible publishing working group was formed in December. I'm sharing that. It consists of about 20 to 25 people and its goal is to create a quick start guide that will allow publishers to quickly grasp what it means to be accessible. Some people say it's one of the most important initiatives they've seen the BISG launch. As everybody here has said, beautiful content is content that's born accessible. It enriches everyone's reading experience and the BISG is championing that in a major way. All these other initiatives I won't go into, but they are happening furiously around the world. Just in closing, from Benetech, our top tips. We have tools such as MathML Cloud, which is a tool that helps make math accessible. We have an image description training module to help publishers understand how to precisely describe images and graphics. And if you go to bornaccessible.org on our website, that will lead you to all sorts of fabulous tools. And that is it for me. This is an earlier slide, Katya. Thank you very much, Robin. That slide was a little surprised in the middle. I am Katya Periasowska and I am the visiting program officer with Accessibility and Universal Design Working Group of the Association of Research Libraries as well as the project manager. I'm a librarian who is responsible for a series of accessibility initiatives at Scholars Portal which is an operational arm of the Ontario Council of University Libraries to which I will refer by its acronym, OKL. So in my role at Scholars Portal, I'm in a series of different types of initiatives such as the Accessible Content ePortal, known as ACE. And it's a shared portal of accessible text, which is shared across our 21 member institutions. The Accessibility Toolkit for Libraries and the Report in Accessible Media Publication, Rome which was just released last month. In the following few slides I'll briefly talk about a couple of interesting projects and resources that I think you should all be aware of. So there is an amazing Arrow Web Accessibility Toolkit which was inspired by the following guiding philosophy to promote the principles of accessibility, universal design, and digital inclusion to help research libraries achieve digital accessibility and to connect research libraries with tools, people, and examples they need to provide accessible digital content. Research Libraries in Canada and the US are eager to learn more about how to make their learning environments more inclusive. And it is tools such as this one which are helping library staff in North America to develop core accessibility competencies in accessible web design, customer service, policy development. The path forward requires planning and collaboration across the research institutions motivating partnership, which is very important. Advocacy is also a very important piece of what we are as library staff and what we need to take on. We must advocate behalf of all library users and find a seamless solution, not start developing special services, but finding a seamless solution to ensure that learning environments which we are building are responsive and flexible to accommodate users of all abilities and learning styles. The Arrow Toolkit provides resources highlighting standards and best practices with regard to web accessibility, steps on how to foster an inclusive institution which includes policy revision, conducting audits, disability testing, training staff, and embedding accessibility into all areas of library from licenses to document production. In its effort to establish a community of practice, the Toolkit also provides a very valuable list of experts across Canada and the United States mainly, and their context as well as a list of sample policies across institutions. So this is a very, very useful research which could be consulted on an ongoing basis as institutions work towards improving their accessibility levels. As Stephen mentioned earlier in Ontario, research libraries are faced with specific requirements outlined in the Accessibility, Foreign Terrain, and Disabilities Act. And we are faced with a number of milestones for institutions of higher learning, such as recent January 1st, 2015 deadline to make all library materials accessible upon request. So to clip our consortium members, and I've mentioned before the 21 University Libraries in Ontario, with the knowledge and tools to be able to meet rolling deadlines, Okul has engaged in a number of research projects in the last three years. We developed the shared portal of Accessible Text known as ACE, which is a portal that has also extended its use for trial year starting January 1st, 2015 to all Ontario colleges as well. So we are growing pretty quickly and it's possible that one day we might expand our services beyond Ontario. But while ACE is limited to Ontario for the time being, Okul, I wanted to highlight some of the resources that we have that are useful and open to the general public. We've got the Accessibility Toolkit for Libraries and this was released in 2014. And the report on Accessible Media, which just came out in February 2015. There are three sections in the toolkit. We've got a section on Law and Administration which explains AOGA, but we also look at an international framework, we'll look at ADA and so on. We have a section on Public Services which highlights some of the best practices, learning existing resources, and there was a lot of original content that was written for that section. And then we also have a section for procurement, encouraging libraries to start thinking about buying accessibly as opposed to buying inaccessible content just because accessibility was not a consideration and then retroactively trying to make something more user friendly. And the Accessible Media report known as ROM is all about digital video. It's a key resource for teaching and learning in universities. We look at video use in classrooms a little bit, but mostly at the landscape and the use and provision of accessible multimedia services at Ontario University Libraries. So in this report it provides a detailed analysis of potential costs and benefits of a variety of approaches to video captioning and delivery of accessible media educational materials. We try to provide clarity on sharing video captioning under Canadian law. There were a lot of questions that we walked away with, some unanswered but some questions which we would like to encourage all of our schools to take to their own legal counsel. And then the bottom line, we wanted to find ways to continue assisting Ontario universities in becoming AODA compliant and perhaps going beyond the basic requirements. So this report contains environmental scan, market research, best practices, technology flows, options for libraries, and a very useful piece for everyone. It has a director of service providers across Canada and the United States as well as the software options. Much like the Accessibility Toolkit, a lot of its contents are applicable beyond the Ontario context. So this document was really designed to highlight some of the best practices that we learned about across different institutions. Moving away from resources and just looking at kind of more general frameworks of what libraries can really do, what kind of advocacy work can you do on campus. This is a really good example. A book was published very recently by Harvard University Press. It's called How Did You Get Here? And this book is a brilliant resource of information for people who are interested in accessibility for persons with disabilities in higher education. I did recently learn that Harvard University Press only released this book exclusively in print, making an important text on accessibility in higher education accessible to anyone with vision impairment, print disabled, someone with print disabled that struggles with manipulation of the physical book, excluding many from being able to access this valuable content. I know that an electronic version is coming out hopefully soon at some point. But this kind of highlighted for me the importance and the value of doing things right and promoting awareness for not creating separate services or separate solutions for certain user groups. If you're releasing this material, this book, you should be releasing it in all formats all at the same time. So how can academic libraries what can we do to raise awareness on campus to advocate on behalf of our users? I just put together a few thoughts that were kind of I was thinking about. So faculty who are publishing need to understand that they have a lot of power when selecting their publisher. They need to advise their publishing house that it's very important to them to make sure that their scholarship reaches the widest audience possible. And that means publishing accessible. University college libraries need to raise awareness about the value of inclusive scholarship. So as you're talking with different partners on campus to explain to them what your role is, what kind of new and exciting resources are coming up from the library, this is your chance to also start the accessibility dialogue. There's no one solution fits all. So the bookstore could request digital files to accompany all titles purchased in print. This would be the best case scenario, a really good solution to make sure that anything that's purchased in print that we know all of these materials are already digitally worn, that the bookstore requires the publisher to provide an accessible digital copy. And lastly, making format availability more transparent. We saw in the Harvard example that the initial release was just in print without any information about other formats. It's very important to make sure that materials that are accessible are very visible, and that the message is very consistent. And if you're planning to release a new and exciting book, try to consider releasing it in all formats possible. And I just have one more slide. This is something that we talked about a little bit before. We talked about VPATS and how valuable it is for libraries to encourage publishers to complete these templates in order to provide additional information to procurement officers across different institutions to have a better understanding of how accessible a product is. So libraries for universal accessibility Lua began their existence in 2010 at LLA Conference in Washington. In 2014, this group launched this wonderful blog style website which is designed as a forum space for library staff to share questions and expertise, establishing a community of practice and helping one another grow. This site also houses an extremely useful resource called VPAT Repository. So this voluntary product accessibility template repository which Lua talked about. Lua talked about VPATS earlier in this presentation and the value of collecting these from publishers. So sometimes publishers make VPATS documents available online. Sometimes you have to ask whether or not they might have one available and ideally they do. So this repository is a crowdsourced tool that also highlights future opportunities to collect and share data like dedicated accessibility contacts at a trying organization which sometimes can be hard to find on a publisher website. We could maybe try looking at future solutions for crowdsourcing information about internal and external audits which institutions have conducted to evaluate their current resources. We know that a lot of schools are doing these but trying to avoid that duplication where 20 different institutions have conducted their individual audits of the same type of resource, I think it would make so much more sense if we could all pull our resources together and share that information. So there is no need for institutions to pay for this work twice if it has already been done. And that pretty much concludes my part of the presentation and I do apologize if we went over 12 minutes past noon but if there are questions I think at least some of the presenters are still going to be available to take them. Just for those of you who are tuning in to the audio there was a question with regard to Kim's presentation and there was a reference to the 2020 Dadmines for Instructor Auxiliaries in the AODA requirements. So that is a specifically Canadian requirement that Kim was referring to. I think it's possible that this webinar was so jam packed with information that people are still absorbing some of the new things that they've heard about or they're adjusting some ideas. I don't see any questions coming in through chat. There are a lot of thumbs up which is great. I'm very happy that this webinar fulfilled expectations. Thank you all very much. This concludes our webinar for the day. We would like to thank everyone who was able to attend and we'll be in touch with you shortly with a copy of the recording hopefully within a...