 So welcome everyone to the search and discoverability aka metadata panel. My name is Marisa de Melio I'm from the Daisy consortium and I'm going to be moderating. So during this panel, we're going to talk about metadata and how it impacts accessibility. I know we just heard a lot about metadata in the stakeholders panel that we all just attended. So we see how important it is. Our experts here today are going to give us different perspectives on how metadata is created and consumed and we'll hear from them as well about best practices and some of the latest developments so be sure to make a note if you have any questions or comments. The format of this is that we're going to have our panel for 30 minutes. And we're going to hear from our panelists during that time. And then afterwards, we're going to have a long working session during which there's plenty of time for questions, comments, discussion, all that. So, with that said, I'm going to ask our panelists to introduce themselves. And let's start with George Kirscher. Hi, my name is George Kirscher with the Daisy consortium also with Benetech, and just delighted to be here. Next, can I hear from Sarah Falkar. Thanks. I'm Sarah Falkar. I'm the head of technology at the Weston and Cougar Memorial Library, which is in British Columbia. And I work with sort of the back end library systems as well as sort of how they interface with our public and our community. Thanks. And then can we hear from Farah little. Hi, everyone. I'm Farah. I am the content coordinator at NELS. Thanks. And finally, Hi there. I'm Gregorio. I'm from Italy. Sorry for my Italian accent. I'm the chief accessibility officer in foundation area. We certify ebooks, Italian ebooks for accessibility. Thank you so much for that. So, I have a series of questions to ask you all. And let's start out by looking at what is the role of metadata. And the question here is what accessibility information might a user get for metadata. I think I'd like to start off with Farah. So, I think basically I like to think of it like the user is going to get information about the accessibility features that the book has or doesn't have. So when accessibility metadata is made public, a reader would know if the ebook for example has print page page navigation, or if all of the images in the book are described. Or if the ebook has a full and functional table of contents, or if they're able to customize the reading display. So that's the kind of information that a reader would get if the metadata is displayed to them. Basically, all the useful stuff that will help them decide if this book meets their needs. Onyx and schema.org metadata, I'll just say they pretty much cover all the same features. And you can find those feature lists online and we can share. I think we're going to share some links out to help to get a sense of like all the accessibility features your ebook might have, and that you might want to promote to your readers. George, can I see your hand up? And I'm a blind user. I would want to know if this book would would work for me. Is it screen reader friendly? That's critical for people who are blind. Definitely so important. Oh, sorry, am I allowed to ask a question? Oh, yeah, the screen reader friendly bit. I've seen that live on some sites. George, from your perspective, does that mean just that it's machine readable or does it mean that the contents actually really well structured and you can navigate it using table of contents headings, page lists and everything. And how do you view what that means? So the fundamental principle here is that all the text is available in the correct reading order. And images have all text, or they are described sufficiently with extended descriptions or in the surrounding area, so that the entire publication can be consumed textually. And that the screen reader can get at essentially all the information that's in the book. And of course the other features like navigation through the table of contents or direct pay page navigation are other important features, but screen reader friendly means the whole thing is available through a textual presentation and screen readers with their text-to-speech function can allow you to read the book. Great. Thanks. Thanks very much. So our next question is what needs to happen to ensure that metadata is present in ebooks? And Georgia, I was wondering if we could ask you to address this. The publishers have the responsibility to include the accessibility metadata in their EPUB and they can answer the questions that need to be addressed because they know what's in their book. And the various features and the hazards like flashing or motion simulations that could be a problem for some users need to be identified. We just talked about the screen reader friendly and that's addressed in the schema.org metadata for access mode sufficient and access mode sufficient equals textual flags that it will be screen reader friendly. The other very, very cool accessibility metadata field is accessibility summary. And this is a intended to be a human readable description. What are the pros of what are the features? What are the, whether it's W, WCAG AA, does it have a page list that you can navigate full table of contents? What are the images described fully? Does it use MathML? Any of these things that will help an end user or a teacher decide that this is a good book to use for their course should be in that accessibility summary. Fortunately, the accessibility checker for EPUB ACE, when you run that on an EPUB, it pulls out the accessibility metadata, presents it in a tab, and you can just review that accessibility metadata, make sure it's good for you. And with the GUI of the ACE, you could go in and edit that metadata if it was incorrect. Very cool. Any more, any more comments from our panelists on ensuring or what needs to happen to ensure that metadata is present in ebooks? Yeah, I think I might just add to that. Like, I think the first step is really that people need to understand what accessibility means in relation to their ebooks. So like they need to know what features does my ebook have that make it accessible or usable, what features doesn't it have. So the first step really before everything is really understanding the usability of your ebook. Yeah, there's a lot of resources online that we can share out that'll help you. And I'll just say that if you're in Canada, you can just contact Nels and we'll help guide you through that too. And then, like George mentioned, the second step is actually putting it in your ebook. And ACE by Daisy is a really easy way to do that because you don't have to crack open your ebook and put it in the code. So definitely download ACE if you don't have it. And the ACE tool links to the Daisy Knowledge Base, which provides guidance. So, you know, if there's accessibility errors that are identified the automatic part of their link to the Knowledge Base so you can read what is the best practice there. And it also provides a list of the images and their alt text so that you can review to make sure that this is really meaningful alt text. It's a great tip. I love the Daisy Knowledge Base. I use it myself. Yeah, that's awesome. I love it. Our hats tip to the man, a Canadian who maintains that he's terrific. So our next question and I'm going to ask Gregorio to start us off with this one. Our next question is what needs to happen to ensure that metadata is retained throughout the distribution chain. Yeah, so our expertise in Italy is that the supply chain for digital book is quite long as the supply chain for paper books. So all the actor in the supply chain has to know that accessibility metadata exists and how to manage them. So, for example, for distributors and aggregators. There are different platforms. The mark is present in Italy, for example, with a digital and the distributors and aggregators have to be sure to have the right fields in their database to store the accessibility metadata and also to not strip any metadata from the file itself because, as you know, there are two different formats for metadata schema.org in the file and onyx through the supply chain so they both need to store and send the onyx and do not strip any metadata inside the file. But then we have store and landing platforms and they have to receive correctly the metadata to interpret them and to display to the end user and they can decide both to use the metadata in the file or the metadata through the supply chain using onyx. But this particular piece of the supply chain is really crucial to be sure that then the end user can get the data because if only one actor of the supply chain doesn't manage the metadata correctly then the end user doesn't get anything about the information in the the information about the accessibility of ebooks and we started creating the metadata and we, in Italy, we are distributing the metadata through the supply chain but only one store displays it right now. We have spoken with big online stores, international online stores and for them it's really really difficult to change their systems because they work globally so they have to change their backend for the world to get those data but I think that with the European Accessibility Act with the promotion of accessibility in Canada they are moving. Here we have something about it because I think that displaying the right metadata to the end user is really crucial but also for content creators for publishers. If the publisher can display that they are creating accessible books, it is a marketing communication for them so it is really crucial to have those metadata to the end users. I'd like to just add to that that some companies ingest a title like Vital Swores and Red Shell so they've actually got that EPUB there where they can crack it open and snatch that metadata out of the file. But if you don't ingest it then the ONIX metadata externally available through the publisher is a great way to get the same accessibility metadata but in a form that you're used to because you're used to displaying the metadata through the ONIX feed. So one is ingestion and one is through the ONIX feed so those are two good mechanisms for this accessibility metadata to percolate through the system. Yeah, I'll say like at NELS like I love it when the ebook itself has the metadata in it because then you know it won't disappear it's there forever and it'll travel with the book forever. And at NELS we extract that data and use it to enhance our mark records in addition to using the ONIX as well because sometimes publishers just put it in one place and not the other. And they do have a little can give a little bit different information so make sure your metadata is in one of those places at least and then hopefully the retailers and libraries and distributors can do their part to display that data publicly so that's a which is the most important part in the distribution chain. It's required to be there. According to the accessibility conformance and discovery specification so if it's not. It's an accessibility error in the EPUB and when you run the ACE checker and you see an empty accessibility metadata tab that would be like, you know, not good. Yeah, and it is required also by the European Accessibility Act by the for all the ebooks sold in Europe. So that's our head of us in Europe. Yeah, looking forward to some of that influence drifting our way right. Well it's already influencing the publishers who have a global market. They're looking at this very closely. So our next question is what are some approaches to displaying metadata, and I'm going to ask Sarah to start us off here. Yes, and Farah just mentioned sort of the mark display and as a public library and most libraries were not using sort of the onyx data at all. We're using something called Mark 21 which is sort of a transferring the old card catalogs from you olden days into something vaguely modern and no one I think who's worked in a public library would say that it's a great format but it is what we have it's been in use since the 1960s so it's hard to move that ship. So we can sort of transfer onyx data into the mark records but as a standard mark is quite different. And I think Nels does a really good job. So for us for displaying. We're not necessarily always having the right connectors, especially for smaller libraries so my library serves a population of only 42,000 people. Which is quite different than say a really big system like Ottawa or Vancouver or Toronto, which might have the resources and there's a lot of tiny libraries out there that might not have the ability to display things easily. So they might be fully reliant on being provided with sort of public mark records that they can grab from other libraries and borrow it. And you can often see where someone made a mistake, possibly at a big library and then that just spreads through many other libraries and then is almost impossible to fix later on because once they're in there they're sort of static. They're sort of stuck with a legacy system that that makes things a bit difficult. But if we can, we are trying slowly will be sort of honestly probably the last piece that will fully modernize out of this entire supply chain. By the way, I know that a couple of you sent me things that we could share. So if at any point you'd like me to bring that up just let me know. But that's really interesting. More, more thoughts around some approaches to displaying metadata. So with the mark issue. I think Mark now has put in some fields for accessibility right. Yeah, two fields actually and it's pretty new. As in, I think they were around November 2018. So the 341 and 532. And those are the fields we use that now that's kind of where we stick the data. So displaying the metadata as I've already said in the in the previous panel. We developed inside the daisy before and then in the WTC guidelines on how to display metadata to end users on the user experience and I think that is really a great document to start with. We are looking for reference also for having consistent way for end users to get the metadata through the different stores in landing platforms and so on. And also to not to remain the will every time you have to display something Sarah. I'm wondering if you have run across library simplified in your career at all. That's a good question and as a small Canadian library we've heard of it, but it's not something that's accessible to us. For example in British Columbia we have 72 library systems and most of which serve populations under 10,000 people. So anything as large and complex and requiring a huge investment of time and people would be something that would have to be handled on either a national or provincial scale. Well I just mentioned it because they're really doing a lot in terms of bringing accessibility to public libraries. There are standards like LCP and reading the or you know, reading them and thorium soon thorium to as as readers so, and, and that they have one location in Canada, which is the Ottawa Public Library but they don't seem to have actually the, the simply reader but I just mentioned it as a, as a direction that Canadian and other libraries should be looking at. And I think if you look into it the actual implementation is not that expensive. Distribution protocol called OPD S which is a standard for a pub distribution these days and and would simplify an awful lot of the distribution problems or challenges that that that we face. OPD S is used in other systems than just just deep up. Great. Well thank you for that. So, we've got about eight minutes left in the panel before we switch to general discussion. And I just want to make sure that we, you know I'm going to skip around a little bit in our questions because I want to make sure that we get to this one. And so one question that we hear a lot in accessible publishing is where can I go to find references and resources that will help me learn more about, excuse me about developing and incorporating metadata. And I was wondering if I could ask Farah to start us off with this one and then I'm sure everyone can chime in. I think this has been mentioned a few times as a favorite resource for us so I'd say Daisy knowledge base would be a great place to start they have a section on schema.org tags that explain what's available and what they mean. They have a little section on onyx tags that also go through the different onyx tags on what they mean exactly so I would really recommend checking out that website in general but those two pages specific to metadata. I think we also mentioned the UX guide for displaying accessibility metadata that was put together by some folks at the W3C, I think. They have some good suggestions in there it's good place definitely read it before you embark on any work towards exposing that data on your website. So I'd say those two for sure. And if you want to go straight to the source and you're feeling a bit adventurous you could read the EPUB accessibility spec. They have a section on there all about accessibility metadata and how it's important for discovery and what's required if you want to meet that standard. And contact Nels if you're in Canada, it can be a little bit overwhelming especially if you're new to ebooks and accessibility. So at Nels we're happy to like walk you through it to look at your book, explain to you, you know, what features your ebook has, how it works and how you can add that data in. So we have a metadata channel in our Slack or our accessible publishing summit Slack. And I think it would be great to drop some of these links in there. Oh cool. We have like a specific chat. Sorry. We have a channel called it's called hash metadata. Oh in Slack. Okay. Yeah, yeah, I'll have to go on there. But yes. I haven't joined the Slack channel. I mean, either yet. Another document that I found really useful is the crosswalk crosswalk between onyx and schema dot all you can find it online. It's a crosswalk onyx schema. And it is really helpful if you have to create both metadata. So onyx and schema, because you have quite a one to one mapping from one format of metadata to another. So, yeah, for content creators, I think that is quite useful. A little bit jig. Would this be at accessibility metadata.org. Yeah, right. Great. You know, we've got that slide showing vital sources and red shelves. Do you want to display that. Yeah. Yeah, let me share my screen let's see so I believe that was slide 11 was vital source and 12 was red shelf so let me just open that and get my screen sharing. Can everybody see that. Yeah, great. Yeah. So what we're looking at here is the slide from a presentation that George did the title of the slide is buying accessible e pubs vital source and what this shows us. Like, there's a book cover title of the book is about statistics and probability and it, you know, tells you the author and the ISBN and things like that. And then George what, what do you want to highlight. Well, they're really features. Yeah, if there's, if the publisher has provided accessibility metadata than an accessibility tab shows up. And the vital source was the first to present accessibility metadata, and they just way back when just displayed the raw schema.org metadata, and it was scary. That that really triggered us to write the user experience guide, where things like a screen reader friendly evolved. And so it will show the most important accessibility metadata, whether it's screen reader friendly any hazards features, the accessibility summary that the publisher wrote, and then normally there's a link to the full accessibility metadata. If you want to knock yourself out and read the raw, the raw accessibility metadata that that would be available as well. And then the next slide. Let me just pull that up. I have to share my screen and reshare my screen. The new image sorry it's. The most efficient. Yeah, I just took screen grabs because of the right my computer doesn't like PowerPoints, necessarily. So yeah, now we should all be able to see the slide about the red shelf metadata display. All good. Yeah, and the in red shelf to has used the user experience guide. It's still being finished but they did give us comments about it and we do expect that guide to be completed in the next week or two, I think, and then we'll publish that as a community group note from the W3C. Yeah, one thing I like about what they both did is they also show you if the book is certified accessible and by who. So I think that's a good quick way for readers and others to get a sense of accessibility of the book. Right. And, you know, I asked them the question well what happens if there's no accessibility metadata available. Aaron from red shelf said well they don't display that tab then they don't display anything, which you know I was saying well why don't you just say no no accessibility metadata available from the publisher and and that was what they noodled on and discussed internally, and they thought it was not appropriate to kind of shame publishers at this time. But hopefully more and more, the accessibility metadata will be will be available. I'll click on vital source for a second. I noticed they still do display George like you said that entire list of schema.org metadata. Yeah. When you click on the view all accessibility metadata information that's where they'll display like a huge long list. Literally they just took out those schema tags and expose them to everyone. I don't know why this is public but in general I would probably say I'm not a fan of that particular approach, just because, like you said they're not super user friendly, are understandable to people outside the industry. So like all those scary words like math ML display transform ability area might not mean much to like the average person. So I think at Nels as we're working on how to best display this data to users right now. I think one of our goals is to make sure. Yeah we want to display all those specific accessibility features a book has just like vital sources done but we want to make sure to use user friendly language and that's the tricky part. So I look forward to reading the UX guide on it's totally complete again to see if there's some more good tips in there. Also good stuff at the beginning it's just that they expose that nasty stuff. Yeah no no like they're they're the forerunner here so they've done a great job. One thing that would be important too I think is to make those tags searchable for readers. So like all those accessibility features to have that as a search filter would be really useful. Oh, yeah. Good idea. Yeah, I would love to search on screen reader friendly in a collection, because those are the ones that I could benefit from. Yeah, yeah, so that's our goal at Nels. So we'll see bug me in a few months and we'll see what we've come up with. So another link in the slack Sarah has just shared some slides there. Which is really a neat way to see another display of metadata. Very informative. Thank you very much Sarah. Some examples of what metadata display looks like in some public libraries using the Bibliocommons interface so this was an example of a record that we have that's available in print ebook and a Nels sort of audio book format and sort of what that looks like so it's a series of screenshots, including one of what Mark metadata looks like that you can get publicly a lot of Mark metadata is not often searchable through library public catalogs. Even if it is there if sort of staff know what to look for. Often it's only used by library school students when they're doing research for assignments. A lot of it isn't searchable it's not always indexed by our public catalogs. But we can as staff sort of run. Because oftentimes, we rely on sort of Nels and Selah for the most accessible things since we are often locked into various other content distributors which don't make accessibility metadata available. Push for Bibliocommons to do that because I know a ton of libraries these billiocommons so be great if they expose that data to readers. Well, I think this brings us to a close time wise on our panel but of course, you know, the plan is to continue talking about metadata we have an hour and a half working session. Just following this so I'm going to stop the recording I just want to say thank you so much to our panelists that was really really interesting excellent discussion. If you are able to stick around for the working session please do otherwise just thank you again and yeah I'm going to shift from moderator to participant. And that's going to bring us to a close so thank you so much.