 by Sina Barham. This presentation is brought to you by the Advocacy and Education subgroup of the DLF Digital Accessibility Working Group. For questions regarding subgroup, or if you would like to contribute, please email markweiler at mweiler at wlu.ca or alexwordmarkcullen and actually we'll be dropping their emails in the chat shortly. For today, our speaker is the founder of the Inclusive Design firm, Prime Access Consulting. Sina is an accessibility consultant, computer scientist, researcher, speaker, and entrepreneur. In 2012, Sina was recognized as a White House champion of change by President Barack Obama for his doctoral research work enabling users with disabilities to succeed in science, technology, engineering, and math, STEM fields. Believing that accessibility is sustainable when adopted as a culture, not just as a tactic, Sina and his team work with executive management policymakers, engineering teams, content creators, designers, and other stakeholders within institutions to promulgate accessibility and inclusive design throughout the fabric of an organization. In addition to serving on and sharing various boards, conferences, committees, and working groups across corporate, nonprofit, and research entities, Sina serves as an invited expert on the worldwide web consortium W3C, accessible, rich, internet applications, ARIA, working group where he helps share the next generation of digital accessibility standards and best practices. We thank Sina for joining us today. Before we hand things over to him, however, I'd like to get some housekeeping out of the way. Along with me today, we have Mark Weiler and Alex or Mark Cullen who both chair the continuing education and advocacy subgroup of the digital accessibility working group. They have done a tremendous amount of work to get us to this point. And this event is set to last 90 minutes with the first hour being dedicated to Sina's presentation and the last 30 minutes being reserved for questions. Questions will be recorded as they come in, but they will be read out for Sina in the last 30 minutes. So once again, go ahead and drop your questions into the chat. We will be recording them, as well as your name, and then in the last 30 minutes you'll have a chance, we'll be reading them out loud to be captured by the transcript, in order for them to be captured within the transcript, which will be provided along with the recording after today's event. And finally, we'd like to acknowledge today is Indigenous People's Day. While we are all currently participating in this event from various remote locations, we would still like to acknowledge that we of the Americas are living on land, taking the violence from Native American peoples, who to this day continue to advocate and fight for agency and justice. And with all of that being said, without further ado, we'd like to thank you for joining us, and I'm going to go ahead and hand things over to Sina. Thank you so much for that kind introduction. I just want to get a verbal and a visual check that I'm audible, and the slides are available on the screen, and you can see them? Yes. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you again for all of the work that was put to having me here, and to putting this event together. I'll dive right in. Today, I'd like to be talking with you for a little bit of time about welcoming the widest possible audience, and what does this mean in the context of inclusive design and accessibility and all these terms that we spend a lot of time talking about at Prime Access Consulting? A couple of things to point out before we continue. At the bottom of the slides, you'll see a couple of pieces of redundant information. I'll just speak these out loud for accessibility reasons. The first is my Twitter handle at Sina Baram, S-I-N-A-B-A-H-R-A-M. That's true on other social media platforms as well. Feel free if you'd like to continue the conversation or engage over social media. That's a great way to do so with me. And the other one is this hashtag A11Y, and that's a numeronym. It's a word where the number in the middle is the number of letters that have been removed from the word. So accessibility, C-C-E-S-S-I-B-I-L-I-T, has been removed from it, and you get A11Y. Another one is I-18-N for internationalization, for example. So this hashtag is a great way of engaging with the overall community in terms of the discourse around inclusive design and accessibility. It's a great tribe of people to communicate with. So a little bit of background about me. I happen to be blind. I use a screen reader. I read Braille. I travel with a cane, et cetera. And this happened when I was pretty young, around seven or eight years old. I didn't have a perfect vision to begin with, but a lot more usable vision than I have now. And then there was an incident involving a tennis ball where I was hitting it against the board and essentially missed one of the shots came back and hit me in the face. And this really brought up an issue very early on. And what we see here, for example, is just myself, a very young scene leaning over a railing. And it brought me to this conclusion at a very young age, I would say proximal to that, around nine, 10 years old, that you can influence how you feel. You cannot control how you feel. There are many factors, the external world being a great example of how external factors can affect how we feel these days. But also things involving mental health, et cetera, right? However, you can influence how you feel. And I choose that, for me, having this difference in terms of ability, which is to say that inability to see, for example, has really shaped and lensed the way that I interact with the world. And I chose at a very young age to turn this into an opportunity and a strength as opposed to something to be upset about. This in no way means that it doesn't provide certain difficulties and differences. But as we'll see throughout this talk, there are a lot of ways as people who produce anything from content to technology to information, there are things we can do to minimize those difficulties. Before we get into that, though, just a little bit more in terms of background stories and to make a long story short, ended up going to North Carolina State University or NC State here in the States in North Carolina for computer science. So my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in that space, namely in a field called human computer interaction. So we spend a lot of time looking at ways in which we interact with technology and how computers can not only make the digital world more accessible, but also the physical world more accessible, right? We see here an image of me smiling while making a gesture on a tablet, and this was part of the PhD work that I was doing at the time, looking at making maps, bar charts and graphs more accessible through the use of touch screens and AI and speech technologies and things of that nature. In 2012, I was incredibly honored to receive a champion of change award that was mentioned earlier in the bio from President Obama. And this is the reason that I got into museums and working with libraries and galleries and everybody. While I was there at the White House, there were some very opportune meetings, and I'll talk a little bit about that, but this is basically how I started working with museums. Before I get into that, though, I wanted to point out that while I was in DC, I got the opportunity to do some, you know, the regular tourist related stuff, right? And one of those is to visit the Capitol building. So what we see here is the Helen Keller statue in the Capitol building, it's in solid bronze, it's cast in bronze, as is the braille that is on the statue. And this is really important because, I'm sorry for the auto advancing of that slide there, let me go back here, this is particularly important because that braille happens to have a mistake in it. And so I don't say that to really give them a hard time, although I do recommend if you're going to cast something in solid bronze, some additional type of proofing might be in order. But to say that we need to fail forward, and we need to iterate and understand that when mistakes happen, we don't call things off, but we need to move forward into this idea that this will happen and how we interact with that, how we deal with mistakes happening is very important. I'm wondering about this auto advancing issue, I apologize for that. So I mentioned that, I will get us to the right place, here we go, I mentioned that this is how I got interested in museums again at being at that White House meeting, I met up with a woman named Christine Reich, and she was working at the Museum of Science in Cambridge at the time, and invited me to this NSF seminar, this National Science Foundation seminar, auto advancing has not happened before, I will try to keep an eye on it, to work on creating museum multimedia for everyone. And this was really interesting to me because I knew all the computer science people in the room, those were my colleagues, my peers, people I had done research with, I didn't know any of the museum people in the room. And it was amazing because it was this opportunity, and what we see here is a prototype of something that we created actually during this week-long NSF workshop, where we were working on like, okay, what does data visualization mean, and how can you make that accessible to someone who's unable to see it. If a kid comes in and is unable to see, for example, how can they see a graph of temperatures on the screen, where everybody has placed their hand, and there's a little Peltier sensor to map temperatures from your classmates. How can we make these things more inclusive? And can we do that? Can we prototype some of these ideas in a really quick way? And that is what really got me interested in this because I was in a room full of people that were just not willing to basically take no for an answer. And it's like, okay, let's try some stuff. We've got some hardware here, we've got a little bit of a shop in the basement of a museum, let's put some things together, and let's actually attempt to make this happen. So we did, and this is one of the prototypes that we were able to build, but that this really just invigorated my interest in working in the cultural sector, because I saw a lot of opportunities for these types of rich interactions, where it's really about the experience and making sure that that is done in an inclusive way is really important to me. So I want to talk about a couple of definitions, because I feel like that's important just so we can all get on the same page. These are to get our discussion and our conversation started. So the first one is simply what is accessibility, right? And the working definition I'll use for today's talk is that it is the ability of all people to use a product, a service, a place, any type of offering, regardless of disability. And this is important because accessibility is rooted in this definition of disability, right? And so what is disability? Disability is the consequence of an impairment. This can be visual, olfactory, sensory, emotional, cognitive, dexterity, mobility, any of these things, a combination of these things. It could be permanent or temporary. Think about when you're driving in a car going somewhere, if you have the ability to do that, then you very much should not be looking down at your phone, right? Texting and driving is a pretty bad idea. And so you are disabled in the sense that there is a temporary impairment there. And this is why we get into concepts where accessibility helps everyone because the phone reading out that text message to you, the map reading out the next place you will turn to you, is helpful not only for someone who can't see the screen, but someone who can't see the screen or shouldn't be looking at that screen. So this overlap is going to come up again and again as we have these discussions. So there's a couple of ways of thinking about disability. I want to point out first, these are not the only two ways of thinking about disability. There are many models. There is an entire field of critical disability studies. I really encourage you that if you have interest in this space to read the literature in this space because it is quite exhaustive and there's a lot of it that has been done. I present these two models of disability just as a method for us to compare and contrast two possible viewpoints. So one is a more traditional old school representation of the medical model, right? Something is broken, so we fix it, right? You break your arm, you go to the doctor, you get a cast, hopefully it gets better. What happens when it doesn't? What happens when the arm does not get full range of motion? What happens when the vision is not able to be restored? What happens when you are not able to use your legs for locomotion anymore? Then what do we do as a society is really important? And in the medical model, we treat the individual as being disabled. So we put the burden on the person, on the individual, right? In the social or environmental model of disability, we look at the environment as that which is disabling. So this means that the environment is disabling in the sense that if you're unable to open the door to a building because there's no door opening button and you happen to use crutches or a wheelchair and that operation is rather difficult to do, it's not your fault for using a wheelchair or crutches. It is the fault of the environment for not having that be inclusive and not having that be accessible. So this brings us to a related concept that I wanted to talk about which is othering, right? Like what is othering? And this is the consequence of making an individual or a group of people feel different, right? Feel essentially different or othered. And this can come up intentionally through all the ways that we can think of malicious or otherwise from ableism and racism and just lack of consideration in terms of how we build things, et cetera. But it can also come up unintentionally, right? So it can come up in the sense that we might offer someone an affordance like an assisted listening device or something along these lines. But then because of how that is designed, let's say for example in a museum or library context, it will immediately point out that that is an individual using an accessibility affordance, right? Now in some cases, the individual in question may be completely okay with this and that's fine. However, in other scenarios, they may not choose to do so. And the important takeaway for me here is that the agency, whenever we can, should remain with the user, should remain with the visitor, right? That is really important because then they are the one making the choice. The choice is not being made for them, right? So how do we make our environments less excluding? How do we make them less othering and less disabling? And one methodology that I'm a particular fan of is this of inclusive design. So this is a design methodology that realizes at the end of the day, the things we are creating, whether they are in interfaces, whether they are physical exhibits, whether they are content that we're putting into the world, whatever they may be, they're going to be consumed and interacted with by individual people, with their own individual preferences, needs, and ways of understanding that information. And so what we want to try to do is remove any obstacles or barriers we're placing into that design process so that we can make our environments more adaptive and more accessible to cater to as many possible variances of needs and abilities that we possibly can. This is the idea of considering this stuff upfront, as opposed to after the fact, when it's so much more expensive, so much more difficult or in some cases, impossible to do, right? So why does this matter? Why are we bothering talking about this stuff, right? Well, first, it's the right thing to do. I hope we can all get on the same page about that from a moral imperative perspective, right? This is a group of people that are traditionally excluded from our global discourse due to environments not being inclusive and accessible. So I think it is the right thing to do to include as many voices in our conversations as possible. It's the law, right? So this is definitely a different statement in many countries around the world, but there are from UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities to the ADA and the ACA in Canada now, this is a matter of legal mandate as well. According to WHO, there's around 1.5 billion people in the world with some form of disability. This is something that is simply the tapestry of humanity that we're dealing with, right? And so it's something that we need to take into consideration and really more pressing than that number to me is that over the age of 35, your chances of experiencing a disability are actually 50%. They're one out of two, right? So this really deeply affects everybody we know and love and work with in some way, shape or form. So I feel like it's a very important topic for us to be thinking about and doing a better job at. Just really briefly about PAC, Prime Access Consulting is a company I run. We do a ton of work in the inclusive design space. Happy to talk to anybody if you're interested in that, but essentially we love working on projects whether it's museum interactives or exhibits all the way to training and writing policy, whatever we can do to help make experiences more available and more welcoming and more inclusive for as many people as possible. If that's in the digital sphere or in the physical sphere, we love working on either angle of that particular problem. I'm joined in this work oftentimes by Corey Timson who lives up in Ottawa and previously was the vice president at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. And he and I do a great deal of work in this space in terms of inclusive design and accessibility. So I wanted to make sure to give Corey a shout out as well. So to talk about a couple of examples of inclusive design, this is what I will call the cliche slide. I think this is one that where most of us are pretty familiar with. It's a curb cut. There is a boy using a wheelchair. And just to define a curb cut for anybody who may not be familiar with that term, it is that sloped part of the sidewalk that is not a curb. In other words, it doesn't have a height difference between where you're standing and the road. So there's not a step down. There's a nice gentle slope if you are a wheelchair user or anybody who has difficulty with steps whatsoever. This is very helpful. Of course, this is an example of universal design. One of the most classic examples because it's not only helpful for somebody who is a wheelchair user, right? You can use it on a skateboard. You can, it's mostly used by parents who are walking behind a stroller, grocery cart to the airport, all of these types of things. So it might be critical for one audience, right? But it is augmentative or helpful for many audiences. And that's a really key takeaway of universal and inclusive design. Now, what's important to keep in mind here is that when we first, speaking of iterating and failing forward, when we first came up with curb cuts, we made them kind of smooth, right? And this problem comes up a lot, especially in front of, for example, like a parking garage or a parking structure if you're familiar with that concept, where there'll be a driveway, where cars are entering and exiting, and you might be walking along the sidewalk, and there'll be this very gentle slope. And so if you're a blind pedestrian, you may not always, but you may be in the path of travel of some vehicles without knowing it, right? Because there's not much of a textural difference. And this is particularly important when we consider coupling this concept with the idea of silent cars, right? Silent electric cars and so forth, where you may not have an audio cue, and that can be a recipe for a dangerous situation. So what we did is, society, as we said, all right, not a problem, we're not gonna give up on curb cuts and just say, oh, well, it's been real curb cuts, right? Instead, we have something called foot braille. So these are these bumps that I'm highlighting in this picture here. And so we see a stroller being pushed, a woman with a white cane using it, right? As well as the mind your gap signage and the yellow foot braille that we see in this photo here. And the idea behind these domed dots are, again, they don't get in the way of anybody. They don't interfere with a wheelchair being able to roll over it, but it gives you this textural feedback. And we've used this concept both outdoors, but also indoors to indicate where there may be some assistive technology or an accessible access point for people to interact with an exhibit. So this is a concept that is very helpful, not only for outdoor obstacles, but for indoor affordances as well. I wanted to take a minute and show this video. I'll do the ironic thing of being the blind guy, doing some audio description, which is that what we're gonna see is there's an escalator and we're gonna think through the thought experiment of, what would it mean like for someone who is a wheelchair user to use the escalator, right? So just to kind of reiterate this concept of othering, there may be an elevator that may be perfectly accessible, right? But what does it mean if we just thought to ourselves, how could we make an escalator more inclusive? And so as the steps of the escalator proceed, like they regularly do, instead of one of them flattening into a step, three of them does, so there's enough room for the wheelchair to roll on to it, and then for the wheelchair user to therefore be able to ride the escalator up. So I'll let this play. Now, I think that's pretty cool, not because it's a universal solution to make all escalators inclusive and accessible, but I think it's an interesting thought experiment around what would it mean to make what we traditionally say, oh, well, that's impossible or that's not gonna be accessible. What does it mean to consider how to make these environments more inclusive in areas where we've traditionally just written that off? So I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about the principles of inclusive and inclusive design and universal design. I've borrowed some principles from both of these specific disciplines, and we are going to look at some examples from exhibits and performances and so forth in which they've been applied. So the first one is equitable use. Can people with different abilities get an equitable experience? And what's important to understand here, of course, is that it's not an equivalent or an exact experience. It's an equitable one. What we see here is a gentleman using a wheelchair with presumably his granddaughter, they're able to sit together because they're in a theater where there's adjacency seating. There are seats some with backs, some without, some with armrests, some without. There are universal access points or keypads on the benches where you can plug in to receive audio description or augmented audio. There is perhaps not very easily seen in this photo, American Sign Language as well as LSQ offered for which would be Sign Language for French offered in addition to captions and audio description, as I mentioned earlier. So all of these affordances are able to come together to create this inclusive environment for this 360-degree theater. And this is an example of one of the installations at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. So along these same lines for equitable use, another example of this is this instance of a tryptic display. Basically it's three touch screens that are side by side. This is out of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and essentially this is a touch screen experience. Now it's important here is that traditionally this would be basically a wall of interactive glass. You come up to it, you can do some deep looking at the different artworks and learn about them and browse through them, quickly flicking through them with your fingers. If you're unable to see, how can you interact with that? So there is a button that you can press. It has a Braille label. There is a headphone jack. The descriptions of all of the artworks are provided. So there's visual descriptions. I'll talk a little bit about that later along in this talk. And those are able to be read out. There's both short descriptions and long descriptions for whether you're zoomed in or not. And in this way, you're able not only to appreciate the content and interact with this wall of glass that otherwise would be completely inaccessible. But it's done in a standards compliant way or at least the standards compliant as we can make it at the time. So the gestures that we used were taken directly from the gestural language that's available on the iPhone and that is pretty widely known and used by the community of people with low and no vision. We actually found through prototyping that one of the things that was nice was to leave the speech being said on the screen. We had that as a debug window. We just had that for logging while we were developing. We were going to take it out in production. But we decided to leave it and style it up just a little bit for production because what was helpful was a couple of different interactions. One was when we had a group of people where there was a sighted friend and a friend who is using the screen reading feature for them to know where the other person is. So that was really helpful. So there was this sort of companion benefit that came out of this mode. But also it was proving helpful for people who were identifying as being on the spectrum and helping to understand some of the context, especially since the text on the screen was also the visual description of the artwork since that was being read out for the person who presumably couldn't see it. So again, might be critical for one audience, but we're getting these benefits across the group of people as a whole. So the second principle is giving control. And what I mean by that is can people access and interact with your content, but in their preferred way? This goes back to that whole premise behind inclusive design. The thing that we see here is the universal keypad. This is from CMHR from Canadian Museum for Human Rights. This has also been used in a few other museums and buildings as well. And essentially we've got a control surface. It's a rectangular device with 13 buttons on it. There's back home and help. There's arrow keys like you would see on a gaming keypad, up, down, left, right, and the center key, select or enter. There's zoom in and zoom out. There's volume up and down. And then there's an audio description button where the mode button where you can press it to transition between hearing audio descriptions or hearing augmented audio. This is very helpful if somebody wishes to consume the content at a much louder volume, but we don't want to affect the volume of the broadcast audio in the exhibit. So this keypad exists at all of the interactives at the museum. And there's also a tactile floor marker as well. So remember I was talking about foot braille earlier with the bumps. So this is a similar concept where there's a flat strip and that strip is able to be detected with your foot or with your cane. And you then know that if you reach out, there will be a universal keypad, headphone jack, braille label. There's also a Bluetooth to interface with the exhibit from your phone. So this way the content can also be browsed on the phone. For example, in some situations where we were not able to fit both the captions and the sign language and some other affordances in the video, we absolutely made sure that those were available on someone's personal device. So there's all these different affordances that are working together in the ecosystem to bring the inclusivity and the accessibility level much higher in terms of these digital interactives and the content that they're trying to portray. So the third principle is making things easy. Are we making things intuitive and easy to access? This is one of those things that I feel is easy to say and hard to do. There's an example here of a bathroom sign that sounds pretty pedestrian, pretty mundane. However, there's a lot of considerations here. So, first of all, language differences, right? So what if you don't speak English? Are you able to still know the function of the sign, right? So there's availability in English and French, for example. Is it available in braille? Are the letters made tactile in case you're not a braille reader but know the shapes of the letters in the alphabet that is your primary language, right? There's a pictogram as well. So it doesn't require reading to know the function, right? The signage also advertises the changing table that's in there and then the classic handicaps symbol that was used as well, right? So there's a lot of different affordances all that come together to try to not assume expertise or a particular set of knowledge on behalf of the visitor. What's most important, perhaps, is that there's an image of a toilet here because the alternative signage, there's various pictograms that are used. Some are these like, for example, supposed to be, for example, evocative of female and male features and it's joined together. There's all of these different bathroom signs that you can look into. And we wanted to concentrate on function, not who, right? This is what you can find behind this door, not trying to signify who it's for and again, to just go back to the sense of equity and justice. So context matters, right? Can people interact with your content in a dynamic environment? Whether we're talking about, for example, aquaria or museums or outdoor spaces, everything really changes throughout the day from lighting to the number of people in the space and the background level of audio, for example, that that implies or the lighting that that implies. And this is really important because, again, we're thinking about these environments as an ecosystem, not just as a one-off. And so it's important to consider these various environmental factors when we think about the accessibility and inclusive design of these spaces. So what we see here, just as an example of this, is a relaxed performance, right? Where we're thinking about, for example, can we leave the house lights on? There's a pre-assumed contract between the actors and the people in the audience that somebody may run to the restroom 20 times because they're pregnant or they might just need a space to go outside and decompress for a little while. And all of these things are perfectly fine. This is something that is known ahead of time. So expectations have been set on both sides. And what I can tell you from having attended several of these is that they're not more distracting or disruptive. There's just this, I really like the fact that they're called relaxed performances because I feel there is this era of relaxness that accompanies them and obviously of much, much greater sense of inclusivity and accessibility as well. Here we see two kids enjoying the performance and they're both wearing, and also I should mention the noise-canceling headphones here. So I have several friends who identify as being autistic, for example, and use noise-canceling headphones set to particular frequencies because those frequencies happen to offer them a great deal of discomfort and they're able to noise cancel those out, right? Tolerance for error. So this idea, number five, is can people always return to a known starting point, right? No matter what they do. I feel like this is a situation that we've all found ourselves in where we'll be using some interface, whether it's a kiosk or a website or anything along these lines, right? Something on our computers. And we'll end up in this scenario where we will go, I was trying to do this thing. I only had 15 minutes to do this thing and I'm totally lost in this interface. I just need to get back to where I was and I don't know how I got here, right? It's very frustrating kind of experience. And to me, as a computer scientist and as someone who thinks about these topics, I view that as a failure of design. I view that as an abject failure of design. And it is our job to make computer systems and technology in general adapt to us and work for us, not the other way around. And this is made doubly true when we look at this through an inclusivity and an accessibility lens. So what we see here is something perhaps very simple, but it's an undo button. And yet there are many interfaces where even something as simple as an undo button or a go back button doesn't exist. And this is a really easy thing that we can do to allow people to have a little bit more control over their context. So number six, low physical effort. I know this says low physical effort, but I do want to point out that this is doubly true in digital interfaces as well. We might have an interface that's perfectly accessible with the keyboard, but if it requires someone to hit tab 100 times, it in no way is inclusive and in no way is usable, right? So are people able to interact with your content and appreciate it without requiring much physical effort or dexterity, right? So this could be very small touch targets or very small clickable areas that are hard to get to. What we see here is a physical example of a crowded, for example. Excuse me. What we see here in this image is the universal keypad I mentioned earlier and the headphone jack is conically shaped. So gravity gives you a little bit of an assist when you want to plug in. Now this sounds like a small detail, but imagine being someone who needs to rely on the audio features of something and then due to a dexterity problem, not being able to plug your headphones in in order to appreciate that content. So by having this be horizontally mounted and by gravity giving you an assist to plug that plug-in, to plug that jack in, you're able to then make this a little bit less reliant on clarity and effort. This is similarly true with push bars on doors instead of doorknobs and concepts like that. So size and space for approaching use. So this idea is again physical in nature in terms of its description but also absolutely applicable to digital interfaces as well. And the idea is is there enough space to maneuver and interact? We see this hallway, it's got plenty of room, turning radius and so forth versus a crowded art gallery, for example, where there would be very little room for things like sighted guide or for example for a U-turn in a wheelchair. And so just thinking about these things upfront is incredibly important because they're easy to mitigate against. And if we then leave the problem until later on, we see a lot of a lot more difficulty, a lot more expense arises when we go to remediate it. So inclusion leads to innovation. What we see here is a promo photo for this play that was in the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. Now the main actor in this particular it's a one person show. He is portraying a character who has schizophrenia and so there are two screens live on stage that you're able to see. They have digital content as well as some handwritten content from him throughout the show. There's also him performing actions as well on stage. For example, there's a stool on stage he might be getting up and sitting down on it and performing different things with his body while there's also content going on on the screens. So what I'm going to play for you and I'm going to pipe some audio into the call hopefully for those wearing headphones you'll get some stereo separation but I thought it was really creative what Steppenwolf did here with the audio description. They did not just do one track of audio description for what was going on because there's simultaneous pieces of information happening. So what they did instead was they have three different descriptions one in the left one in the right and one in the center and here's just a snippet so you can take a listen to what that sounds like keeping in mind they were trying not to break immersion so for example you'll hear them using subdued voices and it is in keeping with sort of the thematic elements of the play where this character is in cases hearing voices in his head. So I thought it was a pretty interesting thematic expression of audio description here we go and sorry for the screen reader piping in there at the last moment it was reading the zoom background messages but that's an example of something pretty dense that's not what the entire show sounds like when it comes to audio description but I just thought it was an interesting overlap where there was this one area where you could hear both the left and the right hand and the center hand audio description so hopefully that made it through in terms of the audio. Really quick shout out that this is not only true in the cultural sector these concepts that we've been talking about this comes up in the commercial sector as well and so what we see here is Tim Cook from Apple CEO of Apple and the quote is that when we work on making our devices accessible to the blind I don't consider the bloody ROI the return on investment. To be fair to both sides of this particular argument Apple has definitely benefited a great deal from their considerable investments in accessibility but they really have walked the talk on this as well Apple products come with a myriad of assistive technologies built in especially in the mobile space so iPhone Apple watching things like this TV OS on Apple TV and what's fascinating about that is that it is baked in and it is baked in from the beginning so there are many instances for example where I might reach out as a blind user of an app or a developer and I'll say hey you know great app there's this one little accessibility problem and maybe they have like an unlabeled button or they have something I can't get to with my screen reader and their response is wow I had no idea this is amazing I'll fix that because it's just a two-line change because Apple has built a lot of these accessibility affordances into the ecosystem and in some cases developers just by following the correct methodology and mechanisms that Apple recommends to build an app or making their apps accessible now does that always happen or do you get 100% of accessibility for free absolutely not but it's a huge step in systemizing and having a systematic approach to accessibility that I feel deserves some credit I also wanted to mention the Coyote project I'm happy to talk about this during the Q&A phase as well but this was a project that was thrown out of the collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art and ourselves in terms of looking at a mechanism by which we can put in a platform and a workflow to support visual descriptions especially of artworks the issue that spawned this project was that the MCA was doing a website and that they had 15,000 unlabeled images and we needed to come up with a way of solving that single edit field in a content management system is just not going to be sufficient we wanted to do we wanted to treat the visual description as real content that means proof editing and an approval flow and having curatorial chime in in case there's a word choice or something else that we need some assistance with so this is an online platform it's an open source platform I'm happy to talk to you if you're interested in contributing to this and it allows for the system to learn about the different resources at the organization whether it's a museum a library, publisher to learn about all of these different images it doesn't have to store them, just know about them and then it offers a facility for editing and reviewing and publishing these visual descriptions so that they can be accessed by an exhibit a mobile app a voice assistance skill what have you and this is something that we're working on right now for example actively with the Smithsonian with Cooper Hewitt the Nations Design Museum because we feel it's really important to get visual description practice built into museological practice so that it's something that is simply just done as opposed to an afterthought right so one of the things that has come out of this project I think are some pretty amazing visual descriptions I'll play one of those for you right now and so I'll pipe the audio in and I will silence the speech of my own screen reader so we don't hear those zoom announcements and then we'll discuss it so let me do that here we go alright and I'll pipe the audio in this painted portrait depicts a young woman with jet black skin holding along thin paint brush up to a colorful messy painter's palette she is shown in a three quarter pose gazing directly at the viewer her face which is central to the square composition stands out against a large white canvas almost blending into the pitch black background to her right closer inspection reveals however that her skin is subtly rendered with various shades of contours and highlights she wears two large hoop earrings three small hoop earrings with an oversized boxy high-collar jacket made of stiff fabric her voluminous hair black with a notch or sheen rises in thick coils on top of her head the canvas to her left shows a partly finished paint by number self portrait in it her likeness is broken up into smaller segments with pale blue outlines and numbers she has outlined many of the segments and filled them in with colors from her palette orange blue yellow pink brown and a few shades of green she uses brighter more vivid colors to paint her jacket on the paint by number canvas using bright oranges and greens rather than the deep mustards and maroons that are on the real life jacket now I think that's a pretty cool visual description just in and of itself I think that description it itself has an artistic quality to it there's a couple of things that Coyote made very clear one of them is this concept of multiplicity of voices this is a piece by Kerry James Marshall and it turns out that a 23 year old black man out of Baltimore is going to have a different visual description of a KJM painting than a 45 year old woman white lady working at a museum in Chicago right and that's that's fine so how do we how do we portray this multiplicity of voices so one of the things that Coyote does is it doesn't just allow for a single visual description for an artwork or for an object but it allows for multiple such descriptions to to occur the explanation that the description that we just heard I wanted to play for you the way that I tend to to listen to it and I consume it just to show you the the advantages of having this information be digital so that people have different ways of consuming it so one way of consuming it would be to put the letters on the screen and to see them another way is the voice that you just heard it's basically the voice from an iPhone another way is the voice that I happen to use and I tend to listen to it at a pretty fast speed so I'll play that for you just to give you a sense this is the exact same description we heard before no no words have been changed or dropped or anything like that I've just run it through the speech that the speech rate that I tend to use a computer at so let's take a listen at what that sounds like so so and there's that version of it now the other thing I think worth pointing out there before we move on from that is that this flexibility is really powerful when it's done right if a website is made accessible if a digital interactive is made inclusive someone like myself who likes to listen to things pretty fast and is able to do that can come along and interact with it and fly across the page someone else can listen to it at a smaller slower speed or interact with it in with a Braille display or what have you right enlarge the text however if something is inaccessible if we don't get those semantics right if we don't build the website in the right way it doesn't matter how impressively you know fast you can listen to things or how good you are with a screen reader the person is then stuck and not able to move forward so I just want to make sure that we we keep that in mind a similar concept to visual descriptions but that comes up a lot when there's something tactile when there's something to be felt in addition to just listening to some content about a visual work of art is a tactile reproduction or guided tactile descriptions so I wanted to play a sample of that for us here what we're going to hear is JJ's voice JJ Hunt is an amazing audio describer works with us a great deal lives up in Toronto and JJ right now is going to be describing the Campbell soup can basically this is a Warhol work this is out of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the description is cognizant of the fact that someone will be touching a tactile reproduction while it is going on so it's going to be referring to things being raised or lowered because there's a tactile reproduction that's being felt while the description is being read out loud this color screen print is a large can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup against a white backdrop the top half of the cans label is red which is recessed and the lower half is white which is raised bridging the two halves at the center of the label is a small heavily textured gold emblem more on that in a moment let's begin at the top of the piece where you will find the cans sealed lid represented by raised concentric arches inside an oval move your left hand to the left corner of the lid then slowly make your way down the straight edge of the can while sweeping your thumb back and forth right away near the top of the label you will find a large uppercase letter C which features a long curving lead in stroke at its top and a small flourish at the bottom this is the beginning of the manufacturer's brand name written in white therefore raised cursive explore the letters noting the thin shadow that falls to the lower right of the metallic font C, A, M P, B E, L, L apostrophe S you might have noticed the unusual lowercase E which in this font resembles a backwards number three and I'll cut it off there it does keep going for about four and a half minutes and it does a little bit of a description of this tactile reproduction and what's incredible about this especially when I was when we were working on these and I felt them for the first time is that when you hear JJ talk about like the drop shadow of the font that's actually discernible it's not it's not a subtle thing it is it is quite discernible tactily and can then open up discussions around those concepts where there's additional didactic information whether it's from the website et cetera so a couple of just practical tips and tricks I want to be cognizant of time here and opening it up for for Q&A but to raise awareness about these things about accessibility and inclusive design I think is really critical I feel like often times some of the problems that we encounter when we see something that is deeply inaccessible or frustrating to use especially amongst disabilities it's because a conversation didn't happen during the design phase and so anything that you can do in your own personal lives and your professional lives to promote this topic at whatever level you're comfortable doing whether it's like hey is that font going to be readable in sunlight or is there enough color contrast or what are we going to do if someone is unable to use their hand in order to interact with this thing I think really helps make all of the things that we are designing and working on better second looking at implementing small steps at first so basically not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good not trying to boil the ocean here right a lot of times will be on projects where we'll see that some very rich accessible interactions are being proposed and maybe due to whatever reasons those aren't able to be done and yet the alternative seems to be that nothing is done and I want to try to break this out of this mold of all or nothing and that we need to start iterating forward so anything that you can do to suggest small tiny improvements to accessibility while also working on those big ticket items is an improvement and a step in the right direction and lastly build off of past successes this doesn't mean to over celebrate this doesn't mean to you know send out a tweet and being like you know we solved accessibility hashtag winning right that's not the suggestion here right but at the same time also to celebrate those things that you are doing as an organization or with friends and colleagues on a project to promote inclusivity and accessibility and to welcome to use that as a welcoming point for discussion for critique for the ability for members of the community to give you further feedback and also to help build awareness amongst the individuals that you're working with amongst co-workers and colleagues that this is something that's going on sometimes we live in very siloed environments and so we might not even know about a project that's going on you know virtually down the hall so to speak in today's world and so having these celebratory moments while not claiming that we've solved something but helping to move and promote these concepts of inclusivity and accessibility is something I feel can have a resounding impact lastly you don't have to be an expert what we see here is an image of me skydiving over over San Diego plummeting through the sky and the idea here is basically this this story I'm reminded of when I did go skydiving when I went on this particular adventure that we're working there essentially they weren't experts in accessibility or inclusive design or anything like that but they opened up with a question that we often start with when we're talking with visitor services staff for example which is how may I best help you right so just to make sure that that agency is with the individual right they still followed all of their safety rules and everything else that had to go along with skydiving but they also had interesting ideas like do you want to stick your legs out of the aircraft while we take off which was amazing and a lot of fun or do you want me to dangle you out of the plane so you can kind of get a sense of what it feels like to be up here before we jump sure that sounds amazing let's do that so little things like that that they did just because they recognized alright there's a difference here this isn't like all the other jumps I've done but how can I make this experience more enjoyable while still keeping it safe and while still following all those other rules and practices so this really stuck with me as an as an approach and a starting point for that discussion how may I best help you and I'll close with this was thought from from Maya Angelou which is that people will forget what you said and people will forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel I feel like this is really important and this is something that comes up a lot in the work that we are all engaged in where we're creating things that are being put out into the world whether it's content whether it's interfaces whether it's training programs what have you and they have an impact on how we are making people feel and hopefully through thinking about principles from inclusive and universal design and considering concepts like othering and the ways we think about disability we can make as many people as possible feel welcome and feel included in the conversation as opposed to excluded and you know along those lines I want to thank you for spending time thinking about and talking about these concepts here today I've got some contact information up here and these slides have been shared in an accessible format as well and I'll just read out the domain name because everything else can be gotten from there it's pack.bz pac.bz so if you go to that website everything else you can you can find on there if you want to contact me and happy to spend some time on the Q&A section great can you hear me Sina yes I can it's Mark yeah thank you so much and bravo to you for skydiving wow that was exciting we have a lot of questions we have about eight questions so far so just to give you a sense in the 30 minutes how we're doing the first question that was from Debbie so that was what is the error in the Braille on the Helen Keller statue there was a typo it's either in the last sentence and there's literally a typo in the Braille so the wrong character was used and then of course it's in bronze so if I remember the gentleman who was giving us the tour at the time he was the head of accommodations for congress and he was saying that it would take an act of congress and something like 40,000 dollars to fix that particular mistake well speaking of large organizations like congress the next question is from Stanley asked what metrics can I consult for measuring progress towards an inclusive design that's a great question so there's a couple of ways of going about that it depends on what aspect we're talking about so I'm going to give you a couple but then I'm happy if there's a follow up or you want to continue that conversation so one is just looking at things like KPIs right so key performance indicators this is you know museums have everything from engagement to dwell time to re-visitation to earned revenue you know there's all of these different KPIs we use as an organization and tracking those with respect to a pre-post of inclusive design and accessibility efforts is a fascinating exercise because what we've found is it's a great way of portraying this truth that we all say but is you know there's something we have to sell these days unfortunately which is that doing this work in the long run is actually cheaper and in lots of cases earns revenue at Canadian Museum for Human Rights we did Corey produced a site on scene where all of the photographers were themselves had lower no vision that show had some tactile reproductions you saw there JJ did audio description for it we consulted on all the inclusive design and accessibility for it there were some costs associated with that that show also earned $8 million in earned revenue from the PR campaign alone right so there's one of those concepts of tracking just the standard KPIs that you would at your organization but linking them against accessibility and inclusive design efforts is a huge thing now there's the other aspect of tracking that might be part of your question which is what about like how well are we doing at inclusive design how well are we doing at the websites accessibility how well are we doing at making sure that somebody who might require a sense sensory friendly space is able to have access to that and that then can be broken down into a couple of different methodologies so without spending too much time on this answer I would say that the one technique that we've had a lot of success with is to work with organizations to develop an inclusive design or accessibility roadmap this is not set against the schedule but it is set against the sequence so you sequence the operations but you don't come into the timeline just yet this lets everybody get on the same page and then you're able on that roadmap to use other project management mechanism something like a racy comes to mind where you look at who's responsible accountable consulted and included how well are we doing these different tasks and you can then use that as a mechanism to say all right well we've broken down media into let's say audio description and captioning and transcripts and sign language how well are we doing on these metrics as a percentage of all the videos we're publishing or we've broken down all of the entrances into accessible ingress and egress how well are we doing along these metrics so that's another way I'll briefly touch on the digital side of things with respect to things like WCAG the web content accessibility guidelines there are methodologies in place there we do this all the time where we might do an audit or spot checks so you can take a look at your website and you can say how well is this website doing from an accessibility point of view there are automated tools to do that but just please be aware that no matter what you do and I say this with all sincerity I really truly mean this I don't care if you work with us or someone else please work with an accessibility company that knows their stuff and is not just offering you an automated solution because the automated solutions as a computer scientist I can tell you only can at best capture 20 to 25% of your accessibility issues on let's say an app or a website so hopefully one of those three categories kind of answers your question but happy for any follow ups and I'll just mention to this question has come up in the chat that yes the slides they've been made available if you need them they will be made available as well as the recording and the captioning and transcripts for this presentation so all that's going to be coming out the next question is from Jen let me just read it out here there are numerous disabilities and combinations of human situations that many developers might even be aware of and therefore unintentionally create a website that isn't exactly 100% accessible what is a good resource for a complete guide list of these disabilities and how to design for them to ensure that your site is completely accessible and abides into the law avoiding unhappy customers and lawsuits and you're able to hear me by the way yes okay so there's a couple of things here I would say I would not design for disability I think that if you start from there we may have some other problems that will creep into the design and implementation process so just to do a little bit of framing around that it's important to design with an inclusive design methodology this means from the design phase all the way through post-implementation we're taking into account color contrast and semantics and proper use of a markup to actually convey what we want to convey with the website there is an entire school of thought around this there's an entire way that for example when we're doing trainings when we're working with clients on this you've got to build evaluation into your methodology it is the only way you don't know what you don't know so if you believe in auditing and doing an inspection on a house before buying it then you should inspect the website before hitting the button to have it go live now the way that that's done is there's various forms of that that will take I mentioned automated tools in my previous answer it's important to use those not rely on them but to use them and so that's number one so there's things like for example the dev tools in Chrome itself and the browser lets you do a little accessibility audit right there and that's part of the lighthouse offerings so you can use that in addition to that you've got to work with native assistive technology users people who use a screen reader who use screen enlargement and text enlargement and things of this nature and you're able to then discover a lot of problems that arise but what's interesting is that the problems that you discover they're not because someone who's blind can't use it it's because to to be frank with you it's simply coded wrong and I can say that having built web technologies that 95% of the problems simply come from the incorrect usage of the semantics were given in our tools in HTML and JavaScript and CSS in these tools that web developers use so in a roundabout way just to answer your question at a high level make sure you build testing into your process make sure you're testing and considering accessibility and inclusive design at your design process throughout implementation and then at the end when there's an audit type mechanism put in place to ensure that everything is done correctly make sure that the developers you're working with know that this is something that's not only important but is linked against their payment milestones so if you're working with a third-party company don't just make a statement of work that forces them to comply with let's say WCAG 2.1 level AA but also link this against payment milestones earlier in the process so it's not left as the last to do item because what we see a lot of times in these procurement processes is that accessibility is in the RFP accessibility is in the contract so everybody thinks they're doing a great job right and then you get an inaccessible website and this sounds a little unintuitive how do we get an inaccessible website if we had it in the contract we had it in the RFP the vendor agreed that it would result in an inaccessible website and the reason is that a phone call or an email happens maybe a month or two before launch that says you know we've got all these accessibility requirements but we've also got to make sure the videos on the blog are working and the client is put in that position of having to choose incorrectly this false choice between their eventual product launching and accessibility so anything we can do to prevent that from happening in front loading accessibility requirements throughout the process that's the way to do it and we have an entire methodology that I can get into and talk if folks want to follow up on the specifics of that I'm happy to talk to that but again I cannot stress enough the importance of doing this the design phase the implementation phase and then well into production Great thanks and this next question is from Kira but any guidance on applying these ideas to virtual exhibits Yeah I think the guidance doesn't change the implementation is where the devil's in the details to use that phrase so that means that for example when we talk about physical affordances if we don't control the built environment because we have individuals who are joining remotely and so therefore we may not be able to offer them a keypad but we do well one of the things we can do is to make sure that that exhibit is available and usable through the keyboard you don't have to be an accessibility expert or a screen reader user or anything like that to simply try to take a virtual exhibit you may be working on and just run through it with the keyboard in fact I encourage everybody on this webinar to just try that try using your favorite interface purely with the keyboard everywhere you need to get to can you do everything you need to get to do if you can't there's a pretty good indication there that someone who may be relying on a keyboard but also with the use of a screen reader and other assistive technologies also would have difficulties doing that now that's not a foolproof test but it will highlight so many issues that it's not even funny right other things you could be doing is try to look at it with your computer in high contrast mode try to zoom in on your browser past 200% and see how it behaves try to do text zoom instead of just optical zoom and see what that looks like see how that behaves these are some simple things you can do but then again to go back to working with experts or becoming knowledgeable yourself on the web content accessibility guidelines and where appropriate the accessible rich internet applications aria standard is very helpful from an implementation phase lastly the content accessibility requirements don't change right the videos still need audio description they need sign language they need transcripts they need captions when you've got an audio only exhibit is there a visual affordance like a transcript that lets someone know what that is what's being said for example or what is being played if the interface offers the facility for images to exist do those have descriptions on them are all the controls able to be gotten to with the keyboard and do they have clear labels right that would be read out with a screen reader so there's all those web accessibility guidelines and standards they are just doubly as important in an online exhibit great thanks and we're about halfway through the questions and this one is from Rachel is bad or subpar accessibility for example alt text on social media worse than no accessibility at all yeah I mean I think it depends right there's lots of ways of phrasing that particular question I think that with respect to social media you know describe your tweets Twitter has image description put image descriptions on your images in Twitter you get like a thousand characters per image Facebook similarly right on things like LinkedIn and Instagram take advantage of these accessibility affordances because they're very helpful if you're asking if a bad description is better than no description I would say it really depends but if someone has the ability to take the time and effort to do a bad description they also have the ability to take the time to do a good description because a bad description is not necessarily faster to jot out it's a difference in consideration and time and a little bit of practice so I would need to look at the specific case you're talking about to sort of make that make that comparison but to use that as an excuse to talk about social media accessibility please note that these platforms have these affordances built in now and I definitely encourage you to be to be using them officially one last thing actually I will mention with respect to social media when you're using hashtags please use initial case in your hashtags so if you want to talk about like you know libraries for all don't just have that be all caps don't just have that all be run together capitalize the L and the F and the A libraries for all you know something like that because then what you're able to do is you read out correctly by speech technology and they don't just run together as one long word thanks Sina this one is from Cherry how will COVID requirements be included in the reopenings ahead have you thought about that yeah that's been a top of mind conversation with a lot of our clients that aren't doing you know capital projects but are doing just look we're going to reopen what are the considerations there's a couple of things this is not an epidemiology conference or anything like that so I'm going to leave the scientists you know I'm going to leave the science to the scientists but I would encourage you to take a practical look at for example airborne transmission versus fomite transmission and transmission through touch I think that's really important to understand and be practical about if you've got something that one percent of your audience is touching one percent of the time let's invest in some isopropyl alcohol and let's actually have a proper disinfectant policy in place and have someone do that the one to three times a week that thing is being touched and not just take the touch things off the floor on the other hand you might have an environment in which that's not practical and so we need to think about what that means in terms of the affordances that we are offering visitors and it's really important to message this the what is worse than you know having no touch where one was expecting there to be touch right is not knowing about it ahead of time right so if you can on your websites on social media if you're taking down something that previously was there and expected by an audience that is relying on various accessibility affordances make sure you're communicating this as much as you can with the communities that you're working with and also involve them in these processes as much as possible it's not always possible to involve external groups in the strict decision-making process or in the pipeline of authority depending on how the structure of the organization is set up but having advisory groups of persons with varying abilities and having online environments in which you can have these conversations and zoom call and so on and so forth these are things that you can do so that you're able to get a 360 degree view of what the implications of whatever choices you're making around COVID are going to have on these particular communities lastly just keep in mind touch is not going away forever this is a temporary thing and we will you know we will eventually get through this and you know it's going to be awfully unfortunate if in 2024 we have to reinvent a bunch of 2021 wheels so let's try to be cognizant of that as well in the precautions that we are able to take now I want to jump ahead to Catherine's question because it's very similar and I think it might build on what you just said Sina it's both COVID and do you have any advice regarding touch screens or other adaptive uses that rely upon touch what can we do now and what can we do now and how may we need to change in the future yeah I mean this is this is related to the previous question and also the example of the universal keypad from Canadian Museum for Human Rights right that was alongside a touchscreen exhibit and so it was a physical affordance that is able to be to be used in addition to the touchscreen now the reason I bring it up is yes that's yet something else that you have to touch but that also implies that the kiosk is responsive to a keyboard or to an external source and there are technologies that actually can allow you for example to use your phone as the control surface for an exhibit so instead of interacting with the exhibits touchscreen or interacting with for example let's say a keypad beside it you have a situation where the digital information is either available remotely on a micro website or through a URL that can be scanned and therefore someone can use their own assistive technology and their own device in order to interact with it or in a more simplistic sense you have everything in front of you at traditionally speaking but you use your phone as the control surface to actually do the swiping and to touch things now there's different offerings in this space so it's going to depend specifically on what you're looking into and there's differing levels of accessibility so be aware of that but there are some alternatives and it all comes back to those same considerations we took to make sure the keypad worked with that exhibit now can pay dividends because it will ensure that a remote app running on a phone can interact with that exhibit. Great now this one next question is from Mona if you have limited resources how do you ensure universal and inclusive design? I think that one important thing is to not try to aim to do everything and then get discouraged by the fact that you have limited resources and may not be able to do it because you don't require a resource spend but a difference in considerations up front choosing a different font where both of them are equal cost or both are free is not a cost consideration it is a design consideration that you can make but then can increase the readability and legibility for many people similarly if you've got a little bit of money to caption videos but then you're able to batch them and then affect your production schedule in that way but not from a cost perspective you're then able to consolidate and get some savings there right now putting those types of operational tactics aside I do want to answer the heart of the question which is what if we simply don't have the resources to do a particular thing and this is where ideas like soft tactics come into play if you're not able to for example functionality on a touch screen based exhibit what are the soft tactics that you can provide is there a tactic in which that media is available on the website you've already got it in a digital format is it in a content management system so that you can simply export it in an accessible way maybe it's only on demand maybe it's available for everybody or is there an intervention in which a human is in the loop where they're performing a function that yes it would be ideal if we had made this accessible but due to resources or other constraints maybe we weren't but can they act as that soft tactic there and then lastly sometimes it's a matter of messaging sometimes it's a matter of just telling people that this particular offering doesn't have certain affordances and it is far better to own that and say that upfront than have someone showing up expecting it and then to deal with that situation so again just being very clear and honest about what you are able to do and what you're able to offer is really important those are some considerations there's others as well I think we have about seven minutes and two questions left so we're doing well Sina this one is from Stephanie do you have any recommendations for making online collections of images and PDFs more accessible would adding descriptions of the images below be sufficient it's not sufficient because those online collections need to be actually accessible according to the web content accessibility guidelines this is really important so adding descriptions to your images is never sufficient to make an online anything accessible full stop this is a universal truth is it a step in the right direction you better believe it it's absolutely a wonderful thing to do but then how are those images descriptions going to be surfaced as alternative text or alt text for like somebody like myself who's a screen reader user to have them read out or are we also visually surfacing them for everybody to enjoy is there going to be a facility for something that is available as a PDF to also be available as an EPOP EPUB is an alternative format that is far more accessible and allows for a lot of these web standards to be incorporated than PDF does it is absolutely possible to make accessible PDFs but you need to be ensuring that you're doing that or the headings the lists the fonts that are used links clearly labeled tables well laid out in that PDF it's not just about the image descriptions and then happy to you know just give a call back out to the Coyote project I mentioned because that's literally the job we were trying to solve there was how can we take all of these images from a collections website and from a production pipeline for publishing for example and how can we provide visual descriptions for all of those so that's one additional tool that could be used in that process and that's a perfect kind for our last question from Taliesin I'm curious about the Coyote project it sounds like it could be used as somewhat of an iterative design tool I work on interactive learning tools ones you are familiar with we need to iterate a lot throughout the design process and I'm wondering if the Coyote project might be helpful in tracking a design process it's an interesting thing we've used it to track a couple of different processes not purely a design process because usually it relies on images from a pipeline in the organization that is more production oriented so you know imagine the output of a collections management system a digital asset management system something like that having said that it absolutely could be used for that I'd love to talk to you about that but there are some other techniques I might recommend for iterative design where you're weaving accessibility and inclusive design considerations into iterative design so for example there's Wizard of Oz studies that you can do when you're running through and pretending a screen reader is accessing something where you can zoom in and do color contrast analysis purely in the design phase you can have different designs that are quickly mocked up in HTML and so therefore they're able to be interacted with with a host of assistive technologies and you can figure out which one is you know more which one your users are more receptive to there's also the methodology of just following and looking at the WCAG success criteria the WCAG success criteria against your design so for example if you've got a menu system if you're invoking a menu based on hover that's fine except if that's not the only way you're invoking that menu system because a keyboard user has to get to that a touch user has to get to that a screen reader user has to get to that menu so even within your purely visual design process there are ways of iterating and improving the accessibility before a line of code is written I think we can probably squeeze in two more questions if you're already, is that Sina? No, absolutely. Is it best practice to visually surface all text or maybe that might be all text? This is an interesting one. Is it best practice? I think I probably can't call it a best practice unless if I can cite multiple institutions doing it and there's only a few that have done this so far, right? DMCA Chicago did this, the Museum of Contemporary or Chicago did this when we were working with them on Coyote some other museums that I don't want to put right now do have plans of doing this in the next six months and so I would claim the answer is yes but I'm going to wear my opinion hat here for a second so in my opinion the answer is yes because it helps so many more people than just those who are, you know that can't see the image. I think that's really, really important but traditionally it is not done that way and it does require a design treatment. How are they surfaced? Can you move them out of the way not to occlude the image? Can they be collapsed so they don't get in someone's way, right? All of these considerations but we've thought through that with several clients and in each case we've been a fan of airing on the side of visually surfacing them because we feel it's helpful for everybody. We have another alt text question, this one is from Mona is alt text supposed to be short and concise or more descriptive? I've heard mixed messages about that. There's no purpose, right? So there's no universal answer to that. If the alt text is for an image and the image is the logo which when you click it goes to the homepage of the website the alt text can be home. We're done, that's the alt text. It's not a description of that logo because it's acting as a link in that case and it is labeling that link. Alternatively, if the alt text is for a hero image on a blog post and it's showing a group of people conversing around a table with technology or food on the table, et cetera and you need to convey these different things then you need to convey all of these different concepts, right? When we work with institutions we do like visual description trainings and things like that. We talk about how do we identify skin color and gender and talk about all of these different aspects. What's the difference that comes up in art a lot between naked versus nude, right? There's all of these different things and some of those descriptions are not a few words long. They may be several sentences or paragraphs long and then the question comes up how do we surface that? Is it just the alt attribute in HTML or is there actually a better way where that content can be more navigable by a keyboard and also by a screen reader user? There's a new answer there but there's no one right answer whether it should be short and concise or long. It needs to be appropriate for the context of use for that particular image. Just one follow-up on my part here. Can you describe the state of visual description as a cultural practice such as research into effective description, education and training for describers? I feel like describers are formalizing their practice a little bit more in the last few years than we've seen in the last 30 to 40. I feel personally that this is a space that has lacked a lot of rigor in terms of some of the opportunities for professional environments and research environments to have an opportunity to offer that rigor. That's happening now in the past couple of years. I think there's a lot of room to go. I also think that really there's no one right answer for the sector much less the world when it comes to description. If you're describing Daredevil on Netflix you have a different set of criteria and a different set of constraints than when you're describing a painting by Cary James Marshall. Just from purely space and duration and the way that it's going to be consumed. I think it's really important to keep those factors in mind. What we're discovering right now is that over this last summer a lot of people were able to keep their jobs because they were able to do visual description work as opposed to being laid off because their job required a lot of physical interventions that were not possible due to the pandemic and people being on lockdown. I think that it's a nuanced question that is not going to have a single answer but I am heartened by the fact that more rigor is I'm seeing more rigor in the last few years than in the last few decades in this space and I'm seeing a lot more uptick especially amongst museums with respect to doing visual description like entire projects and activities around visual description. That's great and unfortunately that we're at our time so with that I'd like to thank Sina and Jasmine and Alex and the Digital Library Foundation for kicking off the Advocacy and Education subgroup with this talk. We're delighted to have you Sina. If any people could email you if they have any follow-up questions. Everyone if you have questions. If anyone would like to get involved with the Education and Advocacy subgroup please email myself or Alex and at this early stage we're going to ask for some time but we think we'll make the most of it. Thank you very much to everyone and thank you Sina. Thanks so much for having me.