 Hello, everybody. I'm welcome to the panel panel discussion today on power mediation. My name is Rachel Oslo and I am the production coordinator for notes. I'm really excited to be here today so I'm going to be your moderator, obviously. I just wanted to make some quick notes before we get the ball rolling. So we're going to have 30 minutes. To discuss on the key developments and challenges in this area of found remediation. I will start with some guiding questions. I also have a list of questions in case people get stuck on anything. So we can keep the conversation going that being said, you know, I'm just here to moderate. So if the panelists get into a really good conversation, they're just going to go for the glory. I'm going to be giving a 10 minute and a five minute warning to so you guys know that you're going to have to start wrapping up what you're talking about, since we only have 30 minutes. There's going to be no cure and Q&A for the for the panel, but that's what the working session is for. So don't use fear. Yeah, that's it for the quick notes. Before we dive into the actual questions and discussion. I would like all the panelists to introduce themselves. And again, just for the sake of time. Please just state your name and your organization and your institutional affiliations. If anyone wants to learn more about people, you can always see chat them up on Slack, or there's also the full bios on our website for accessibility publishing. So let's start with the first introduction. And we can start with Bob. Good afternoon. I just wanted to check my time to make sure at least it's afternoon here in Ontario. Good morning to those on the West Coast. My name is Bob Minnery. I'm the manager of alternate education resources Ontario, which is arrow. And I'm happy to be here. So those that don't know, I should let you know that arrow is responsible for alternate format production from K to post doctorate within the province of Ontario for us publicly blended schools. We provide large print Braille digital audio. We also provide accessible PDF Kurzweil and word, and I think I've got all the mediums that I mentioned all the mediums. And everyone all that Oh, an accessible PDF as well. Okay, thanks Bob. Now let's go to Adam. Hi everyone. My name is Adam Wilton. I'm the manager of the provincial resource center for the visually impaired. And the accessible resource center British Columbia in, you guessed it British Columbia PRC VI does a hard copy alternate format so Braille and enlarge print for students who are blind or visually impaired and the accessible resource for ARC BC does digital format production for all students with print disabilities K to 12 in British Columbia and I'm delighted to see that my friend and colleague Corey playford is here with us. Who manages caper BC and Corey takes care of pretty well the rest in terms of post secondary. That's me. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Adam. And let's go on to Lee. Lee Nash, the publisher of invisible publishing here in Ontario and I've been making ebooks for well over a decade now by hand so if it's fun to learn all the new stuff you can do with. Yeah, I love learning new stuff to you. That's really exciting. Thank you, Lee. And now, last but definitely not least, we're going to talk to me. Hi, I am knowing the Kesson. I'm the founder of a company called Heteris, which focuses on creating automated book production tools for any publisher who wants to use them. It's sort of an extension of all my work doing book production both manually and through automated workflows for various large and small publishers throughout my career. Thank you so much. Great. So thank you all for the amazing panelists for being here. I'm really excited for this conversation to get going. So let's just dive in. I'm going to start with a question and just open it up to the panelists. The first question I'm going to start up with is what advances have been happening around file remediation. That's a great question. I guess I can kick things off. I'm, I'm a little worried that I'm going to, I'm going to be a bit of a broken record here in this panel and harp on about how the best defense is the good offense. I think there's been a lot of focus lately on people revamping their workflows to actually do born accessible books, born accessible books rather than having to like do actual file remediation on their back with titles, which I think is a great advancement field. The cleaner that your ebook files are the more standardized they are at the very beginning of the process, the easier it is to add new accessibility developments to those files as they are developed. You know, if like next year EPUB four is suddenly the standard if you have very clean structured files that you started making even today, it'll be so much easier to convert those to the new standard once it comes out. I can jump in and echo that actually just a bit. Hi, it's Adam speaking. The, the quality, the initial quality of the file available, like from a remediation perspective, we often try to work with files from publishers, but you know publishers know their content. They, they have, you know, that they are course intimately connected with kind of the entire process of bringing that file into being. And the cleaner the file that we get from publishers in from an all format production perspective, the, the more efficiently, effectively, we're able to create an alternate format from that, from whatever we receive from publishers. You know, in 2021, we still cut the spines off of an inordinate number of books to scan them. And, yeah, I know, I know it's, but, but the reality is, is that we don't often and you know we were grateful for what publishers are able to share with us but often we don't receive something in a format that is that we can work with. So just, you know, Nellie I couldn't agree more the idea of starting, you know, with the, with, with accessibility in mind from the outset, even if the file is not all the way where it needs to be to meet the access requirements of the end user. At least the alternate format sector can kind of pick up the ball and run with it, rather than having to cut the spine off of the dead tree version, which we're still doing in 2021. Totally, I totally agree. I also think there's a lot of development happening in the publishing ecosystem right now around tools that you can use both to create your books at the, at the beginning, and back your books I know they mentioned that ace accessibility checker in the last session, which is a great tool that you can use to just run your pubs through and it'll give you a list of things that you need to fix to make that book more accessible. Going back to my previous point. Your books are standardized by which I mean that you're using style names or tag names consistently for every paragraph you're using the same types of elements in the HTML and this might be getting more technical than than most of you want to get into. So just standardizing that markup that's inside the e pub will help you know that, you know, if the ace checker is saying I need to fix this one thing in one book, I know that all of my other books use exactly the same markup and so I know that I need to change that same thing in all of my other books. So it just makes your job a lot easier. So the things that I've published are the thing for me that's been really exciting is that this knowledge is more out there. It's easier to access, because a couple of years ago I would have had no idea where to even look for information about making our books accessible and that even just having that available for people to, you know, to, to Google or through associations. That's the thing that's made it easier for me in particular to pick up and pick up the changes and make them part of it, you know, there's still some stuff I don't know, and I'm learning, but I know where to go to learn. So we've found, and that's an excellent point. One of the other things that arrow has found just to shift gears a bit is that we've, we've been fortunate enough to create partnerships with publishers. We originally started with our post secondary publishers. So, when a request was made from a school into arrow it automatically went to the publishers and they have publishers because they knew that arrow was a trusted intermediary that provided us the know the file with which to work, and that works so well at the post secondary level that now we have a stable of publishers. We have a set of 20 publishers totally who we have a contact where so when an advisor makes a request into arrow saying I need this particular title in this particular format. And this is the publisher, we have a contact and the publisher has a relationship with us where we're not trying to reestablish, you know, all the criteria we're just saying, we need this title and and they have a comfort level to send it to to give it to us, and for us to transcribe it. And from an edge in the educational field, because timeliness is as important as, you know, accessibility. It's been a game changer for us is creating like relationships with publishers where they know that arrow and and by extension care, the care members are doing the work that's that's required, should we be now should we be doing it is another day for another day, but the fact that we do do it, and the fact that we have a real a conduit for quick, quick result has been a game changer for at the K to 12 level, in addition to the post secondary. Can I just add Bob to that that care is the Canadian Association of Education and Resource Center for alternate format materials. And so we're a we're a network of essentially all of the K to 12 and post secondary producers at a provincial level. For alternate format materials so we're, we're working in coordination with one another so that if a student in Halifax needs a let's say biology 12 in Braille format, we can, we can get that on loan and vice versa. Yeah, I was gonna say I loved Bob's point about having good partnerships also I think that's really important. You know if you're working with a conversion vendor, or if you know people from the various W3C working groups. I think there are lots of people out there who will be happy to help you figure out what your approach toward needs to be based on your own unique needs at your company. I have to say the Nells audits have been amazing, like the Nells audits of materials that was a real sort of turning point for me was to have somebody walk through one of my E pubs point out all the things that were wrong with it. And then give me a chance to go back and fix it and bring it back and have it audited again and that was such a great opportunity so the more of that can happen. And at least to then come out with sort of like now I have a standardized ebook that I can use for every project going forward, which a has cut my ebook production time down to like next to nothing. But it's also a template that I know is going to be accessible with relatively minor tweaking. Yeah. So go Nells. Okay. No, no, Rachel. It's okay. I was all good. I just wanted to ask you guys. How, how about a dealing with the cost of remediation. Oh my goodness. The cost of the remediation of files and titles. I can say it's a big barrier. It's a constant time right like those are the two things and, you know, where we're public as publishers were very short on both of those things. There's a bunch of programs happening right now that are making it more available for us to apply for funding to remediate those titles or have them done for us and that's huge especially for publishers with bigger artists. You know, it's, it's great to be able to hire interns periodically but those aren't guaranteed nor are enough and if you get an intern one year you don't get one the next year so the continuity can be difficult there to support it. You know, I've been chipping it away at it. I'm really hopeful that a bunch of our titles will go through this through one of the programs that are available right now but it's a challenge. One of the because we work in the educational sector I'll give you an example of a title that we had to outsource was the Canadian income tax act annotated. Okay, so you can imagine. So, while the, so it was an 800 page book, full of tables. We had to make it accessible. The cost was north of 40 grand. And by north, I mean, you know, Yukon north of 40 grand. That's not unusual in the educational sector. And that's, I think it's those type of titles that are that one keep arrow and piece PR CVI in business but it's also it's a real problem. And it's not so much the cost only. It's because there's very few houses and individuals that have the expertise in one medium, let alone for multiple mediums, the ability to train someone like you couldn't expect the publisher to have the expertise in house, you know, or because that the that expertise may only be used once, you know, in a year. And likewise it's a change it's even a challenge from a, like from it from an educational, like a like a resource center like our own. And like Adams and Adam correct me if I'm saying something incorrect here but it's having the cost to keep the skill sets current is it is another cost associated with with transcription. Absolutely Bob, these are highly specialized skill sets. And not not only are they highly specialized but they're, they're continuing to evolve in an increasingly complex environment. When you start adding in, you know, EPUB production, and what is you know what is the interface, or the involvement for EPUB production for for, let's say a Braille transcriber in terms of writing descriptions or producing a tactile supplement. So, no, absolutely. These are these are and these these costs I think play out differently across the education sector. You know, in our province in British Columbia we have two separate agencies which are funded, you know, again, funded separately between post secondary and and the K to 12 sector. And I know that students in the post secondary sector do face some specific cost pressures around remediation. And I don't want to put you on the spot Corey but can you speak to that point just a little bit. That's funny I was just looking for Corey to. To make myself a panelist so I was just mentioning to Adam that I know in certain provinces students in the post secondary sector are expected to pay their own remediation costs so if they ask their school for a file. That's being farmed out to third party to do and that students bearing that cost which is just an inconceivable burden to me at the level of reading that students are expected to undertake in post secondary. The information like that makes its way to publishers. That's, that's, they probably don't hear that so that's a really eye opening even to be working in this field, asking students to bear that cost is, it's just unconscionable. So, off the panel. Something else related to costs that I will mention was something is actually related to something that I brought up on the earlier panel is this notion of the baseline accessibility work that an alternate format producer would need to do versus some of the more specialized student specific work, and sometimes a challenge for us is a balancing both of those within our budget to, you know, in terms of, you know, ensuring that there's enough staff time and resources to be able to produce let's say, you know, the scope of a book that might be used by, you know, five or six students versus a really specialized title for a student who perhaps relies on non visual access that may only be used by one student, but it's, but that student has just as much right to, to, you know, equitable controlling access as any other learner and so another piece of that yeah the costing puzzle for us is, is managing the, the, you know, managing those things that we're making accessible for a wider range of students versus those we know are going to be very isolated cases. And so the promise of born accessible in my mind is that with a greater proportion of students with perceptual disabilities, being able to use materials that are right out of the box from publishers, then the alternative format sector has more latitude to be able to focus on those access cases that are going to require more advanced remediation. So this is just going to give the, the 10 minute warning. And I guess, another question we can go into is how are publishers dealing with the cost and time of remediating their backlists. I think I already spoke to that hoping hoping to get a grant. Oh, which is not a good answer. I would argue it's the worst answer. But it's, it's tricky to, I mean, we're most publishers will ask if there's a business case for it to write and I think that it has to fall in, you know, that's such an ugly way to put these things when you're talking about access, frankly, but at the same time we are businesses. And there are some people that are always going to take that line. And I think the best thing. I think getting people on board to be honest making accessible books going forward should be a priority and helping publishers triage the books in their backlist that that would benefit most from remediation if there was some way to do that. And to really take sort of a pronged approach would be in my mind the ideal way to come at it that's sort of how we've been working our way through our backlist to, but it'll be tricky for publishers with lots of titles, no matter how you slice or dice it. God, I feel like I'm all bad news. I feel positive about this. And it's quiet right now because the honest answer is like there isn't really a great approach. Like it's just, it's going to be hard if you have a lot of files in your backlist and like that came from a mixed number of sources like maybe you even have like frame maker files or like something, it's just going to be hard and it's going to take money and time. And which is why I keep harping again on like it's never too late to start having like a cleaner more streamlined workflow like what Lee was saying where she has this like templated EPUB now, where she can just use that for every new title, and it completely cuts down on her production costs and also kind of paves the way for her to be able to go back and add accessibility features in sort of a mass like Broadway, either through scripting or some other faster way to add it that's not going to take all that time and money. Yeah, even find and replace is great for quick, quick updates. But it's not. One other thing, it actually, it occurs to me that maybe getting to that point where from a publisher's perspective where you can actually then hand the file over to somebody who does need to take it further like, there are steps we can be taking as publishers to even make our books, even moderately more accessible. But image descriptions are a huge one they don't need to be like I was actually shocked that we were told our image descriptions were good because I thought they were terrible. But it turns out that, you know, I guess that's the bar, which is also terrible. But they're not good, but I think even just getting basic image descriptions into your ebooks like pick something and do it. You know, rather than waiting until it's the perfect perfect way to get it done. Yeah, maybe two tongue and cheek Lee but the fact that you had them was probably that was like, oh, it's not good. Yeah. I'm all about baby steps, you can at least take baby steps. Yeah, great advice. And it sounds like when it comes to like remediating, especially like backless or when you have a lot of titles or like what was said before like really complicated academic titles that are going to take a lot of time money and, and it's a very specialized skill that sometimes is the best we can do. And then hopefully build on in the future. When would be, when would it be necessary to remediate all the time. Yeah, that's a great question I mean it's definitely something that's come up with us, because we help a variety of different publishers we have just sort of like standard like trade novel publishers and then we have educational publishers on the other side, on the other side. I think for educational publishing always is probably the answer like, it's so crucial to give every student access to all of the information that they need for trade publishing. Ideally always for sure but I think like, there are, there's sort of like a bare minimum of accessibility features that you can have in a novel that you can get away with. I feel terrible saying this and like again it all comes back to the business case. You know as long as someone can read the book comfortably through whatever means they're, they're interacting with that text. I think that's good so it's sort of, it comes down to what you're publishing and where you're trying to send it. I'll give you the policy language around this exit this question essentially. Well, when, when, when there when a mismatch continues to exist between the book and it's the work and its current format and the access requirements or profile of the user that and as long as that mismatch continues to exist. There's a role for file there's a place for file remediation. And Bob, would you agree with that. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, so we, and this and again I'm Nellie if if you're a broken record I am a shattered box of records somewhere in someone's basement right now because I'm going to go back to something I said before where it, the, the, the really precise work that we do in the alt format sector. It's like depending on the needs of the learner and the complexity of the material I mean that can be a really precise process I mean I just give you an example. In BC, we just produced a grade 11 math textbook that was that was in accessible PDF and had a corresponding tactile supplement. But you see that that was for a specific user with a very unique profile. And so I think that there's, I think that there's, there's, there's always likely going to be a need for some remediation again depending on the learner and the, and the, and their, their access requirements, but then to also to also say that, you know that work. I think it's important to make sure that we that we as a community have that capacity at some level. Yeah, totally. So we have three minutes left. And then our, our last all three minutes. This has been a really great discussion. Is there anyone have any closing thoughts about remediation and what we've been discussing. We'd like to add. I'd like to point out that since the symposium began. And this is the third year. We seem to be riding a wave rather than pushing a rock up a hill. You know, we know, we know we've gone from slogging to surfing. Right. I'm trying to find a metaphor that sounds fun like the momentum, the momentum's on our side, recognizing that we hardly we hardly made inroads enough, but we know that we, this is the way we need to go, and that's not even up to that's not even a question anymore. And I applaud the publishers that are at the front of this that and that are making all the mistakes so that other publishers won't have to pay for those mistakes. That's not a small thing. I would further that Bob and say that we've come, we as a community have come a long way in terms of publishers understanding and appreciating the need for their materials to be to be produced excessively, but not only that to really embrace the the idea of inclusive and that you know that that it's not just a matter of, of asking, asking users what they need, and then going off and working on it somewhere in the background and then bringing it back to them and say, Oh, hey, is this kind of what you need. Oh, no, okay, I'm then taking it back here that there's been much more of kind of a co design, you know, approach where where publishers have been interested and engaged in centering the perspectives of users of print of readers with with print disabilities. And so someone working in the alt format sector, who is connecting with publishers and hearing more of, like, and hearing publishers speak the language of accessibility more fluidly and more frequently. That's been really encouraging. That's awesome. And now I do have any closing thoughts. I guess my main closing thought is just saying the same thing I've been saying, invest in a good structured format for your profiles. It's never too late to invest in that. I'll turn to you a year from now if you start today, you'll be so thankful that you did it. So don't like even if you have a huge backlist of course that's still a problem that you need to tackle but you'll save yourself so many more file remediation issues, if you start today. And we do you have anything quick to say before we open it up to the working session. Book should be available to everybody, the business case for books is that we want to sell more of them. Yay. Thank you panelists. This has been a really excellent discussion. So I am just going to stop my recording.