 Good morning everyone. Look at you up for that first session. You've had your first cup of coffee. Thank you for joining us. My name is Laura Wood and I'm gonna kick off our presentation before I do a couple of words. They are recording this session. The Q&A however will not be recorded. It's just the audio of the first part of the presentation that they're trying to capture and the slides. To my left, your right, Jody Combs. He's from the University of Vanderbilt and also working with ARL more intensively these days. And our invisible co-presenter Beth Namachovaya from the University of Illinois unfortunately had to send her regrets. She is ill and was not cleared for travel and we are quite grateful that she is not sharing with us at this time although we wish she were here for her presentation. We do have notes from her and so we'll try our best to represent the content and the update on her project. So jumping in, the issue of accessibility is not a new one at all. Most of us are familiar with the Americans with Disabilities Act, ADA from 1990. People, I find that people may be less aware of the Rehabilitation Act that President Nixon signed into law and in Section 504 of that extended civil rights to people with disabilities and provided a lot of opportunities in education and anywhere federal funds are involved. Section 508 required that electronic and information technology developed by the federal government be accessible to people with disabilities in 1973. So they were fairly prescient and we're still trying to figure out how to do that. As scholarly content made its way into digital devices, electronic versions and online, colleges and universities have been adopting these and finding that accessibility issues are a major stumbling block leading to lawsuits and typically settlement agreements. These agreements are a trove of information and have served as a startling kick in the pants for some institutions. About two weeks ago, many of you have already seen the 2017 NMC Horizon Report on Libraries was released. It helpfully identifies trends for the industry as well as challenges. Accessibility of library resources and services is called out this year as one of those challenges. The good news is that NMC has labeled this challenge as solvable. It's a challenge we understand and know how to solve and that's I think where we come in today. There are many projects these will be just three that are trying to work on how we do that solving, how we chip away at that challenge. I will discuss accessible instructional materials or AIM. Jody will talk about video captioning and I'll share a few words on behalf of Beth regarding daisy files and the Hottie Trust digital library. I do want to spend a few minutes in the beginning talking about the scope and nature of this issue just in case some of you are also looking for some entry into the issues of accessibility. So I hope you can read this in the back. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, 10.8% of students enrolled in post-secondary institutions in 2008 had a disability. While dated, these seem to be holding and are the best comprehensive statistics I could find that array this way. This represents more than 2 million students in post-secondary institutions across the United States. Students with disabilities share demographic distribution with the general population of post-secondary students in terms of race, age and schools attended. So this table shows you the categories of disabilities that have been tracked and how that 10.8% population is distributed across those categories. It's important to note here that learning disabilities is by far the largest population group and that's where most of the growth has come from. Statistics on disabilities in higher education are also based on self-identification by students and so are widely believed to be underestimates which is only logical. We just don't know how dramatically they're underestimated. 88% of institutions report enrolled students with disabilities and 99% of public institutions and 100% of medium and large institutions report students enrolled. So accessibility is an extensive and relatively urgent issue in higher education. It also helps to talk about what do we mean when we say accessible. The federal government has used this language in many of the settlement agreements. The repetition of this over and over again serves as a signal that this is not an evolving concept but a clear expectation of compliance. Accessible means a person with a disability is afforded the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions and enjoy the same services as a person without a disability in an equally effective and equally integrated manner with substantially equivalent ease of use. The person with a disability must be able to obtain the information as fully, equally and independently as a person without a disability. Although this might not result in identical ease of use compared to that of persons without disabilities, it still must ensure equal opportunity to the educational benefits and opportunities afforded by the technology and equal treatment in the use of such technology. Now a basic element of trying to meet accessibility is the availability of required readings for a class. So I'm going to start to talk about my project update which deals with that material. We've been working on an INLS planning grant which was titled Repository Services for Accessible Course Content. The core members of my steering committee on this project were Jamie Axelrod, Stephen Downey, Mike Furlow and John Unsworth. Major help came from David Wiedemann who's also a co-author on the White Paper and from Katrina Femlin who really did Yeoman's work on the research we did, the focus groups we conducted and then the data analysis and she is the first author on the paper that was published. So what is accessible instruction materials? In order to provide accessible learning materials, institutions navigate a variety of sources to see if digital formats already exist. They also request electronic copies directly from publishers or through a mediated service. Some publishers are relatively responsive to requests but others aren't. Response rates range from one day to two weeks or more and there is no obligation for publishers to be timely with responses. As a last resort of school may scan works from print, some of them do that a lot because they don't want to wait. Regardless of the original source, a digital file will then need to go undergo significant reformatting before delivery to the student. Numerous institutions may be seeking the same text at any given time but they have no mechanism for sharing. Here you might think about best selling text books and how often they would be used across the country and if one of those is made accessible where it might also be needed in an accessible format. The work that goes into a single file may represent many hours of labor and quality of the results vary depending on the school's resources. As those electronic files are created and provided to students, the disability resources and services department must wrestle with a significant file management problem. The files need to be secured for the sake of copyrights but most courses are taught multiple times with some reuse of common texts. The ability to securely store, describe and reuse these reformatted materials is necessary on every college campus. In our planning project, a major component was sitting down with disability services staff to better understand how they create and manage accessible course content. We held focus groups at the AHEAD conference in 2015. AHEAD is the Association of Higher Education and Disabilities. Excuse me. The paper that was published through the proceedings of the ASIS annual conference and the white paper we very recently released both detail more of the findings from that research. It is not the number of students or the volume of requests as much as the nature of the request that determines the amount of effort and funding required to make materials accessible. Focus group participants were very clear that there were certain disciplines and content types that are exceedingly difficult and resource intensive. STEM disciplines are by far most difficult and highest in demand. The common use of equations, images, charts and graphs make accessibility requests very challenging. Images need text descriptions far beyond an image caption that might be already provided. Charts and graphs may need to be depicted tactily for some students. Staff may need to solicit help from the teaching faculty or graduate assistants to create those descriptions and interpretations of the material for the student. The second most often mentioned area of difficulty was foreign language materials, especially when involving additional alphabets. Furthermore, images, tables, multimedia may need special attention for conversion and adaptation. Music, theology and professional school disciplines also present extra challenges. Non-text formats are resource intensive such as video and audio. Focus group participants conveyed the need for flexibility and creativity in order to provide disability accommodations and they are a very flexible and very creative bunch. Our white paper describes in some detail additional factors such as the existing landscape of resources and the behavior and practices of publishers. And frankly, I decided that at this hour of the day, it's too depressing to start that way. But they are important factors and I hope you will peruse the white paper for more information and it's available through the links on the project briefing page for this presentation. Overall, it's very hard to quantify the cost associated with current ways schools create and distribute accessible instructional materials. But I would like to offer an example for context. One state institution that we know of, it has a population of roughly 28,000 students. The institution uses a mixture of full time staff, student workers and third party vendors. They remediate on average 1200 print items and caption 1500 multimedia items every year. In total, the annual budget for those processes is around $100,000. I believe that doesn't include some of the staffing costs for that single university for that single year. And that excludes any Braille production, which varies significantly from year to year. And when those Braille costs come in, those can have real spikes in terms of costs for people. For a single student requesting an accessible version of an assigned text for class accessibility typically refers to a version of the text that can be or has been manipulated to meet the student's need. Whether a student will use the copy electronically, such as with screen reader software or other assistive technologies, or needs to fixed version like large text or Braille, an accessible file will be a digital copy of a text with markup of headers and other formatting features, alternative text to describe images and graphs, notifications of page breaks and marginalia and so on. In short, the accessible file replicates the structure of the document in addition to the content of the text. I can't help but talk a little bit about the legal landscape here. Our schools are prudent in attempts to mitigate and reduce risk. There are two fundamental legal areas that drive college and university behavior with accessible course content, copyright infringement on the one hand and civil rights violations on the other. Many schools remain concerned that the act of simply creating an accessible version of course materials is a violation of copyright and illegal liability. The legal basis for providing reformatted and accessible course content services in libraries and universities was recently strongly affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals Second Circuit, which ruled in authors Guild V. Hathi Trust that the doctrine of fair use allows the libraries to provide full digital access to copyrighted works to their print disabled patrons. Through this ruling, the court removed considerable ambiguity regarding the rights of schools and for the first time made clear that authorized entities can make copies for print disabled users. It is important to note, however, that the court was specifically addressing the provision of works digitized en masse from library collections, not newly produced textbooks. Further, although the logic of the ruling could be extended to other formats such as audio and video materials, the ruling doesn't specifically address their reproduction. Nevertheless, the Second Circuit ruling should reassure libraries and educational institutions that they can lawfully make and provide specialized copies of educational materials for their eligible students. And it has encouraged many to expand their services, which is a good thing. Libraries and their parent institutions must be attentive to numerous elements of potential violation of copyrighted status with printed published scholarly works and media, but in the context of accessible course materials, protection of copyright owners might take a backseat to a greater area of legal risk, the potential of a lawsuit or investigation for failure to provide adequate accommodations for students with disabilities by the Office of Civil Rights, by the Department of Justice, or by individuals and advocacy agencies. The Office of Civil Rights is focused on the availability of alternate formats of materials or other accommodations to provide access when a student need arises. And they have stipulated that the timeliness and ease of use of those materials is a critical factor in ensuring equity. Most importantly, institutions should be considering accessibility even before an individual need may arise. This includes the holdings of the institution's library and all of the services it offers. Libraries need to be able to provide equal access to the educational opportunities and benefits of the library, all the collections and all the services. Despite government expectations, there's little evidence of widespread proactive efforts by our schools to ensure readiness for requests. While there's increased attention in the literature of libraries around web accessibility, relatively little is found around course materials or general collections or other kinds of services. And through the combined pressures of liability to demonstrate ADA compliance and reassurances of safe harbor through the Doctrine of Fair Use really makes this an excellent time for further action to address this growing need. Like it or not, there's at least one digital library on your campus that could use some help. Disability resources and services staff need help with storage, metadata, multiple formats and discovery. Armed with the research of our project, we have a really fairly clear understanding of the needs of the community. So we're trying to move ahead with a project to create repository services. This will be a specification driven process. We're now evaluating platform technology options in light of the awareness of needs to see what is our best option going forward. These are some of the these are the current collaborators for the next part of this project as we seek our next round of support. Each one of these schools has identified participants from both the Disability Resource Services area and the library. So the project intends to build collaboration within institutions while it also builds collaboration across institutions. We're hardly the first to propose file sharing. Various groups and organizations have attempt attempted this approach previously in areas around accessibility. However, we're finding that as the population grows, the technology is improving and the legal environment shifts. It now is a better time and a good time for us to focus on sharing. This is my favorite quote from our focus groups. And it gives me motivation when I feel like this is an impossible task to keep it going. Before I turn it over to Jody, one more point. There's much more work to do. The Horizon report says it very well. Libraries can pave the way for their campuses by working with other institutional stakeholders to implement policies that ensure a quality of opportunity for disabled students, faculty and scholars. In addition to our analysis of the environment, our white paper includes a set of recommendations directed towards libraries, one directed towards university and college administration and one directed towards publishers, we can always hope. Any development of repository services is simply one tool in a very complex environment. So we're calling on libraries to take seriously the information needs of students with disabilities. For those willing to connect with their disability services staff, we provide an appendix with suggested topics for discussion and questions for working together to develop new service workflows. And for libraries interested in a more internal review of how the library handles accessibility, there's an appendix of reflection questions and topics and resources to support making improvements in your own environment. By analyzing the local environment at a single institution, the library can create a set of priorities for action, which will best assist their community and enable librarians to be a bigger part and a better, stronger part of the community puzzle. Our work has to be proactive, it has to be collaborative and we really need to be persistent. So with that, Jody's turn. Waypoints for roadmap. Okay, so I've been working with with the accessibility side of things for ARL on the captioning project, starting in January and came into this conversation almost immediately as a pre-proposal was being developed for a larger grant. And as part of that conversation, along with a lot of conversations with many of you, I think I probably talk into it and talk to probably half of you on the phone at some point or another, or in a conference call. Been trying to put together, you know, pieces and parts of a puzzle that might lead to a roadmap for a project plan. Also trying to spin up as fast as possible in terms of where the state of the art is for captioning as it sits in this larger context of accessible materials. So I've started categorizing certain aspects of the conversations that I've had with you to and put them together into the next slide, which is sort of waypoints for the roadmap. It's not quite a roadmap. I'm sorry, it's so text dense, but I didn't want to go to multiple, multiple slides. These are areas where we've had some really fruitful, I think, conversations that have helped me understand what might work, what's feasible and what's not. The first part had to do with the discoverability issue. One of the things that I think frustrates all of us is building a tool or a service that nobody uses because they can't find it. And that led me to questions around Lars project about what kind of metadata standards are exist for accessibility. There have in fact been a fair number of projects aimed at this, starting in around 2011, really taking traction around 2013. There is a W3C standard that includes accessibility tagging. And and there's going to be slides here with links to this material. I didn't want to waste our waste our time together today, going over each each piece in part. We can do that in the Q&A if you'd like. But zeroing in on captioning version one of that standard, which was developed by Schema.org and then adopted has one tag for captioning and it is captioned. That's it. Not, you know, quality of the captioning, not how the caption was generated, not whether it has error correction or anything like that done to it. So one could hope for more articulate metadata, but it's a start. And that means we wouldn't have to start from zero. There's a much more tagging associated with other types of accessible formats that I think merit some revisiting. A lot of this work came out of funding by the Gates Foundation through I don't know how to pronounce this, but it's a 11 Y metadata, which was a work group that's that you'll have a link to. So the discoverability issue I think is one that is feasible, fungible, manageable, if a little needing a little additional work. The next thing that I wanted to look at were the tools and technologies for captioning. And so have spent a fair amount of time asking and begging people to test things for me or or inform me about what they're currently using, what's working, what's really clunky and what doesn't work and what gaps are there where we could maybe ask for better tools. And I have played a little bit, talked with YouTube about their automated captioning process, which by the way, has gotten better, which is not to say that the bar was pretty low to begin with. So it's a comparative thing, but I would encourage you if you're interested to have a look again. I've had some of our folks tested out on short videos and the accuracy rate seems to be around 90, 95%, which is pretty good. And you can go back and do error correction or enhancement challenge for automated captioning, of course, has to do with descriptions of sound that are not words. So if there's an explosion in the background, someone's got to type in and machines aren't terribly good at figuring that out yet, though maybe eventually they will be the desktop availability of desktop software has has also increased as has commercial providers of providing caption that many of you use. I've played around myself with a couple of desktop things. And I'm one impressed by how friendly they generally are, but to how labor intensive process it is. This is something that cries out for crowd sourcing, I think. I think there are folks that would spend a couple hours on a weekend doing error correction if the tools are available for it. The intellectual property considerations around video, I have some familiarity with having an association with the Vanderbilt Television News Archive and lots of very friendly conversations with legal counsel for national network news organizations. Every time they get a new Vice President, I usually get a call to say, what are you doing with our stuff? And how how dare you? And oh, there is actually a section of the copyright law that allows us to do this. So dealing with the intellectual property issues, I think, is is a dicey thing, particularly if we, as we first imagined, would be storing video with embedded captioning in it. But in conversations since I've come on board, we've thought about not storing video with embedded captioning, but just in the captioned files in multiple formats. Players, video players, including web based HTML5 players are able to merge the captioned file with the video at the point that it's being streamed. And this would do two things for us, we think one, reduce the the liability issue. Obviously, I don't think we would be storing captioned files that were already on sale by a publisher somewhere. And two would greatly limit the storage problem that video tends to present. Caption files are small text files. Storing them would be a trivial matter. Working with partners for Lawrence Project might be a way to deal with the issue of storage and making them discoverable and marking them up and that sort of thing. So the intellectual property considerations, I think, are we think are also something that we can work with. Interesting side here when I talked with YouTube about, I mean, clearly, they have this problem, right? They've developed a service called caption, no, sorry, content ID, where if I upload your video and you discover it, you can claim it as yours. And effectively, any ad revenue that's generated by that item goes to you, not to me. In other words, I'm I'm doing free labor for you if you're a publisher, for example. And I'm not sure that it wouldn't be a bad idea to tell publishers if you haven't, if you don't have a captioned version of this, we're going to place it up into a shared repository. Let's have a conversation about whether we just give it to you, or somehow or another work out in arrangement that that you benefit. And therefore, it's not a question of liability, but a question of a business arrangement. I know that's unheard of, but you know, give it a try. I've also spent a fair amount of time looking at at the landscape of commercial providers. As I say, I've talked with YouTube. Many of you use the replay media, I'm sure, if you have this service on your campus. They're fairly economical ways to have captions generated if you want to. At least one university has a site license site wide subscription to deal with this issue of accommodation with three play so that effectively it's on demand may not be the fastest way, the most prompt way to get things to to students, but at least is there. And no, it is not cheap. So this might be something that many of us going together might might be able to look at. Lots of you are interested, obviously, or you wouldn't be here, but there's a very large list and growing list of of universities that are interested in in dealing with this. Partly, I think, because of of compliance issues, but also partly because it's the right thing to do. And many times, these issues are being dealt with this as compliance. Problems, but they're also part and parcel of the diversity and inclusion movements that are sweeping our campuses. This is a diverse. It's a diversity question. This is a group of people with a different perspective that bring different abilities and different parts of the Congress views on the conversation to the table and as institutions of higher education, that is, after all, part of our mission, maybe a central part. I have looked at architectural considerations and talked with many of you about whether a centralized repository is really the preferred route, Al-Ahati, or one of the others, or whether we would want to have a linked set of repositories, possibly piggy backing on the institutional repository infrastructure. I don't think there's any clear direction on that other than the answer seems to be both. It would be good to have a centralized, easily findable repository, but the ability to link out to repositories around the country. Types of materials of interest. There's also another question. How am I doing on time? Okay. As we think through the issues of what kinds of things go into a repository, at least initially, some kind of prioritization might be in order. Whether those are items that, for example, are part of our collections that need to be captioned, or there are instructional videos that are of general interest to many of us, or there are associational webinars. One of the things I asked about the PowerPoint today was, will it be captioned? And the answer is, yes, it will be captioned. So, you know, those kind of things that are widespread in general interest, I think, are natural targets for this kind of activity. The business model and sustainability question, I really haven't made a lot of progress on, but it'll have to be asked and answered at some point. Grant funding will go some way, and I think this is an eminently fundable area. In the long run, we'd have to think through the issues of how do you keep it going into the future. And the same, I haven't made a lot of progress on identifying possible funding for pilot projects. I will, though, say that there are a number of foundations that have expressed interest in the past in this kind of work. Gates Foundation is one that did the metadata schema.org thing. And so I'm kind of confident that those things can be turned up. And I think I'll stop there and we'll wait. I hope we'll have some good questions and we can have a conversation. The next two slides, or maybe there are more, are items that will be part of this deck that you'll have access to. And then these are just things that I've researched that you might want to visit if you haven't already. Is there one more? Yeah, here's the standards. That's at A11Y metadata. I was very pleased to find this. I mean, this is a route by which tagged material makes its way into the large search engines. Jodi and I flipped a coin and decided that I do a better best imitation. So we'll do it my best shot. So the University of Illinois has been working with Hottie Trust Digital Library and their ultimate goal is to develop a scalable approach to scanning, generating metadata and daisy files and making digital accessible text available to print disabled readers through the Hottie Trust Digital Library. The pilot partners are the library and the digital resources and educational services. They refer to them as DRES unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Hottie Trust Digital Library. The initial goal is to develop and test and evaluate a workflow and access method for the University of Illinois to produce digitized texts, metadata and accessible digital texts, daisy files, ingest them into the Hottie Trust Digital Library and to have them accessible to proxies for download on behalf of print disabled users. Our initial goal was to have a pilot workflow outlined by December 1st, 2016, so that we can put a test volume through the steps. This would be utilized to have a more significant pilot of about 50 volumes ready to launch in 2017. The pilot would be used to refine the service, develop a more accurate cost model and launch a full program for late 2017, early 2018. With responsibilities, the University of Illinois Library agreed to fund the acquisitions needed, the associated internet archive scanning and the staff resources to work on the Hottie Trust ingest process. DRES has assumed responsibility for generating the daisy files, working with the JPEG 2000 images and OCR generated from the internet archive scans. So, to date, with scanning an OCR production using internet archive, to date the library chose to scan the content so it would mesh well with the internet archive's existing operations and invoicing procedure. In order to do so, the content had to be placed online. If we want the images to be cropped and OCR processed, which we do, they need to be uploaded and derived. After discussing with staff from internet archive, the end recommendation was to load this content into internet archive's print disabled collection, which is not findable as it consists of in copyright content. This interferes with Illinois' internet archive workflow the least and subsequently would allow the internet archive to host and share the JPEG 2000 files for those items so that with the login, Dres can go in and download the JPEG 2 files and manipulate them as needed to create the proper OCR Daisy content. This removes the added need for setting up shared server workspace and keeping it updated. For availability in restricted internet archive collections, from there, internet archive and I, Beth, decided that designating this content in the future as Dres would entail the scanners uploading it to an access restricted collection, which content appears only to users who have the URL and proper permissions through an internet archive login, which they've made for preservation services to be shared with the cataloging and metadata unit and eventually with Dres. Following this, conversations with Haughty about how Haughty could ingest this content resulted in the solution of having internet archive link the UIUC and Haughty Trust accounts and grant Haughty's internet archive login with equal permissions to access and manipulate the disability resources educational services collection. The Haughty Trust metadata access, Haughty was subsequently able to get this working on their end and found that they were able to get content working with their ingest tools in their development environment, which means that once there's metadata for it, the Haughty Trust's effort metadata system, once there's metadata for it in the Haughty Trust's effort metadata system, it can then be fully ingested. On Illinois part, we have been able to download and modify the metadata for a test item. In theory, we are on the cusp of being able to fully ingest the content. The final step for the pilot is to ensure that this content is fully accessible to a proxy user. For the future, the Haughty Trust intends to start developing a workflow for ingesting the metadata and making the daisy files accessible to proxy users sometime in 2017. From the usability end, our applied health sciences librarian is to focus on how these items are used from a patron perspective. The Haughty proxy system, in essence, allows her as a proxy for the print disabled patron to download the full text PDF from Haughty. In future development, Haughty may also place a daisy download under it, similar to what Internet Archive offers. Their daisy files are automatically generated but feature unacceptable OCR quality for the Illinois Dres level needs. Where to store daisy files and how to make them available to proxies who need to download them for print disabled users is on the agenda for Haughty Trust to consider in the future. There is strong interest among the Big Ten Academic Alliance in seeing Haughty develop the capability to ingest daisy files, OCR, and metadata associated with the accessible text and to make this information available within the Haughty Trust proxy service. Haughty Trust is clearly interested in working toward this resources permitting. Access to this content has the potential to be one of several federated components that support more streamlined access to text and media for users with disability. And she lists here members of the project team with some of their contact information. And you can see, as she has mentioned, that this is bringing people in from across the university to work together. So now we have time for questions.