 Okay, that actually seemed to work now. So I just had to tell it to happen two times. I'm very glad. What a relief. Okay, well let's get this video going and then we'll meet back after and do some Q&A. Sorry for the delay. I was much better at this yesterday. I don't know what's going to happen. Okay. So hello everyone and a very warm welcome to this, the International Perspectives panel discussion. My name is Sarah Hilderly and I work for the Daisy Consortium where I manage inclusive publishing, an international news and information hub on all things accessibility. So I'm really delighted to be moderating this panel today and my thanks to the NELS team for bringing together such an excellent group of international speakers from whom we can learn so much. So we're going to have about a 40 to 45 minute discussion here centered on accessible books and publishing in these various different markets and we'll follow that with a 10 to 15 minute question and answer session. But before I begin, I'd like to ask our panelists to introduce themselves. For those of you watching, you can find full bios on the accessible publishing website but for now, Christina, perhaps you'd like to get us started with a quick introduction. Thank you very much. I'm Christina Mussinelli. I'm the Secretary-General of the Lia Foundation. I work in accessibility since a long time now and I'm also involved in the standard organization like W3C and Daisy and all the other organizations involved in accessibility. Thank you, Christina. That was perfect. Agatha, over to you. Thank you. My name is Sagata Merva Montoya and I'm a lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. Before that, I was publishing manager at Sydney University Press where, among other things, I led the implementation of accessible publishing practices and I've been involved in various accessibility initiatives in Australia, the Australia Inclusive Publishing Initiative since 2018, the Accessibility Initiative Working Party of the Institute of Professional Editors since 2020 and, more recently, the Round Table on Information Access for People with Printed Disabilities. I'm currently working on a couple of research projects on accessibility implementation and I'm delighted to be here. Thank you. That's great, Agatha. Thank you. Issa, your turn. Hello. I'm Issa Dada Cal. I'm from Brazil and I work at Buquire, Brazil. I'm a data analysis manager and I actually got in touch with accessibility when I went to the Techfarer event in Canada and then I started a project at Buquire to encourage our publishers in Brazil to make accessible e-books from the beginning, not only by demand, which was the case before. Thank you. Finally, let's hear from Stacey. Thank you. My name is Stacey Scott and I have recently been made accessibility manager at Taylor and Francis Publishing. Before that, I was the service lead for RNIB Bookshare here in the UK. I worked in education in international development for several years with site savers working in a number of fantastic countries and it's a pleasure to be here at the panel today. I also am the chair of the Accessibility Action Group for the Publishers Association, again here in the UK. That's wonderful. Thank you, everyone. What an amazing group you are. So let's dive in with a question for all of you. I'd like to ask each of you to help us gain some insight into your particular markets and I wonder if you could each provide us with a brief overview of how your government is or perhaps isn't encouraging accessible publishing and if your government isn't engaged in this area, how is the private sector working towards accessible publishing? So I'm going to go to Agata first for an overview of the landscape in Australia. Thank you, Sarah. So following the ratification of Marrakesh Treaty in 2016, the Australian government introduced legislative changes to our copyright law. In the amendment introduced in 2017, the previous provision has been replaced with two new exceptions. The first is a third dealing exception for persons with a disability and anyone assisting them. And the second is an exception for organisations assisting persons with a disability. Now accessibility is at the core of the government's digital transformation strategy, which aims to deliver world-leading digital services for the benefit of all Australians. Now to add the strategy, the Australian government style manual contains an extensive section on how to write accessible inclusive content. And the digital service standard, a set of best practice principles for designing and delivering government services, aims to ensure that these services are accessible inclusive of all users. Now in 2016, the government released new procurement rules, which require public libraries and educational institutions to procure access to products and services, which of course include digital books and content to meet accessibility requirements. These have been refreshed and updated in 2020. However, the implementation in practice has been somewhat lagging. That said, these rules are more likely affecting the school educational market first. So our government is very supportive in terms of legislation and across digital accessibility in terms of government operations, but has not provided any funding to develop the publishing industry capability in this area. So the work on improving access to books to date has been driven by the disability sector and the publishing industry. Now the key organization in the disability sector is the round table on information access for people with print disabilities, with membership across Australia and New Zealand, which includes organizations like Vision Australia or NexSense, but also the Australian Publishers Association and some publishers. The round table produces guidelines and hosts an annual conference and workshops. Now in 2016, representatives of the publishing industry, libraries, disability organizations, the government and accessible format producers met for the first time as part of the Marcus Treaty Forum to identify the challenges and ways to improve the industry capability. A year later, this forum was renamed the Australian Inclusive Publishing Initiative, also known as the AP. The AP released two guides in 2019, one on copyrights and one on inclusive publishing and has been supporting collaboration, research and lobbying for funding without much luck so far, but we'll get to that. The members of the AP have been meeting annually until the start of the COVID pandemic and while we haven't met since 2020, work on increasing accessibility awareness and industry capability continues in the background with the support of the Australian Publishers Association. And another key industry organization is the Institute of Professional Editors, which in 2020 formed a working party to research and create guidelines and training on editorial practices that address the needs of readers with a print disability. And apart from working on the guidelines, the members of the group contributed to revising the national editing standards to increase discussion of accessibility among the editing professionals. So that's the landscape in Australia. Thanks, Sarah. Thank you, Agata. It's lots going on. If I could turn to Issa now and ask her the same question about the publishing landscape in Brazil. Yes. So we are not doing as much as Australia is doing, but we had in 2015 a new law which we call the Brazilian Law of Inclusion, where it says that people with disabilities, they must have the same access and the same opportunities as everyone else. And these effects publishing, of course, because publishers are now obliged to provide books, accessible books. However, it doesn't say when you have to provide this book, if you have to provide it in a digital format. It's not very detailed. And from then, it's been six, seven years since the law was released. Sorry that I'm forgetting words in English. But nothing much has changed. The government has this portal for accessible books where if you have a disability, you can just register and then you can demand a book there. You're going to buy the book, but you're going to have to do it through this portal. And not all the publishers are available there. So I don't see it as very accessible, as I believe that accessibility should be. You know, if I buy a book at Amazon or Kobo, everyone else should be able to do the same at the same time. They should not have to wait for the book to be made. But there is this portal and it works and publishers have, they have to provide the book within 60 days. And this is what we have so far. But then the pandemic came and the government realized that for schools, they would also have to provide digital books that were accessible. Before that, the National Reading Program did not have digital books as an option only for people with disabilities and not for all cases. And now they see it as mandatory. So all the books they should be provided from the beginning in print and also in digital accessible formats. So this is what the government's doing so far. For Brazil, it's a lot, I would say, but there is still a long way to go. And the private sector, it's not doing much sadly. But we at Bookwire, we work with publishers, so we don't make accessible books, but we have been trying to encourage publishers to make the books accessible from the beginning. They should not wait for a demand. So make your book accessible as you make it from the release date. Because then it will be also available in an accessible format for the government if they're going to buy books for you. And for the private sector, if they're going to buy books for you. So this is where we at. Great. Thank you very much, Stacey, over to you for the UK perspective. Thank you, Sarah. And it was really interesting hearing about Australia and Brazil. And I guess from my thinking, the UK is probably somewhere in the middle. So I've certainly traveled, as I mentioned before, I've traveled a lot for looking at education in different countries. And I've certainly seen far less provision than we get here in the United Kingdom. And I think it's important to mention that. But I would also say that we don't actually get a lot here in the UK either. So we have our copyright 2014 legislation, very similar to Brazil, where anyone with a print disability has the legal right to have books in the methods that they require them in. But there is no government department that you can go to to make that happen. And so they're very, very hands off, I'd say, the government in terms of inclusive publishing and making things accessible. So they provide grants and funding to schools and colleges. And we have the disabled students allowance. So students are very much reliant on either scanning themselves and making the book accessible themselves or working with librarians or qualified teachers of the visually impaired and many others to your teaching staff, support staff, to make sure that they get the content that they need in the way that they need it. The problem with this as well, though, is it can be a bit of a postcode lottery. And we've heard about this a lot, particularly over the pandemic. So some schools had a lot of support and had the money they needed, had the staff that they needed. And then we had that a lot of other schools, depending on where they were, so more deprived areas, they didn't receive all the support that they needed. And that a lot of children are falling behind, particularly those that need support with their reading needs. So I would say that we mostly rely on charities, hugely rely on charities and the public sector and the private sector to get us the content that we need. So, for example, RNIB Bookshare and Talking Books, so that they have, I think, just over three quarters of a million books when I left a couple of months ago. But that was all done through a collaboration effort between charity and publisher. So publishers provided that content to RNIB and RNIB tried to make it as accessible as it possibly could. And in terms of other private sectors, I mean, of course, it is predominantly reliant on publishers, which I think have been really particularly good in the UK, certainly through Bookshare. So if we didn't have a copy, we would contact that publisher and ask for that copy and we could make it into a variety of different accessible formats for that student. So I think publishers have certainly had a massive part to play. And then just looking at the publisher's association and the accessibility action group, everyone coming together there to try and get some movement and some stuff happening. There's a lot of effort there. But I think the biggest effort that needs to come is from the government. And I still think the government needs to recognise how big a problem that this can be, how difficult it could be. And actually, they need to start funding people with print disabilities as much as they fund everybody else. Thank you, Stacey. That's really interesting. Christina, we're going to come to you next for an insight into the Italian landscape, please. Thank you very much. First, I would explain a little bit more about the foundation because it's a kind of strange organisation because it has been started as a project funded by the Ministry of Culture in Italy and it has been managed by the Italian Publishers Association. And we work very, very closely since the beginning with the Italian Blind Union. Then after the project closed, we founded the foundation and the foundation now has as a member the Italian Blind Union, the Italian Publishers Association, the Italian Dyslexia Association, a specialist organisation that is an organisation working since many, many years in the production of digital braille and a larger textbook for students who are blind and visually impaired. And we also have many publishers. And the main goal of the foundation we started in 2011 was to create a catalogue of born accessible publication that should be sold in the mainstream distribution channel because our goal was not only to produce accessible book, but was to provide the accessible book in the same environment that is available for everybody because we believe that the person should buy a book as any other reader without any lagging of time and without any specific request. Now we have a catalogue of 28,000 eBooks in the Italian market that are already accessible. And we work with the publisher and we certify also the accessibility of the file and we produce the metadata so the end user can understand which are the features of the file. So it's a full ecosystem that we want to achieve in an accessible way. The other important element, we start with the fiction book, but now we are also working with educational publisher and academic and professional publisher. And we are working with them not only on the file, but also on the platform and on the website because this is another important part. And the last but not least, not in Italy, but in Europe, I think it's important to know there is a new directive that is the European Accessibility Act that has been approved in 2019 and should be implemented in the national legislation of all European countries by 2022 and will enter in force by 2025. And one of the services that are included in the directive are eBooks and the digital publishing value chain. And this is really important because not only publishers in Europe, but every publisher we want to sell in Europe should comply with the accessibility requirement. We are now, as Leah Foundation, working very closely with the Federation of European Publishers, with the European Blind Union and European Disability Forum to monitor the implementation and to find a solution to make the implementation possible. Because it's, as you have already said, costly. There are a lot of investment and it's a completely shift and also the production process and the knowledge that the people should acquire, not only in the publishing industry, but let's say developer of application or a web developer should know what means to create an accessible website. And there is no large knowledge on that at European level. And I believe not only at European level. So what we are now trying to ask is to convince the Commission to fund and to put some money in a specific call in the European project focus on this topic, because we believe it's also research and development. It's not something that is already done. There are a lot of research also in technology and in process that should be done. And we believe this is very important and is not only a problem of the publisher, but should be something that it should be taking in consideration also at European Commission level. Thank you, Christina. So I'd like to move on to ask you all about the activities that you're currently involved in and what perhaps is your own organization doing to advance accessible publishing? Issa, perhaps we could start with you to tell us about the good work that Bookwire are currently engaged with. Sure. So like I said, after I visit Canada, when I went to tech forum, I realized that something had to be done regarding accessibility. It was a subject that the government had already post and or association of publishers and had already also taken into consideration. They had this portal for the accessible book. But I realized this was very important because I had this international exchange and I realized that accessibility is way more than just a file that works for a blind person that there is like text to speech, text to speech that works. And since we at Bookwire, we work with a lot of publishers in Brazil, I would say 60 to 70 percent of the market is for clients. We had this voice to talk to the publishers about this matter, even though we are an aggregator, we just deliver books to shops, let's say. But this was something that we could talk to them about it. They would listen because they rely on us when the subject's technology. And so I brought this subject to Bookwire and we started we started small. We started sending out newsletter and asking publishers what they were doing to make the books accessible. We realized that they were still using EPUB 2. They were not aware of EPUB 3 sometimes. There were, of course, some bigger publishers that were more they were more aware of the matter. But it was usually something that were not on the radar. And they just saw accessible books as something really difficult to make and expensive. And that's not that's not true. There are a lot of people in our market, even in Brazil that make accessible ebooks for a very reasonable price. They don't demand a lot of time. We were also starting with audiobooks. So that's what we did. We started talking about it. We started we started sending this letter and, you know, making the subject sort of happen. And then we we have a validator of EPUB files in our platform. And we used ACE by Daisy as like as a benchmark we we used. I think we use the code as an open code. I'm not sure about the details of the technology, but we included the validation in our validators. So now publishers are able to check if they their ebook is accessible. And if it's not, where is the where's the mistake? What is missing? You know, there is like a very detailed report. And this already made a lot of publishers open their eyes to the matter because they in order to deliver a book to any of the channels that we deliver to, they have to validate the ebook. And then you have something selling your ebooks not accessible. And this is what you should do to fix it. And a lot of publishers started to ask questions and they realized that it was not super expensive. It didn't demand a lot of time. There were people in Brazil that were doing it. It was not something so out of reach. So this was the first step. And we're still like taking baby steps. It's not as fast as I would like since this was, you know, 2019. But there is something else that we've been pushing that I think makes a lot of difference, which is making your book accessible in more places. And in the same places for everyone so accessible books should not be available on demand. They should be available at Amazon and Kobo and Google and Apple and Storytel, Script, whatever. They should be available for everyone in our business models. In libraries, we have a very different library market in Brazil from all the other countries, I assume. We don't have the same culture. But this is something that has been changing slowly, especially since the pandemic started. And the library business is growing. And we've been talking to publishers that you should also make your books available at libraries because we have blind people, people with disabilities. It's not only visual impairment, but there are other kinds of things that can make a person need an accessible book. And they won't be able to access this book because, you know, Brazil is a very huge country and we have a different reality in some places, you know, there are some places that you're going to have bookshops and you're going to have libraries and everyone has access to the internet. But if you go to other places, there is no internet or there is no bookshops and Amazon will take, I don't know, days, weeks to deliver a book for you. So you have to make books accessible there as well. So this is what we are doing. We are starting the conversation and making the publishers aware because they are the ones making the books. So they are the ones who have to take this step to make the books accessible. And I think they didn't understand how to do it. They didn't have the information. So they didn't do it. And we are trying to get this information to them to show them that it's not that hard. It's totally worth it. There is a social reason, but there is also a bunch of readers that you're not reaching because you just, you just don't want to, you know, you could make a small effort and have this whole new bunch of readers, you know, reading your books. So yeah, this is what you're doing. That's wonderful. And it's great to hear about Bookquire tackling the challenge of informing your publishing industry in Brazil and indeed offering the Ace by Daisy validation option. Always pleased to hear about that. Stacey, you wear many hats, I know, but we'd love to hear about the work that Taylor and Francis are currently engaged in. And perhaps you could spend a few moments telling us about that. Thank you. So I think it's been quite a year or two for Taylor and Francis, and they've certainly done a lot to make their content more accessible. They've employed me, I don't know if you would class that as a good thing or not. So bringing me in as accessibility manager is one of the key things that they've done recently to ensure the continuation of all the accessibility work that it aligns with the overall strategy of the company-wide strategy of inclusion and making sure that the inclusive practices and inclusive content is across absolutely everything that we do, both in-house and externally. Basically, you probably know that last year they had received a 100% Aspire score for their corporate accessibility statement. So this describes what they're doing in terms of accessibility and inclusive publishing, what tools they use, and most importantly, how you can use them. So 100% that was up from, I think it was about 71% the year before. So they really did put a lot of work into making sure that they made the accessibility statement as clear as possible. They also decided that wasn't enough and they've gone ahead and won the ABC Gold Standard Award as well for their work in accessible publishing. The partner three of the key, we don't say libraries but organizations across the world, so RNIB Bookshare, so that's Bookshare UK, Bookshare US, and the Access Tech's next work. And through those three partnerships, they've made sure that over 50,000 books were downloaded just last year alone and that was over 37,000 books. And between these three partnerships, 95% of Taylor and Francis content is available in a variety of different formats immediately. So in total, we have more than 150,000 eBooks available and are continually digitizing and upgrading our backlist. One of our other schemes is our VIP mailbox, definitely VIPs to us. So in this mailbox, we answer queries from anyone who requires books in alternative formats. And through this program, since its inception about 10 years ago, about 2010, I believe they've processed 28,000 books. So it's quite a lot of books to process as a team and they do a wonderful job and they're very passionate about what they do. We've also got a descriptions program for images. So we're looking at, as part of our commitment to WCAG compliance, we introduced image descriptions into our workflows in 2020. So hundreds of books are now supplied with image descriptions with this number growing every day. We also have an author submission program, which was a really interesting thing to start running to see if we could get authors, when they submit their manuscripts, to actually do their own image descriptions. And this has actually gone reasonably well. So the numbers are so small, but they are growing because we're still getting the word out there, talking to authors, letting them know why it's so important and having other authors lead by example. And where this is most important in my view is when you're looking at, say, particularly STEM content. So it might be that somebody, you need somebody who really understands the topic in order to describe a graph and calculus or a part of the human body even. And we, you know, you don't want that getting wrong. Somebody, you know, making the best effort they can to make a book accessible, but getting that wrong. And therefore, the person that's using it isn't getting the information that they need. Taylor and Francis have also joined the Global Certified Accessibility programme with Benedict. So to make sure again that they're publishing a fully accessible PDF and EPUBs. Moving on to our journals as well. Our journals are available in HTML, EPUB and PDF format. And I believe there is, we've just converted 360,000 books into a journal, sorry, into accessible EPUB format. And we're also, we've made any new articles will be published automatically into EPUB. So again, that number is growing quite rapidly. And it'll be exciting to see where it is in a few years time. There's also a two year project on the go at the moment to upgrade a 65,000 EPUB 2 files into EPUB 3 to improve the structural integrity of these files with accessibility in mind. One for the thing. So we have a read speaker tool built into our journals platform. So it means that anyone can go on and click on that and have they either an entire journal or part of a journal read to them. So if they, you know, if they have a print impairment and they don't actually want to read the whole thing themselves, then that tool is free and it's already there. And it's suitable for a wide variety of needs. So I think T and F have done a lot. There's still a lot we want to do. And the thing I would see is most important that they do as well is that they make it easy to contact them. So regardless of whether or not you know, you're having an issue browsing their websites or getting their books, you go to that accessibility statement or on their homepage and it's always easy to get hold of somebody. And you should always receive a really fast response because they really recognise that actually even a few days of not having your content can make such a difference. Wow, that was really impressive, Stacey. Thank you. And Taylor and Francis have certainly been really busy. Christina, the Lear Foundation I'm sure has got a lot to report on here. So I'm going to hand over to you for a quick resume of everything you've been doing recently. We understand that the Lear Foundation has recently collaborated with European colleagues on a number of fantastic accessible resources. And we'd be interested, I'd be interested in understanding how that alters everyone's approach to the European Accessibility Act. Over to you. Thank you. Yes, we have done, first of all, we have prepared a paper two years ago that was explaining what the Accessibility Act means and which are the implications for all the actor in value chain. It was in English and it was freely downloadable. And from that, we started collaboration with other organisations who translated the paper in their own languages. And we have a Canadian version of the document that has been adapted to the Canadian market. We have a Japanese version who has been done in collaboration with the K University. And now we have prepared, last two weeks ago, the German version in collaboration with the Bursen-Ferain and DZB Lasen, who are the partners of Bursen-Ferain in this field. And we are now working on a Lithuanian version of the same book for the Lithuanian blind organisation. And this is one big part. If someone else is interested in translating it in Spanish or any other language, we are available and we will be very happy. The other thing that we are doing at the international level is training. We have created a quite wide catalogue of training courses that with the pandemic, we are now able to offer online. And we train on many different aspects from raising awareness and explaining which are the general issue to very detailed and long training course on how to use InDesign, Word, and all the other tools to create accessible publication within the production process. We are quite, we have a quite strong knowledge in the production process in publishing because we are from the publisher association. So we understand how the publisher create and which are the issues they face. We have an image description training programme to explain all the things that Stacy is playing very well. And we are working also on some training course on the workflows and the production process that is another element that is really relevant. We also do some event to raise awareness in book fairs and festival. And we are now part of European project of the network of European fairs. And we manage within this project that is named Aldus App, all the activity of the most important European fair focus on accessibility. And we recently have released a research that we have done within this project to verify the accessibility of book fairs. There was Frankfurt, Turin, Lisbon, many different fairs, both in terms of physical accessibility, but also digital and communication accessibility. And an article will be published very soon on the Aldus App website. So what and the other thing that we do a lot is consultancy and support for the publisher. We also use the Daisy tool. We have embedded that in a platform that we have that is an automated process to verify and certify the e-books from the publisher. And also to create the metadata on accessibility in an automated way. Fantastic. Thank you, Christina. Leah has always got so much going on. It's wonderful to hear about all the various activities. Agatha, last but not least, we'd like to come to you. And if you could take a few moments to tell us about the surveys that you recently conducted and how this informs your activities in Australia, that would be wonderful. We are running fairly close to the end of the session. So if I could ask you to be reasonably brief and then I think we have time for one more question at the end. Yes, I'll be very brief. So I've been involved accessible publishing at Sydney University Press where I've worked. And this sort of made me interested in actually researching what's the landscape of accessibility implementation in Australia. So I carried the research project in 2020. I've done a couple of survey, one with publishers and one with disability organisations just to understand what were the key challenges from both sides. So I don't want to go too much into the details. I've got reports online that can be read. But basically it shows that there is publishers are producing digital books, but they are not making, they're not sure whether they are accessible. So they are awareness and is limited. So there is demand for training and more knowledge. What I found really interesting is finding it out from disability organisations and alternative format producers. What are their challenges? Because it showed how much unnecessary work is being carried out and how time consuming the conversion is and really publishers could step up. And this survey sort of resulted in some really key suggestion that could be implemented short term by publishers like improving response and turn around time for providing files, having contact on the website, providing the correct files in the first instance. And just having a policy on the website is like what Stacey mentioned, the talent Francis has. But of course in the long term publishers should produce more inaccessible books. So what from there? So in the first instance we implemented many of those suggestions on our SAPO websites. We have a policy, we have a contact. But also we done a number of industry webinars and conference presentations and workshops aimed to increase awareness and provide a starting point for publishers of how can they get involved in accessible publishing. And COVID slowed some of this work, but we are still making progress on the guidelines, as I mentioned before, organising a series of workshops and work on further research projects to support raising awareness and increasing capability of the industry. And also the key I guess finding from the service for me is how much we can learn from each other. So working together for the disability section and publishing industry is the key. So that's for me. Brief. Perfect. Thank you very much Agata. And just to let all our audience know that some of these wonderful resources that have been mentioned today, we will provide those links and make them available to you all so that you can read a little bit more about them in more detail. So I have one final question for you all, and if you could just give me a very brief idea of your thoughts on how realistic this dream of a world where born accessible books become the norm. How realistic is it in your market, do you think? And I'm going to go immediately back to Agata for this one for your view. So I am an eternal optimist by default. And I believe this is very realistic and especially with the European Accessibility Act in place, which is a game changer. And I know it's limited to, it's European Accessibility Act, but it will impact all publishers who want to sell to Europe. And if publishers are thinking of doing it, and I presume it wouldn't only be surprised if in Australia and other places, our legal framework will change to follow this directive in any way. So in my mind, working together, as I mentioned before, is the key to changing the way books are produced. And this is what we've done at SUP, because we work together with our platform provider in this big organization, we were able to make huge progress despite the fact that we are very small, five people. So yeah, and like just looking back and how much has changed in the last few years, since I've been heavily involved in this area since 2018, the awareness and knowledge of accessibility issues has grown incredibly over the last few years. There are more guidelines and tools, such as, say, by Daisy, which is a game changer. And there's more training available from different organizations around the world. So to sum up, I believe that the world where born accessible books are the norm is coming and coming soon. Wonderful. It's great to hear your optimism there. Let's hear from Stacey and whether there is any difference on her opinion with regards to the UK market? I have to say, I completely agree with Agatha 100%. I don't think we're going to wake up tomorrow and find that it's, you know, we're born accessible and everything's wonderful. But we have come such a long way. And when I think back as myself, you know, as a blind student, when I think back even just, you know, 10, however many years ago, it was so, so different. And we've come such a long way. And I think there's still a way to go, but we're on the right tracks. We're implementing the right legislation. And we're collaborating a lot more. And so I think I never used to think that it was possible, but I'm 100% convinced that it is very, very possible. And we can look forward to celebrating that day and looking at everything that we've achieved. Thank you, Stacey. Christina, are you, are you as optimistic as Stacey and Agatha? Yes, also because in Italy for trade book is already reality. So I think it's more complicated and it will be longer journey for academic and professional school books. But I'm sure that is a journey that started that the people is working quite fast. So I'm quite confident. Wonderful. That's three out of four. Finally, let's hear from Issa on this. I'm really sorry, guys. I'm going to be the pessimist here. But this is about my market. So I mean, I do think it's possible, of course. And we do have some people working really hard. I didn't mention before, but we have the foundation called Dorena and the Wheel, which is very similar to the Lia Foundation. They do a great work for a long time. They're present in almost all the cities in Brazil. But my country, sadly, does not think so much about these matters. And we had this law of inclusion. It's been seven years now. And not much has changed. Not many publishers are involved. And it's just very slow, I don't think. I don't think nothing will change if the government doesn't really push, doesn't make it mandatory and mandatory in a way that it's truly accessible, not only by demand, not only through a different portal because that's not true accessibility. I don't see the publishers, which are in Brazil at least, they are the private sector. I don't see they working towards this because it will require time, it will require money, unless they are forced to. So I'm a little pessimist, but it will happen. I just think we need more focus on this matter from our government. Well, let's cross our fingers that yours optimisticas are the rest of our panel in a short time. I know Christina wants to hop in here with something quick before we close up. So I will revert quickly to Christina. Now, I just want to highlight that one very important element to push accessibility is to explain that accessibility is a higher quality for everybody. If you create accessible digital publication, they will be much better for every reader. And this is something that we were able to explain to the publisher. And I think it's a very good point. It's a quality and it's also increasing the market. So I think these are also business value, not only quality and the social issue. There are also some business issues that should be explained and demonstrated to the publisher. And I think that this is clear, is very clear, for example, in Francis and Taylor. And I think this one of the reason that is important to explain because publisher will move also for that. Thank you, Christina. I couldn't agree more. So we've come to the end of our discussion here today. And I'd like to thank all of our wonderful panelists for this excellent discussion. It's been fascinating to hear about the different approaches in your countries. And I think we can all learn something from the various terrific activities that have been presented here. Thank you to you, our audience, for your time. And we hope to be able to connect with you in the future. I'm going to hand over to Leah from Nails at this point. And we look forward to some questions from you all. So hello, everyone. Sorry about that. Don't need to start it over, even though it was excellent. Let's see. Okay, so thank you so much to Agata, Issa, Stacey. Oh no, who else is there? My brain is fried. Christina and Sarah for that panel. And we do have some time for Q&A now if anyone has any questions for these excellent panelists. Just to mention only, we have Agata and Isadora here, but we don't have Christina or Stacey. They just weren't able to make it today. But yeah, that was a really great panel. So much to learn from each other, definitely. So I'm so glad that we're all here at the summit. I think Christina will definitely be back for the working sessions tomorrow. So yeah, if anyone has any questions, you can feel free to pop them in the chat or raise your hand. Sure. Hey, Lars. Come on down. We can't hear you. I can see you're unmuted, but I can't hear. It looks like Stacey just joined. Hello, Stacey. Welcome. We just finished playing the panel video. And we're just seeing if there's any questions. But it seems like there might not be questions this morning, which is totally fine. There's a lot of information. Yeah. Lars, if you want to maybe put your question in the chat, you're not coming through. Lars, I'll be back. Okay, great. Good luck here. All right. Well, if no one has any questions, that's totally fine. Does any of the panelists have anything to add? Oh, we've actually got one from Kay. Sorry. I think there is a question in the chat from Bob. Oh, I didn't see that one. Oh, okay, great, great, great. Thanks for catching that. Bob says Stacey mentioned finding or cultivating STEM experts. How is that going? Stacey, are you able to speak to that? Yes. Can you hear me okay? We can. Yep. Do you need a video on? No, it's okay. Okay. So, yes, cultivating STEM experts. It's a good question, because I guess part of it is what do we mean by expert, which I guess is part of the question there. For me, we've always tried to look at gathering anyone who even has an interest in the area of teaching STEM subjects, but particularly with visual impairments, if they use any alternative software, if they use MathML, and over the years, and it must be about maybe 10 or 12 years now, we've met a lot of different people on the way who are much, much better experts than me even in it, really. I'm just, I did a degree in Maths with a screen reader, but since then, there's been so many people with a lot of expertise have come up and into the area of STEM and using accessible tech. And there are now quite a few operating groups who are looking at specifically STEM subjects, how to read, but also, very importantly, how to write mathematics. And that can be from the sort of top level, how do you code it, down to how do you, how do you write a simple, you know, two plus two equals four, regardless of your site condition. So there are a lot of experts out there. I'm not sure I claim to be one of them, but we certainly have some really great groups and great resources going now. Oh, that's excellent. Thank you so much. I'm going to go to Kate, and then we've got another question in the chat, but Kate. Hi. Thanks. I think you can, I'm in my cozy clothes right now. I've got my sweater on. So thank you for all the, for all the panelists. I feel like we're all sort of stunned taking in the amount of information that was shared. This question is for Stacey because she brought it up, but anybody else is welcome to answer it. I was really interested to hear about the goal of getting authors to write their own alternative texts, and I was just hoping to hear a little bit more about the successes that you've had with that and also the challenges. I'm certainly happy to answer to that, and then also if anyone else has any experience of that, then it'd be great to hear it. So it's something that was launched at Taylor & Francis before I joined, but it's something that I've been really interested in actually, the idea that you're asking an author to describe their own pictures and diagrams, and in one way it's worked really well because a lot of authors have responded really positively. And I think at first, a lot of it's about guidance. So what we didn't do is say, okay, we want authors to describe your content for us. We wrote a lot of guidance and you can find out on the TNF pages, how to write good alt text, how to write descriptive diagrams and images and stuff. So there's a lot of guidance there for authors and they can always come and speak to us as well about how to do that. So there was a lot of guidance given to them. So then I'm not saying that 100% of authors went, oh great, let's jump on board and do this. I mean, a lot of content doesn't need it. For example, you're kind of social science type stuff. You don't often need any description in those books. There's not always diagrams, but certainly for the stem side, that content, we have actually seen quite an uptake in the number of authors that have come on board and chatted to us about it and who are actually providing described content to us now. And where we found that to be really good is that when it comes to a picture or an image that is so niche, it's not something that you could just hand to somebody that doesn't work in that area and say, okay, explain what this means. And it could be anything. There's some complicated images out there. It could be the inside matter of something or a nucleus or even more complicated than that. And you need to make sure that you have a person who is an expert in the subject who is explaining that diagram because you don't want something to be lost that somebody looking at it with their eyes would pick up and somebody who's getting that description, if something's been missed out, then they might miss out a crucial part of that particular diagram. So that's partly why we feel it's really important to get our authors involved in describing the images. It's not to say we haven't had challenges either. We've had some authors to be truthful who have said, well, what's the point in that? No blind student would ever take my subject. And that's been quite shocking to us. And we go back and say, well, do you think no blind student would ever take your subject because you haven't made your subject accessible? Do you think if you described your pictures and your diagrams, some blind students might actually take your subjects? And actually, we've had some come back and say, oh, well, I hadn't considered that, you know, cause and effect. So I hadn't considered that blind people aren't taking my subject because it isn't accessible. It's not accessible before they don't take it. It's actually the other way around. So we've managed to convince a lot of authors who would have thought it would be impossible for a blind person to study their subject to describe their content and to put it out there and make it fully accessible and to understand that whether somebody with a vision impairment decides to take up their course or not is actually irrelevant in some ways, because it's about having that out there and ready should be wished to and it's about giving them the choice. So we've definitely seen a mixed response, but I would say it's been mostly positive and the more authors that do it, the more feedback we get, the more guidance we can build, the more content described by authors we all have. And I think it's a really, it's a really good thing. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much, Stacey. And thanks for the question, Kay. All right, we'll try to go to Lars now or actually, sorry, before we do that, does any do any of the other panelists have any thoughts on the authors and alt text question? Maybe I just quickly jump in. So at SAP we started, we first put guidelines in our author guidelines around alt text and we sort of started suggesting on signing the contract. And now we actually have it in our contract. So we require author to provide alt text together with manuscript in the same way as we've asked them to provide to fill in all the information form with some marketing suggestions and stuff like this. And most of them do, sometimes they are not great, so we need to rewrite them, but it's a good start. So, and you know, our books are much simpler than, you know, we normally have a monograph with, you know, 10 illustrations or something like this, but even in the sort of more illustrated books on archaeology, we had authors contribute and we feel it's much better. Yeah, now as we put together like some image description guidelines and that's always what we try to encourage, if possible, because they have, you know, the authors are so familiar with the content. Exactly. They got the content and the context, so like they know why that image is there and that kind of thing. Did any, anyone else want to speak to this or they'll move on to the next? All right. So we've got a question in the chat. So this sounds like it's for anyone. What would be the top item on your wish list that would have the biggest impact when working with governments? So I think, what could the government do? I can start. I think if the government makes burn accessible books amended to our thing, these would solve like most of the issues that we have right now, at least in Brazil. It is actually absurd to me that this is not the norm that we left out people that they are not able to buy books whenever they want and what, where they want. So I think, yeah, they should be like forced. Publishers should provide burn accessible books from the release date and then we would have no issues. It would be available for everyone at all the same places. So this is my top item on my wish list. Yeah, that one makes a lot of sense. And it's all fun. I agree with it because just looking at what's happening in Europe at the moment, it's obvious that mandates motivate action. Yes, that's very true. Stacey, do you have any wish list for what you'd like to see from government? I mean, I would absolutely agree with what's been said. I mean, a government that said, you need to make every book published in this country burn accessible would be amazing. I think also maybe they could put a little bit more money towards it to supporting publishers and also educators to make sure that that can happen. So I think with a little bit of government money and a lot of government push to say, yep, you cannot put this out in this country unless it meets this criteria where it is 100% accessible to those with print disabilities. And that would be the dream, I think. Yeah, these are good dreams. And I think they're all reachable. Thanks, everyone. And yeah, okay, let's try Lars now. I need, I must try my microphone, right? Yes, yep. Hi. And it works. Yeah. Yeah, I was actually wondering something and that was regarding government documents and public documents, maybe like you know, that the city you live in, of course, publishes so much documents every year to its citizens. And so does the national governments and so on. And from what I understand, they, at least when I speak to people in Sweden and in Gothenburg, especially maybe that they are have no plans, they don't get the same kind of information that the publishers do, right? But isn't it a fact that at least in Europe, that the, you know, like government agencies and public institutions and so on also need to publish inaccessible formats? I am no expert in this. So, but you guys are, right? De Sadora and Agatha and all of you. So what are your thoughts about this? What should, is there rules of regulations around this or should there be? Maybe I jump in first. So definitely in Australia, the government has done a lot of work and much more actually than, and it's far more advanced in terms of making sure that they publications and the government websites are accessible. They're not they at 100 percent, but I think at the moment they claim on their website that they are accessible to a level and they're aiming for double A level and they're working on it. So I mentioned those guidelines. So the, in terms of writing and editing and also the standards. So whenever a government department produces a website, it's going to be accessible and and it's actually, I spoke to someone who works with the government a lot and they definitely required it. So definitely government here is doing a lot in this area. I can also say that in Brazil, when you talk about the internet, accessibility is in another level. It's different from the publishing market. For some reason, we are very slow when it comes to changing, but the government's websites, they are all accessible and usually they do provide documents in an accessible way. I'm no expert on this, Lars. I'm just really curious. So I try to, you know, get in the middle of everything, but the website is accessible. They actually have this accessibility flag if you go into the website. And I know that the government now that they are requiring accessible books for schools, for public schools in Brazil, they also have this documentation on how the e-book must be. So I'm not sure if I got your question 100 percent. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, basically what I wanted to, I thought it would be, you know, super ironic if all the publishers were forced to use EPUB and so on. And that would improve. But then communication with its citizens, because they publish so many PDFs every year, right? And I've never received any PDF from any institution or, you know, public place that was accessible. So I just thought it would be hugely ironic if like the government, the EU government and everything were sticking with inaccessible PDFs. So I was just curious. Okay, I actually don't know about the PDFs if they're accessible or not from the government, because I don't think our government sends out so many information. I mean, you have information on the website, but I'm not like, I don't know how these documents go to the public. It's not as transparent in Brazil as it is in Sweden, I think, from what you're saying. But so, yeah, the websites and you can find information in there, like all the information that they make public. The website is accessible. PDFs, however, I'm not sure, to be honest. Thank you so much, everyone. I'm going to bring this to a close. Thanks for the great questions, everyone. And thanks for the people who got the question ball rolling. It always just takes one person and there's so many good ones out there. We are now going to go to break. So yes, thank you so much to the panelists, to Sarah for this excellent session. And we'll be back, we'll meet back here at half past the hour. So slightly shorter break, but then we're going to go to the breakout room. So come back to the main room, because I'm going to talk about how we're going to be doing the panels and going to the breakout rooms and that kind of thing. So yeah, see you back here in 13 minutes. Thank you, everyone. And thanks to the live streamers for coming where this is the end of the live stream and the end of the public sessions. Have a great day and follow Mel's on Twitter and send us questions on there if you've got them. Thank you so much. Thank you.