In this talk from last year's ebookcraft conference in Toronto, Amanda Karby from Michigan Publishing Services and Kristin Waites from The MIT Press shared the 7 milestones on their roadmap for accessibility, complete with details and examples from their own journeys putting those steps into action at their respective presses. From task forces to audits, they've got practical steps you can start taking today to make sure you're on the road towards producing accessible ebooks.
(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)
Want to learn more about digital publishing and accessibility? We've got not one, not two, but three sessions specifically on that topic at this year's ebookcraft conference, which is taking place on March 21 and 22 in Toronto. You can learn more and get tickets at ebookcraft.booknetcanada.ca until March 12.
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Transcript
Zalina: Welcome to the BookNet Canada podcast, I'm your host Zalina Alvi. And this month we're diving deep into some practical steps you can take towards creating born accessible digital content. If your organization dreams of producing accessible ebooks, but you could use some guidance on how exactly to get your team creating born accessible digital books rather than endlessly retrofitting content after the fact, then the next 20 minutes are going to be very valuable. In this presentation from last year's ebookcraft Conference in Toronto, Amanda Karby from Michigan Publishing Services, and Kristen Waites from “The MIT Press," share the seven milestones on their roadmap for accessibility, complete with details and examples from their own journeys, putting those steps into action at their respective presses. From task forces to audits, they've got practical steps you can start taking today to make sure you're on the road towards producing accessible ebooks. So let's jump right into it and hear what those milestones are. First step, believe it or not, networking.
Amanda: So networking gives publishers a sense of what others in our industry are doing, what sort of initiatives are taking place, especially around accessibility, and where we can all go for help and advice. So, when it comes to accessibility specifically, what are some ways in which we as publishers can network? So, to speak to university presses, in particular, we are able to consult with our university Accessibility Offices and our Student Disability Services office, and we can determine what we can do for each other, what kind of information is out there in relation to universities, and what we can do to meet the needs of not only our campus community but also our audience as a whole. In the case of Michigan Publishing, we are able to recruit and hire an accessibility expert through the university library, and she's a member of our task force.
So for the rest of us that aren't in university presses, we can connect with any local accessibility groups. And as we are today, we can connect with other publishers who are working towards accessibility initiatives or who want to start working towards accessibility initiatives. That's why Kristen and I are here today giving this talk. And I do wanna make note, not everyone is as far along in their accessibility initiatives as perhaps our presses are. So having these conversations and making these connections is very important, even to us. If we are a little bit further along, we just wanna make sure that we are as in the loop as possible.
Kristen: Networking is something that I found extremely important. Everything that MIT is doing now has already been done by Michigan, and that's because I bugged them about it every couple of days. I'm like, "Hey, how can we do this? What are you guys working on? How can we make this work at MIT?" And that's been really, really helpful to me. So, we are open to, you know, questions and discussion from everyone here. And I hope that you guys are able to find people in the crowd that you are able to connect with as well.
So, our next milestone is creating a task force. We think it's important to have a group of members of different departments of your organization who can come together and determine, basically, how you want to run your accessibility initiative. They can help develop concrete dates and deliverables, determine what criteria you'll use to rate your successes, they will be crucial in implementing workflow changes and disseminating information to the rest of the press. So at MIT, our task force had our first meeting in October of 2016, so not too long ago. But we've met monthly since then. We have about 10 members from various departments, including acquisitions, editorial, digital products, production, and rights and permissions. Our goals have been to create an accessibility statement, which we will talk about later, conduct an audit and then determine what our most important changes are that we want to make to our workflow. I spent a lot of time researching and, you know, talking to people before I actually decided to do anything. But when I did, this was the first thing that I did. I talked to my supervisor and the director of the press, and then brought up a task force at one of our staff meetings, and then sent out an all-staff email, and basically just gathered volunteers that way. Having the support from our director's office was really helpful because it reinforced the importance of what we were working towards, which made it really easy to get lots of volunteers and people who were interested and wanted to help.
So, one of the challenges that we faced was educating each other on accessibility, because we had people from lots of different departments and not just digital production. There were lots of people who weren't familiar with, like, EPUB specs and things like that, and so we took a lot of time at the beginning to just kind of get together and teach each other what we knew about accessibility and figure out what we all needed to know collectively.
Amanda: Our task force includes representatives from all of the units in Michigan Publishing. There's currently seven members, and that includes the accessibility specialists from the university library that I mentioned earlier. Her name is Stephanie. And she's responsible for ensuring that all departments collaborate to implement accessibility policy. So, support for her role and for our task force was endorsed by our senior managers and our director. And this helps to demonstrate the importance of accessibility throughout our organization. Kristen alluded to that. If you pursue these initiatives, and if you are already, you know this, this work is going to really impact your organization and your workflow. So, having representation from every major group is key to ensure things are communicated across all units. And if you contract work out to anybody, you need to involve those people at some point, too.
So back to the basics of our task force. At its inception, our group educated each other on ally. We researched best practices. We sought out training. We consulted with experts on campus and elsewhere. In addition to our goals, we decided on some deliverables for our organization. And these include performing an accessibility audit of selected press titles, creating technical guidelines for our production staff. So for people like me, creating guidelines for authors and for editors, that's key. It's not just the authors, the editors need to know as well. And presenting a timeline for implementing these new guidelines.
And having a timeline for implementation can really help you get that buy-in across your organization. It can really help you get that support that you need, and it can also help you plan ahead on the different deliverables that you end up creating. So, that covers our task forces and how they came about. So now Kristen is going to move into our next milestone, which is composing an accessibility statement.
Kristen: Basically, the next milestone is to work with your task force to create a press or organization accessibility statement, which lays out the scope of your project, including your current status and goals. There are a few samples here, but Amanda and I are going to talk more in-depth about our own accessibility statements and how we wrote them basically. So, to facilitate writing our statement, I cobbled together a bunch of pieces that I liked from other websites, and then I brought it to our task force, and we kind of all sat in the same room and just edited it together to make sure that it sounded the way we wanted it to, that it aligned with our mission, that we had the right language. It was really helpful to have the different perspectives of everyone weighing in. So, this is our statement currently. So I will read it. It says, "The MIT Press is committed to making its digital content, including our website and ebooks accessible to as broad an audience as possible. We are working towards compliance and standards governed by the W3C, the IDPF, and Section 508 guidelines. This commitment is in line with our principles of publishing and disseminating important scholarly knowledge to those who need it, which includes making all content accessible in all formats. As the University Press, we strive to continually evolve to meet the changing needs of the communities of readers we serve."
Amanda: So, for Michigan, crafting our accessibility statement was very similar to how MIT crafted theirs. We looked for the best examples, we picked out what applied to us most, and what most closely aligned with our mission. And our mission features... It has a strong focus on open access. I mentioned that earlier. And making scholarship available to the broadest possible audience. So, we had to make sure that this was a focus in our accessibility statement as well. So you can see the brief statement on this current slide. The statement might seem short, just glancing at it, but if you visit our webpage, you'll see that the accessibility section is actually much longer than the statement itself. There's a fair amount of other information, including some services we offer. And some of those services are for users with print disabilities. So, we complete specific digital file requests. We participate in Bookshare. We're always accepting feedback on accessibility. And, you know, there's ongoing testing and remediation, we're not going to stop improving our processes. And we make that pretty clear on our website. So, next, we're gonna move on to our next milestone, which is actually creating a web page for that accessibility information and statement to live.
Kristen: We found it particularly important to have a dedicated webpage to accessibility. This is helpful for readers and authors to be able to find the information that they might need to know, especially where to direct feedback and request for accessible files. But we also just wanted to make sure that it was out there so that anyone who is, you know, curious about what we're doing can access that information without having to go to, you know, a bunch of different pages or, you know, search around to find the right email.
Amanda: So, that's milestone four. And our next milestone is, we're gonna get more in-depth to the nitty-gritty here. Our next milestone is conducting an audit of your current output.
Kristen: Okay. So, conducting an audit of your ebook files will help you determine the current level of accessibility you're currently producing in your ebooks. The purpose of this is to help you determine near future goals based on the results, which will help you focus your efforts. This can also be a useful tool in developing recommended lists of reading systems, retailers and platforms that are best for your readers. Currently, "MIT Press" is in the early stages of our audit. We are working with MIT's Office of Accessibility and Usability, who's been extremely helpful. So, to prepare for this, we created a list of about 35 books from a list of books that are most often requested for accessible files. And there are various subjects on this list, including algorithms, linguistics, economics, neuroscience, media and architecture, which means that they include lots and lots of different things like math ML, foreign languages, and extensive images and tables, all of which require different accessibility features. So we think that this is gonna be a good diverse list of books to learn about, and hopefully, see how we can improve.
We're hoping to understand, specifically, what more it will take to make our textbooks more accessible since that is one of our large, like, markets. And we know it's gonna be complicated because we publish lots of math-heavy and image-heavy books. But those are our most used books, and we think they'll benefit the most from it. We are going to audit our books in-house, but also, MIT's Office of Accessibility and Usability has offered their expertise using screen readers. So they're gonna give us specific feedback about what our books look like and what the reading experience is using various screen readers. We also provided them with a checklist to basically help them in their audit, based on the EPUB 1.0 accessibility spec. And we think that, well, having that spec, helps us a lot to, I guess, identify which problems we wanna address and what we wanna focus on.
Kristen: So, for Michigan, conducting a title audit was one of the very first things that our task force did. We needed to see how our current EPUBs were being generated through our XML first workflow, what was good, what was not so good about these files. And we looked at one or two titles from each list of the press, and we utilized the IDPFs ally checklist, and we looked out for specific elements, things like foreign language, heavy image use, mathematics, notes, tables, all the things that we've been talking about.
Amanda: So, this is going to be a very short discussion about an ongoing and complex process. But basically, you want to develop a workflow that integrates accessibility first, which is the whole purpose of the born accessible initiative, which has been spoken a lot about today. Updating your workflow may include updating the author's guide to incorporate new requirements, creating or updating documentation for internal workflows, determining the best way to disseminate information to the rest of your organization and also to your external stakeholders, most importantly, probably authors. MIT is not quite to the workflow...
Zalina: It's okay. Sorry. Go ahead.
Amanda: Not quite to the workflow adjustment stage. We hope to be there in the next six months or so after we finish our audit, but we are still thinking ahead about how we want to communicate those kinds of changes that we're thinking about having to make.
Kristen: So, with guidance from our ally specialists in the library, one of our biggest revelations during the audit and when we started to adjust our workflow, is that this is way more than just a technical project. We needed to start from acquisition and follow a book all the way through production and introduce these ally concerns at the earliest point possible. This is something else that we've been talking about yesterday and today. The earlier that we insert accessibility into the process, the better off that we're gonna be in the end, instead of having to... I shouldn't say in the end, but the better off we're going to be overall, and as, you know, we continue to publish, instead of having to retrofit all of our content.
So when starting to adjust our workflow, we have been focused on revamping our authors' guidelines, and we're introducing new accessibility requirements and examples to help our authors comply with these new guidelines. So I'm going to briefly talk about our first authors' guide alteration, which is image guidelines. And I feel a little bit like a broken record because we've talked so much about non-visual descriptions today and yesterday, but I'm gonna do it anyway. Images, maps, and figures appearing in books, we all know this, they must include a non-visual text description in order to make the book accessible. And this is particularly when the images are central to the theme, arguments, etc. So in this way, readers using screen access software can still have access to these very important features of the book. So, on this slide, are some examples of the language that we're using in our author's guide to instruct authors on providing image descriptions while telling them what we're looking for. We require two forms of non-visual text descriptions, alt text, and full description.
So alt text is 140 characters or less. Brief description. It's required for every image that is not merely decorative. And then there's the long description, which is indefinite length. And that communicates information and details that are relevant within the context. We require these to be delivered in the same format as captions because we copy edit them. We are not leaving it to the authors to copy edit them. Remember that. We are also providing authors with examples of textual descriptions. And we make a point of noting that good textual descriptions depend on the context. They don't need to repeat information that's already in the text. So basically, we try to make our accessibility needs as clear to our authors as possible. Even if, you know, this language that we're including in our guidelines might seem a little long-winded, but we just wanna make it as clear as possible and, you know, don't have too many questions back and forth.
Amanda: So basically, as we all know, things with accessibility are changing rapidly, and so, in order to not only keep up with the standards and the industry but to keep the information that you're giving to the public up to date, you should continue to revise your statement, your webpage and your workflow as necessary to reflect the progress you've made. Other things that you can do are, consider doing periodic audits to determine how far you've come. And then you can also consider exploring possible future endeavours for accessibility since we know that ebooks are not the only avenue for this. So some things that you can look at are ensuring that your website is fully accessible, that other electronic content that you might provide, like podcasts or blogs, are also accessible, and then ensuring that your content is being sent to vendors who focus on accessibility, and continuing to research new and emerging standards.
Zalina: Want to learn more about digital publishing and accessibility? You've gotten, not one, not two, but three sessions specifically on that topic at this year's ebookcraft Conference, which is taking place on March 21st and 22nd in Toronto. You can learn more and get tickets at ebookcraft.booknetcanada.ca until March 12th. In the meantime, thanks to Amanda and Kristen for sharing these insights at last year's ebookcraft, and to the Government of Canada for their support through the Canada Book Fund for this project. And, of course, thanks to you for listening.
