Liisa McCloy-Kelley (she/her): Okay, I welcome everyone to our
W3C Publishing Business Group meeting with Conference day to day, and there's been a request to talk more in depth about accessibility and some best practices for how people are approaching the Ea.
Liisa: Before we dive into that
Liisa: I want to see if anybody you come here to describe today in our Irc.
It's a
Liisa: a woman, Please,
Liisa: Jen, can you help uscribing for the first part of it, and i'll scribe during yours.
Zheng Xu - Wysebee - Ottawa, Canada: Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, Thank you.
Liisa: And And before we jump into the accessibility stuff,
I'm wondering, Wendy, do you want to mention the publishing salon to this group
and make sure that people are aware.
Wendy Reid: Check um
Wendy Reid: me almost. Ralph is quicker to the the link grabbing game in. I can't believe it's in two weeks and two weeks. September the thirteenth, at eight, zero, A. M. Pacific, which I
Wendy: i'm not going to attempt to do at times on that we're going to be holding an event. We're calling the digital publishing salon.
Wendy: It is, in essence, a workshop of sorts to um gather the use cases and ideas around what comes next for digital publishing. So um! The work for epub is kind of is coming to a close in a couple of months.
Wendy: We're nearly done with the of three point three. Aside from the testing and finalization of the spec. So we are looking for what we should be working on next. The goal for this session is really just to get people together from all over the publishing industry. So you know not just trade, not just education
Wendy: um, and to understand the use cases and things that people would like to be doing with their books that are either currently possible or aren't possible, and they'd like to, you know, explore those ideas. So if everyone is welcome to attend, we're going to be doing kind of a joint
Wendy: in-person remote type situation so equal participation, if you're there in person, are there remotely, and bring your best ideas.
Wendy: We're going to be talking about the future of digital publications on the web.
Liisa: Thanks, Wendy.
Bill Kasdorf: All right, I, Christina. We wanted to start with you. Do you have any update for us on where things stand in Europe with the Eaa, and as countries progress with figuring out how they're going to implement,
Cristina Mussinelli: because the majority of the countries are still in the process of discussing how to implement the legislation in the national law,
Cristina: even if the timeframe in reality should be ended, because they should have done by the June, the twentieth twenty two,
Cristina: but there is still an ongoing process in different countries. Some information in Italy has been approved, and it has been approved mainly as it is in the European legislation,
Cristina: one in the Ministry of Development that will be involved, especially in the product area, and the other one is a special organization that is the innovation center that will be mainly involved in the service implementation. One
Cristina: uh this organization has been already uh involved for the Web Directive for the accessibility, Webinar. So they are aware of all the issue related with standard, and so on. So I think this is a good thing.
Cristina: The other element that has been added in the European, in the Italian legislation are the penalties, and the penalties are depending on the level of problems that you create. Let's say
Cristina: it can start from five thousand euro to forty thousand euro, and it depends which of the not conformance that you are doing, and also, if
Cristina: the fact that you are. Maybe you have been asked to apply once, and you are not applying again. So it depends also from the frequency of the of the non compliant that you have. So this is uh, these are the main uh new information in Italy. And then there are some information that are more general
Cristina: that are related with the two main discussion that we had at your level. One is still the back list.
Cristina: We are sure that the backlist should be included by two thousand and twenty five, and this is something that is
Cristina: under discussion, not discuss, that it should be exempt. But to understand how the disproportionate burden could be applied.
Cristina: French has done a survey Ah! An analogy not to survey the rapporteur highlighting the cost for the publishing industry to co over for the non-accessible T. Or inaccessible one;
Cristina: for to be comply with all the title would be too much and we are doing the same kind of analysis in Italy. We have now collected all the information on the e-books available in the Italian market, and now we reduce the same
Cristina: um
Cristina: kind of survey also considering the different exemption that you have. So it was quite complicated, because you need to consider
Cristina: how many title you have, how many organization are small medium at the price, and how many are publishing, Let's say, only comics, or are group, and so on. So it's not so easy to do, and I hope that Ah! Within the October we will have the same ah numbers! And then with this number it will be possible, maybe, to go back to the permission and explain which are the problems that are related to this, or at least
Cristina: to define
Cristina: a more detailed way what this proportionate burden means, and how you can apply on that.
Cristina: The another element was that there was a request from the Danish Government to. They asked for the Commission if they're responsible for the accessibility of ebooks at the publisher or the retailers,
Cristina: and the Commission asked different European ministries, and the answer was that they could consider that they responsible are the publisher,
Cristina: because otherwise the micro, the prize would not be exempted. And also it's impossible for a retailer to change the content, or to add, for example, thermatic description to images, because they have no possibility
Cristina: to work on the content that they have no rights to do it. So it's quite clear now, but we are still waiting for the final one
Cristina: answer for the Commission. So these are the two other main topic that could be
Cristina: relevant in the next month.
Cristina: The other element that I know that in Europe is going on is a discussion about the metadata distribution,
Cristina: and we in Italy are working on a pilot with a combo, and with the market, with the title of Mondadori. That is a big publisher that is, distributing directly, not through aggregator to the
Cristina: to the retailer. So it's easier to to manage, and I know that also in French, and maybe around maybe something is under way. A similar ah project. So we will
Cristina: in the next month. What's going on? It's not done yet, but this is something that we are.
Cristina: We are working. The other element is that in the Frank Hood Book Fair, there will be some event related with accessibility.
Cristina: One is a seminar that we reorganize the near foundation with the International Publish Association.
Um! Sorry I forgot the the date
Cristina: on the nineteen uh at three Pm. And we'll be also streamed uh online, and the other one will be the only in presence event that will be managed by the partners, and ferrine task force will be at five uh Pm. And the following day we reorganizing cooperation with the book fair, and they are just. Project that everything in the
Cristina: that we not know yet. But I think next week we will be able to send all the information on location, time, speaker, and so on.
Cristina: So we will keep you informed. And last, but not least, the Daisy Board will be held in Milano in November, and then we will organize on the seventh of November, an accessibility camp
Cristina: in Milano under the artist project. So it would be a very interactive day with with a working group, a focus on different topics. So these are mainly
Cristina: the most relevant information I know that Germany is, uh still, uh under a discussion for the implementation. I know France is a boy, so I think, with the reopening of the office and the munic recovery next month
to provide you more information on that.
Cristina: If you have any comment of question they are available.
Cristina: It's a
Liisa: okay, you're on the queue.
Bill Kasdorf: Yeah, Hi, Christina. Um. You actually alluded to this at the very your very ending comments. But most of your comments obviously were about France and Italy. So it appears that those two countries are the most engaged, I guess, would be a way to put it. And then you mentioned Germany, et cetera.
Bill: But the Eu is composed of a lot of uh other countries. So
Bill: where are they? On this?
Cristina: They are still under discussion. I mean, the Danish are working on that. The Poland just started to work on that Denmark is a
Cristina: the Netherlands that the process is going on. So you have to consider that the deadline is not so. It's normal that the deadline is not.
Cristina: How can I say It's not, uh
Cristina: Oh, I don't remember the English word Ah can be postponed, I he at European level. So I think that the majority of country are discussing on that. But there is no legislation approved except these countries. So for sure there is a discussion on that, and but not the final version of the legislation.
Bill: So basically, your implication is they may be dragging their feet. But you
Bill: the deadline is the deadline. Is that what you're saying?
Yes, but the deadline, normally with the implementation of the directive is not so straight,
Bill: so it is not so strict. It is not so strict. So it it happens often that the legislation is approved after the deadline. The commission. May,
Liisa: Kristina, I put my song on the queue to ask you so for Emily. You say that the fines can range anywhere from five thousand euros to forty thousand euros.
Liisa: Is that what a single instance? Or is that that the catalog has been evaluated?
Bill: So if there is, it may not be for one title, I I think it's not. I mean, these penalties are for the overall European act. So it could be for the bank it could be for the er it could be for any
Cristina: any different situation. Then it will be an evaluation for the single case. But right now, in the legislation you don't have all these days, they say, depending on the on the
Cristina: level of the problem, then the the the organization can define the field,
Cristina: but it's It's something that you may occur. You may solve the problem, and so the female never
Cristina: come. But it's a a range, so it's not the finest in the day, for which case, also, because, as you know, the European act is very complicated and very wide, so I don't think that if you have one book that is not accessible, you will. You will need to pay a fee
Cristina: fine. You probably solve the problem for the book, and nothing happens. But if you have
Cristina: thousands of titles that are not accessible, the Commission, the organization that is involved in the monitoring ask you to sort the issue.
Cristina: It's in generally the same for other legislation. So
Cristina: the penalty that you have to pay. This is the range from
Cristina: that is more or less the for example, it's less than the one defined for the web directly, because for the web directly. If you are not apply, and the fine would be much mature.
Liisa: Just one other piece of that. So
Liisa: do you have a sense that,
Liisa: like, let's just say you had a big title. It wasn't accessible.
Liisa: You got a notice from Italy that there was an issue with it.
Liisa: Is there any data that's being shared across Europe, about which
Liisa: violations there are or would like. Are you at more risk by saying, Okay, Well, we've already gotten this complaint from Italy. Are you now at more risk from every other country complaining about the same thing or not?
Cristina: It's difficult. It's difficult that the organization monitoring the accessibility of the file. So probably some end user who issue this content are not accessible, and also the fine are defined nationally.
Cristina: So These are the rate that has been defined for Italy, but maybe in Germany they define a higher rate, a different rate. Every European country can define a different rate
Cristina: summary of all the different. Ah! Of all the different information as soon as they are available. But you can define, for in Italy, in one way and in France in another one
Laurent Le Meur (EDRLab): a
Liisa: Laurent. You're on the queue.
Laurent Le Meur (EDRLab): Yes, I just wanted to to bring some details about the French situation, so I don't have any news about the legal issues, the analytical process at the moment. I I will try to get some some more information in the system.
Laurent: But um about uh the work we are doing at the moment. Uh, the work is essentially on the presentation of the data in French, on French bookstores and uh readers. So you know that, uh, we've got lots of languages in in Europe. So translating uh the
Laurent: even the metadata labels in French is not so use,
Laurent: because, as you know, the public even doesn't know what the is. So to know what the screen reader is. What a what the drm is. A Everything is complex. So we try to find some some good names in French for all that, all these concepts. And we made a Survey National Survey with the help of bookstores, and and so more than
Laurent: Ah! Almost one hundred thousand people were reached by by the selling with simple questions to know which label they would understand, for a given concept that was described.
Laurent: So we got the the results. It's not that we we have some solutions for the the labels. So first, then, we are doing the same with the uh blind people and these taxi people, because we we We went to the
Laurent: the generic public first to get dreams of what they can understand. Now we focus on on blind people. If they go to a bookstore what they can understand and not
Laurent: Ah, and we want to implement the first prototype of that on the bookstore, and we've got a partner. It's a page in in France, so if machine will, on its bookstore, we put the results of this survey, but it's totally done,
Laurent: and we are also making a prototype on a reader. And, as you know, we are masters of Toyam, reader, so we will put that on to him, reader, just to to well, to have some feedback,
Laurent: and when we've got feedback it will be generalized.
Laurent: Um, that's uh, that's all. And uh and uh yes, about the fines we're asking about the fines and and uh, the the networks of information that could go through Europe. Well, I I don't think that there will be uh international
Laurent: official networks.
Laurent: A
Laurent: is the network uh nothing. She could stop to have different goals for fines in different countries organized by an association. So so yes, the publisher should be careful about that,
Liisa: Wendy, you're on the queue.
Wendy: Yeah, I was going to mention the fine thing because I, and just because of my work with Tillino I ended up spending a bit of time with the German legislation. So they have a slightly different Enforcement pathway, and i'm not a lawyer. So
Wendy: take what I say with a great assault. They've gone with them much. They've gone with kind of a consumer arbitration route. So I mean just like Italy. And I think in most countries uh this happens in the Us. And Canada as well in terms of how these things go, but it's prompted by a user complaint,
Wendy: and in Germany it's taken to kind of a the consumer. It's. It's part of the Consumer Protections law. So it's, you know it.
Wendy: The The publisher, the retailer, and the consumer, were brought together is kind of how can we come to an agreement for a settlement of sorts. So I mean in most of these cases, and the same is true in us and Canada like. If you have a demonstrated effort of. We are trying to work on. This Improvements will be made in X amount of time, or we have a history of fixing these things nothing usually happens. It's only really, if you
Wendy: Aren't, fixing things or are ignoring, you know, calls to fix stuff that you really run into issues. So.
Cristina: Yes, in in Europe cross-section are slightly different than in us, so it will be very difficult to have this kind of request
Cristina: and also it depends a lot from which other organization that will be involved in the monitoring and implementation of the act at the National level.
Cristina: It could be a ministry. It could be the Ministry of Health. It could be the ministry of a of a development depend also from the structure of this kind of organization in different countries.
Cristina: That's for sure, I think, in the next before Christmas. From now in there will be more information on the different situation.
Liisa: So, hey, you're next on the queue, and then Adam will jump back to your question.
Daihei Shiohama: Yeah, my question uh, is that Christina? You talked about the the monitoring body, and then I think the the ministry, and then the another one is some ah public appropriate organization. Anyway, my question to you is that so? That's physically
Daihei: here? The Italian situation right? And then my understanding is that the monitoring system or the monitoring body? Is it going to be ah happening at the Eu entire Europe level,
Daihei: and also the another question is about the that is, that monitoring which will be up applied to say the other outside of our Europe; in other words, that the residents in Europe they are using, say, the At some service in the United States or Japan, and then the the
Daihei: those activities are going to be also overseen by the such European monitoring body.
Cristina: Now the national implementation will be done by national organization,
Cristina: so the situation in each country will be defined and monitored by every single.
Daihei: Then the Commission is still exists, so the Commission will organize some monitoring activity at European level, and they will check and they will control, but the implementation will be done by international level. So
Cristina: Ah! It it may happen that there is a multinational multi-european ah problem, and then the Commission may intervene, but the Commission Don't have the power to intervene in the national legislation in Europe,
Cristina: that as they have now for the implementation of the of the directive. So they are making some meeting with the people at national level to discuss some of the topic. The backlist topic has been discussed also at European level, but then one hundred and fifty
Cristina: uh the the implementation is left to the single country.
Daihei: Okay, thank you.
Daihei: He's.
Cristina: So. I don't know. Sorry. Sorry, just the last information, and there will be, maybe a review of the legislation. After three years they will have a check after the two thousand and twenty five. They will be three year time
Cristina: for checking how it happens, what are the problem, and so on. And after that it may happen that there are some changes in the legislation, but until then
Cristina: the the the implementation and the monitoring is done at the national level.
Liisa: So Adam had a question in the chat about the backlist, and whether it needs to be compliant or not. And, Eugene, you commented that backlist compliance is on a timeline for two thousand and twenty-five, and I just want to clarify. We've always been talking about the fact that
Liisa: the ea covers
Liisa: all of your catalogue,
Liisa: the expectation that the entire catalogue
Liisa: that you are selling in Europe is accessible,
Liisa: and that that be in place by June of two thousand and twenty, five,
Liisa: and part of what Christina was saying earlier is that there there are a lot of people and organizations struggling to figure out how they're going to get all that work done,
Liisa: and there is a sense of whether there's any opportunity to prove that there is a disproportionate burden that it would be too hard or too expensive, and there's a concern that some publishers may look at this and think
it's easier to take that book out of the market
Cristina: than it is to take on that risk of not making it accessible, or the expense of making it accessible, and that offsetting what the sales are. So
Cristina: everybody's trying to come to some kind of understanding and agreement about what that burden might be. What that cost is what that risk is, and trying to sort out. You know how close to the bottom of the pile with your backlist. Do you need to get?
Liisa: And what is the risk? If you don't get there in this timeframe?
Cristina: Yes, the the the the issue of the backlist is because ebook are considered as a service. So if you are a serving, you should offer everything included in the service should be accessible.
Cristina: Then, if you think that if you can demonstrate that doing that is too costly or ah impossible. But you need to demonstrate, and This is why we are working on the disproportionate.
Cristina: And this is why we are doing this. Ah analysis as an in front of you at nine eleven. Because if we can demonstrate that for a for a title that is sold just in one,
Cristina: it doesn't make any sense to create an accessible version, or to convert a non-accessible title in an accessible one, Then this is something that you can do,
Cristina: but it's still a complicated issue. It's not an easy one, or so, because also in this case the demonstration of disproportionate burden is not
Cristina: detailed for ebooks in the legislation. But it's general
Cristina: something that,
Cristina: and they could be very different If you are a big publisher or an academic publisher, or something like this,
Adam Blondin: and you also, if you are a micro enterprise, you can consider that you are excellent. If you publish comics and the art book and the Illustrated Children books, you know that until the the the technology and the meeting solution, and everything is food.
Cristina: The row gives the the the framework.
Cristina: Then it's a it's a it's a strategic choice.
Liisa: Don't you. You're on the queue.
Daihei: Oh, Lisa, i'm sorry that was a mistake.
Liisa: Ah, okay,
Daihei: Hi Wendy,
Wendy: I have a question, and it's slightly tangential to apologies.
Wendy: We recently had some testing done on one of our platforms, and a result that we got back as a result. But I knew we were going to get back,
Wendy: and that is that our audiobooks players fail in one respect, and that is that we do not provide a transcript for pre-recorded audio, which is a requirement under what Ca: it's a double a requirement that if there is pre-recorded audio, it must have an accompanying transcript
Wendy: to be considered accessible,
Wendy: led me to wonder about the requirements around reading systems in Eaa, because a reading system itself is considered a service, and that means the apps, websites. Whatever
Wendy: must, if here, to the harmonized standard which is I and I both through that European standard which is what keg two point one
Wendy: double A
Wendy: has the commission discussed at all about audiobooks, and this like this.
Wendy: I just wonder where that these things kind of come together. Is this going to be an enforceable requirement? Is this a concern? Audiobooks, I know, are not mentioned at all. But there's a huge part of the market, you know I have. They consider bringing audiobooks, and maybe in an amendment in a couple of years, like what's
Wendy: what's going on there?
Cristina: The audio five are included only if you sell an e-book with the audio track,
Cristina: and then in this case you should synchronize it,
Cristina: but otherwise no audiobook are in room, only book are completely out of scope of the directive. This is clear. The Commission has given a clear answer on that. But I don't know how many publishers do this
Cristina: of the text in that case, in the same package. In that case you should synchronize it. But, as far as I know, in Europe, the number of titles that have this situation is really minimal.
Wendy: Yeah, I think it is
Wendy: definitely your. You should consider that the the European and one is the standard is not considered the
Cristina: the final standard for the for the European Directive, because That is a standard for the
Cristina: but it's not yet defined. That will be also the standard for the for the European Act.
Wendy: He's
Cristina: the If I was clear.
Wendy: I thought it was just updated because when I looked last and looked up harmonized Standard. It mentioned the updated version of en.
Wendy: Yes, it has been. I always get the number wrong. But right now the requirements for the European act are the ones that are available in the
Cristina: so there is no specific other specification or for the specification. The The the requirements are the high level requirements that are, I don't remember the number of dynamics, but they are in their next of the direct.
Liisa: Okay, and
Liisa: let's change gears.
Cristina: I'm going to present a short deck
Liisa: woo-hoo
Liisa: get some powerpoint, and my Powerpoint is being really weird
Liisa: in the interest of time a minute ago,
Liisa: sharing this. You just talk to it
Liisa: two.
Liisa: I was asked to think about
Liisa: one an approach. How do we think about this at Penguin Random House, and
Liisa: you know, accessibility for each organization, as Christina points out, is going to be a individual thing. It is going to be a strategic thing at Penguin Random house
Liisa: in the Us. We have a little bit of a different philosophy than we do
Liisa: for each localized country, because there's a lot more focus in each localized area for what the workflow is, what the risk is, what those localized walls are going to be. And but our philosophy for
Liisa: the books that we published in North America, that we have well rights for that we intend to make available around the world.
Liisa: Our philosophy is that all of our books should be accessible,
Liisa: and that this is a problem that we need to resolve in our basic workflow, but that we also can't do it all at once, right? So we're starting with the frontlist
Liisa: and making sure that we have really good practice across all of our frontless books thinking about. How do we stop the bleeding there, so that we're not adding more books to the catalog that are not accessible.
Liisa: We are doing a lot to look at evaluating our current file output,
Liisa: looking at that with the vendors talking to people about it, looking in it with our in-house experts running ace checker on it,
Liisa: checking it against the Wiki success criteria, and trying to figure out bit by bit, keys by piece. How do we improve our processes? We've been working on this for about three years. We started with all the things that were under volume. So where were there things that we could change in the code that did not affect the way that looked, or the way the book read. And we have bit by bit gotten through things where we're actually changing what appears on screen
Liisa: where we're changing, how the books navigate. And we've been really careful to build processes and code libraries and practices that are super consistent,
Liisa: because we're trying to get to a place where what we're doing is
Liisa: something that we don't have to actually test the accessibility on every individual title going into the future, that if we know that this is a good practice for how we are going to format lists,
Liisa: how we're going to make good accessible lists, and we do that consistently moving forward, and we do it consistently as we look at the backlist, that we can then use that as a framework to not feel like you have to, you know,
Liisa: read everything with every disability in mind,
Liisa: and so we go through a lot of upfront testing before we change processes. We also are really mindful of the fact that
Liisa: none of this is set in stone yet, and that
Liisa: there are a lot of ways that we can get in our own way. And so we say a lot in our talking about this. The Perfect is the enemy of the good,
Liisa: because you can go down a thousand different rabbit holes
Liisa: trying to find that exact right way to make something perfectly accessible, and a lot of times we Don't. We do that without necessarily having all of the input that we need from the community that we're making books for. So we a lot of times, put discussions to the sign, and and that's one of the things I want to talk about here. Um! But we also are very mindful of the fact that
Liisa: things will continue to evolve,
Liisa: but that isn't a reason to stop and wait. It's not like there's going to be a moment. And there there that you know, like from here on it's all perfect. So those sailing clear skies we know exactly what to do.
It's going to be a bit of messy if it's, it starts. And there are learnings to take from that.
Liisa: Looking back at our back list the way that we're approaching it as we're trying to look at this as an opportunity to
Liisa: finally update that software that our ebooks really are
Liisa: to try to take a very wide lens at our approach. For how we're doing this, so that we don't just think about
Liisa: bolting and accessibility. But we also think about Where is the opportunity to improve the reading experience? Where is the opportunity to get these files updated? Where is there an opportunity to maybe replace core image quality? That was a result of,
Liisa: you know, working too quickly and too early. I mean too many limitations in the reading systems that we supported. And we're also looking at it relative to how many quality complaints we have on things because there are still books out there that we published in the early two thousand that you know the summer's twenty years old. There was Bad Ocr. Now, maybe the time to finally
Liisa: reconvert those books actually get things re- key. Maybe there are newer source files available. So we try to look at the backlists with a real lens of
Liisa: how do we segment it into bite-size chunks and when we think about the Eaa risk,
Liisa: the first thing he is like back to like making the books accessible, for everyone to read them is just the right thing to do.
Liisa: Yes, it is very hard to put a dollar amount to exactly what the cost is to fix all of this, and hard to put a dollar amount to exactly what the risk is, if you don't,
Liisa: and and certainly you know, you need to somehow find some amount that works for your organization to understand. But we look at it like we would any legal risk
Liisa: that, You know. There's a legal risk, and you don't really want to deal with it, and it's the right thing to do so. How do you start chopping away at mitigating that risk? We selected what keg double? It is a target,
Liisa: We, you know, remind ourselves constantly that the Ea is mainly focused on Reflow for two thousand and twenty-five. It is not so focused on the books that are really easy to get yourself hung up over, because really heavily illustrated. Cookbooks and lifestyle books
Liisa: are on that edge of exception from what the Ea is concerned with. So when we get too deep in the weeds about like. But what do we do about this and the colors and that like That's That's the stuff that we'll get to. Let's focus on the things that we know how to fix.
Liisa: And we think about the backlist really trying to think about. How do you triangulate
Liisa: three pieces to put it into some manageable buckets. One what is high profile?
Liisa: So it has a lot of eyeballs, and it's going to be totally worth it to spend the time in the money.
Liisa: What is really simple,
Liisa: that actually the work to be done is relatively easy and possibly automatable.
Liisa: Where really do we make sure that we're doing that focused on
Liisa: are the writes. A piece of it is the amount of reconversion, like finding those other kinds of lovers that put them into different segments. So we've been able to take what is an active catalog of ninety thousand titles and say, Okay, off the top
Liisa: we knock out the that ten thousand books because they're not Reflow
Liisa: those children's picture books, graphic novels, other things that we made in fix layout for. So now the eighty thousand there's probably
Liisa: forty-five to fifty thousand
Liisa: that are relatively simple titles that only have a handful of images that may have a few more text elements. Some of those may already be pub three. Some of them may need to be turned into, but we just keep like segmenting it down into
Liisa: manageable pieces of work
Liisa: that we can focus on, so that we can build out projects to get us to two thousand and twenty-five, some of the basics that We just make sure our practice all the time with what we're doing for accessibility, and
Liisa: we make sure that we're making refill wherever possible.
Liisa: We make sure that we are
Liisa: teaching our organization that good digital reading practices don't have to be an exact match to print, so getting buy in that
Liisa: the design decisions that were made for print may be reworked for a good ebook experience. Those are things that we've just made a part of our frontless practice from the beginning, but they're really important. Now, as we're looking at accessibility,
Liisa: making sure there's good navigation both for the book and for the content within the pages, making sure there's good title level information on the Html pages, maintaining the page maps and making page references throughout, using proper Html semantics for
Liisa: heading lists, tables sides not getting drawn, into. But this is a better way that I can manage the design a kindle if I, Jerry, rig it in this way like forget about the Jerry Riggs again about doing that for any one retailer. Do the right thing for the code.
Liisa: It's
Liisa: things will get there,
Liisa: and we haven't got fonts only where it is actually important. So we really avoid trying to embed body fonts. We're using them where there is some piece of the story. We're also only using fonts that we've tested across
Liisa: all of the devices that we support, so that we know that they're really readable, and we avoid breaking words with spans. So, making sure that we're both looking at that in the development of our ebooks, but also working on How do we change that Workflow upstream from us?
Liisa: We use high res images. We use a good practice of figures with captions, so that the captions and the arts stay together.
Liisa: I'm. Taking care of this phrase, break ordinance that we use in the role of presentation, making sure that we keep Yeah, Urls linked where it is appropriate, and that we maintain and try to keep hyperlinks active,
Liisa: and taking a really good bit of care with all of the color that we use, and sometimes looking really closely at a color contrast, but also thinking about colored pallets,
Liisa: not easy on every book,
Liisa: and definitely taken time to teach everybody how to get there. The things we're really proud of that we've done is that we we kind of went over and above with our footnote and note and index handling
Liisa: to think about, How do we create enough space. How do we make those very readable? How do we make sure that when you're listening that it makes sense that you're navigating, that it makes it easy for someone to navigate. And we're also really proud of the fact that we have this
Liisa: advanced accessibility practice where we any person in our workflow from the publishing side. From the production side
Liisa: we can identify that a book is super important. To make sure it is accessible can be an author issue where someone's really engaged. It can be that the team is really engaged. It can be that an author has provided us with material that we can use. It can be that the book is for
Liisa: a disabled audience, and we make sure that we take those as projects that we collaborate on and use as learning,
Liisa: so that we do a lot of testing on those we do a lot of hand creating of building out what's really good, all text and learning to write all text and writing good, best practices that we can then share that gut stream in our workflow,
Liisa: and every one of those projects that we've done. We've learned something that we've been able to put back into the bigger process, and
Liisa: and then, you know. But we still like anybody in this space. At this point we've got a handful of things that we don't know what to do with.
Liisa: Is it really important that the exact location of every page bit right. Be captured. Precisely,
Liisa: You know. That is something that we need help. And input i'm figuring out what there's the ideal. And then there's the practical and
Liisa: adobe doesn't do this while we're in design. You know. How far do we go? And there's questions about heading levels, and what do you do when you know the author intentionally goes back and forth between
Liisa: two and heads, three and doesn't nest them. But that's the way the book was written.
Liisa: And What do you do when heads are not nested? Well, in chapter openers? Or how important is it that every single foreign word in an English title is
Liisa: accurately noted, and who makes that decision.
Liisa: And so there's a lot of stuff that we don't know all the answers to. We know clearly in our books, but building that intention and practice is the thing that we feel like we've done a good job of, and that keeps us moving towards confidence that we will get to June two thousand and twenty-five, with a good portion of the catalogue
and the intention to get to the bottom of the pot.
Liisa: Other struggles people are having.
Liisa: Leslie is a question about best practices for writing all text, and and then we'll get to the queue,
Liisa: Leslie. You know one of the things that we did to try to get out of our own way. On. That
Liisa: was, we literally sat down with a group of people who know the kinds of books that we publish people in our ebook group,
Liisa: and we talked about every type of image we run into in our books.
Liisa: There's always a cover page. There's always there may be a title page that was captured as an image. There's a logo on the copyright page. There are, so like we literally listed out every kind of image. And then we talked through
Liisa: Isn't there a way to automate all text that makes sense. Is there a way to capture it at the point that we maybe are moving from image from text to image. If that's what we're doing,
Liisa: and and then we started figuring out like, How do you actually describe something? Well, if you've got a graph in a business book,
Liisa: what kind of best practices are we going to be able to give. We have an eighty five page document that we wrote as a result of all of these conversations where we're stuck at the moment it's figuring out,
Liisa: How do we turn that document into something that's usable to share with authors to share with production editors to give to a vendor to have somebody on our team who may be doing it, because those are all slightly different audiences.
Liisa: And but it's given us a lot more confidence that we have a good sense. We also spent a a bit of time working with a blind person on our staff,
Liisa: trying to understand, like what the expectations would be. What do you want to hear about this image? And looking at some of the writing from the Disabilities community that our authors are in, and trying to learn from that as well.
Liisa: It depends mostly. Um. There are as many ways that images get into the books as there are books, so we, you know our intention Long term is to get it early in the process. Right now it may be at a variety of different places. We do not,
Liisa: and we do not get in a hundred percent there on everything unless we have the advanced accessibility process in place.
Liisa: Christina, you're on the you
Cristina: problematic issue, and it is probably one that is the majority of the disproportionate that would come from there. Because it's something that you need to do only for this
Cristina: situation. Why, if you have to manage train books. I don't think this will be any problem. I think this will be for some education of books, and so on. This could be really an issue.
Cristina: Uh, the other thing is um.
Cristina: I I was wondering if you are considering also, not from only the commercial, from Epa to if I'm two, I am three, or whatever. But if you are also working on the Pdf. Versus Epa,
Cristina: and the third thing is if you are also working on the e-commerce website.
Liisa: So
Cristina: we actually find that even in
Liisa: relatively simple trade fiction that we are
Liisa: seeing a lot of images. Storytelling is changing these days, And so there is a lot. There are a lot of stories that are told with text messages. There are a lot of stories that are told with emojis. There are a lot of stories that have a lot of hand drawn images interspersed through the text. So we're trying to find in those practices and and trying to like. We just keep expanding what we're doing, that
Liisa: at some point, as somebody is going through this, they are describing things and starting to learn how we describe things, and the epub versus two versus three we are. We are looking as we look at the backlist to get everything to three
Liisa: and and to, and we've built a lot of internal tools to
Liisa: automate, taking a basic epub, two to get it to a basic epub, three, and then figuring out how we add on to the that process for using whatever tagging is in the file to build out as much automation as we can.
Liisa: We are somewhat lucky, and that we don't have Pdfs as digital books,
Liisa: and we do not sell them. At this point we took a very hard line early on in the you know we are supporting epub as the format for the future of digital books, and we are doing a lot of work on our e-commerce sites and our internal websites,
Liisa: and all of the apps that we support. So we have an ebook effort working on accessibility. We also um have several teams working across all of the other work that we do to make sure that our offering is as accessible as possible.
Cristina: Thank you, Bill. You're on the cue.
Bill: I didn't try that, Adam go first, because he's got some good questions that are relevant to this in that.
Liisa: Yes,
Liisa: so, Adam, your question of Are you asking your editorial staff to provide any all text that can be automated? And is that what you would consider best practice? Um! And How have you gotten their buy-in. So we are. We are taking some incredibly baby steps towards this.
Liisa: If an editorial team tells us that they need the book to have advanced accessibility. We do an evaluation of the files that we first receive in production, and or you know, even sometimes it's even months in advance. We'll have a conversation about
Liisa: is the team or the author planning to write that text, and if they will, if they are willing, we're really excited about it, and we'll offer tips and tricks to help them with it if they want the accessibility. But they don't have the time.
Liisa: The book team will take it on, and as a learning thing. And you know our our
Liisa: our We have a really good tagging structure in place for our design workflow and for a production editorial workflow that we're able to leverage in a lot of this work
Liisa: to get to good html with tagging, and that was something that we put in place several years ago. That helped our manuscript process that helped our,
Liisa: you know, designing print pages that helped with the consistent styling of print pages. It is not used on every title. It's not used completely across the board. We have two different markup languages that we use, but we are able to leverage a lot of that towards accessibility, and trying to figure out particularly like the one place where we really try to engage the upstream editorial teams is what we need to capture long descriptions,
Liisa: because there's something like a handwritten letter that was captured as an image,
Liisa: and making sure that they are giving us a long description for that that someone has actually proved that copy edited, and then they make sure they have right that we can build out in appendix at the end of the book to make sure that you can see the image, but that there's more than just all text there is that long description that has all of the environment contents, and no one uses anything.
Liisa: Um, and the buy-in is it's tricky right like we're trying to figure out ways that we do all of this without significantly increasing anyone's workload, and and that's not always possible.
Liisa: Which is why there are a lot of steps to getting there. It's it's. It's also been really slow down a little bit over the last couple of years, because the shift to working from home, the shift to working remotely to working on smaller screens to people having to work digitally. On one hand it's great.
Liisa: We had a trial by fire of people letting go of hand marked up manuscripts, but we are only now getting back to that level where people are comfortable, doing it digitally, and trying to get them engaged in doing more of the upfront work.
Adam Blondin: Have you noticed an increase in your production timeline with any of this added stuff?
Adam: It's it's a
Liisa: um. Yes, in that a lot of times. If there is someone other than the author who's writing any of the Alt text, and they want to add a review cycle
Liisa: to make sure that a production editor, at least, and oftentimes, if it's a really engaged author, has a chance to look at the file,
Liisa: and and we've been trying to build out tools to make that easier to say. You don't have to listen to all of the alt text like, here's a spreadsheet that shows you.
Liisa: You know the chapter, the page, the a little thumbnail of the image, and i'm kind of building off of a little bit of what ace does with that
Adam: I that makes up Stacky
Liisa: Bill, you had a question.
Bill: Yeah, I'll try to be brief, and you know how hard that is for me.
Bill: So Ah, First of all, I think what you're doing is really commendable. I'm going to use a better adjective, which is exemplary, and because Prh is so big, and
Bill: I would contend, at least to the extent that I know what you're doing. You're doing it so Well, that's actually really helpful to the industry to see that
Bill: because a lot of these things are like Oh, my God, I don't even want to think about that yet. And i'm i'm. I'm dealing with so much more basic things, and it's like, Wait a minute. This part isn't as hard as you think it is. So i'm going to use a ah an example that is important to me, and how it is not important to most people, and that is indexes.
Bill: Every time I use the word indexes I get a lot of push back. It's like
Bill: shut up about indexes. Nobody cares about indexes anymore, Right? It's like, Well, they're missing a lot of point about what indexes are aren't for right, they think. Oh, I got search. I don't need indexes. Well, they're completely different.
Bill: So, anyway, you know, a few months ago I reached out to you because you'd made a comment on one of these meetings about indexes, I said, What are you doing with the nexus? And lo and behold, I discovered that you now
Bill: have all your frontless books that have in print. Indexes have linked indexes in the epochs, and you showed me how you were doing that, and it's like Well, that's exactly what people should be doing. It's very straightforward. It is not rocket science,
Bill: and so you know, I I get pushed back all the time. When I mention index it's saying, Oh, they're incredibly difficult to deal with it's like, Well, if you've got a print index and you've got page break markers in your Ep. Which you're supposed to have. If you've got an excess of leap up,
Bill: it is actually not that hard. So, anyway, to what extent
Bill: are you open to showing those kinds of things to the industry? So it's like, hey? Here's how we're doing this
with.
Bill: We were doing a lot of this stuff for our books for our authors, but we also it benefits all of us. If there's a great meeting experience for people, and if they're having an experience that it doesn't matter whose book they buy, they get a good digital experience. So you know we're happy to share it in any way and and help anyone else who is interested, like the index work we did was,
Liisa: it was hard to get people bought into that work, and their fear was that they would have to actually click on every link to check and make sure it was right,
Liisa: and it was just gaining their trust to understand that the logic of the way that we wrote
Liisa: the tool that puts the links automatically in that that was using those page angers, and it was matching it, and it was failing when it didn't have a match, and so you could spot check a few of them without
Liisa: clicking on one thousand five hundred links that finally got people to be like. Oh, okay, If I don't have to have one thousand five hundred clicks to tell you the book is good, then fine,
Bill: and one one corollary comment that I always want to make is that um
Bill: sharing that with other publishers helps to
Bill: demystify it and make the publishers understand. That's hey? But this is not the the huge obstacle you think it is the
Bill: almost more importantly, it's the vendors, because
Bill: the vendors that are actually cranking out all these ebooks
Bill: would not find linking those indexes at all difficult. In my In my opinion, any Gca certified vendor, for example, should be able to do that;
Bill: but in my experience having been invented for many years, vendors tend to do what their publisher with their clients, ask them to do
Bill: so if the publisher doesn't say, And, by the way, in my epub, please make sure the index is linked.
Bill: Um, they're not going to do it.
Bill: Can they do it? Sure they can do it?
Liisa: So,
Liisa: Wendy Leslie, You've had a conversation here in the chat about
Liisa: Wikag levels, and as Wendy coins out double A is the minimum. The Eaa requires double A, and you know It's an interesting
Liisa: activity to look at what is required in each of those levels, and and there are some things in our practices that are triple and compliance. But there's not everything that's your boy, and that's and for us like picking a target that was,
Liisa: you know, not impossible.
Liisa: That was not going to require that we reached. Everything was important, and I would say that most like when you look at most of our books, even the ones that we're not confident and yet have a one hundred percent accessibility. They're like ninety five percent accessible.
Liisa: You know, when we went through this week the list of the next development cycle of things that we need to put in, and we are down to some really detailed kind of code
Liisa: massaging that would be really great practice and and beyond best practice.
Liisa: So in the interest of time i'd like to give the Florida to Zhang,
Liisa: who wants to talk a bit about the task force and the metadata work that's being done, and some of the ways that we could work with the community group to make sure that when we do have open issues of what do we do with this and what is best practice that we have somewhere to go. Have a conversation about it with a wider audience.
Liisa: She
Zheng: shook.
Liisa: So uh, yeah, I've had a slides here
screen.
Zheng: Hey? Karen was semester.
Wendy: Yeah. Okay, I guess that's okay.
Zheng: Yeah, Thank you.
Zheng: Yeah. Personal. Thank you for a time. And
Zheng: so I
Zheng: the first by me, the manual member. Here we have bad exam many. But for people who don't me i'm. I'm also working with Daisy partnership program, and I was trying to be
Zheng: the problems that the current accessibility task force A.
Zheng: Is it you
Zheng: are as following: I want to have to know. The book in the store are accessible
Zheng: how to collaborate with the existing accessibility metadata like onyx mark,
Zheng: and also how publishers should expose their books to
Zheng: access paid A. User to disable users.
Zheng: So those are even before actually reading a user and started reading book. But or how the book can be presented in a web store to that, user to actually first find the book are readable for them.
Zheng: The active members are as following an avish language: Gregorio, George, Charles, and others, which included me.
Zheng: So for
Zheng: for each of the problems we actually have the document, we actually have specification. We can put link later.
Zheng: And so, for example, for how to present that book
Zheng: in accessible way in the store we provide a guidance
Zheng: about how Starr Page can show the
Zheng: how accessible a book is to show the accessible disability metadata to the end, user
Zheng: and for our
Zheng: for books itself. We also we are also trying to provide certain level as practice in our github.
Zheng: I mean by in our Academy of Access, but Beta Github,
Zheng: and in the publication Cg. Github. Here there's here we are providing a place to that User By user I mean publishers
Zheng: and vendors. Everyone have. I have my encounter some accessibility issue
Zheng: to raise problems here or write down use case to share,
Zheng: which also, including, which also includes. So yeah, I think it will be a great practice. So we can
Zheng: all this useful information here in Pcg. That other people can be easier to refer, and we can always have it like. Go to place to
Zheng: find more kind of official, accessible data and knowledge base
Zheng: in this website here which the Pg. The link is down below at the bottom, and so
Zheng: it's pretty easy to create issue here. You just said not have this. Then it will give a template to showcase your
Zheng: to to guide, to work as guidance about how to write use case.
Zheng: But you can. Yeah, as long as you have some real problem there for them. Oh, hey, I but my for index! How can I provide it? That's more accessible way, like I trying to do this and this and this, but I don't know how to it,
Zheng: and
Zheng: I have some
Zheng: folks that I don't know the way how to write a good figure caption for for this type book for them a cooking book, or anything else, or some other different type or
Zheng: so Maybe you have more. Not just a realflow, a book. Maybe you have question about how to deal with. For example, how can we define older, or how can we,
Zheng: and define the patch the index for a fixed layer of books and make it more successful to
Zheng: so all these use case are very useful. As input for the accessibility task force. So we have meeting once per, I think, two weeks, or amounts to talk about,
Zheng: to discuss about the current work and the use case in accessibility task force, as well as the Pcg. Bounce Committee, so that an open the really good place for people to gather and discuss, and one
Zheng: hopefully you can find some either solution or maybe homework.
Zheng: So yeah, that So that is also a reason how we build up this this community.
Zheng: It's. You can also, with pointing the issue to the correct person to give more answer. And
Zheng: yeah, so it does not need to be very formal or like with formal format, but it
Zheng: anything you think can help your real question, real problem there in your in any circumstances.
Zheng: So yeah, I did not know that I think many people would like one stuff. So I put something really simple here.
Zheng: So yeah, from my experience of working with accessibility, you can say I i'm also a software developer for as well as a mobile application. And so there is some. There's a lot of myth about accessibility support
Zheng: erez agmoni. One of them is says better. It's difficult, for if we, from my experience we're only targeting one problem at once, creating a successful book
Zheng: and creating some accessible content from mobile app. It is not that difficult as we think, and we thought it might be, Of course the whole process for a service is complicated, but for them. But if you just create a one
Zheng: accessible digital book or epub that can satisfy Okay, to find Oh, which Wa standard it's not difficult than creating just like website to be more successful.
Zheng: And there's a
Zheng: the myth Number two I've occurred so far is a access bet his name is only for vision environment. But actually it's not, and
Zheng: it's not. You can consider. People can. For one example, it's for them. But if the icon, or farther into more,
Zheng: it cannot. It can be really hard to touch. So in what there is an item defined about size, minimal side of bottom or clickable area,
Zheng: these these items, and are also very important for important for the other, the
Zheng: for the paper, which are the different perspective of a disability.
Zheng: And
Zheng: yeah, also also actually applying this case,
Zheng: and the number three I've heard is about text to speech. So text to speech is not one for the
Zheng: way for it to to so successful, to improve accessibility of the book. The technically can improve accessibility.
Zheng: But in the reality there are way more requirements regarding to make a book more accessible even only for video,
Zheng: and which also, including
Zheng: uh, the the car uh, which i'll say, including uh,
Zheng: the outer, the reading order, and the accuracy, the accuracy of reading without items, as well as
Zheng: uh, some,
Zheng: otherwise, some some
Zheng: reading. Speed and reading pitch need to be all need to be customizable for screen Reader Reserve. So Tesla's speech is a good advantage, but that's not, for that's not all What we need to do. So
Zheng: So yeah, that is all from me for the presentation.
Zheng: I'm going to
Liisa: sh. I think there's a question from Wendy who's on the queue?
Wendy: Uh, actually I put myself in the queue because Leslie had a question.
And
Wendy: well as this question was, we provide a link to access, so I should. I shared what I think is the right link to the best practice documentation for accessibility. Metadata correct me if i'm wrong people. Is there really a standard practice across retailers and presenting accessibility features on a retail web page?
Wendy: Put my cell on the queue to answer that,
Wendy: because
Wendy: the best answer I have right now is no,
Liisa: I think that answer is very accurate. There is not a standard for it. The way to do it yet.
Wendy: Some of the work Laurent is doing, I mean, i'm excited to see the results of that survey, because we've not done something similar in English.
Wendy: Um, I think, would be quite helpful to help us make these decisions. To be honest, I have looked at the Ux Guide. I think there's some good stuff in there, but there is also a lot of questions I still need to answer on the retail platform because the way we display metadata Um, we put a lot of effort into user experience and and the understandability of metadata
Wendy: and making it as useful as possible. So there's good stuff in that ux guide. We're definitely going to use some elements of it. But what the end result looks like is
Wendy: it's A. It's A.
Leslie Hulse: What we are doing is to provide more practical suggestion or tech notes that I hope we
Zheng: you can improve the or industry. So yeah, we cannot say is so. It is not a really stand standard practice cross retailers. But yeah, it
Zheng: it is A.
Zheng: It is something that the task force is trying to
Zheng: that. If this can work for the whole industry, and that that can be a good start point to move forward to make standard for that
Zheng: so? Our recommendation, or the task force around the
Zheng: we can try to improve from certain point that we have discussed again. Then we'll improve it at the end of the day we really hope one hundred
Zheng: these following this, this, this, this, this report, or some documentation about this, can be improved, and we move forward to standard. So that's where by a lot of input so
Zheng: use cases of real practice from publisher and vendors,
Zheng: we hope it is a good where I think it is a good start. Start Point. We hope we are looking for things to move forward a bit later.
Liisa: Thanks, Shane.
Liisa: Um. So we are close to time. Thank you. Everyone for your attendance today. If you have other questions, please, Don't hesitate to reach out to any of us, and Leslie's question is, can we hold this kind of session every six months or so,
and to try to share more best practices? And I would say that I talk to Christina and die, but I think we probably can, and thank you. Everyone you welcome.