- [Richard] Hello everyone. And a very warm welcome to this DAISY Consortium Information Sharing Day and welcome to part C all about accessible publishing. - Hello everyone. I'm Avneesh Singh. I'm Chief of strategy and operations DAISY Consortium in W3C, I chair accessibility task forces of both EPUB 3 Working Group and Publishing Community Group. Just for additional information I am also an adviser on the advisory board of W3C. In this session I will be providing the highlights of accessible publishing in 2021. I will start from the overview after which Gregorio, Charles and George will do a deeper dive in these topics after which I will be providing our near future plans. So let's start with EPUB accessibility version 1.1. EPUB Accessibility version 1.1 is approaching the candidate recommendations stage. Which means that it is almost feature complete. After this we will be looking forward to the implementations. The candidate recommendation stage is a major stage before becoming a proposed recommendation and then finally the final recommendation. Now let's see what's new in EPUB accessibility. The first one is alignment with the European Accessibility Directive. We all know that this is the game changer act that will accelerate accessibility in Europe and some of our DAISY members have contributed to it. EPUB 3 is one of the popular formats being used by the publishing industry. So we wanted to make sure that by following the EPUB accessibility specification a publisher is able to meet the requirements of European Accessibility Act. So we improved EPUB accessibility accordingly. In this process we worked on a mapping document that maps EPUB accessibility to the relevant requirements of the European Accessibility Directive. Thanks to Gregorio, Christina and Luc Audrain for driving this great work. After my presentation Gregorio from LIA will be doing a deeper dive in this mapping document. The next one is alignment with the latest version of web content accessibility guidelines. We all know that EPUB accessibility is built on WCAG. In fact version 1.0 of EPUB Accessibility was hardwired to WCAG 2.0. But since then WCAG is doing incremental improvements and providing incremental releases and deeper accessibility should come along isn't it. So we have updated the EPUB Accessibility and it now refers to the latest revision of WCAG. But still if you want to refer to earlier versions of WCAG for backward compatibility you can do it we allow it but up to WCAG 2.0 not below that. The next improvement is in media overlays. This will be very interesting for DAISY Members. We have added some more requirements to video overlays. First one is that audio should be provided for all the meaningful text of the publication so that a non-visual user doesn't miss out anything in the publication. Anything meaningful I mean. The next one is that video overlays should provide a logical reading order in alignment with the reading order of the publication. It's a logical requirement isn't it? And the third one is, that adequate markup should be used for enabling skippability and escapability. You may be thinking that we are trying to DAISY-fy the EPUB 3 media overlays. Yeah to some extent. But these requirements are optional at this point of time. The reason is that the media overlays never picked up in a great way in the mainstream publishing industry and if we raise the bar too high then we will hamper its adoption further. So we want to raise the bar step by step. Apart from this there are incremental improvements to the specification, ambiguity has been reduced and the specification are now much more readable. Now let's talk about the user experience guide for displaying accessibility metadata. The first version was released recently in September. We know that some publishers are doing great efforts in making their publications accessible. That's great but how will the users discover that you have done such a great effort on accessibility when your publication is on the retailer's website and the user is exploring the accessible publications for them? Yes it's great that you have added accessibility metadata but this metadata is machine readable not designed for human consumption to great extent. So we worked on a document for providing guidance to the retailers and distributors, how to interpret the accessibility metadata in the right way and how to display it to your users in a user-friendly way. While working on this user experience guide we also realise that there are many metadata formats used in the publishing industry ONIX Schema.org Mark 21 and more. The principles that we were developing, some of the metadata formats were able to meet some of those principles while other metadata format was able to meet some other set of principles. So we realised that it is very important for implementation of user experience guide that the accessibility meta metadata of different metadata formats is harmonised. So we started another sub project for harmonising the different metadata formats for accessibility metadata. And Charles and George will provide a deeper dive on user experience guide after presentation of Gregorio. So ladies and gentlemen this is the overview from me, now over to Gregorio for understanding the mapping document Thank you. - [Gregorio] Hi everybody. Thank you for having me here. I hope you can hear well because I'm in the Turin Book Fair which is the first book fairing in presence here in Italy. As you may understand from my accent actually I am Italian and I work for Fondazione LIA. So I will tell you something about the work that we have done in the mapping from the EPUB Accessibility 1.1 and the European Accessibility Act. As you may know, the European Accessibility Act is an important law, but for all the ebooks in the market in Europe starting from 2025 because all these ebooks are required to be born accessible. So to be published by publishers in an accessible way. The question now is on the standards. So the European commission is working on the standards to understand which standard can support all the different requirements. And the European commission has written some requirements specifically for accessible ebooks. So we started with the questions, do the requirements of EPUB Accessibility 1.1 meet the requirements of the European Accessibility Act? And the short answer is yes. But let me explain something more. Okay. So one requirement is ensuring access to the content, the navigation of the file content and layout including dynamic layout. The provision of the structure flexibility and choice in the presentation of the content. And this requirement is supported by the EPUB specifications where the TOC nav. So the table of contents is specified from the EPUB Accessibility 1.1 in the page navigation requirement. And lastly from the WCAG principle 1.3 which means adaptable. As Avneesh has said EPUB Accessibility 1.1 is widely based on WCAG. So for some of the requirements of the European Accessibility Act we directly linked to the WCAG principles. Another requirement is ensuring that digital rights management measures do not block accessibility features. And this is a requirement of the EPUB accessibility 1.1 which is not normative and it is in the section distribution. But let me tell you some further considerations. One thing that we understood is that WCAG 2 level single A is not enough. Because for example for the requirement of the European Act that requires presenting in fonts of adequate size and suitable shape taking into account foreseeable conditions of use and using sufficient contrast as well as adjustable spacing between letters, lines and paragraphs two success criteria of the WCAG are required. One, is 1.4.3 which is on contrast, colour contrast. And the second one is 1.4.4 which is on resize text. And both these two success criteria are from the double A level of the WCAG. So what we have understood is that for meeting European Accessibility Act at least you need a single A compliance plus some requirements of the double A. And for online retailers it is not only a meaning of content but it is only on displaying accessibility metadata. And so the UX Guidelines that Avneesh mentioned is really really important for the market. Okay. So, what are the next steps? So the European commission now is evaluating our document our mapping which was published in the W3C environment. And is defining which standard will be suitable for creating accessible ebooks within the European countries by 2025. And we think that EPUB will be in those standards and so that our work of mapping will get the results of not recreating the will within all the European institutions. Thank you - [Richard] Thank you Gregorio. So next we will turn to the user experience guide. And for this section, we'll hear from George Kerscher and from Charles LaPierre. - Hi everybody. My name is George Kerscher, Chief Innovations Officer with the DAISY Consortium. As we have heard the EPUB accessibility conformance and discoverability specification was approved years ago, 1.0 and 1.1 is nearing candidate recommendation. We have from the very beginning required the use of accessibility metadata inside the EPUB. And there are some that is required and some metadata that is optional. VitalSource two years ago in their catalogue started to display the accessibility metadata directly as it appeared in the EPUB. Of course this is machine readable, and we looked at this and instantly recognised that we needed a way to present this to people in a more palatable way. And we started working on the user experience guide. This guide was just approved in its first version, although drafts of it have been in use for well over a year already. But one item, for example, the schema.org metadata access modes sufficient equals textual gets converted to screen reader friendly. That's just one example of taking a very complicated metadata string and presenting it in a way that people will easily understand. To take us through more of the details of this, I'm turning it over to Charles. - [Charles] So finding, buying, and finally reading a publication is a very personal experience. For most of us this is routine. We go to a bookstore search for a title that we were interested in, or perhaps browse the bestseller list, then purchase the book and start reading. Now consider you're blind and relying on assistive technology to read this publication. You're wondering, will my screen reader work with this title? Are there image descriptions that will be spoken to describe these images? Are there page numbers which are accessible and is the reading order correct? So I don't hear a caution about our reading after reading a paragraph which could be dangerous. These are just a few of the accessibility concerns consumers have when trying to purchase and ultimately read a digital publication. The good news is, more and more publishers are creating born accessible i.e. accessible from the onset, not fixed later and publications and getting that accessibility validation or accessibility audits done by independent organisations, such as Benetech's Global Certified Accessible. These accessible publications needs to be easily found, and there needs to be a consistent way to expose the very technical metadata in a user-friendly way. Gregorio Pellegrino and I are the editors of the user experience guide for accessibility metadata. And we decided to divide the documents into two parts. On the one hand, you have the principles which are independent from the metadata standards used. And on the other, the techniques that are explained to developers, how to extract this information from the standards and display it to end users. Usually this metadata is in a machine readable format that only insiders can understand with special handshakes. So, in our documents we explain how to present this very technical information in a user-friendly way. The goal for digital publication catalogues like libraries and online bookstores is to be able to present accessible information in a way that can be understood by everyone and aid in the discovery of these accessible titles. Ordering this information in a meaningful and consistent way is key. So that the most important information appears first to help the user quickly determine if this publication's going to meet their specific needs. The two most important accessibility accommodations are, if the publication is, as George said, screen reader friendly, which implies that all the text in the book is accessible and any images at present are well-described. Secondly, if this publication has full audio, and then we have the next important piece, which is the accessibility summary, which is actually a human readable piece of metadata describing all of the accessibility accommodations provided by this publication. Following this are the accessibility conformance statements. What level was reached with a AA who certified it? Do they have any credentials? Et cetera. Finally displaying any hazards if present and linking to all of the accessibility metadata, including the specific accessibility features such as if there are image descriptions. Is there MathML? Table of contents, et cetera. So here we have a screenshot of a mock accessibility page showing this information in order of importance. At the top, we have a screen reader friendly, then followed by the accessibility summary and then the conformance level reached. Which was the EPUB accessibility and WCAG AA conformance. And this was certified by Benetech Global Certified Accessible with our GCA logo. Followed by all of the other accessibility metadata, including any features, hazards, access modes, et cetera. As mentioned before, the general principles can be adapted to different standards of metadata for accessible publications. Therefore, we thought to offer useful documentation to developers with code examples, showing how to extract this information from the metadata and present it according to the principles. Currently, we have techniques for the EPUB metadata in schema.org, which exists inside the EPUB and for ONIX. But we would also like to increase the list of technical documentation in the future for different metadata standards. We started with these two because the world of digital publications and EPUBs, these are the two ways to describe accessibility. Both of which are important, but for different use cases. Metadata within the digital publication, such as schema.org and the EPUB metadata data is useful for all systems that receive the physical EPUB file. And do the ingestion before making them available on their platforms or within the reading application that these files are available. Secondly, metadata along with the supply chain in ONIX is good for all the other cases of catalogues that present collections of digital publications without actually having the file available. Like digital libraries, online bookstores, et cetera. Not all the accessibility metadata can exist inside the EPUB is available in ONIX. Other, and or other metadata standards, such as MARC, M A R C which is used in libraries and J A T S used for journal articles. Harmonisation between these different metadata standards is work that has already started with new accessibility features being added to ONIX 3.1. And future work to be done as we continue to support these metadata standards in our ecosystem. In parallel to the work being done in ONIX, the next standard which looks promising is MARC-21. As libraries are looking also to provide this accessibility information to their customers. And the final two slides we have, if you're looking for more information of all the accessibility metadata, the code list for ONIX, the crosswalk between these standards, the get hub repos, as well as links to the principle documents and techniques are provided as well. So thank you very much. - [Richard] Thank you, George and thank you, Charles. There's lots of work happening to ensure that books coming from publishers have great accessibility. And these digital publications will be read using an app, website or hardware device, which we refer to as a reading system. In this presentation we'll tell you about DAISY's reading systems evaluation project. The speakers in this session are myself, Richard Orme, George Kerscher, Erin Lucas, and Stacy Ray. So let's start with George to tell us about the project objectives. - [George] We've got a couple of key goals where we need to be able to help developers to create the best possible reading systems they can. And to provide consumers and institutions with the information they need to make a really good decision about what they're going to be using to provide a great reading experience. We started this in 2013 and the board approved the project to do these evaluations. And we started out where the BISG and the IDPF were running the EPUBTest.org system. But over time it was the DAISY Consortium that continued to develop the work. And it was the accessibility testing that everybody was looking at. So today we've taken over the design and management of that website. So if we take a look at the EPUBtest.org website, it's really quite simple with three areas. One, with test books, one where the results can be found, and one where we provide information about participating. So looking at the test books, the test books are key to the work that we do. All the books are designed for a separate category. So non-visual reading that is done with screen readers. There's the visual adjustments that is very important for low-vision readers and for people with dyslexia. And the read aloud function is very important where we can demonstrate reading systems that do the read aloud functions and highlight the information as it's being read. And then we also have testing for math and for extended descriptions. Each individual test has an ID and a title and a series of instructions on how to perform the test and what the success criteria is for passing the test. - [Richard] Okay Well, the results from these tests are recorded on the website. So let's take a look now at the results section. There are lots of evaluation results shown in this grid, so it can be filtered and searched to make it convenient for you. The columns are arranged to show us the reading system, assistive technology and operating system. And then the names of the different test books, where the percentage showing the number of tests that were passed in that test book. Much more useful than a percentage though, are the individual test results. So in the results page, we can review each test with its description and see the result for this reading system and any notes that have been provided by the evaluator. Let's hear now from the developers of reading systems who've participated in this project. Between them, they provide digital textbooks and other publications to millions of students in over 240 countries. The first voice is Erin from RedShelf who's joined in conversation by Stacy, from VitalSource. - [Erin] Having the opportunity to have the, our rating system evaluated was absolutely crucial in, really even standing up our accessibility practise at RedShelf. Because it was such fantastic feedback, and it's done in such a way that not only developers can understand what you're talking about, but you know, everyone within an organisation can understand the results of your tests. - [Stacy] With the test books and having the results comparative of cross, not only bookshelf, but also with competitive products that objectivity for me is really important. It focuses on the key areas that are important for accessibility and then removes from it any kind of issues related to specific content. So, it's really important to kind of level that playing field and give students and institutions an opportunity to evaluate consistently across platforms. - [Erin] It's kind of almost a competitive thing in a way, like, you know, we watch their scores and they probably watch our scores and we wanna make sure that we're, you know, on the same playing field. Right? So, I mean, I think that's great and that's probably not just us. Like everybody, their goal is to have the best scores possible. So almost kind of makes it fun and competitive for our developers too. Because they just have this end goal in mind of getting 100% reading system evaluations scores. - [Stacy] Right. And that visibility across all of the reading systems, like Erin said really helps us, you know, increase our game. Right? And so we're all levelling up to be, you know, comparative to other reading systems. And I think that together we lift everyone and all of the users that have disabilities. - [Erin] Yeah. That's 100% true. You know, the end result is that that, you know, student or any reader in general is having the most accessible experience. You know, so, you know, all the other things aside, that's really the goal. - [George] We welcome participation from everywhere. We've got a conference call that we hold on Zoom, approximately every three weeks we have developers join us. We have publishers join us and our team of testers. And we welcome more participation in there. And we'd love to see people from around the world with different language skills, joining in with the work that we do. - [Richard] Thanks, George. Well, for more information about this project, including our work plans and how to contact us to participate, you can find us in the projects area on the DAISY website. You can go straight there using daisy.org/epubtest Now I'll turn over to Avneesh Singh who will tell us about future plans. - [Avneesh] Hello everyone again. So I'll be talking about what are the future plans for accessible publishing, starting with the EPUB Accessibility specification 1.1. We will be encouraging the implementations after the candidate recommendation stage. And the next year we need to drive the accessibility specification to the final recommendation. We will further improve the user experience guide based on the feedback that we get from the implementers. In fact we already have issues in our issue tracker that we need to resolve. Very interesting work. And we will continue to harmonise the metadata formats for accessibility. Some more improvements are required for ONIX and EPUB plus schema.org mapping. And, the MARC-21 is also on in our radar. Another interesting thing is that we have started work on a new document. It is about accessibility summary. Accessibility summary is the only human readable accessibility metadata I would say. And a publisher can provide very valuable information in this piece. For example which are the additional accessibility features that the publishers are providing. Or, is there some crucial accessibility feature which is missing? And publishers are asking us is there a best practise for writing the accessibility summary? So we have started a work on a document for guiding the publishers how to write really good accessibility summary. And we will continue to create more best practises for accessible publishing. Another discussion is starting in the publishing community it is all about what is the next major specification for publishing. We know that EPUB 3 is one of the popular publishing formats at the same time it's a fact that EPUB 3 is not able to address the needs of all the segments of publishing industry. So that this discussion has started what major specification can we work on to address more needs of the publishing industry? And we are participating in the discussion for ensuring accessibility and internationalisation. And coming to the reading systems, Well, one of the really nice focus is the testing on MathML and extended descriptions. You know, the support for MathML standard description is not perfect at this point of time also but the technology is evolving rapidly. So in next year we would like to do another round of testings of these advanced features and check where the technology are and so that we are able to provide more guidance to the educators, the universities, the students. And if we have more funding, another thing that we would like to do in the reading systems testing is to expand the reading system testing to the reading solutions of the libraries. But it needs heavy lifting. So if there is funding that would be good. So this is this a lot of work that we need to do in the next year. But, you know, that the change in the environment comes only with hard work. - [Richard] Thank you Avneesh. Well, very exciting plans there. We're now coming to the end of this DAISY Information Sharing day. Once again, thank you to all of our speakers through all our different sessions and thank you to our audience too. Our audience who are interested in learning about the work of the DAISY Consortium, our global nonprofit organisation, our organisation, our members and our partners, all working together on innovative and impactful projects to further our mission, developing global solutions for accessible publishing and reading. Well, that's it for this marathon session. I hope you'll join us again soon. And in the meantime, thank you for your time. Stay safe and well and have a wonderful rest of your day. Goodbye.