And I'd like to welcome you to our 90 min session today. Born digital, born accessible, making the documents and data in open scholarship accessible to all.
This session is part of a series of webinars commemorating the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Year of Open Science, and is co-sponsored by the UMD Libraries and UMD Pact, a cross campus group at UMD, working to advance open scholarship at the university.
In today's session, our fantastic lineup of speakers will present the case for making the born digital products of research.
Accessible at the point of creation. Our panelists will share their individual remarks first, one by one, and then they will spend time reacting as a panel to the issues and ideas raised.
We hope to leave approximately 15 min at the end of our session for audience questions and comments. To that end, we ask that attendees use the Q&A function in Zoom to submit questions and comments to the panelists.
No, I'd like to introduce our moderator for today's discussion. Lindsey Inge Carpenter, head of research education at the UMD Libraries.
In addition to offering workshops and events for graduate students and faculty in her role, Lindsey supports instructors in adopting, adapting, and creating open educational resources.
And she serves as subject specialist for UMDs second language acquisitions department. Lindsey, thank you for agreeing to introduce our speakers.
And for serving as our moderator. Hi, turn the microphone over to you. Thank you.
Thank you, Adrian, and good afternoon, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. So as Adrian mentioned, my function here today will be to introduce our speakers.
I'm going to introduce all the panelists at the beginning, then let each have an opportunity to share their presentation and then at the conclusion of all presentations, will take your questions.
So our panelists today in order of presentations, we have Dr. Jonathan Lazar, who is a professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland.
And it's the executive director of the Maryland Initiative for Digital Accessibility. And a faculty member in the human computer interaction lab.
He is authored or edited over 200 referee articles and 17 books, including his most recent foundations of information law.
Published in September, 2023. And has been granted to US patents for his work on accessible web-based security features for blind users.
Dr. Lazar has been on the executive board of the Friends of the Maryland Library for the blind and print disabled since 2,009.
Yes, I served as the co chair of the Cambridge University Workshop on Universal Access and Assistive Technology since 2,012.
Has been on the program committee of the ACM Conference on Accessible Computing most years since 2,006.
Our next 2 panelists are Stephanie S. Rosen. Who has worked at the intersection of accessibility and higher education since 2,010 and is currently the IT accessibility assistant director.
At University of Michigan IT services. Rosen has a background in the humanities, digital scholarship, and libraries, and has contributed to accessibility and publishing and information science.
Well, working at the University of Michigan Library. And Rachel Woodbrook who has worked in data curation at the University of Michigan Library since 2,018.
And is currently the data curation specialist for humanities, social science, and medicine. Her previous work was in global health research and at Community College Libraries.
She oversaw and contributed to an accessibility primer for the data curation network. And his invested in extending the knowledge established around accessibility to best practices for data creation and sharing.
Thank you again to all of our panelists. Dr. Lazar, I will turn it over to you.
Great. Thank you so much. Going to minimize the video here. Great.
Thank you so much. Good afternoon, everyone. If you're on the East Coast, good morning or good evening, depending on where else you might be.
So excited to be talking to you today about the born accessible model for documents. Now I want to start just with an overview of what we're going to talk about today.
So there are basically 3 key points here. First of all, a background on the philosophy of the born accessible model.
What we know so far about the born accessible model and then applying born-accessible concepts to documents and data.
So let's first of all start there. So background on the philosophy of born accessible. Now you often hear this.
Inaccessible digital technologies are a barrier to inclusion in education, health, employment, commerce, and civic engagement until the technology is remediated.
But I say, why do we have to remediate the technology? Why do we have to wait until the technologies were immediate?
Why, why are we doing it this way? This is why we need the born accessible model. It doesn't make sense to build technologies, build them in excessively, and then remediate them.
So you hear often the disability rights community talking about this we want everything to be born accessible and I give this example right here.
Anil Lewis, who is executive vice president of the National Federation of the Blind. In his testimony, the US Senate Special Committee on Aging in 2,022.
He said there are many public agencies spending significant time and money to remediate inaccessible documents created through an anacated process rather than investing in the training necessary to teach someone to create a born-accessible document during the initial design and development process.
You can look through testimony, you can look through advocacy, you'll always find the disability rights community saying, born accessible.
Now, if you look also, right, in kind of the the practitioner literature in human computer interaction, you get a great article for instance from Elizabeth Churchill putting accessibility first where she talks about how building a technology to be inaccessible or digital content to be inaccessible and remediating how that's not an effective approach.
And she says, if you release it, right, if you build it, release it, and then people with disabilities have to wait for access.
That is a form of societal discrimination. It's not only that that wait while you have to wait for it to be mediated is a form of sidel discrimination.
Right? It also makes the perception that accessibility is expensive. People say, well, it costs so much to make it accessible. Right?
That's because you built it the wrong way. You know, you wouldn't build a new university building, right, build it in excessively and then say now we're gonna go back and add the ramps and we're gonna add elevators.
Similarly, building technology inaccessibly and then making it accessible. That doesn't make sense.
It's not cost-effective. And Elizabeth Churchill mentions this in her article. When accessibility requirements are deferred, he creates a backlog of she calls it accessibility debt.
Which will lead to downstream costs and it'll slow you down much more than taking these requirements into account upfront ever could.
And so we know we're mediating after the fact is not the most innovative or elegant or effective or cost-effective.
Design solution. And in fact, it also leads to future barriers. And I give this example from the US Department of Labor.
Unfortunately, it was the US Department of Labor, right? In beginning of the 2,000 tens, the US Department of Labor requested a waiver saying they should be able to procure inexccessible right software.
Why? Well, we don't have any people with disabilities who might use the software. Of course, the problem is that they didn't currently have any employees and if they if they purchase that software it would stop them in the future from hiring employees with disabilities it was a barrier to employing people with disabilities in the future.
Oh and by the way it's the Department of Labor. Little bit embarrassing, come on, they should feel guilty.
So this idea of the born accessible model. Right? Of going born accessible is that first of all people with disabilities have access at the same time, right?
The cost for making something accessible comes negligible, comes much lower, and it really comes up with innovative and elegant solutions.
By the way, we also teach this way unfortunately at the university. We still teach a remediation approach.
Think about where most universities teach about digital accessibility. You learn all of your technology things and your last year like last class in the graduate program or senior level undergraduate, that's where you learn about accessibility.
Oh, you have to go back and fix it. Rather than teaching about accessibility throughout the curriculum. So we also teach a remediation approach rather than a born-accessible approach.
It's usually taught at the end of the academic program, which is not the right way to teach it.
We want the world to move towards a born accessible model. We need more knowledge about the born accessible model and I'll talk about that but we also have to acknowledge that there are a lot of things that will need remediation.
And so we both need knowledge about born accessible approaches. And remediation approaches. You know, I give the example of 2 colleagues of mine from the University of Maryland.
Baron Jordan works on creating technical standards to create kiosks that are accessible from the start. Watch you paying in computer science works on, okay, so you're blind and you come up to a kiosk in your daily life.
What do you do to figure out how to get access to an inaccessible kiosk in your daily life that already exists.
So we need both remediation of something's inaccessible, how do I deal with it, as well as how do we make sure that the future is born accessible?
So we need work on both. Now! What do we already know about the born accessible model? And this is actually challenging and we talk about as the born accessible model, but I really want to say it's almost more like a theory.
Because if you look at disability rights advocates. If you look at publishers, if you look right, do you have all these people organizations saying I want to move to the born accessible model.
We want to make this born accessible. How do we make it born accessible? Well, the challenge is that if you go and look in the research literature.
If you go in the practitioner literature, there's a call for making things born accessible, but there isn't the deep base of literature and methodology about how you do this.
So if you're looking for, you say, I want to make a born accessible, why can't I find things about that?
That's because the born accessible model, right, hasn't really been totally defined yet. There is not a base of knowledge about it.
So, you know, I saw this occurring more and more and I discussed it with some of my colleagues.
And so, you know, I lead the Maryland initiative for digital accessibility. It's over 45 faculty and staff at the University of Maryland.
Almost 50 external organizational partners all focused on making the world of technology more inclusive for people with disabilities.
We have 16 disability rights organizations as partners. So I sent out a request to all of the disability rights organizations and said, So you're always asking for the born accessible model.
It seems there really isn't kind of a base of literature or methodology about how to do this, what do you think should be in the born accessible model?
Right? So this really comes from my, you know, sending emails and interviewing and serving our disability rights organization partners.
I want to be clear this is not like a final methodology. This is not, you know, hundreds of articles written.
This is what I've been able to discern so far from talking with our disability rights partners. And that's that.
The organizational partners, the disability rights organizations. Seem to believe that there are 4 core concepts of the born accessible model.
One is that you have clear accessibility goals from the start of a project. 2 is that you include people with disabilities from the start of a project.
3 that you code to accessibility standards or if you're doing you know data or documents you mark up to accessibility standards and 4 is that you involve a broader group even of people with disabilities in user valuations.
So I'm going to talk about each one of these briefly and then we're going to move on talking about documents specifically.
Okay, so first of all, set clear accessibility goals from the start of a project. Now, it's important to note that we have goals to make something accessible, but it doesn't only help people disabilities.
The image we have on the screen right now is of the state at the University of Maryland, right? And so the data, you know, depending on the data, you know, depending on the source says about between 20 or 30% of people in the United States have a disability.
But there's lots of other research that shows it's not just that 25% that benefit from accessibility, right?
Actually, majority of people without disabilities benefit from accessibility changes from assistive technology. From compliance with the web content accessibility guidelines.
So we move forward to this this third graphic which shows in the University of Maryland Stadium most people with and without disabilities.
Benefit from, right, technologies that are accessible. So I just want to start by pointing it out because sometimes organizations will start thinking about, well, how many people does this help?
Actually, it helps them a majority of people with and without disabilities.
So what are some methods towards this goal? Whoever is involved in developing technology procuring technology content, right?
Make sure everyone is training about accessibility. Only use tools for either code generation or content generation that are equipped for accessibility.
Clearly define the market opportunity while again noting that accessibility helps everyone. Right? And make sure that you use checklists, use scenarios, have personas involving people with disabilities.
Regardless of whether you're doing something external or internal, if you're developing content in-house, right?
Have accessibility be a clearly required goal if you're let's say procuring digital libraries externally make sure that you have contracts that specify accessibility.
Use procurement controls, right, clearly defined what the legal requirements are, right? Libraries, university libraries, public libraries, any type of library is covered under various set where we're not giving a presentation on law but you know you've got title 2 title 3 of the ADA public universities under title 2 private under title 3 section 5 of for the rehab act we could do a whole nother talk about legal
requirements. But philosophically, how you approach born accessible. Look at what Sarah Hurlinger said, whose director of accessibility at Apple.
Accessibility is something that's brought in at the very early stages of everything we do. The accessibility teams, they're working with every design team on every new product to say, okay.
We're gonna come out with this new whatever it might be and how do we ensure that this product will work for everyone?
Andy Stefan, creator of the quorum programming language, which is a born accessible programming language.
Said how do we make programming accessible to everyone? We started by observing high school age blind individuals using a variety of programming languages and those observations led to the discovery that language syntax was hard to use for everyone, right?
And it helped us figure out which pieces of the code were the likely culprits.
Right? Ethan Eisman, the senior vice president of design at Slack said, we took accessibility considerations very seriously throughout the development process and tried to bake it into the fundamental way we were working from a design perspective and ensuring that the product was as accessible as we could possibly make.
So there's this idea that, you know, organizations, businesses are actually considering accessibility as a design goal from the start, but they're often doing it because they say, we think this is the right way to go.
They don't really have a full methodology built out yet for born accessible. So the second component of the born accessible model so far include people with disabilities from the start of the design process.
Again, Sarah Hurlinger from Apple. We've always incorporated members of the community into the process as we've done this.
We believe in the mantra of the disability community. Nothing about us without us. Because you can't design a product that's really gonna work for someone if you're on the outside looking in and you think you know how something is going to work.
Now, for those of you familiar with concepts of user center design or participatory design or value sensitive design, guess what?
The born accessible models within those same philosophical traditions but focuses specifically on users with disabilities and the needs of people with disabilities and the specific challenges in trying to build technologies or content.
So what are some of the methods here? Well, obviously hire people with disabilities as developers, as content managers, but also be aware they may not represent the typical person with the disability.
They may be sort of above averaging their technical skills. Use a participatory design approach where you involve people with disabilities.
How user advisory boards where you have a board of library patrons with disabilities or faculty and students with disabilities, right?
Disability rights organizational advisory boards. That's what we have with MIDA, with the Maryland initiative for digital accessibility.
When I have questions, I go directly to our advisory board of disability rights groups. Right? And can I tell you the most common question I get about this is, well, which groups do you involve or which do you ask specific questions?
I'll tell you, I involve as many groups as wanna be part. I send out the questions the groups themselves figure out the priority so they will let me know which ones to them are priorities and which ones are not.
That's how. I don't make the choice, right? I let the disability rights groups make the choice.
And you know, if you look in the literature, you can find some projects that were usually AT focused.
So they were focused on building some type of technology, some type of app. For people with disabilities.
So like Lampost, this project from Google about building an email writing prototype for people with dyslexia, which included people dyslexia from the beginning or find my things from Microsoft where they had blind collaborators helping them build.
But notice that for both of these, they were tools specifically focused on that population. You don't see as much having people with disabilities involved in general technologies and digital content and documents.
And things like that. So we need to try to move to that model. Now, where do you often hear this phrase, born accessible?
If you search on born accessible, I can tell you the top 10 things you'll find online probably all relate to publishers.
Publishers have been the ones who have been moving forward and saying, born accessible. Yes, we believe in this.
But the challenge is that born accessible books is a little bit easier from a process point of view than either born accessible like documents or born accessible just technologies.
Why? Because a book typically, you know, it starts digitally as a book, right? They transform it into paper, they can transform it at the same time into an accessible EPUB 3.
But the book typically doesn't have that much user interaction with it. You don't go back and update and change the book multiple times.
So A, it's done as a one-off and B, usually have publishers doing this.
When we talk about documents, we're often talking about a lot of different content creators who may or may not have expertise when it comes to accessibility, right?
And documents are being created all the time. There's always new documents. There's always tons of updates.
There's changes to documents, right? So it's not exactly the same as books. And it's kind of a halfway between books and let's say websites or things like that, you know, or or even apps.
So the third part so far of the born accessible model is code to accessibility standards. This is probably the one that most people are most familiar with, right?
So if you've heard of the web content accessibility guidelines, by the way, not just for web, there is guidance from the WAI about how you apply those concepts.
To other technologies. EPUB 3, many of you are familiar with. Right, certainly EPUB 3 is a great guideline for technical standard for accessible books.
PDF UA. Most people are familiar with the pains of trying to make a PDF document accessible, but you may not be familiar with the technical standards for how to do so.
And of course, WCAG 2 ICT, which is again how you apply WCAG concepts.
And by the way, WCAG, even if you have a digital document format where you can't find guidelines on accessibility, right?
You can apply the core concepts of WCAG. I mean, WCAG is the only technical standard that has its own music video and that has hundreds of videos explaining it.
It's a really good way to easily learn about digital accessibility. So apply WCAG concepts.
Now, as much as we say standards, use technical standards, technical standards by themselves are not enough. And there was this great article in there's a line of research after this.
Guidelines are only half the story. Accessibility problems encountered by blind users on the web.
And they found that only 50% of the problems encountered by blind users were actually covered by success criteria in Wikiped.
So just saying we're gonna code to standards, you know, I think of that as a very narrow form of accessibility.
It's almost like the most, the, the least accessibility you can do. I want all of us to think more broadly, broad accessibility, the born accessible approach.
And many governments take this approach. Even if you look at the US government, right, they have this great training program called Trusted Tester, but trusted tester basically focuses on compliance with standards.
There are other governments that have a broader approach or I should say not only other governments but so in in some federal and state laws in the US, they take this approach of compliance with technical standards.
However, if you look at, for instance, the air carrier access act. Which is a federal statute, the regulation associated with a requires that you test the interfaces with people with disabilities.
So it's not only just technical compliance. We want with standards. We want to broaden it out more into involving people with disabilities and having accessibility as a goal, not just, oh, we'll check it for accessibility later on and fix it.
So there are lots of approaches that can help compliance with technical standard. I did the study, you have an image here of a study I did about a decade ago about the role of webpage templates.
Obviously, if your coding used technical standards, but use also tools that create standards and you know make sure that you provide templates that help people and right all these different approaches don't just use automated tools right use manual inspections to determine if your meeting compliance with standards so there's a there's actually a pretty good base of literature about how to move towards compliance with standards in documents in technologies.
And the fourth one, the fourth component of the born-accessible model so far because as I said it's an ongoing theory we're still building it is involve people with disabilities in user valuations.
Now, the usability testing should involve a much larger circle of people than those involved with the design. Not just the people who were involved with design, because obviously they may have some biases they're familiar with it have clear inclusion criteria have diverse representation more disabilities more levels of disability right so don't just have blind screen producers have some users who use Braille devices have some low vision users who use magnification, et
cetera. Anytime you want to, determine if people meet inclusion criteria, don't ask medical data, ask what technology they can use.
In in digital accessibility, we focus on the societal and social model of disability, not the medical model.
Don't say what is your vision loss. Say, are you able to use screen magnification or only able to use a screen reader?
That gives you a sense of if they have some vision, visual acuity and and some visual use they're still there.
Also let users use their technology environment. Why? They have it set up to maximize the likelihood of their success.
That's a conservative approach that shows that you're not overestimating, right? If they're using their own assistive technology with their own settings, that will show users at their best.
And when you do use ability testing involving people with disabilities, make sure that you think ahead about transportation.
If you can do remote evaluations, that would be great. Don't make any last minute changes because transportation may be an issue.
And allow for flexibility if either people need different format of communication. Right, so they need a Braille document, so they need audio guides, whether they need a sign language interpreter, or one of my favorite examples of a usability test we did.
We were testing a scheduling application involving someone with Down syndrome. And we ask them to create a note on the schedule for Bill's birthday party from one to 2 PM.
And our user said, why would you have a birthday party for only 1 h? Why don't Bill deserves a birthday party at least 3 h?
I'm not doing this task. Unless you let me put in for 3 h and we said, sure, that's fine.
Right? It was fine. You're not doing a strict experimental design. You're doing usability testing.
So be flexible. To make it a useful and enjoyable experience. For your users with disabilities. Now, one thing I really like, the National Health Service in the UK, every 2 weeks they do user valuations and one out of every 6 users needs to have a diverse need and that's just their policy as listed in their gov.
Uk service standards carry out research with participants who represent the potential audience for the service, including people with access needs.
So I like their approach. I think we should move to doing more on going user testing and make sure that we have you know every one out of every 4 one of every 5 users should have a disability.
So that summarizes what we know so far about the born accessible model. As I said, still under development because there's been kind of demand for it.
And people are interested in it, but really we don't have this base of knowledge of exactly how to implement it yet.
So next I want to move on to How we apply these concepts to document.
How do we apply the born accessible model to documents? So let's first of all start with considering that different formats can be harder or easier to make accessible.
Right? Certainly the PDF format right now is one of the hardest formats to make accessible.
The tools and I do collaborative research with Adobe, we're working with Adobe on trying to make tools for both remediation and for born accessible document creation, we're trying to make the much easier use.
But right now, HTML is a much easier document format to make accessible. Word is a much easier document format to make accessible.
EPUB 3, much easier. And realize that not only will the format determine how easy or hard it is to actually make it accessible.
But also realize that at various points you may be transforming the format from one format to another. Right?
And you also may be updating the document. Right? It may be a document that changes often or it may be a document that's like in a journal once it's published, it's published.
So, you know, think about those things. The different formats you could do, maybe you want to do it in multiple formats, I would think that's a good approach, right?
Think about the transformation of formats and then how often the documents going to be updated. So for instance, consider this Word to PDF pipeline.
This is one of the most challenging pipelines, right, of format translation from Word to PDF.
Why? You can make something accessible using the markup features in MS Word. When you transform it into a PDF, depending on how you do it, and depending on what platform, you may have a majority of the markup for accessibility still there in the PDF or not.
And, but it depends on do you create the PDF within MS Word or do you create the PDF in Adobe Acrobat?
And surprisingly, it makes a difference if you do it in a, in a, an Apple version versus a Windows version.
So a Mac OS versus a Windows version, right? Different amounts of Markup for accessibility that you start in Word are using Word for Mac or are you using Word for, Word for Windows?
It'll actually make a difference, right? And where are you creating it? And so there are all these different factors.
So you could actually change the process of document transformation to make it so that you have to remediate less.
You'll still have to remediate some in Adobe Acrobat. But so there all these things to consider.
But I wanna say and make clear to everyone that most of our current document creation tools Use a remediation approach.
Right? We want to talk about born accessible documents. But the reality is we want it really in the end in the future to be born accessible so as a content creator let's say a faculty member, let's say a librarian as they are creating the content, that they will be creating it excessively as they are writing.
Right now we don't get have tools that really support that. So the best way can do right now is make sure that as documents go through our pipeline of publication, whether it's a document at a university, whether it's a document that the library is putting into a journal, whether it is, you know, a digital library that's being procured.
We can do our best to make sure that we are getting the documents remediated. But we have to be honest that in terms of a true born accessible approach Not yet.
We don't really have the tools yet that allow the content creators create at that moment as the writing of content.
We're working on a project with Adobe on that and I'll show you some examples of that.
But so the best we can do right now is still remediation, but I don't mean remediation after it's released.
I mean, right, as soon as we get even a draft document remediated then while we're closer to the content creator and can ask questions and clarifications.
So for instance, we are working right now with Adobe as one of our Maryland initiative for digital accessibility project.
We're working with Adobe on trying to create a born-accessible approach for for Adobe Express.
Adobe Express is a new tool out of Adobe, right? And it's to create kind of short form content.
Right now, they are already making the tweaks to make the tool accessible, but the content that it produces is not yet accessible in any way, shape or form.
This is an ideal opportunity to say, let's rethink the process. How would we support content creators in creating accessible content so it doesn't need to be remediated?
So just here are 3 examples from some recent mock ups that we've been trying.
Right, here's one. So as the user, as the content creators writing content, Right?
They increase the font size and bold this line, the Fox. Right? But do we express could ask, you just increased the font size of the line.
Is this a heading? Yes or no? Right? So it would be kind of in line as they're doing as they're creating the content.
It would ask questions. Another example would be This one right here, when an image is inserted. Right, Adobe Express has automatically generated an alt text caption for this image.
Is this accurate? Son sending in a mountain ring. Now I will tell you that some of the Microsoft tools are starting to provide alt text suggestions, but it doesn't interrupt you.
You have to go look for it. So it's kind of defaulted to not interrupt you. We like the idea of putting it in line in the process.
Note one other item here is that we are trying out this idea. Of saying, by the way, adding an alt text caption would make your content accessible for up to 25% more users.
We have to think about as a content creators creating content. How How do we, how do we make it so for the content creator, they say, this is valuable, this is worth my time.
25% more users can understand this content. I will take the time then because most of the time Most content creators don't realize it.
Here's another example. Content creator is writing a list. Right? We're checking out that we're testing out this idea.
Adobe Express Auto Tagging has detected this is possibly a list. Is this a list? Right?
And by the way, if it's a list, the user doesn't need to do anything else.
Just say, yes, it's a list. And notice that we update there to 30% more users will be able to access this content.
So one of the things we had for this project already a series of listening sessions involving disability rights groups. The first and most important thing they all said is we want to make sure that accessibility supporting features are the default.
Not that you have to go look for them, not that you have to enable them. They always pop up when you open the content creation application.
It's a priority. We want to make sure it's not opt-in where the user has to go look for it.
We want to make sure it's already there. So any features need to be not only enabled in your content creation process, but also defaulted.
Right? And you know, we, we determined so far again from these disability rights groups. It's important to distinguish between asking a content creator like a list.
Is it a list? Great. All you have to say is it's a list. The tool can do the rest or others like a table. Is it a table?
Well, you're gonna have to create some table headers. Or maybe, right, is it an image?
Here's a suggested image. Is this accurate? So we'll still need to have human in the loop for some aspects of document accessibility.
So I want to give some suggestions. For libraries and for other organizations and administrators who are in charge of managing document creation.
Because if you want to end up with accessible documents, you really have to plan out for it. You have to put it in the process.
Right? So for instance, you As I mentioned earlier, provide accessible templates. Right? That is likely to lead to more accessibility, provide obviously training about accessibility, specify accessible formats.
Right? Maybe you want to choose one format over another. I'll talk about that on the next slide.
Provide software tools. If you need to mark it up for accessibility using Acrobat Pro, make sure you have Acrobat Pro.
Have clear policies and this is really important. Make it count. You know, I always say we're trying to get more syllabi, more course materials, more documents at a university to be accessible.
But yet when faculty go through an appointment, a motion, a promotion and tenure process an APT process is what's called at the University of Maryland.
Now where do they get credit for it? They don't get awards. They don't get credit.
They're not evaluated on it. So you can imagine some faculty say, well, this must not be a priority.
I don't get evaluated for it. It's not mentioned in my promotion and tenure materials.
So make it count if you want to have accessible documents, make sure that faculty, staff, whoever is creating the documents, make sure that they get credit for doing a good job and it gets noted if it's not accessible.
The White House Office of Management and Budget put out this memo about 2 days before Christmas in 2023.
How do we make the federal government more accessible, digitally more accessible? And there was this really interesting paragraph.
And it said in the memo from the White House, from their own be at the White House, agencies should use HTML as the default when creating a publishing content online in lieu of publishing content and other electronic document formats that are designed for printing or preserving and protecting the content and layout.
Of the document, EG, PDF, and Doc X. Okay? Did, did you hear that?
The White House suggested to government agencies put it in HTML. Don't put it in PDF.
Don't put it in docx and said this practice makes web content easier to find, use, maintain, and makes it work more reliably with assistive technology.
By the memo also talks about how it's less expensive. The OMB memo. So it is okay to have policies saying we prefer one format or the other.
Now, if you are managing document creation, like let's say you are building a digital library, you are collecting content from different sources, you are putting together a journal, you're putting together a conference, you're building an archive, whatever it is.
There are different models you could use to try and make sure that people are submitting. Right? Accessible content.
So I've been involved with efforts in 2 different professional conferences related to human computer interaction.
And they use 2 different models. So the year that I was in charge of digital accessibility for the Kai conference.
The computer, human, interaction conference. The model there was that content creators, authors, faculty and students wrote papers, they were given guidelines and were given accessible templates and told, please create excessively.
Right? And if they're paper was accepted, they then received a report from Acrobat on where they had problems with accessibility in their document.
Just by giving the template just by providing information and giving feedback about where there are barriers that doubled the rate of accessible papers.
That didn't mean that we got to 100% accessible, but double the rate just by informing people and making them aware.
Now contrast that with the assets model. I was general chair of the assets conference. It's the ACM conference on accessible computing.
I was General Chair in 2,021. The model there is that you must submit an accessible paper.
If you submit a paper for a review that's not accessible, it gets automatically rejected. Right? Automatically rejected.
That gets people to make sure it's accessible before it's submitted. So you could use the Kai model of informing people and that may double the accessibility level, but it may not get you all the way there or the assets model, which you get you closer to the goal of all documents that people are submitting are accessible.
So think about these models. For how you inform people, how you require it for people. Right? Content creators who are submitting content to anything.
Right? How about dissertations being submitted? Right? To be archived at a university library.
That's another example of where you could do this. Always mention the why. You have a lot of people who don't understand digital accessibility and don't say, well, how does this benefit me?
Understand that and communicate that 25 to 30% depending on which statistic you use more people can read your document if it's accessible.
I always think one way to frame that is, you know, faculty always care about what they write that people read it and cite it, the more people who can read and sight your paper, the more likely you're gonna be cited the higher H index is going to be.
Accessibility influences your H index. For those of you not familiar with H index, H index is this statistic that faculty are often judged by about how many papers they have, how often those papers are cited over a period of time.
If you've gone through a promotion in ten-year cases as a faculty member, you know what your H index score is.
Trust me, you know what it is. So make sure that people who create content and want that content to be sighted make sure they know of the impact it can have to make sure that content is accessible can influence their citations, their H index, more people can read it.
Realize that you should start with policy. We actually did an article, it was a Brian Wins, Paul Yeager, Ursula Gorman, myself, where we survey journal editors about their accessibility policies.
And you know what we found? Most journals don't have a policy on accessibility. Most journals don't even inspect their articles for accessibility.
And most journal editors say, publishers take care of that. I don't take care of that. And guess what?
Publishers often don't. So this is an article in the University of Maryland Journal of Business and Technology Law, a socio legal framework for improving the accessibility of research articles for people with disabilities.
By the way, if you are also acquiring a digital library from any type of professional organization and they say well it doesn't have to be accessible.
Most professional organized scientific organizations receive federal money if so they are covered under section 504 they have to have their digital databases be accessible.
If you're procuring digital libraries and documents, right, use VPs, voluntary product accessibility templates, use procurement controls.
My favorite is the indemnification clause. Make vendors sign that if you get sued for having an inaccessible whatever it is you've procured from them, document database that the vendors on the hook.
Right? You want to indemnify the university. All universities should do this. If a vendor is saying it's accessible, they should be willing to say, yeah, if you get sued for accessibility, we're on the hook.
That's an indemnification clause. Push vendors hard. What are their current plans for digital accessibility in their document databases?
What have they done in terms of the legacy documents? Right? Require a roadmap from these organizations.
There is so much that can be done. To move documents. Towards a born accessible future. We still will need to mediate a lot.
Let's bring attention to the topic. Digital accessibility of documents and data. Let's move forward to under better understand this model.
Who wants to work on a born accessible approach in a library? Contact me. I am more than happy to work with an advise you on this.
Right? My goal and our goal at the Maryland Initiative for digital accessibility is to move the world towards a more born-accessible approach where people with disabilities don't have to wait where accessibility is a primary design goal where we include it from the start.
Working together, we can all do this. I have the website listed here for the Maryland initiative for digital accessibility.
Maida. Dot comd. Edu. I'm also a faculty member the human computer in action lab.
My email address is JLAZ A r@umd.edu. And again, the born accessible model, what we know so far is it's these 4 components.
Set clear accessibility goals from the start of a project. Include people with disabilities from the start of the design process.
Code to accessibility standards and involve people with disabilities in user valuations. All right, I look forward to hearing from my co presenters and the awesome content that they're gonna deliver as well and I look forward to having discussion later on.
And and questions and we're all gonna work together to moving the world more towards a born-accessible model for scholarship, documents, data, you name it, we can do it.
Thank you.
I feel highly motivated by that. That was a great conclusion. I put the address for, a web address from Ida and Jonathan's email in the chat.
So hopefully everybody could see that. And I'm also going to put the link to Stephanie and Rachel slides in the chat so you can follow along.
And Stephanie and Rachel, I will turn it over to you.
Thank you, Lindsey. And that was a great presentation, Jonathan. I think we're excited to see now since we didn't see each other slide backs before how these things sort of dovetail and echo each other.
So, our presentation is born-accessible born digital focusing on data, Lindsey already introduced us, but just as a little refresher, I've been a data librarian for the past 12 years.
I got into data into accessibility via research project I was working on and then a student who I supervised and an internship as well as Stephanie and I worked at the same library where I work with the repositories and so we also worked together in thinking about accessibility when it came to the those platforms and the content that they host.
As mentioned, I am a co-author and mentor for the Data Accessibility Primer.
We'll talk about some of the content from this later, but basically it's a resource for beginning to think about what accessibility means for data.
In various file formats and it points to gaps and further work needed, much in line with, what Jonathan has been talking about in terms of the born accessible model actually.
And just a note as well, Stephanie and I are going going to be switching off slide-by-side sort of in this presentation.
So it's not one big chunk. But I will turn it over to Stephanie to introduce herself.
Thank you so much, Rachel, and thanks to our hosts and to Jonathan Lasar for going first with that great presentation.
So I'm Stephanie Rosen. My current position is the IT accessibility assistant director at the University of Michigan IT services.
Which means that I lead a team to help all of the university align with our digital accessibility policy. Formerly, I worked at the University of Michigan Library and focused on accessibility there.
I am the author of a book called Accessibility and Publishing. I've worked a lot with our publishing division and thought a lot about accessibility and not context.
But, Rachel has helped me think about accessibility as an applies to research data and that's what we've been focusing for today's presentation.
You have the link to our slides if you'd like to follow along there in the chat.
Next to Lindsey. We'll also be sharing our screen as we go. You can use this QR code to get to the slides as well.
If you'd like to try that method. A quick overview of what we'll be doing today.
Will be defining accessibility. What does accessibility mean for data? We'll be talking about the state of the field.
What's happening in the field to support data availability and accessibility now? I will be giving some examples.
What does data accessibility look like in practice? And we'll hope to give you practices and techniques that you can take to your various roles.
So back to Rachel. What is data?
Yeah, so Stephanie noted, we're going to define accessibility for data, but. Last minute we decided it would also be helpful to define data.
And how it's different from documents. I really like this definition from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
That defines data as materials generated or collected during the course of conducting research. This is very broad and intentionally so.
You might notice that it doesn't say anything about numbers and the way that we think about data. The same formats of either file formats or types of information, videos, audio, things like that can be data or not data depending in part on how they're intended to be used.
And of course, AI and machine learning are only making this line blurry. But documents in general, I would say, are Usually final human readable products.
Meant to be consumed by eyes and brains. And data is oftentimes meant to be navigated by machines.
Computers and I think importantly it doesn't have as standardized a process or history or threshold for what it means to be ready for public dissemination and consumption.
Everybody kind of knows the process of writing something, then editing it, then publishing it, but for data, there's much less of a shared understanding I would say and I see that in my work with the repositories where part of what I do is ingest datasets and help researchers add the context and add Make recommendations and changes to make it more understandable by other folks.
Thank you. Thank you so much, Rachel. So we're going to be talking about what it means to make your data accessible.
So as you already know and, as Jonathan mentioned, People mean different things when they talk about accessible.
Accessibility. So sometimes people might actually mean availability, available data, some people might mean of portable.
Some people might mean equitably accessible to people with disabilities. And some people might just mean easy to use.
So there are both technical and narrow meanings of accessibility and they're on much broader common sense names of accessibility.
And in order to kind of better understand the state of data. Accessibility, we're gonna pull these meetings apart a little bit and try to be precise in our use of them to help in this conversation.
So we want to draw some distinctions between availability and accessibility. Although the terms are similar, they both exist on a spectrum.
So for example, published data is more available than data available upon request. Which is more available than no public data.
So these are all on a spectrum in relation to each other. It's similar with accessibility. Which also exist on a spectrum as we saw in Dr.
Lazar's talk. So born accessible data or documents is more accessible than data or documents that is remediated upon request.
Which is more accessible than just inaccessible formats with no re radiation plan at all.
So in this way, accessibility and availability are similar, but they're also related to each other.
If something isn't available, it can't be accessible. If we take a broad and comprehensive meaning of accessibility, I'd say that I accessibility is about equitable access for all users.
Regardless of the user's needs or disabilities. So this includes technical accessibility according to standards, which we'll discuss a little more later.
And it includes other fats, it's like availability.
Janine's in today's presentation, we're going to talk about the various facets that contribute to accessibility broadly speaking and consider actions that you can take whatever your role to move.
Further down that spectrum, making your data more and more accessible. We're also going to be referring to the Accessibility Data Primer.
Which Rachel mentioned earlier and on which she is a co-author. This, primer is part of a series of data curation primers, which are peer reviewed.
Living documents that detail a specific subject disciplinary area or curation task and can be used as a reference to curate research data.
So this document gathers together the current thinking from the field and goes into far more detail than we will today.
But it's a reference point and we want you to have that access to it. If it's of interest.
Now I'll turn it over to Rachel to say more about the current conversation about data access.
Oh Stephanie. Yeah, Stephanie said I'm going to give a real brief overview of the way accessible as a term is used in the field icon from which is data librarian ship data management.
One of the most commonly referenced standards in this domain are the fare principles and this stands for findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.
As you can see here, I don't expect you to read all of this, but I've included the breakdown of the accessible portion and their own words the principles emphasize machine action ability so the capacity of computational systems to find access and reuse data with as little human intervention or manual intervention as possible.
Accessible as it's used here which says once the user finds the required data. She, he, they need to know how they can be accessed, possibly including authentication and authorization.
So I want to highlight 2 things about this. First, the emphasis here is on making data accessible to technology.
However, there is no explicit acknowledgement of disability considerations directly. In addition, the emphasis is on information about how to get to the data.
That's the way in which access is used here, but not necessarily on the structure or accessibility needed to navigate the data or accessibility needed to navigate the data itself.
So the points mentioned here, I would say, the data itself. So the points mentioned here, I would say, and the sort of state of the data itself.
So the points mentioned here, I would say, and the sort of state of the conversation, the field up until now.
Has has been that these are consistent with what we're talking about today, but as an extension of it, these are necessary but not sufficient for true accessibility then.
I would also say that accessibility in the way we mean in this presentation is very consistent with extrapolating from these though.
And I would also say that availability to assistive technology specifically is implicit in what the principals call for.
Alright, next slide. Going back to available versus accessible, we wanted to give some other concrete examples of what that can look like.
So some examples of what might be meant by general uses of the phrase accessible data in the data management field would include the data being indexed and searchable.
That's usually these days online. Using clear language and including sufficient context. So documentation such as code comments, read me, appropriate metadata.
Having a well-defined and standardized path of access, which is really what the fair principles are.
Pointing towards. Not being cost prohibitive to view or acquire, so where possible not having it behind a paywall.
Often being downloadable online and then using open formatting and file types for possible. I would say though that most of these can be covered by those more general ideas.
That Stephanie referenced in terms of availability, affordability, and ease of use, then accessibility more specifically defined.
So to be truly accessible, data must meet additional other criteria. For example, The data should consider design.
Sorry, it must be compatible with assistive technology specifically. It should also consider design elements of the data itself.
The research software used to create and manipulate it and the platforms used to distribute it and we'll again touch on that in in a few moments.
But not in terms of accessibility here I would say for the data content side of things ensuring data files are not only compatible with, but also where possible optimized for assistive technologies, effective use of elements such as color contrast, appropriate fonts.
Not communicating information for example solely by highlighting a sheet in an Excel data set. An example of considering different needs could be making sure that if you're generating video, for example, that you minimize or eliminate risk of inducing seizures and those who are photosensitive.
And generally, Jonathan also pointed to this, communicating information. In multiple different ways in multiple formats in particular for information that is presented visually to allow users to make their own choices about what the best way to consume it is for them.
Alright, now we're gonna look at how to make data more available and accessible. And what's happening in the field to encourage and support this as well as where there is still a little ways to go.
To start with, I want to point to a general shift in academia, funders, institutions, and publishers are all shifting toward requesting or even requiring more data be shared.
This means that more and more people not only need to make their data available, but need to know how to make it useful, how to lower barriers to acquiring and reusing it, and to understand true accessibility.
I also want to very briefly point out that hidden within this perspective that data sharing is overall good, which is one that I hold, is an acknowledgement that not all data should be made public.
Those conversations have not always the open data data sharing conversation has not always taken that into account. Thoroughly enough, I would say, but for our purposes, what's important is to ask the question, what can and should be shared really intentionally.
And then whatever the answer to that may be, material it is shared should be equally accessible regardless of use of assistive technology, disabilities or nerd.
Greater accessibility benefits everyone who wants to interact with the data set, and it can also benefit researchers careers.
If you want to click Stephanie, there's just a quote here about. Making the data underlying a publication available supports better, more transparent, trustworthy, and replicable research, and it can also increase citations and then therefore that publication count and the metrics that folks can use.
So Sharing data is a step on the path toward true accessibility, even though it's not sufficient.
Next.
So one reason we're taking such a broad focus today is that even when it comes to basic availability, we're not always where we need to be.
A data sharing practice that's historically common in some disciplines is to say that the data will be made available upon request.
Which is basically that if someone is interested in seeing the underlying data, they should reach out to the author and request it.
However, this is really equivalent to that ad hoc remediation approach that Jonathan was talking about. Making data usable for others usually take significant labor and deep familiarity.
And similar with other types of ad hoc remediation, it's much more work to do that later on.
In practice, this research found that few researchers have the time or inclination to go back.
And prepare requested data to be useful or willing to share it. You can see the results here under 7% of the data requests resulted in them being able to obtain the data.
And I would say guidelines are also starting to acknowledge this. The NIH has a new data sharing policy that was implemented in January, 2,023 and it specifies that making data available means that it should be prepared and deposited in a location that allows for systematic access.
So depositing into a repository that has a standardized process even even if it needs to be, restricted or approved individually versus just relying on individual PI approval.
Next slide. I'm going to go very quickly over this one, but this is another piece of research that points to just this common sense.
That even if researchers are willing to take on the burden of maintaining the data over time, It's just hard.
Software becomes obsolete, file types become obsolete, website hosting shifts, and it can be difficult to get in touch.
And so really, as Jonathan was talking about, the most efficient thing to do is to prepare that data when the gap between.
Where it is and where it could be is as small as possible. And that includes the information the researcher has stored in their head.
Which Seems like it will never go away when you've been immersed in a project for so long, but it does decline over time.
Turn it back over to Stephanie.
Thank you. Okay, so. Moving over to thinking about the.
Practical techniques of making data accessible. What does it mean and what does it look like?
And where do we go to learn how to make certain data types accessible? So there's a few sources of knowledge about data accessibility.
There are standards, there are best practices and there are user innovations. So basically, standards are technical documents that describe an agreed upon definition of accessibility for a specific format or contacts.
They're based on ongoing research and best practices and they're also somewhat behind ongoing research and best practices.
Because they take a long time to codify, agree on, approve, and publish.
And the digital environment, the established standards are the web content accessibility guidelines or WCAG. Which Dr.
Asar mentioned. These standards are cited and legal decisions. Institutional and state policy requirements from government funders and so on.
They're maintained by an independent international body of experts and they're regularly updated. They've been around since the early internet first published in 1,999.
They are the standard in this space. But you'll notice that the name has well accessibility in it.
However, they're designed to be platform agnostic and well suited to extend to all other digital formats like digital documents and software applications.
They're organized around basic principles. They're not so prescriptive on how to achieve accessibility.
And because they are so extensible to other formats Other formats don't even have to have digital accessibility standards like Word documents don't have their own standards because we can is just applicable.
Where other standards do exist, they're often aligned with this. EPA, the standard would be an example as directly aligned.
The PDF UA is more prescriptive about implementation but similar in its principles. So that's a little bit about standards.
There are also best practices where if standards are more black and white, best practices is more of a gray area.
Not fully codified, but still a great value. Best practices can fill the gap where standards are still catching up.
They also go above and beyond what is required towards what is good and effective. So the WCAG has standards for where captions are required on video.
But. There are best practices which tell us how do you make quality cupions. How do you translate audio into text?
Those are where best practices come into play. And beyond this, there's also user innovations and hacks.
It's good to remember that all accessibility knowledge really starts here. Disabled people encountering a world that is not designed for our bodies and minds and inventing solutions.
These might be come best practices, these might become standards, but sometimes in some new spaces, this cutting edge, User innovation is the best source of knowledge.
Because data can be so many different things, the accessibility data primer draws from all these various sources.
And pulls together the most relevant principles and techniques for different formats and contexts Back over to you, Rich.
Yeah. So as Stephanie alluded to, one of the challenges of this topic is that it's really complex and interdependent and not really covered by a single.
Overarching. Standard or model. When we talk about accessible data, we may generally think about the files themselves and what they can contain being accessible but accessible data files are the result of a long string of choices at both the organizational or institutional and individual levels.
I'm gonna go a little bit into this image of a, well I called it the data accessibility ecosystem.
The image is actually a pyramid so that's a little bit of mixing metaphors but it's more complex than we could represent visually.
But to illustrate some of those dependencies, at the bottom here we have policies, support, and incentives at the organizational level.
So does a fund or university that requires data sharing provide support in providing sharing up in preparing data for sharing.
Does it provide support in understanding what data accessibility means and what work that will entail and does it provide that support before someone has already begun a project?
Moving up what types of platforms are provided? Where those are being used to share data. Where has that institution potentially chosen to invest resources?
What have they bought? And on the individual side, does the researcher have a choice about where to share their data and if so what criteria are they using to choose that platform?
Similarly, once you get down to the actual data programs and software that is used to create the data, are those programs accessible, especially if they are really niche programs or software that are required to open the data where it's hard to open using other software.
I'm getting up to the top here on the more individuals side of things. Stephanie is going to talk in a moment about a few examples illustrating those, but basically individual researcher choices about how to organize files and data within those files.
Also shapes accessibility as does the file formats chosen to store the data. So this is one of the challenges I think of data is that Making it accessible is very tied in with this process where things aren't finalized and people are still producing that knowledge.
And then finally at the top here, our considerations around accessibility making into other presentations of information beyond the raw data.
For example, tables and figures in publications or even more complex visualizations. Each of these levels has depth and breadth to it.
We don't intend by talking about how complex it is to make it seem overwhelming, but we do hope that members of the audience here today are able to see their own position reflected somewhere in this image and start to think about what choices or leverage they have access to that can shift that ecosystem towards more accessibility generally.
So for example, are you involved in an institution at choosing platforms or programs that get purchased or within your discipline do you have a choice between storing data and proprietary or open access file types?
Or if you don't and you have to use or your discipline expects you to use proprietary software and files, can you convert those before sharing them out more broadly?
Back to you, Stephanie.
Thanks. Okay, so. We wanted to give some examples of data accessibility in practice.
And these focus on choices you can make when you're in control of your own use and presentation of data.
There's many more examples in the data accessibility primer, but one is thinking about data visualization, which is any visual representation of data.
Making data visualization more accessible means using choices that allow concept to be perceived visually. Hey, I'm making the underlying data available and it's time to reform.
So here on this slide I have 2 examples of pie charts and the first example the slices of the pie are in different colors and there's a key with those same colors and the labels for the slices.
So, You have to be able to accurately perceive and present this color in order to make sense of the data.
Well, as in the second one, there's a pie chart where the slices are in different colors and the labels are directly beside.
Those slices. The second example is more accessible because it's more visually perceivable by more people.
And I'm not accessible example would be to also include not just the color and the label or the color and a icon, for example.
To also include the tabular data so that a user could arrange it and, consume it in a way that best suits their needs.
Another example is accessibility metadata. So metadata is data about data. In this case, we're talking about information about the accessibility of digital information that goes along with that information.
So this practice is more mature within electronic publishing, but the ideas and the techniques are exactly the same in the data space.
In an EPUB package, an author or a publisher can add accessibility metadata.
Which can then be exposed by catalogs, libraries, and other distribution platforms. So this example is a book which is available on the Red Shel platform, a bookseller.
And the page for the book shows e-bock features which show for example that it's in an reflowable format, text to speech compatible.
And even has a additional accessibility metadata. That can let a user know what accessibility features are present.
What are missing and basically can I use this or not before they purchase or download.
All metadata makes things more accessible and it needs to be correctly structured and entered into the proper fields to facilitate access.
Accessibility metadata in particular lets people with disabilities know, can I use this? How can I use this as very valuable to make informed decisions?
I think we'll skip this at times. We wanted to point out that not all accessible data practices go along with the big, big projects, big publications, they can be used in your everyday work.
We've tried to use several throughout our presentation today. Happy to talk more about that in our QA time, but I'll hand it over to Rachel to conclude for us.
Yeah, just to sort of wrap things up, we wanted to reiterate that data accessibility is emerging as an area of knowledge.
And is built independent on existing practices around data availability on established web and legal requirements and practices. So it's, it's a complex system that is not always straightforward and might require novel solutions, but hopefully we all understand why it's worth it.
We've already heard why it's important and beneficial not only to those with disabilities or using assistive technologies, but to anyone who wants to interact with, understand, trust, or reuse the material.
We do also acknowledge that many of us already feel over capacity. I most, I will admit of the data sets I see, don't follow all best practices.
But the reality is that change happens over time. We all contribute to a collective. And even if we are not where we want to be yet, we have to start from where we are.
Finally, we have a couple of resources if you would like to learn more. We talked about the primer several times.
It also has a section on identified gaps and directions for further research as well as a bibliography that's also available on Zotero and just 2 sources I thought I would highlight are a recent article from some folks looking at this exact intersection of sort of data management, disability studies, and accessibility of data.
And then for anybody who's really interested in a deeper dive, I would point to the work by Professor Jonathan Godfrey, who is a researcher in New Zealand who has been conducting research and evaluations in particular on various statistical softwares from a blind researcher perspective.
Thank you so much for your time. We hope this was informative and we look forward to hearing any questions.
Thank you so much, Stephanie and Rachel. I really appreciate it, especially your discussion about the.
Sort of the scale from individual to organizational and structural choices. While we wait for folks to put questions into the chat, Stephanie, did you want to share more of those examples?
On the slide where you were talking about like linking versus just including a citation.
Alright, this is Stephanie. I can start talking through that. without sharing my screen again, I'll just mention what we were going to say.
We tried to use some accessible practices in our presentation today, for example, when quoting text.
We've copied and pasted that actual text into our slides rather than just including a screenshot.
When citing a source, we've included the link to the original rather than simply the citation along.
So these are small ways in which we're providing access to the data itself, which can be very many different things.
But this comes up in presentations. It can come up and research publications if you're thinking about including a table of statistics.
Which a table is better than an image of a table. But even better to perhaps include more of that raw data as an opinion.
So we're just trying to think through the ways this shows up in our everyday work. Not always and not only.
The big big funded projects that we might think of when we think of open data or . Accessible data
Thank you. So we have some questions coming in. Jonathan, both of these came in during your presentation, so I'll start with you and then Stephanie and Rachel, if there's anything you want to add.
So our first question was for web reading preferences. Have you seen any preferences for format among people with various disabilities and some examples they give our digital PDF versus HTML versus Prix books versus manifold, EPUB or others.
I guess I'll go first then since you said it came during my presentation. So yeah, in terms of preferences.
First of all, I would say, you know, if you already have setup or if you're going set up.
A panel or an advisory board of people with disabilities for your library, that would be the great type of question to ask them.
Right? And so, you know, we have the choice of the following vendors. We have, you know, right.
From what I've seen, certainly HTML and EPUB are preferable off into PDF just because PDFs are so rarely accessible.
Because it's so hard to make it accessible. Again, we're working on trying to improve that, but So that's what I've seen.
I really think you should be asking disability rights. Communities and the people specifically in your community who are involved on an advisory board or something about what they prefer in terms of formats.
Rachel, Stephanie, do you have anything you want to add on that?
Sure. I'll just give a plus one to that for sure. The importance of user.
Research that, Jonathan mentioned. Really comes out here. The reason that HTML and EPUB are more accessible is because they're already sort of can be transformed on the user end in terms of different presentation.
Through people's own technologies. And I guess I would mention that, you know, people have their own preferences, which can sometimes be surprising.
Which is why, multiple formats. Multiple modes of access is principle of universal design and of accessibility.
So, if you ask among your user community, you may find that. People have surprising answers and providing.
More than one format can often serve more user communities.
And the next question is a good segue for this because it's about usability studies. Are there standards or guidelines for people with disabilities participating in broad survey slash usability studies?
For example, accessible or inclusive survey design. Like preferences for specific online survey tools. The survey format or length.
Survey demographic questions.
Well, actually, I'll start with an easy answer that, which is in the textbook, I'm lead author of research methods in HCI.
You'll notice on the cover it actually includes 2 people with with disabilities blind users in cane and someone using a wheelchair.
There's actually a whole chapter in here all about doing research involving people with disabilities and methods for doing so.
That's not say that it's a set of standards and against research methods in human computer interaction, but a lot of people have actually cited this work and also gone on in the accessibility community.
If you look at, for instance, the assets conference ASS ETS. There's been a lot of work done there recently about methods for things that are out of the norm.
So, you know, kind of baseline would be things like setting up a survey as successful for for blind individuals or you know that that's kind of the easy stuff.
There been a lot of papers recently about much more complex, right, much more complex types of data collection.
So I think if you check the assets conference, you'll find a lot more about methods there.
Thank you. And Rachel or Stephanie, anything you want to add to that one?
Okay, so I have my own questions, but also folks, we have another 10 min, so feel free to add things into the chat.
One thing I'm curious about that I think speaks to the theme of it's better to fix things as you go.
Rather than to wait till the end. I do a lot of work with graduate students. And I'm thinking about preparing.
Graduate students while they are in graduate school. For being able to address accessibility. In their own research methods.
But also when they're supporting faculty or on teams of researchers. So I wondered if you could speak to.
You know, if you were able to design a research methods class for graduate students. What types of.
Resources would you recommend that they investigate at the stage. So that they're not doing their final data collection for their dissertation and then just now confronting this idea that the data they're collecting should be prepared in a more accessible way.
Stephanie, Rachel, do you wanna go first or do you want?
I can go first since I have in responded to the questions yet since I haven't worked in publishing.
Please. Go for it.
I would say that most of the work that I do, we work with faculty but mainly with graduate students, I think even when faculty or PIs on a project oftentimes it's the graduate students or the lab managers who are actually touching the data.
Using the tools. And I would say that this is an area where both because there's not really a body of literature specific to data accessibility in this sense.
It's a lot of, translation and extrapolation and like very active participation, which is, takes mental energy.
And also because. Oh, I just lost my train of thought. Oh yes, what to do with graduate students or how to how to work with them.
Yeah. And also because, It can feel intimidating. I would say that my field is actually back in the availability stage of things still in a lot of instances like we'll get people depositing data.
Maybe not even having thought about how somebody else would navigate their file structure. And so thinking about whenever I work with graduate students, we, try to, we don't, teach research methods courses from my department, but we do a lot of workshops and we try to emphasize that you should come out of the workshop with like one or 2 things that sound like they'll make your work easier and will cause your work to
be better and start incorporating those because it's about habit building. Especially for graduate students, they're oftentimes at what they hope is the beginning of a long career so they're building their practices and that just takes time.
So we generally say to choose one or 2 things and start incorporating those, then when you've mastered them, start working on other things.
And there was one other thing I was gonna say.
Well, there was one other thing I was going to say, but I have forgotten. So I'll pass it to someone else.
Okay, because that is a, that's great advice. I'm also in a graduate program and I definitely have a tendency to think that I need to like fix everything at once or just not do it at all.
So I appreciate the advice to just incorporate a couple of things at a time.
Well, you're in it for the long haul.
Yeah.
Hmm.
And Lindsey, I would actually wonder what are the policies. That would require that of graduate students because really if you want to have an impact of let's say you want data sets to be posted by graduate students and if you want their dissertation speed and accessible format right you actually have to have policies requiring that like oh sorry you submitted your data sets and they're not set up for accessibility you don't graduate right like I mean we
just have to be honest that someone mentioned earlier everyone's played is full. How do you surface accessibility and make it important and make it a priority among all these other things?
So, you know, what are the policies requiring it or how about even just making a starting with making awareness of it?
Right? How do you this this idea of surfacing accessibility ask questions? You know, for instance, I'm a big believer and I don't know of any university it's actually implemented this idea but please if you're watching please use this idea.
Right? Faculty put together grant proposals. Right. For let's say developing education materials, let's say for collecting data.
Shouldn't there be some requirement in the grant proposal that you submit for how you're going to ensure that data is, you know, somehow, I mean, we have a lot of data management plans.
How that data is going to be posted, whether it's going to be accessible or not, whether educational materials are going to be accessible or not, right?
Even asking the question without requiring it makes people stop and think. If you had to include an accessibility statement in your promotion in tenure documents, if you had to put it in a grant proposal, right?
You know, I always say that if you're developing educational materials, you should have to have a line item in your budget for accessibility.
Now maybe that there may be no costs involved. But it will get you as a PI putting together the proposal to start thinking about, okay then, hmm, right, I need to include a line item in the budget for this.
What does this mean? Have I thought about it? This idea of surfacing accessibility, bringing it to the attention.
Of people by asking questions, even if it's not a hard requirement yet, by asking questions. So, you know, ask graduate students and before you submit this, did you ensure that the data says successful?
Did you ensure that your documents successful? Have you put an alt text for the images for for your dissertation?
You know there are all these questions we could ask that get people at least more aware of accessibility and I think there's a great opportunity there.
In terms of in terms of that.
Jonathan, that just made me think of another thing from your presentation that I thought was helpful as somebody who would not consider myself very like tech savvy.
The types of questions that you're proposing to be in line as people are working in Adobe Express are very like entry level it seems for people who are already used to using that tool it's not asking them to think about something that might be outside of their realm of expertise with technology.
Yeah, and that's absolutely that's one of the goals. I think Abenov Conan is is still on this this webinar.
He's the PhD student working on that Adobe Express project. And so, you know, we've been working on that part of it for about 8, 9 months now on Adobe Express, but actually one of our kind of core tenants that we also heard from the disability rights communities is that you have to make sure that no expertise Right?
Is required that if you're going to kind of put it in line with as they're creating content.
And this actually relates to a question that, that Adrian put into the chat, but I think didn't, didn't come up on the Q&A.
Adrienne's question was that can you speak about the ways that AI and machine learning as these technologies keep making advancements will help us make documents and data more accessible, or maybe it will cause new problems.
So I'll give you 2 thoughts on that. So first of all, in a previous project that we did with Adobe.
And so we've I've been personally working for 5 years with Adobe. I'm trying to figure out solutions involving Adobe scientists and Adobe technology for how you could come with solutions, right?
And it's up to Adobe if they roll out those solutions into the software, but let's try and create solutions.
You know, and one of them was actually using AI in terms of remediating PDF forms.
And the idea is if you're doing forms, there are a lot of repeats. Right? If you think of like a 3, 4 page form, right?
Could, can you use AI so that kind of once you've remediated kind of by hand a few of these things for accessibility, maybe there are other ones that you could do via sort of a suggested bulk edit.
Right? I suggested bulk remediation to fix some other field. That's what we're trying to do with these ideas with, with Abenov and with the Adobe Team Working on Express is okay.
Right? Maybe there are some things that you can just say, yes, this is a list. Done.
But there are other things that maybe the the content creator will have to confirm. But can we provide a suggestion, like almost split it up into categories of what are things that are can automatically be detected what are things that the content creator just says say yes it's a list and Adobe Express can do it what are things where maybe you have to.
You have to get a suggestion, would be helpful to have a suggestion from the tool saying, you know, this image looks like.
Right? And one of the challenges, of course, is that our AI tools are not there yet. And great image recognition.
So, but we're gonna get there. And I think if we can come up with the processes now, right, if we can come up with how would we integrate this into content creation for accessible documents, you know, some of the technology will get better, but we need a lot of research about how we would make that happen because that's not something we've ever tried before.
Of how do we make a document accessible as it's being written. Almost like a if you think of like spell check or you know a dramatic check where it will like give you symbols as you're writing.
How can we do that for documents? So I think that, Adrian, relate to your question, I think that may be one of the ways that that AI could help in the future with document accessibility.
I don't think everything is going to be completely AI, but I think it can help give more power to the user and make it easier to do a.
Thank you. And Rachel and Stephanie, I saw that both of you are responding to questions.
That came up in the QA. Ox, is there anything that you wanted to? To share. Or should I move on to another question?
I'll just say that I think Victoria's question is kind of a million dollar question for for being able to set expectations, right?
And it needs to be studied at a more systematic and institutional level because it is, it depends and it's hard and it depends on how much support folks have in preparing their data.
Her question was around how much time researchers should expect to spend preparing their data and making it fair and accessible.
This is Stephanie. I just typed a answer, so I hope that was helpful to you, Benjamin. Feel free to respond again.
But I wanted to come back to your question about graduate students, Lindsey. I appreciate Jonathan's remarks about thinking through policy.
Rachel and I have done quite a bit of work to try to. Push towards more strict accessibility requirements for dissertation deposits.
And it's difficult because you can't just change the policy if the teacher went to do it.
Like. You needed to work at all those levels at once. I also will mention that I visited several graduate seminars where people are involved in building digital exhibits and archives and I' them about image description and all the stakes of that work and people are so interested in learning about image description as a scholarly practice, as a creative practice, as a practice of solidarity and It's important that subject matter experts do
that work, not just anyone can do it. So I'll just mention on a positive note that the interest and excitement I've seen around that work has been So I've seen some of the greatest interest and excitement in those graduate seminars compared to anywhere else.
And yeah, and it comes, I think both of you are speaking to this too, but I'm just thinking about the University of Michigan press also that has as part of their book ingestion process like that's part of what they ask for as a standard from authors or some of this accessibility metadata including image descriptions and I think getting it, yeah, individuals can do some things and then getting it into the
water, getting it into the system, those expectations. I think that's also where the more we're asking those questions and the more folks are aware of it and knowing to ask, it becomes, gains momentum.
I'd also just like to make a plea if you are writing a book when you're negotiating the contract with the publisher, please negotiate that in the contract it says will be made available in an accessible digital format at the same time as the paper version.
Please put that in the contract, right? You may be working with a publisher, it sounds like University of Michigan Press, they're really familiar with this, they already do this.
But there are a lot of publishers who are not yet doing it. So you can again kind of surface the topic by requiring it goes in the contract.
And if a publisher says, well, we don't normally do that, we can't do that, say, then I'm walking.
You know, I'm sorry, it needs to be in the contract, right? Accessibility, making sure everyone can get access.
To this book at the same time. Is really important because remember sometimes you hear you know faculty saying well do I have to make it accessible we're trying to make sure that 30% more people get access to the content that you're teaching that you're passionate about.
So it's about spreading the message.
And we're a little over time. So we have a few more questions. I am going to put into the chat.
Some shameless self promotion for UMD libraries. This is our workshop series.
And
Point of sharing this is not just to show you what's upcoming but it gives you contact information if you have suggestions for workshops you'd like to see now that you've seen some of the recommendations for the panelists about.
Integrating best practices if they're, workshops we can offer. On using that on specific platforms or just thinking through big picture accessibility, let us know.
We would be happy to offer that. Painless, do you have time for another question?
It looks like we've got one more in the chat that. We can try to address before we break.
Somebody was asking a question about. Navigating IRB for usability testing. So I wondered if any of you had had questions about or had a experience with that.
Yeah, Jonathan.
I'll mention I generally don't find that IRBs require extra protections or anything for at least if you think of, you know, your typical that you're involving, let's say, deaf users, blind users, you know, users with some physical, mobility challenges.
I have not seen maybe I'm lucky that I've worked at with 2 IRVs that at University of Maryland and Previous University that are kind of used to this.
So, but I could imagine if let's say you were trying to do children with disabilities of some type, there might be more challenges, but I've I've not found in general that IRBs are tougher on that as long as you explain here's how we're doing this and you know we may use a different format we may hand out things in Braille or I've generally not found that to
be a problem or had any issues with IRBs.
Hey, Stephanie, anything that you want to add?
Okay. Well, thank you once again to all of our panelists. We really appreciate your time and your willingness to share your expertise with us.
Adrian, is there anything that you'd like to say in closing?
Well, I would just like to say again, thank you, Lindsey, Stephanie, Rachel, Jonathan for sharing your time and your expertise with us.
I don't know about others, but I feel really motivated to learn more. You shared a lot of information with us.
I'm glad that we will have the recording of this webinar available. It will be sent out to registrants but will also have it posted on the Library's website.