If you could define accessibility in less than 10 words, Dawn.
Inclusivity and equal access. 27% of adults in the US have a disability. It's an important endeavor. Sorry, you can delete that last sentence. That wasn't part of the 10 words. VALERIE MORRISON: That's way over 10.
[LAUGHTER]
Just the first four words were my answer. Sorry, delete me.
[ROCK MUSIC]
You are listening to WREK Atlanta. And this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I'm Marlee Givens, in the studio with Fred Rascoe. And that's it.
That's it.
Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it.
Our show today is called "Equal Access to the Online Library." Accessibility is on our minds at the Georgia Tech Library and at libraries and archives all over.
So we're beginning a new occasional series called Accessibility Audit, in which we take a look at how we make our teaching services and resources accessible at the Georgia Tech Library and how sometimes we don't get it right.
Well, yeah. Accessibility was part of our building plan and our website redesign. But when you think about all of the tools we use and content that we share online, there's plenty of opportunities for improvement.
This past year, my department decided to look at what we could do to make our instructional materials more accessible to our students. We partnered with Georgia Tech Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation to learn more about document accessibility.
And we've learned here at Lost in the Stacks that one in four adults has a disability. And for some of them, that's a print-related disability, which means they might have to use assistive technology to listen to textual materials.
Today we'll be talking to experts that will tell us how we can make our electronic documents better for those using assistive tech.
And our songs today are about geeking out, afterthoughts, and feeling accomplished and humbled simultaneously. And by request of our guests, all artists today have a strong connection to Athens, Georgia. And I think wherever Alex is, she's probably going, go Dogs. MARLEE GIVENS: That's exactly right.
And by the way, next week marks 34 years since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which changed the way the world, or at least the US, worked for a lot of folks with accessibility challenges. Right you are. So let's start with "The Way the World Works" by Tunabunny from Athens, Georgia, right here on Lost in the Stacks.
[TUNABUNNY, "THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS"] I don't think you know the way the world works I don't think you know what's going on "The Way the World Works" by Tunabunny. This is Lost in the Stacks. And today's show is called "Equal Access to the Online Library."
Many of us at the Georgia Tech Library recently attended workshops on document accessibility from Georgia Tech's Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation, also known as CIDI. We invited our trainers onto the show, and we'll start by letting them introduce themselves.
Hi, I'm Dawn Evans. I work for the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation, CIDI, at Georgia Tech, where we are focused on all things accessibility, whether it's the environment, whether it's etext documents, et cetera. And I began working in the etext unit, spent years there. And so that's my primary expertise, is working with etext.
And I am Valerie Morrison, and I'm currently the etext manager. And I work alongside Dawn at CIDI here at Georgia Tech. And we focus on making accessible documents and textbooks and course materials primarily for students who need accessible books and materials for their classes.
Can you just briefly describe what is etext? What's the scope?
Sure. So my team, we work on converting scanned materials and inaccessible materials into a wide variety of file formats for individuals who need different accessible files to work with their assistive technology. So a screen reader will be able to read the content aloud. There will be accessible headings or bookmarks for easy navigation with keyboard shortcuts. The images might need to be described for someone who's blind or has low vision.
And so we make accessible PDFs, accessible Microsoft Word documents, EPUB files. Some students even request HTML versions of their textbooks that they can access by opening a free browser of their choice. And then we also have other different types of work that we do, working with publishers or organizations that have lots of images they want to describe. Or sometimes they come to us for training about how to make their accessible documents.
Is the primary user of your services students for their educational materials?
That is definitely how we started out. So we were originally funded by the Board of Regents, by the University System of Georgia. But we have since branched out, and we work not only with students in Georgia but across the nation. And then we've also branched out. We work with a lot of nonprofits and state agencies. We work with publishers of educational material.
Sometimes we'll even have companies or corporations come to us wanting us to make accessible journal articles or accessible pamphlets or those kinds of materials. But our main focus has always been on education and making accessible, higher ed material, which is a lot more complex than a lot of other material.
How did you get into this business?
My background is in psychology and social work. I have a master's in social work. So it's always been true for me that my personal mission is leveling the playing field for everyone. And working in this accessibility space allows me to accomplish that mission. And it also allows me to geek out about all of these technological and technical ways that we manipulate these files. There's so much to learn about accessibility. And it's taken me years to gather all of that information.
But it's just a dream job.
And I used to be an educator. I was an instructor of composition and literature at University of Georgia and graduated with my doctorate. And there weren't any jobs because it was 2008. And so I had a former student who worked at CIDI and recommended it. And I interviewed. Dawn was actually the person who interviewed me. So thank you, Dawn, for taking a chance on me.
Well worth it.
Thank you. For me, there's a lot of my education background that comes into play with this job because we're creating material that's going to help students succeed in the classroom. There's a lot of writing involved too. So my grammar background and my writing and grading of papers comes into play because there's a lot of description of images that's really important.
How do you describe a bar graph or a complicated STEM diagram to someone in a way that they're going to understand it with clarity and precision if they're going to be tested on that material? So it feels very much in line with the educational work that I had done previously. And I also really do enjoy that technical aspect that Dawn taught me.
So we get to really kind of open up the hood and see what's going on behind the scenes of these files and make sure that they're working and optimize them for work with the assistive technology.
So what do you do more of, making text readable for those with sight impairments yourself, like you doing the work yourself, versus training instructors to do that so that instructors have the capability of making their assignments more accessible to students?
I would say traditionally we always tried to be on the side of the disability service provider at each school and help them make that accessible content. But more and more, we're finding that different institutions are reaching out to us, hearing about the different trainings that we provide.
And we're working with that train the trainer model, where we work with faculty or we work with different organizations like the library or different nonprofits or even the ADA's office to teach them about accessibility.
So we're really trying to get the word out and advocate for more people learning about accessibility because it really does take buy in from everyone at an organization to make sure that materials are being made in accessible way and then when you update those documents, you're not reverting back to an old inaccessible version. So we do a little bit of both, to answer that question.
We'll be back with more from Dawn Evans and Valerie Morrison after a music set.
File this set under LC 4019.T46.
[JUCIFER, "AMPLIFIER"]
[PACIFIC UV, "WOLVES AGAIN"]
That was "Wolves Again" by Pacific UV. And before that, "Amplifier" by Jucifer, songs about geeking out.
[ROCK MUSIC]
This is Lost in the Stacks, and we are speaking with Dawn Evans and Valerie Morrison from CIDI. Dawn and Valerie recently presented workshops on document accessibility to the Georgia Tech Library.
I had learned from Valerie in one of her workshops that there is an update to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act that could affect us as a public institution. So I asked her to explain Title II and the update.
So Title II is about making accessible mobile and website materials accessible to everyone. And so the updates that just got made, I think in April, indicate that all public institutions are going to need to make all content across their mobile apps, their mobile content, and their website content accessible. Depending on the size of the organization, those changes will need to be made either within two years or within three years. There used to be a lot of exemptions.
There were a lot of ways to archive material and not have it need to be made accessible. But the new requirements for Title II say that everything now needs to be made accessible. So that's a big shift that a lot of public universities, public institutions are going to need to work towards.
Do you think you can sum up what it means for Georgia Tech?
Well, that's a big question.
Or I guess why we happened to learn about it during these workshops, and it wasn't something that got sent around campus. Do you have any thoughts?
I have a lot of thoughts. I think that accessibility has always been considered the last step or a bonus extra step instead of what should really be a fundamental beginning step. You should start with your accessibility in mind when you're creating a document. I think if people are aware of accessibility-- and I'm generalizing here, but if people are aware of accessibility, they might know about the built-in Accessibility Checker in Word or PowerPoint.
And they think of it as, oh, I'm just going to run this checker at the end. This is going to be something that I do after I've made my document or I've made my presentation. But when you come to accessibility or you think of accessibility as an extra step or something that happens at the very end, it's not foregrounded, and it's not given the importance that it needs to have.
It's way easier to make an accessible document when you have accessibility in mind at the beginning than it is to remediate it or retrofit it afterwards. The other thought that I would have is just from my own experience, starting work in accessibility around 10 years ago, I really thought I was helping people with blindness, people who were deaf, people with very kind of forefront, visible disabilities. That's a very small percentage of the people who use assistive technology.
So we're finding more and more people are using our accessible documents, for instance, people who have different learning disabilities such as dyslexia or dysgraphia, people who have different types of color blindness, visual learners, or audio learners. It's kind of like turning on the Netflix subtitles, right? You don't have to be deaf or hard of hearing to benefit from those.
More and more people are finding that these assistive technologies are really creating universally designed products and media that are helpful for everyone.
We've talked a lot about making documents accessible, and I'll say that I didn't even really know about the Microsoft document accessibility checker until I attended one of your presentations. But for those listening, what is a kind of basic example of a document accessibility change that, say, someone would have to meet to meet the accessibility needs for a student?
Let's say we're working with a Microsoft Word document. There are many things that you can do to enhance the accessibility of that document so that it can be read or spoken out loud by assistive technology. Adding headings using the Home ribbon and the Styles group-- inserting headings to your document is an extremely important part of accessibility because screen reading software can allow the student or the person to navigate around that Word document with the headings.
And it will list out all of the headings, so it gives them greater navigation within the document. And also, as Valerie mentioned, adding alternative text to the images for anyone who needs it. Making sure that the reading order is correct, that it's not reading across columns, so that it speaks in the proper order. Adding metadata to your file so that it's more searchable and accessible to people that are looking for it. Valerie, what am I leaving out?
So my top three are always telling people about bookmarks and headings for navigation so that someone can easily navigate. They might not use a mouse. They might be using the keyboard or verbal commands to navigate through a document. So the headings and bookmarks. Describing images with brief alternative text is the other one.
And then just my other-- usually when I'm doing a training on the basics of accessibility, I'll group some things under design and style considerations, like your font size, your color choice. You want a high ratio. You don't want to have a blue text on a light blue background. You really want a higher color contrast because people might be accessing your document online. They might be sighted or have low vision. And they need to magnify the text in order to read it.
So your color choice is important. You also never want to use color as the only indicator of meaning. So if someone's colorblind, they might not process color in the same way. So if you say, look at all of the words in red below, if you can find another way to indicate that, that would be helpful and more accessible to everyone.
Talking about the headings is important because I didn't realize that. If I'm typing a Word document and I just go to the heading of a document and increase the font by about 20 points and make it bold, that's not making it a heading to someone who uses a screen reader.
Exactly. It's making it visually a heading. And it's making it stand out for someone who's looking at the document. But it doesn't function-- it's not a functional accessible heading. If you make an accessible heading, using, as Dawn mentioned, that Styles group on the Home ribbon, then your heading can automatically generate a table of contents for you, and people can bring up a list of headings and use the up/down arrows to jump to different parts of the document.
And it gives someone a sense of how your document is organized and what content is there just from viewing the heading pane or the navigation pane.
This is Lost in the Stacks. And we'll be back with more about accessibility of electronic texts on the left side of the hour.
[ROCK MUSIC]
Hello. I am Aziza Chaouni, a Moroccan architect, associate professor at the John H. Daniels School of Architecture and Landscape and Urban Design at the University of Toronto, and an architect activist active mainly in my home country of Morocco. You are listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta.
Today's show is called "Equal Access to the Online Library." The Georgia Tech Library has started efforts to increase the accessibility of library materials, especially for folks who use assistive technology to access our online services. However, there are limits to how much control we have over online content. While we were talking to our accessibility experts, we discussed some challenges with accessibility in the online environment.
In my work we talk about tools. In a previous role I had, we had to do an audit. And all the tools that libraries are paying a good deal of money for, for subscriptions, were actually found to not be super accessible. How are we working with departments like y'all's or teams like y'all's to make sure that what we're picking is actually useful.
It is a constant learning opportunity and challenge to make sure that the materials that you're making accessible live in an environment that is also accessible. And one analogy that someone brought up is, well, you can have an accessible house, and you could spend all this money making your house beautiful and accessible for everyone, but if the road to get there isn't accessible, then it doesn't really do any good. So you need to make the pathway there.
Where you host that file or that video needs to be accessible too. And it changes because there are constant software updates all the time.
The library as a customer of-- you're procuring journals on behalf of students and professors. You do have the opportunity to bring up the topic of accessibility before you make your procurement choice and find out which publisher is providing the most accessible experience and lean towards their product perhaps, if it suits you.
File this set under KF 480.J37. [OH-OK, "SUCH N SUCH"] Do I really need this?
[THE OLIVIA TREMOR CONTROL, "A SUNSHINE FIX"]
That was "A Sunshine Fix" by The Olivia Tremor Control. Before that, "Such N Such" by Oh-OK, songs about trying to be included on purpose and not just as an afterthought.
Welcome back to Lost in the Stacks. We're speaking with Dawn Evans and Valerie Morrison from Georgia Tech Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation.
I know that accessibility, whenever it's improved, that's a victory, and that's something to be proud of. But what is something that the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation has done that either of you are particularly proud of, something that you think of like, man, I'm glad that we did that, something that you really hang your hat on?
I have one. Back in I believe it was 2009 or '10, we engaged in a project called the STEPP project, S-T-E-P-P. And that was working with a company called CourseSmart, who has since become VitalSource. And what we did-- because at that time, publishers were not producing a lot of accessible content. They were working towards it. And so this e-book platform that sells and rents college textbooks to students, they wanted to make their platform accessible.
And so that meant that behind the scenes, we were taking all of the PDFs that the publishers were giving them and we were properly tagging them, providing correct reading order, marking up all of the elements of that textbook, whether it's a table data cell or a list embedded within a list. We were making every single aspect of that PDF fully accessible to screen reading software and then troubleshooting it with CourseSmart. They loaded it into their proprietary backend system.
And that project was so wonderful because it just led-- it further led to the growth of publishers becoming aware of what all was required to make their PDF accessible. And then came the shift-- not as a result of CIDI's work, but we were a part of it. But then came a shift to publishers focusing on the EPUB format, which is inherently more accessible than PDF will ever be.
And so just the mere fact that publishers are choosing the EPUB format means that automatically all of their books are 90% better or 80% better. You've still got to do that manual add the alternative text to the images or add in that math markup language so that a screen reader can speak that math properly. But they've come a long way. And I think that was a great stepping stone project.
To answer that from my side of things, we had a very teachable moment. We had a great collaboration. We've been asked by the United Nations to make their annual report accessible, both the French and the English version, which we did a great job with the English version, but we needed their help in translating all of our image description into French. And we thought we did such a wonderful job. And as Dawn was saying, we did all the tagging of their PDF documents.
I met with the person who was in charge of the project. And he said this alt text is terrible. It is all wrong. You cannot describe these dignitaries as what they're wearing and just say this woman has a scarf on. No, you have to name them, explain the context of what the meeting is and the political importance of it, and what was decided at that particular hearing. It was very much a learning moment, where we were humbled.
And we realized different audiences need a different type of approach to describing images. And so that's been a fun project to work on.
Nice way to see your impact.
I wanted to talk a little, maybe geek out a little bit more and talk about formats. Would either of you like to talk about, what are actually the best formats to accomplish accessibility in an educational environment? VALERIE MORRISON: Well, I'm always advocating for having multiple modalities available because students really get comfortable and familiar with their favorite technology. So students with different needs are going to gravitate towards different formats.
If they need alt text description of their images, that might mean that they have a disability around vision. And so they do want alt text, and they are not as married to the format of the page. If there's a student who has a disability and they are sighted, they might prefer that PDF because it's always going to have the same format and look like the original material. It will look like the book, the textbook.
Whereas someone who has a different kind of disability might not care that everything's in linear format. And as long as it functions, it doesn't matter what it looks like. And then, of course, there's always crossover. So we have blind students who prefer a PDF. So our goal has always been at CIDI to try and make sure that we are making what the student is most comfortable with and what that individual prefers in terms of their accessible-- or their assistive technology.
I think Dawn is right, that that EPUB is truly accessible, as long as you're describing the images, you have functional headings that are working. It's hard to pick a favorite. I mean, our job has always been to make what the individual asks for.
From the perspective of authoring documents, if you make your Microsoft Word document fully accessible by adding headings and adding alternative text and doing all of the steps and running the Accessibility Checker in Microsoft Word-- finding out, what did you forget? It's a very helpful tool. But from there, you can-- Microsoft Word is a very common format that everybody's pretty much familiar with and can use. And screen reading software can access it. Text-to-speech software can access it.
If you needed a PDF, you can export a PDF from Microsoft Word, and it will retain all of the accessibility features that you inserted into your Word document. So you'd be starting with a PDF that was already better than most PDFs are.
And to piggyback on that idea, that same would go for PowerPoint. So if you're making an accessible Powerpoint, you're not adding a lot of inaccessible text boxes and lines and drawing your own diagrams. You just have some-- you're using the accessible layouts in PowerPoint, maybe adding an image or two. If you export that to PDF, you're going to have a far more accessible PDF.
I think the trouble is when you're using maybe InDesign or a PDF editor of unknown origin that inserts a lot of noise and formatting behind the scenes that you're unaware of, that might be interfering with the assistive technology's ability to read it clearly. If you've ever tried to copy and paste some content from a PDF into Word or into notes and you see a lot of symbols, there's a lot of formatting that's sometimes going on behind the scenes. But I agree with Dawn.
When we're doing trainings of accessible documents, we're always trying to get people to start with Microsoft Word, learn the accessibility basics in Word, and then you can create an accessible EPUB. From there, you can save it as a HTML file from a Word doc. Or you could save it as a PDF. So that's really your foundational format to start with.
I think it just remains to thank you, Valerie and Dawn, for joining us.
Thank you for having us. VALERIE MORRISON: Yes, thank you. This was fun. I love the endeavor. I'm excited about hearing this. And I love the idea of just being lost in the stacks.
And you've been listening to Lost in the Stacks. Our guests were Dawn Evans and Valerie Morrison from Georgia Tech Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation, where Dawn is accessibility specialist and Valerie manages the etext department.
And you can file this set under Z 674.75 W67 F73.
[KING OF PRUSSIA, "YOUR WORK IS MAGIC"]
"Your Work is Magic" by King of Prussia. And before that, we heard "The Hot Chord is Struck" by Still Flyin', songs about the great feeling you get when you accomplish something you set out to do.
[ROCK MUSIC]
Today's show was called "Equal Access to the Online Library," all about accessibility of our online materials. Before we roll the credits, there is just one short but interesting bit from the interview that we didn't get a chance to hear earlier. So Fred, can we hear that now?
We certainly can.
I also like that you had something positive to say about publishers because, honestly, I thought they were more part of the problem than the solution.
Some still are.
We pick on them. Yeah.
Some still are. But some of the major higher education publishers have really upped their game and are selling more accessible books. They're doing amazing work.
Wow.
Positive words about publishers on Lost in the Stacks, who would have thought?
Who would have thunk it?
All right, roll the credits, with a drum roll, please.
[STEADY DRUMROLL]
Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Alex McGee, Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens.
Legal counsel and a pylon box set were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. How did he know we wanted that?
I know, how did he? Special thanks to Dawn and Valerie for being on the show, to everyone working to improve access for students everywhere. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.
Our web page is library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks, where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form if you want to get in touch with us.
Next week's show? Well, let's just say it may sound very familiar to our listeners.
It is time for our last song today.
Now, wait a minute, Fred. Did we get through a whole show of Athens music without playing, well, Pylon for one, or REM, or the B-52's?
Well, that's REM that you're hearing in the background. It's a B-side, "White Tornado."
All right.
And I was going to wrap our show up today with the B-52's.
OK.
This is a song about a hopeful future from a band that welcomes everyone to the party. I thought it fit our accessibility thing, right? So let's close with "Song for a Future Generation" by the B-52's here on Lost in the Stacks. And have a great weekend, everybody.
[REM, "WHITE TORNADO"]
[THE B-52'S, "SONG FOR A FUTURE GENERATION"]