I handed out, I gave out a handout, and there is one mistake on it, which I would like to correct

I handed out, I gave out a handout, and there is one mistake on it, which I would like to correct. I’m a little embraced, a new book came out by Mary Hricko, and I misspelled it, so go to page 13, which says right now hicko, Mary, (inaudible) after the h. So, in case you want to look it up and order it, and you can't find the author the r is missing in here.

So it’s Hricko, the book on design and implementation of what enabled teaching tools, and it just came out fresh off the press, and uh might be of interest to yield. I also have some disks, alternative format for my handout, if you want one feel free to let me know, that also will be placed on, I've also put it on my web site, and the URL is on the handout.

All right, one problem I find with speaking to an audience like this, that I'm not quite sure, who is out there, and where's your current level of knowledge. Am I speaking to the choir, are their folks out there for whom accessibility, in the context of library resources really is something fairly new. If you give me a sense of where you are at, it helps me to skip over certain parts of my presentation, and make it more interesting to you that way. So let me ask this, and please don't hesitate to raise your hand, whom of you is accessibility really, to online resources really a fairly new thing. OK, two or three of them. So I will do is sort of compromise, and will go relatively quickly through my introduction, which will have filled you in on what the issues are. The next thing is, I will summarize and review the research in the area, and then the main part of the session, about half of the time I hope we can spend on discussing strategies that bring about change.

Let's look at the introduction. When we talk about access accessibility, different people mean different things by that term. Some people talk about connectivity, I mean, by simply connectivity, either in the global information infrastructure context, or meaning simply off-campus access. Others equated with availability on the Web. Librarians we tend to talk about the graphic access, the way I use the word here is access for people. Access to electronic resources, for all people, including those with disabilities. That's an interpretation that quite a few folks, really don't necessarily think of when we talk about accessibility. Just a short remark there, about 50 million plus people with disabilities in the US alone, for half of them the disability is severe. The type of disabilities that are relevant in the context of this presentation, I've divided into two groups.

The first group goes under thee umbrella of print disabilities, by which I mean, people who had difficulties reading printed text, because of a number of reasons. Maybe blindness or visual impairment, maybe colorblindness, or certain learning disabilities, some people are unable to read the printed text but, when it’s being read to you by a human, or a computer, they are fully capable of processing. Or certain people with mobility problems, people who can’t hold a page, can’t turn pages, hold a book, can’t use a standard version of a keyboard, also there are other people with other sensory impairments, deafness comes to mind. More and more web resources, including audio clips, and of course if there’s no visual text provided, no captioning provided that would be a problem.

For people with disabilities, print disabilities especially, the digitization of information affords unprecedented opportunities. Whether these opportunities are realized, really is a question of design. That holds true in the physical environment, a ramp, elevators, Braille in crucial places, allows people with disabilities to navigate a building physically. The same holds true in the virtual environments, a key element here that's coming to both is the idea of universal design, or accessible design, or barrier free design. And that is design that is sensitive to the variation of people, and that and does not cause a certain group of people to be systematically excluded. I'll give you a few examples, and all limit it to a few one here. First an example of accessible library homepage at Oshkosh. At Oshkosh, near Stout, not quite Stout, Dick Banks will like that. Anyway, if you visit that page, oh boy, it's not online. I'm going to go to the canned version. What you see, what happened to my canning here? Some of the pictures dropped out for some reason, I don't know why I probably. Well anyway, what you would see is there's some images here, but much as provided, information. Access to the various journals and databases, and the images that you would normally see are not on here, because they dropped out of the picture somehow, but anyway, if you would look at that page with a screen reader, the information you would get is about what I would show in the next slide. And a screen reader basically that's the text that's accessible, that a screen reader would read back. As far as our Polk library at UW Oshkosh, news and features, and whenever there's a link it would probably say link library hours, link other libraries, ect, ect. The information that sighted people would see the regular web page is exactly the same information that someone who accesses it with a screen reader would get.

Let me jumped to the major barriers, here's an example of the UW Whitewater instructional technologies resource Center. I hope this works better my canning here. Bring up the canned version, oh, it works. What you see is in big print Wisconsin instructional technologies resource Center, with various links then about classrooms, labs, software, loans, multimedia, ect, ect. A few links are at the bottom, and a very short explanation about features. If you take that when page and you look at it throughout in links browser, which helps me to check which elements in text format, which accessible. You get the following picture, it says in-line, in-line, in-line, in-line link, in-line link, none of the information on this page in particular is available in text, so it's a good bad example. The reason is the whole web page is basically one big image or image map, and the people have not bother to put alternative tags in their.

OK, the typical major barriers that are being used, oh, let me just make one point, would you argue or talk with web designers, if I make it accessible I have to give up the aesthetics of the side and make a plain, and they complain about that, I don't think that has to be the case. The example I think I picked here, the UW Milwaukee (inaudible) library, the old page looked like this, pleasant to the eye no doubt. But if I go in visit some other things, those elements are simply not accessible. Let's go to the links version here, to see how would look through, what would be accessible, in-line, in-line, in-line, in-line, finally it comes to some more meaningful things, in-line general information, and some links that labeled, but it’s really a lot of graphics element here that are not properly provided with alternative text.

Now the new version, looks like this. Unfortunately what happened here is the images dropped out again. Let me see if I can go directly to it. And no I'm not connected currently, and don't have the time to connect. Unfortunately there was some nice images on the front, and it looked aesthetically pleasing as the other page, but it was fully accessible, if I look at what text elements are available and provided on homepage, that you would have gotten a screen reader which relies on text only. So the arguments that while, and accessible homepage by necessity looks ugly or plain. I don't buy it, it's like telling architect that because they have to make the building wheelchair accessible, and accessible in general, that the building that will look ugly, I think we have reached a point where we don't buy that position, or argument.

The examples, a few words about legal requirements, the reasons why we should make online environments accessible. Aside from ethical reasons, it's just the right thing to do, or economic reasons, along the long-term it's cheaper to build in accessibility from the very moment, and it affords independent employment, and independent forms of lives for many people, which helps the economy also, and for selfish reasons, I'm getting older, my hearings also gradually going, and that may be too many rock concerts, my vision is not the best anymore, but I don't want to be excluded 10 years or 20 years down the road, because people have not paid attention to the online environment when they created it, designed it.

There are many sessions here that deal with the law, and I don't one or really go into detail about it, I just wanna make a few points. Their number of pieces of legislation that are relevant, the ones in particular are sections 504, and the ADA especially title II, which applies to public entities public universities, title III, similar would apply to those private universities, and libraries. When ADA was created, let me see what ADA says. I'm opening up title II, quote from title II “ no qualified individual with a disability shall by reasons of such disability, be excluded from participation in, or be denied the benefits of the services, programs, or activities of a public entity” and then in further clarifies it, ” the services, program, activities provided must be as affective as those provided to other patrons, the same as those provided to others, and provided in the most integrated setting.

Now does that mean, When ADA was written it didn't talk about the web, you don't find anything about the need to make the online environments accessible, the position as I learned yesterday, and I was clarified a few issues that were still mottled, in my mind. The position at the office for Civil Rights takes, when it comes to, when it looks at a case or at a complaint, is not that ADA requires accessible web pages, when it requires is that the content presented in web pages is presented in and accessible format to users, that may be an alternative formats, but the advise recommendations that I think the OCR makes, that I would make, that most of us make, is that providing accessible web pages is just simply the easiest way of fulfilling the ADA requirements to make content accessible. There have been a few legal cases, a ruling by the Department of Justice, some cases that the office of Civil Rights has dealt with such UW in 1998, involving California community colleges, and basically the statements coming out of the OCR, and the Department of Justice, arts be taken not to be taken, as I was told yesterday, don't cite those in court, that they clearly gives some guidance as to what you should be doing at your institution. And that is indeed to, if possible, make your web pages accessible, and to avoid the need to retrofit them later on, it's much more expensive.

Section 508, applies to federal agencies only, and it regards development, procurement, maintenance, or use of electronic information technology. And there some debate as to whether it applies to universities, public universities, state universities the reason is that in 1999, the year 2000, the Department of Education made a statement that, states that receive money, in the assistive technology act, are also required to comply and conform with section 508 standards. What that means, and what the legal bearing, and relevance of this at this point to be clear. Different institutions have given different interpretations, for example the California community colleges, have taken the position, yes we need to comply with section 508, because of that statement made coming out of the Department of Education. Another state was the California State system, interpreted it differently, we have no obligation to section 508, we still had to comply under ADA, and still make stuff accessible, but not under section 508 at this point in time. So no matter what I think section 508, has been beneficial to all of us, education and librarians, it has relieved with a focus on accessibility to the various providers of information resources, and everybody would like potentially, to be a custom of the government. And so there is a great motivation on parts of this company's to provide various products accessible, and we as libraries, and state universities, and universities in general, and consumers outside of the federal government also benefit from that.

Let me look at the scope of the problems, as I feared, as I feared that it presents itself to librarians. We really shouldn't concern ourselves only with accessibility, but also with the accessibility of this all the other resources, the web based for which the Library services are simply getaways. The start of the Library homepage, and certainly that should be accessible, but as you click on the online catalog for example, that would lead you into, and that is also accessible. Online catalog is one example, online indexes, full text databases, electronic reference works, e-books, e-Journal's, digital libraries, archives, electronic reserves, this virtual reference desk, and course where things that come to mind. If your to ask yourself, if you have a student, and you want have a research project, and want to use the Library, those who be the typical resources, that would be pursued in the use of finding information. And the issue of accessibility concerns all of them.

What we know about accessibility and these various resources. And I'll give you a brief overview. In some areas I will be briefer than in others, because some of my other colleagues have presented to you or will present to you, give a much more detailed picture than I had prepared for. So let's look at Library web pages first. One area where I myself have done some research. There are about twenty, or approaching almost thirty studies out there, internationally, that in some fashion have looked at the accessibility of web pages in the public sector, libraries, colleges, ect. If I take the data that are reported by the studies, take the data that applied to academic and public libraries, and look at these the folding picture presents itself. Let's go to the most recent data, I'm having them listed chronologically from nineteen-ninety-nine and two-thousand, look at the ones in two-thousand for academic libraries, the sample that I have taken about forty-seven percent, about half of the web pages were free of major accessibility problems. The other half work to be more precise fifty-three percent showed at least one major accessibility problems on it. In the data pretty much relied on Bobby, most of them look at these major problems as priority one problems, according to the W. C3 guidelines. W this there thousand Wisconsin which I have focused in, comes out of little bit better with seventy-five percent. If I go back to the year two t, the spectrum is typically for libraries, academic libraries, somewhere between thirty-percent And sixty percent, when and that sort of the percentage of Library web pages. Public libraries turn out to be less accessible on the average. Around twenty percent or so, on the data collected in nine-teen-ninety-nine to two thousand. Did I see a hand or was it a figment of my imagination? Ok, I’m anticipating things. This data of course comes from various sources, and it’s a little bit difficult to compare, but there are few data is take from the same institutions over the years, that allow us to look at the trend in accessibility in the library environment, as far as web pages are concerned.

What you see on this graph here, is a percentage of bobbie approved web pages at libraries, from the same sample, these were 24 national libraries, at national universities, one taken in 2000 the other in 2002. And what it shows is that, the accessibility on the average at these institutions has gone down slightly. It was 59%, 59% of those pages in 2000, had no accessibility problems, priority one, as measured by Bobbie, that figure has gone to 53% two years later. These are average data, and if you break that down and look at individual campuses, you see that as a very wide variety. For example the, University of Tennessee, what happened here, my alternative tag pops up. For example was almost 0% or 5%, hovering there in that neighborhood. Others like the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hills, had to accessibility of 100%, that means all the pages of that institution were free of major accessibility problems.

I must clarify, major pages, I mean, what I did when I collected those data, I look at the homepage, and the next link layer down. So what I consider to be the top pages, the homepage in the next layer. So again is almost anything from zero to 100% in the spectrum.

Audience -- did you say that Bobby approved, is equivalent to meeting the web content accessibility guidelines, priority one?

As far as Bobby can measure them automatically, I didn't do any manual evaluations. In order to figure out compliance with all the priority one guidelines, type of features. You cannot just rely on the automated part of Bobbie, you'd also do a manual assessment. Now what I studies like this is involved thousands of pages, I don't have time to do the manual thing. So all rely on the automated feature only, and take this as sort of rough figure, as a rough gauge for the accessibility of those sites.

Audience-- but my question is but if you say its Bobbie approved, you can say it's also approved to satisfying what?

Satisfying a subset of

Audience-- 30% of priority 1

Good, I was going to say a subset of priority one, without committing myself to a percentage the figure. I'm glad you

Audience-- somewhere between 30%, about 25 to 27, is what Google says.

So the actual figure then, on the actual accessibility problems is very likely to be considerably higher, that these graphs reflect.

Audience-- what that does mean is that Bobbie can automatically detect images that don't have alternative text, and bad links that you were talking about, and things like that. It won't detect things like color, being used to do color coding, without some other kind of

Yes, it doesn't tell you whether the text is meaningful or not, I found something where graphic is labeled graphic, stuff of that nature.

Audience-- I just want to mentioned something about (inaudible) Hill's site, it has some accessibility strategies which means, (inaudible), but that intentional on their far, as far as 100%, that intentional for all the web pages as far as they can go, and they were wondering about the telnet version, the text base version, of the online catalog, along with a web-based version, but things they cant control (inaudible)

You might wonder why I picked those schools, and the reason is simply I really picked the schools that have library programs. And when we looked at them I decided, I may as well look not only at the accessibility of the list pages, but also on the accessibility of the library pages. And how I ended up with that selection.

So data available on the accessibility of libraries, for every University in North America, happens to have an ALA accredited libraries will program. I've also collected from last four years, data at the University of Wisconsin, including the various smaller campuses, 13 institutions altogether. And those data, sort of show that, the accessibility of libraries, has gone out consistently, it started out in 1999 as about 30%, and again is a Bobbie figures, the same limitations apply as the national figures, and it's close to 80% now, so again that's average figures again. In comparison, you may be interested to know, that the accessibility of campus pages, has not moved very much at all, in 1999 it was about 50%, and then in 2000 do in spring, it was may be 55%. It has very little movement that's visible. I also to data for departmental web pages, because I was interested in how does it look like, if you leave the top sight and go in the homepage of individual department. They are typically lower altogether, but the campus and library pages, and there is mild increase, so it started out about 22% in 1999, and is now up to about 40%. But still that's about 10% lower than the campus pages on the average. Again, there's variation among those.

I like to go back to the trend of national data, because one other thing occurred to me. I divided the web site that I had look at, into two groups, one sites that that been redesigned in a major way over a two-year period, in the past two years, and those that

had not been designed in a new way. And when I found was interested, quite interested, frightening actually. Among the library web site that I looked at, those that had undergone a major redesign. Accessibility had dropped drastically, on the average in 2000 it was 47%, and had gone down to 24% to half that figure in 2002. In contrast those libraries, who didn't just a little bit with the web pages, minor changes to no change at all, accessibility went up a little that, from 68% to 81%, so that's an interesting figure, that's frightening. We were hoping when people redesign the web pages, it would take advantage of that opportunity and make them more accessible, but that doesn't seem to be the case, and whatever the reasons maybe, these are not very optimistic figures.

Audience-- Yemeni data on whether those redesign sites included things like flash or more interactive stuff.

No, I don't have that data. It would be interesting to know, what is the reason behind, what elements have been used to make them inaccessible.

Audience -- any hunches.

My hunch is that, unless from a what my hunch is, it's sort of a, one that I had was perhaps, those libraries who could afford major redesign, were trying to make it more flashy. And as you make things more flashing, you tend to him for accessibility barriers. and those may be at the beginning, not much resource to begin with, stuff to me straight HTML, and make many changes, and turned out to be more accessible, that's just a hunch, I cannot prove it. But it would be worth investigating further, because it could help the figure out what we can change, and what we can focus on.

Audience – (inaudible) university sites, that's probably true. I talked with some developers, and they use (inaudible) and Dreamweaver (inaudible) seems to me (inaudible) they feel that they need to compete with their web sites, and what does marketing tell you, about web sites (inaudible)

I think competition, is certainly a factor, and it would be interesting to see which web design tools are being used, Dreamweaver versus FrontPage for example. And see whether it's the correlation between the drop in accessibility as…

Audience -- it would also be worth looking, to see whether the institutions, where the negative change at them, has to do with publishing guidelines, I know for example that on our campus. The office of public affairs now owns the university's home page, in certain cases that making it flashy, but also got publishing guidelines, which include things like, making the box on 11 pixels, (inaudible), there may be things like that, where the campus publishing guidelines, are actually pushing in the wrong direction.

Okay, so there's wide field of more research to be done, which would be helpful really to figure out, what can we do, and what advice can we give to bring about improvements.

The next slide here, shows a sort of breakdown of the problems, and are broken down by

error types. What becomes apparent here are that most of the problems, the barriers, consists of the lack of alternatives text, or images, or images elements in an image map. In these are relatively easy to fix, so it's not like if you have a flash design you have to completely redo it, or something. By adding meaningful text, by adding tax most of the problems can be relatively easily taking care of.

Audience -- that word bears out what you are saying earlier about flashiness, not using the class-altering tool, just making them look flashier

Using more images and stuff, and forgetting about alternatives text.

Sue Beverly, and Marybeth, earlier I talked about the accessibility of various online database, also mentioned a special library high-tech issue that came out, with about 10 different studies. Specifically focusing on, the accessibility those resources, those types of resources. I'm just going to give an overview of what was found in the studies, I must however State, that the findings there are a bit outdated now. The problem is that by that time that the study is being published, they came out this summer, that it was taken at least a year earlier, things have changed, it's a moving target. Is it in my opinion it's not worthwhile reading that issue? I think it still is, because it gives you ideas of what you can do if you want to evaluate the resources you have your library. It gives you ideas of what to do, also, if you come to the other sessions I think Ron’s session, tomorrow, is also talking about the up-to-date data.

Two people looked at online catalogs, one on Voyager, one on I-pack, which are things more used in the public library environment. The person looked at exceleperous, there's another one, what was it, used in the East Coast, she had to dropout, couldn’t finish, she didn't that time to complete her studies, but anyway. Data available, and the picture is one and a half years ago, is that those two catalogs, where those pages you would use to conduct searches, the search screens, the help screens, ect. Rather accessible, with some problems here and there, that was sort of the findings. When we talk about accessibility I'm not talking necessarily about usability, many of those resources, catalogs, or later on the Journal databases, and electronic indexes, may well be free of, or fairly free of accessibility barriers, but the way they are structured made a pretty difficult for people to use screen readers for example. So you have to distinguish between accessibility on one hand, and that's the only thing I looked at, and what the data here reflects, actual real-life usability, is some indication on how useful the resources, or efficiently all effectively it can be used.

Index and full text databases, who was not here this morning? A few people, basically again there were a number of studies done looking at various technical access databases, the access that we all used in our libraries. And again the findings that time was that none were really absolutely on accessible. Most of the databases, the indexes had, had some mild degree of accessibility problems, but, didn't make the site completely inaccessible.

the data that we presented earlier today by Sue and Marybeth indicated, that the situation has improved, and is the same message we get from Ron's presentation tomorrow.

Electronic reference works, one person had looked at the Encyclopedia Britannica, and Oxford English dictionary online. That was again 1 1/2 years ago, and found that the Encyclopedia Britannica online was very accessible, and free of accessibility problems on the Gateway screens, which is funny because when I talked just a few months earlier to the representative of Britannica online at ALA. you look that means that I don't know anything about accessibility, and basically told me, made me understand that he didn't want to talk to me. So he didn't even know that he had in accessible site, and can capitalize on that in marketing. The Oxford English dictionary was found to have some in the middle category, there were some significant accessibility problems, but it wasn't completely in accessible.

E-Journal's, the research also is here, Brian Acounan (spelling?), what she found is that with a few exceptions, the providers of electronic journals, emeralds, High wire, had some accessibility problems. In their Gateway screens, that we that's the ultimate resources. And if you look that formats of these in which the articles are ultimately provided. She noted that most of those provide HTML, text based PDF, there are two databases which provided image PDF only namely Jstor and project news (spelling?)

Project News, there were PDF images only available, which of course is problematic, which I'm glad we come back to that because we have people from Jstor here. And once I'm done with this overview I hope we have a little discussion, where we can go that in what we can do as librarians, and one Jstors, to see what Jstor has to offer us. The HTML of course is accessible, text PDF is somewhat accessible, depending on how it's been structured, and image PDF one can argue whether it's accessible or not, I would argue at this point it's not, it's not completely in accessible either.

Electronic reserves, this is one area that I am particularly concerned about, it's so widespread now to have electronic reserves in our libraries, and especially connecting with distance education, having not accessible materials on E-Reserve, really presented a big problem. What the situation today is most E-reserve systems use PDF files, in most cases these are simply scanned in files, imaged based files. What's the accessibility of these files is highly problematic, most people say no they're not accessible, I'd say it's highly problematic. There are some solutions being developed, that would sort of a lot of you to, the OCR's, not imaged based PDF files, and then a screen reader then take out the created text, but again there are number of problem, one is problematic at this point in time, it's a multi-step process, and secondly it's fraught with inaccuracies. You can use the OCR somewhat, to get it dirty version, which is not the same as the original. So you get a second-rate content version which argues, it lies against what the ADA, wants us to do to provide equal access, equal kind of products, of equal quality.

Audience -- do you know anything about PowerPoint?

Audience -- I use PowerPoint quite regularly, and if you use plain PowerPoint it works quite well, it gets complicated when you start these text boxes, and all of a sudden the nightmare starts up.

Audience -- what about outline for?

Audience -- that's a whole different thing

Audience -- I have instructor to uses PowerPoint on web

Audience -- what you're saying is HTML, and all those terrible things, one problem is you get a version with multiple frames. And that's pretty scary. The default stuff comes up with WC3 vocals on. But if you download and install it, there's a configuration I'll where you can tell it what images to use and stuff like that. It's pretty good, it creates a web-based presentation. And every time it sees an H-1 tag it builds a new slide. So there's something about PowerPoint accessibility.

You may notice that I don't use PowerPoint, I use just HTML files. What I risk is that the visual rendering of them various from systems assist them, but I figure on the other hand, the presentation is accessible that give you the URL here, if anybody is interested. The navigation link is a little that if he so. But I think with a little bit of intuition there's easily away to weasel your way through the presentation.

Adobe provides a plug-in to converts text based PDF files, into stream read accessible files. Even that approach is not quite without problem, and I haven't done this myself, but relying on the regiments Steven Mandels (spelling?), that was from a message, on the discussion group, he said that, “ the problem of converting text PDF, to screen reading accessible text file is problematic for a number of reasons, one is while earlier versions of Adobe Acrobat may not be readily convertible to accessible format, further, other features of the new PDF restrict the ability to copy files, even if they are converted. And finally he says the reliable version of formatting and other nuances like tables is not certain. That's why earlier on when it says certain journals put out text PDF's, but their articles in text PDF's, in text based PDF formats, that it somewhat accessible, it depends a little bit on the structure of the text PDF files. As I go down from a list I come over e-reserve, I talked about e-books, I don't know many study that talks about, accessibility of the net libraries, which are assist them in Wisconsin invested lots of kilo-bucks, or six digit figures. I think to get it started, and I have no idea if it's accessible or not and I don't know any studies in that area.

Virtual reference I'm glad that we have special presentation on that, Briana, will give that later this afternoon. I'm not going to talk about it except that I, I don't know any studies so far that lets as an I'm glad Briana has looked into it, and will enlighten us. Online tutorials I don't know of any studies that looked at library tutorials. To use the databases ect, whether in accessible or not. And then there's the group of digital libraries, and electronic archives, and coming back to Jstor now because it falls into that group.

There's a lot of stuff out there that exists only, in original print only format, that people in the process of digitizing, and this is a tough issues to deal with. What is affected here is the stuff you put on e-reserve, some professor wants some journal articles he hands to the libraries put on e-reserve, so we would scanned it in, that would be one situation. The back issues of journals, maybe 100 years back, that's what Jstor does, a great service. A great service, especially for smaller libraries who cannot afford, don't have those journals and can't afford the space, or simply local libraries and want to archives stuff put it in digitalized form.

The issue here is the same, what are the options available in the term of, in the perspective of accessibility. Well, you can take these things and retype them in, very time-consuming of course. You could scanned them in, then OCR them, then edit the OCR text for accuracy and structure, which is needed to make them be parallel to the original print document, which is also very time-consuming, especially the editing part, a lot of time.

The next part would be just to scan it in and OCR it, and provide the dirty text file, and just leave it at that. Scanning and OCRing goes fast, and has a disadvantage that what you get or what is available would be a version has mistakes in it. OCR it better technologically but there are still mistakes in there. Also, as you OCR, text, the structure of the text may determine, may result in not quite coherent text documents so that's not a problem. So what are those other options? Maybe provide some semi-accessible versions maybe provide some Tiff files, that seems to be the current approach, that Jstor is even considering, has adopted, or is even pursuing or in the process of realizing.

Jstor representative- Well, hopefully we’ll be releasing that quite soon.

Jstor representative- (inaudible)

Now let me talk a little bit about the accessibility aspect of it. I welcome comments and more technical advice, and I’m not much of a techie, but this is my understanding. The most common practice until now, when you have an image based text document, lets just say a print thing in your hands. Or an image based electronic document, what’s often done is like an article on Jstor, published 10 years ago, and the approach to that typically now is that the other TDF image is physically printed out, and you scan it in, and then you have software that has to scan it in, or connect to a scanner, converts it to the Tiff file, then OCRs it, and then comes out with some sort of electronic text, that seems to be the current process. I suspect that one other step here, the structure of the e-text, is often messy, and you clean it up all little bit.

It seems that there is newer technology out there, and I think its open book, and curtswhile systems (spelling?) seems to cut over some the steps here, and narrow it down.

Audience – Kurzweil (spelling?), 1000 treats at as if it were a (inaudible), so he printed and Adobe Acrobat document, a pdf document, one of your available printers, in the Kurzweil system is there, so at least it goes straight there, so at least he cut off the going to paper first.

So with the PDF image you go through this virtual printing process, a software-based process, and you end up with TIFF files, when you end up also with E-text. Now Jstor has come up with a solution to that problem by saying, we can also use the TIFF files directly. Which means that the problem in the processing of the text, this steps involved, are reduced to only OCRing text, and having that electronic text available. Initially on my first looking Jstor, I had sort of mixed feelings about that, on one hand I thought, it was very clear to me, I think it's very clear to all of us, Jstor provides a great service, we have access to the back issues of journals which we would not have it wasn't for Jstor, many libraries wouldn’t have had if it wasn’t for Jstor, or many libraries wouldn’t have had, so it’s an excellent service. On the other hand it’s not currently, the format of the journals, are image-based pdf, so that’s not good, so I was mixed. My thinking was why isn’t Jstor making, Jstor also OCRs there files, They ocr it so that the articles and the journals, can become searchable, when you go to Jstor, and you look for matches on articles, articles that match certain terms, it will search through the OCR text, which we refer to as dirty ASCII files, and will maybe locate certain pages and certain journals, and certain articles, and then it will lead you or direct you right to those pages. But these dirty ASCII files are not available to the user, you can search them but, you can't access them with a screen reader, and I thought heck why not? Why not make it accessible that those OCR texts be available, problematic as it may be it probably contains some inaccuracies.

So trying to answer the question myself, I’ll let you explain it.

Audience- (inaudible) from a legal angle as well, and the reason why it has come up again, and again (inaudible) If I can back up a little bit, your introduction was perfect (inaudible) that is our mission were a non profit organization. (Inaudible) when we get licenses from publishers it requires us that we make a faithful representation of the original. So that’s where were coming from, in providing image based content (inaudible) there’s also a legal reason there (inaudible) we run into legal problems on another end, so for that reason, that’s why were image based. And yes, we go and OCR it and make it searchable. It’s very (inaudible) for searching but it dirty, it’s dirty text. But, it’s good for searching, it’s not necessarily good for reading with a screen reader (inaudible) problems, you have wood order issues, and the goal is to provide an equivalent product, it would not be the same (inaudible) OCR, there are products out there, organizations that are typically focused on creating OCR and delivering it to people with screen readers. So what we want to do, is deliver something that is unique with that product and it would be a great resource for us to combine a product that is designed by an organization (inaudible) accessibility (inaudible) continues to evolve. That’s why we have provided the TIFF files, and that’s why we do not feel comfortable handing over the OCR.

Ok, Ron do you want to comment on that, because I think there are many opinions in the library community about that

Ron- (inaudible)

Audience - (inaudible)

Ron- (inaudible)

I thought you were more critical about half a year ago.

Ron- Yeah you always are

We all change our opinions

Ron- The concern for me, as a university administrator, (inaudible) we don’t have enough librarians (inaudible)

Other side of tape

Audience- (inaudible) a PDF and it doesn’t always offer you a PDF (inaudible) there is a dedicated terminal for the disabled community 90 % of the kids who use this same process, of asking for the print and download. (inaudible)

I pretty much have the same opinion as Ron on this matter, I think in the current situation, technology, it’s certainly a great step towards providing, theses resources in a more accessible format, it still not ideal, but we have to live with reality.

Audience (inaudible)

Audience- (inaudible)

Thanks, I still really want to come to strategies and what we can do, and I really want to go ahead here so we cover that. There was one point for Jstor, what is the outlook for the future for the journals that are originally produced electronically, is there a way that you can get an original copy, in original electronic form, and if we don't we can get the best of all worlds, and electronic copy that's true to the original, and that's still accessible without having to go through OCRing, and problems that connect with that. I know that the big question, but if you can respond to it very briefly, I would appreciate it.

Audience- (inaudible)

Uhuh

Audience- (inaudible)

I realize that it's a complex issue, if everything would be out there xhtml, we can probably streamline the process, and copyright wouldn't interfere

Audience- (inaudible) once you have the Journal and electronic format, it's done for you, the production process is very specific, (inaudible)

Ron very briefly

Ron-

What I would like to do is really come to the main part of strategies for change, and what I would like to talk about, I've broken down into various main sections, so let's start with policies. What I think we should do is librarians, or if enough librarians it's involved with formation of resources in Education, whatever, students. We should start out by analyzing the policy, at our own institutions, whether we have accessible policies on the books, we also to look in the policies issued by professional organizations, that really needs of change further down the road. We need to it initiate and support efforts, that inclusive language, not only. Well, here's the thing, many institutions now have accessible web policies, based for the whole campus. Well, that's very get, but do we have that the library level web policies, or accessible resource policies, and further down to we have, (inaudible), reserve, and reference, etc. the problem is we have a policy at top-level, the folks really doing the work, the people doing the collection development, the people who said the reserve systems, the people who maybe put in place a virtual reference system. At that moment they're not looking over at the top-level campus wide accessibility policy, that's not in their view.

So what I would recommend, that we have to repeat, the need for accessible resources, and various policies we have that are more specific in the library context. So what should saying the collection development policy, if possible for example, we should favor a product that is accessible, or something of that sort, whatever wording you want to use. It should be mentioned in their that accessibility in some form at those very specific policies, not to be forgotten in the everyday decision making.

Distance education, by the way, why did I have a link here?

The best policy I know in here of distance education is at the California community colleges, it's an excellent document, it's probably a good document for you to look at if you're considering making your own policies. It cited on this handout if the California community college distance education, I thought I had listed at, it's about the eighth from the bottom on page 12. The first one on the California community college is, and as I notices and you're the only one that I put the first name first get the special status on my bibliography.

Professional organizations, I'll show you an example, the Association of College Research Libraries, has guidelines for distance-learning library services if you look at those guidelines, a little booklet about 15 pages or so, and very recently revised I think the year 2000. And you go through their, you don't find in any of the sections, a definition of personnel or resources, services, no matter what section, accessible accessibility is not address, and that for guidelines and a lot for libraries, that deal with distance education resources certainly needs changing, change. There's a reason probably, anyway, it is like librarians, we need to work through and focus in on our professional organizations to bring about change. The reason why this is important, you may think, aw this is just some acrl policy sitting somewhere it doesn’t matter, it does matter, and why does it matter? Because we you're institutions goes, and if you draft, and if you are in the process of drafting your own distance-learning policy, distance education policies. You look at policies like this, at a higher-level, and you use those as models. And if accessibility is not address here, the folks that draft those at an institutional level, are probably not thinking about it when they draft their own. That's why I think it is important we look to our institutions.

Audience- (inaudible)

I started it out, then it fizzled out again, then it always revs up again before the next ala gets started, and after we get so busy with preparing for other stuff, I’m not very good at working through the organization, and having any function in the ala things. I’m busy doing my research, and giving presentations and writing articles but that’s just something I’m not good at, I’m just not prone to be affective in. If any of you is, please, that’s something that’s very important and needs to be done, and I can give you one contact person to start out with, Audrey Gorman, she would be a good person to start out with in that regards.

Awareness and training, is next on my list after policies, again we have to pretty much, first let us look at in-house awareness raising and training. Of course we need to give workshops internally to colleagues. I think we need to, campus wide we need to somehow to encourage people to teach accessible design or web design, we need to incorporate accessible web design into elements into the regular courses on our campus. Those are courses that students who are doing the web pages, for many of the departments are probably taking those courses that don’t hear about accessible web design there, are likely to do good and design accessible web pages for whoever they work for.

In depth workshops, there are many listed here that are available. Internal ones, here is a good example, Madison, I’m so jealous of Madison, as I look at there web development series programs. Is Ellis here, Ellis Anderson, you look at what they have, you have creating accessible web pages workshop, organizing the content of web sights. Somewhere they have something about Dream Weaver, about cascading style sheets, and it’s all incorporated into the general workshops on web design, it’s not something that’s separated out, there’s a series of workshops on web design where accessibility is integrated into that series, and I think that is an excellent example of how we can provide training at an institutional level. That’s what we should strive for. If resources are available there is also the possibility of resorting to external training opportunities, there are many. EASI is one place that provides online courses, there are others and I have a resource page where I think it’s listed, I have listed the various options that I know about where you can get online training, where people can get online training in accessible web design, it’s in that box, there’s a URL that leads to one of my resource pages.

What I see as important, and what I see as a problem on my campus and what I think is a problem on most campuses. There is no clearly assigned responsibility, which is responsible for accessibility on a campus. Is it the disability folks, is it the IT folks, is it our library director, because it’s in regards to libraries resources, is it the vice chancellor, who is it, who is ultimately the person who orchestrates the whole effort to make our campus accessible, or the online environment accessible. In most situations there’s no assigned person who really can be pinpointed to and everybody is pointing to another person. I’ll go to the disability folks, nah, it’s the IT folks talk to them, talk to the web designer. There is one place that I have found, I think that was, now where are we here, which campus is that, disability on computing, at ACLA? Which campus was it? If you see it please tell me. What I’ve found here is, here is a campus which has a person in place, that does all kinds of things that I really sort of envisioned, which I thing every campus should have a person like that, with that role.

Was it?

Audience- UCLA

UCLA, I thought so I wasn't sure. A person that insures that a web site is usable for everyone, and some of the tasks that that person would be doing, is to track new access guidelines, mandates, the legal stuff, inform campus web publishers of accessibility standards, and provide detailed written accessibility evaluations on existing web pages, work with campus web publishers to correct those accessibility problems, work with campus publishers who are creating new pages to make sure they include, to make sure they are design accessibly, and uh, and so on and so forth. And there's a person here, that would really sort of monitor the whole process, and give impute to the crucial people who create pages, and he would sort of be the hub of it all. I find this lacking in most campuses that I'm aware of.

Audience- (inaudible)

15 that's a small minority, 50 that's still a small minority.

Speaking of training, another training aspect is where do our librarians come from, of course they come out of the libraries schools, how aware, how much emphasis do we put on libraries schools and accessibility. Now if the WebPages themselves on this list are any indication, the future looks very grim indeed. The data I collected again shows that in the year 2002 this spring, only about roughly 23 or 25 percent, barley a quarter of the pages were free of accessibility problems. That is even worse than the other pages that I found on libraries and campuses in general. This list folks, should be the leaders in that area are not living up to, don't seem to be aware of the problem, and don't model the good design in their pages. It also provides people with a certain disability from entering, or discourages them from entering some of their programs. So we ask our self, people with disabilities are so highly un-represented among librarians. Well, at least in parts maybe because there's not enough awareness among the training institutions.

The ALA, a subsection of ALA, the American Library Association, a subsection there of called ASCLA, let me see what that stands for, the Association of, someone help me out here, I can’t remember what it stands for. Anyway, they came up with, they addressed issues of disability within the library context, in the professional organization. They came up with recommendations by which all graduate programs, library and information studies, should require students to learn about accessibility issues, assistive technology, the needs of people with disabilities, both as users and employees, and laws as applicable to the rights of people with disabilities, as they must, as they impact library services.

That is a recommendation coming out of our professional organization or one branch there of. A study by Waling, which is just about to get published, looked at the reality of that. And currently, what she found is that, because we have little time limits, I’m going to go to the last one.

What is really the situation right now is that while about two-thirds of students, or about two-thirds of the institutions offer or include in their curriculum, parts that would include these accessibility issues. Only about one-third of them, one-third of those institutions are that required. So it’s only in about one-third of our library schools, are students required to learn about accessibility. So maybe that needs to be changed to. How can we go about that? I’m not sure weather the thing I came up with is useful. Collect data, publish them, and put them in the face of list schools and hope something good comes out of it. Lets look at the ALA accreditation standards, last revised in 1992 and if I look through those standards what I found is two elements, that possibly could be argued, to make those folks at the libraries accessibility resources when they consider accreditation of that institutions. One is that the standards demands that or state that, unfair discrimination because of age, blah, blah, blah, disability, violates the standards that the accreditation institutions impose, and one specific standard says that applying to physical resource and facilities, says that a program that has access to physical resources and facilities that is sufficient to the accomplishments of it’s objective. So they have accessibility demand there, applying to the physical environment, but that doesn't talk about the online environment.

Now I wrote those guys about two weeks ago the publishers and Axlib asking for clarification, weather their access to physical resources and facilities would also extend to the online environment, or the virtual environment. Now I'm waiting to hear from them back, apparently they have a meeting scheduled for the middle of November, and I was promised they would look into it, and I'm curious, I'm waiting for the results. Weather the accreditation, weather the accreditation agency is responsible for accrediting our libraries schools, thinks that they should include in the things they look at, accessibility of the online resources programs provide.

IT services, let's go to the next thing, I think what's important is that the campus wide accessibility friendly web authoring tool is being adopted, I think for example Dreamweaver is much more favorite than front-page. The provision of accessible web pages is another good strategy. Many people say well, many people say well, many people do not have experience designing web pages but they are in a position where they are asked to do so.

So given limited time, I would appreciate assuming the goodwill on their part, those folks would appreciate, accessible web page templates that they can grab, plug the content in, and chances are in the template is accessible, that the outcome of the modified one fill in document is also probably accessible. That would be at least a good start.

Next (inaudible) power, I think that's a very important aspect, obviously the fact that we have Jstor representatives here, is probably the outcome of that kind of attempt to send a message to the vendors that accessibility counts.

And I think the messages is slowly sinking through, in some instances faster and more quickly, and a very nice response, and in some others it's a little bit like pulling teeth, but it needs to be done. And it needs to be done whenever we adopt, consider the adoption of the new database, or buy a new system, and online information system; we need to put the issue on the table. We need to ask is accessible? We can do that as we write RFTs, or in my experience in that vendors are often welcoming comments from the folks who are concerned about accessibility, not always, but increasingly so. So whenever we have a chance we should let vendors know that we are concerned about accessibility. That's ultimately, they lose out in a competitive market, where other things being equal, where one product is accessible and one is not, if there’s is the one that is not, they're going to be at the losing end.

Rushing through this a little bit, a few things about the impact that research can have, and I'm not sure if, weather I just have the a delusion here, but I hoped since I'm doing some of that research on the, on looking at accessibility of resources, I think that this is helpful for a number of reasons. First it helps to develop policy, a Disney input to develop policy, and if I can show a campus for the last four years your web pages were pretty much inaccessible, there is no positive trend here, we need to do something about it. And that can be used to get people, maybe to get people convinced that we need a policy, and maybe we need implementation plan for that policy. Another thing I'm not sure how affectively, but poor showings in research findings may shame certain institutions into some kind of action, making improvements.

I also wonder, and I'm not sure weather it is true or not, but should it come to a law case, stay a students who is blind sues, a college because of inaccessible web pages, if there is documented evidence, even in published form that that college consistently had poor accessibility, as far as the online environment was concerned, maybe that may sway the judge, or OCR, the office of Civil Rights, well you guys have been aware of that problem for four years and you didn't do anything about it, and they may take a somewhat stronger stance on that institution, then they would if there were no such documented evidence. It is just a possibility, I'm not sure weather that is true or not, but I think research may be helpful there.

Finally what we really need is this kind of a consumer report of information service. Right now we have some studies that look at accessibility of some online resources. They age so quickly by the time they come out in print the information is outdated, so we need some kind of system that does the following,

Audience- (inaudible)

Do I get a kick back, no, I'm happy to hear that.

Audience- (inaudible)

Thanks for mentioning that it makes my day.

Anyway, as librarians we often make collection development decisions, should we adopt this data base, should we dole five thousand bucks for this vendor or not, but what we need at that moment, if you are concerned about accessibility, is information about the accessibility of this product that are up to date, and includes the wide spectrum of online resources, it is up to date, and when resources are being upgraded, and databases are being upgraded, we need new information on it. And it should be instantly available, not in somebody’s file somewhere who did the research, but somewhere on the web where we can go to and quickly check. Now I was wondering how that could be accomplished, and I thought I had this consumer reports model in mind, you want to buy a dish washer or whatever, and you go to the consumer reports to check how it performs, and we need something similar to our online database, with regards to accessibility. So I had the idea, if you have enough librarians, that form little groups, and each group sort of takes under its wing a certain type of resource, maybe electronic reserve, or a certain type of electronic database, indexes or full text databases, ECT. Then evaluates the products, puts them out on the web at a central place, some kind of clearing house, where you can go and visit it and instant information, fairly up to date information. Now I had that idea and I tentatively dubbed it Project Adopted IT, but I never got around to do anything with that idea.

Now hearing what Ron is doing, I think that he might be able to carry that off. So I’m addressing that issue again.

Ron- (inaudible)

I realize everyone is eager to go, so just let me make one point. It’s really important if you want to bring about change that we are in connection, that we communicate, and one great place to communicate is the Axlib discussion forum, and I listed it also here on my handout. If you aren’t a member here, I encourage you to join, there’s new information out on accessibility that relates to the library environment, it’s prone to be published somewhere there. Discussions as we’ve had sometimes happen there. Sometimes it’s quiet, sometimes it’s busy, so please, I thought I put it on here, page 11, please join that list, it allows us to be more affective, if we all pull on the same string and speak in the same voice I think we can accomplish more than id you diddle along there individually and not connected.

Audience- (inaudible)

Thanks for coming and thanks to all of you who contributed to that panel discussion.