Sign Colorado Work Order Mobile

Document type sign work order colorado mobile

then you've been an accessible information advisor at the university of kent for nearly six years what have you done in that time to create a more inclusive and accessible environment thanks uh laura hermann hi everyone thanks thanks for having me i i think the um one of the key things i i think is and i was really pleased to see that in in the survey responses that it's very much a team game i think what what's happened in the past is we've had a very kind of medical approach to accessibility that has been one department or one person who's responsible so it's really good to see that it's kind of a shared responsibility which is um i think the only way you can do it basically everybody has to be playing their part in making stuff accessible it needs to be done at the coalface and it needs to be done um as part of everyone's natural workflow it's um particularly with the the onset of these new public sector bodies websites and mobile applications accessibility regulations um they require us to kind of front load it you know it's no longer good enough to say oh let us know if you have a problem and then we'll figure out a solution we need to figure out the solution at the beginning so i think one of the key things that we've been trying to do is to change the culture so that people have accessibility at the forefront of their mind in everything they do whether that's in the university you know designing a a lecture designing an assessment designing a field trip undertaking some procurement we've done an awful lot of work with our our library around um ebooks to to try and make that a really important part of the procurement that you know we we will um score that very heavily uh you know in favor of of someone who's able to give us a a a favorable response in terms of what they're doing for accessibility now we we don't expect everything to be absolutely perfect because a lot of people are are kind of you know developing their processes around this as we've seen from the the survey results there um but i i think what we would want to see is people taking this seriously and being seriously engaged and wanting to make this better because there's so many reasons for doing it it's you know firstly it's the right thing to do um but but i think that there's broader benefits and i think when we talk about some of the work that iron's been doing to help us with remediate some of our content hopefully we can demonstrate how that actually improves the accessibility of the resources sorry that in improving the accessibility we're improving the sort of broader usability of those resources and and making them better and more useful uh instruments for everyone who who comes across them so i i think there's been lots of yeah lots of strategies to make everyone responsible for their little bit of it in which case that no one has to do the heavy lifting on their own i love that idea of thinking of it as this is the bit that i can do because no one can do it all but if everyone does their part and if as a result of this session everyone goes away and does their little bit of it then that cumulative effect is really really powerful iron so before working at code mantra you uh worked in-house at code um at code mansion no at john wiley um could you please explain what attracted you to working at code manager like what what shift what what drove you to make that shift sure laura and likewise thank you for uh for having me today um that you know the transition came at a natural time for myself i believe i've always been a problem solver i like puzzles and solving issues when i made the transition it was right around the time of the digital era if you will so everybody at that time was trying to create their epubs or their moby pockets if you remember those and uh so getting away from print not getting away from print but bringing digital into the mix right and um so i started that within wiley but it seemed like a natural progression that um you know publishers were looking for support and expertise they had the print industry nailed they had done it for you know decades and decades right but this new digital thing i felt that they were needing support and there were partners and suppliers like comantra that were specialized in that area and so it uh it intrigued me it was another big problem and puzzle to to pursue and so that's what eventually led me to mantra had you worked with code mantra when you were in house or was it something new to you uh it's a small world publishing and uh so yeah um actually a a co-worker or you know an ex-colleague had progressed over to code mantra prior to myself uh an opportunity opened and therefore allowed me to join up with code mantra sounds great and did you have something you wanted to show us today or shall i go to that yep i will bring up a quick slide um so what i wanted to show as ben mentioned we've been working i've been working with him um [Music] to to look at some of the the documents um [Music] and then what i'm going to speak to is pdfs themselves so you know ben shared a few different articles and different documents and what we quickly discovered was that you know unfortunately the pdf files that we found were not compliant and so what i wanted to do is to just show the impact right everybody hears accessibility everybody you know maybe believes they understand but what i really like to try and do is visualize visualize that impact so what i've done here is on the left hand side is just a snapshot of that original article the first page of it and i have two different two different pages within this particular document [Music] and what i usually just how i describe this is that as fortunate and cited readers over the many years of reading all kinds of material we inherently know how to traverse that page there are various visual cues you know we just understand how to read multi-column flow so all of that is again logical and things we have just learned over time but what about users of assistive technologies or even other programs for that matter you know there are other benefits beyond just solving this particular problem which is you know making the content accessible to those using assistive technologies but the other benefits are you know there are other machines or other software that can make better use of this particular document if it is a compliant document so the left-hand side again is the original page and a non-compliant state that same page looks like what you see on the left when accessed by an assistive technology at best you know it's bits and bytes of different paragraphs or even lines the contents all mixed and jumbled up you know you see the third line down is the introduction well that's in the lower portion of the page there's a lot of content at the top of the original page that should probably be read first and foremost the abstract is you know there but it wasn't actually accessed by the assistive technology until much later so this is really a challenging document and in in that non-compliant state if we take a look then you know when it is a compliant document all of that capability that we have as sighted users is now available to those of assistive technologies and again other software programs that may need or you know benefit from access to this content for other purposes we navigate through documents visually by looking for different headings and sections and you know that's the way we typically consume content today is these bite-sized pieces now that this is a compliant document they're able to do the same thing um they can search for the section that interests them how because you know it's been identified with the respective headings and so on and so forth the links are functional the next i wanted to you know that's that's i'll say that's simple text if you look at a table right imagine and this is even a relatively simple table so this same table in a non-compliant state you know you would not even really know that you've entered into a table let alone be able to know what the column heads were or the row heads uh should they exist so you're going to know that encounter you're not going to be able to navigate it like we would typically you don't read a table you look look at the table assess what information is important to you on your fact-finding mission and you you know you locate that data cell to get the information that you're wanting especially in more of a you know a statistical or data-based type of table but this is an example again of that same table after the document has been made compliant so it presents itself to these assistive technologies or other software again as a tabular data you know a table and clearly has the table head both the column and the row heads identified and even goes to the extent that there are list items within each of the data cells so not it's not just a paragraph within or a chunk of data there's actually a list so the user can expect two things when they encounter each of these data cells because the assistive technologies can see that it knows that it encountered a list it'll tell them that they're on list item one of two so really they don't get lost right you could imagine again going back to the non-compliant state you're not even sure if you're reading a table and if you've finally figured it out you're going to struggle to know where you're at in that particular data set so i don't know if you want to add any uh absolutely yeah it's brilliant and i think a key thing is um iron mentioned the broader benefits i mean this is a an open access uh a lot of the material i shared was open access content and of course you know that's crucial for you know academic impact is is one of the key measures there so i think the fact that we're making stuff more accessible by design that means that we're not leaving anyone behind and we're future proofing that content so that when it's published it's published and then it's um accessible to everyone and it's not then gonna oh you know two two weeks down the road you're gonna get somebody saying like i can't access this content and it sounds really helpful to me so i think we we feel really strongly that open access should be a an absolute beacon of good practice um for accessibility um and you know for those broader benefits of you know the discoverability as well as it's the right thing to do so if you're talking about maximizing your impact then you need to maximize your audience and all of the measures that irons outline will benefit everybody and none of the things that iron has done to improve the accessibility of some of these documents is going to mess it up for someone who doesn't have a disability so it's there's absolutely good reasons to do it and a crucial thing is to try and build it into the workflow because ideally sometimes some of the best place people to make some of these um remediations are the the authors themselves um particularly if we were talking about visual images you know maybe we might let's say this was a a paper that had a graph or a chart in it or something that was conveying some visual information probably the best place person to tell you why that image was contextually important in the in the broader document would be the person who decided to put it in their document so they would be able to give a very meaningful description of why it's there so understanding those kind of broader workflows and that's been a super helpful thing for us in working with with iron is that we can identify typical issues that we're facing with certain types of content in order that we can then work out a prioritized list of how we're going to help our authors uh our academic staff to address them at source rather than kind of any kind of retrospective action which has got to be the right way to go because we want this to be a natural part of the workflow and i always talk about kind of what i would love and i will then retire and go around the world on my motorbike if ever we can achieve this is to um get people to think of accessibility in the same way that they think of um uh ex you know a spell spell check you know if if you most of us wouldn't dream of sending something out to a wide audience without running a spell check if we did a similar level of accessibility check i think that would be great you know and it should have that similar kind of status in the workflow because it's super important i'm so glad you've shown us the visuals here iron and ben because i think is like we pay a lot of lip service to oh you know accessibility this but being able to see it um and the way it just really hits home like the difference they can really make by um i think by thinking about this and as ben said thinking about it earlier not not retrospectively and just what you've got planned next at codemanche obviously this is really important work that you've been doing that we've had seen a snapshot of is there anything else that's coming up that would be useful um for our audience to know about and then we'll go to their audience questions sure um yeah what's next is to so this particular product and service that we've been pursuing and working with ben on you know i've been working on this for the last four years essentially so what we plan to do is you know to broaden our our coverage through the use of this product and um you know we were predominantly publishing based over the last two years we've ventured out into other verticals but the next big thing i believe is going to be there's a lot of documents that are you could classify or categorize so they're very similar in nature right the product that we have built to enable this remediation to be as painless as possible um is through a lot of automation uh machine learning and whatnot so our big push right now is to even increase the level of automation for through classifying certain document types um you know um i don't know a particular article may have different content but the construct of the article is the same um the design of it is the same or you can even get into you know various contracts um again they're very structured in nature content is different so looking at more of a highly automated for these high volume or transactional type of documents but um but no our desire the next big thing is to just continue pushing and doing what's right helping people achieve that amazing thank you and sounds like everything you're doing is going to speed things up and make accessibility more accessible in a way so yeah great thank you can you provide us with some good accessibility checker tools is there anything you recommend it's a really great question i mean it kind of depends on what what the content is you know if we're talking for example in the document scenario there's um if somebody's beginning that that document in microsoft office for example there's there's some brilliant inbuilt tools in the office workflow an accessibility checker that will um prompt you a bit like is it it's actually i think it lives next to the spell check now in certainly in office 365 um and that will take you through some of the um the accessibility uh issues that the irons outline so it will help you to look at things in your table so that that would be a really lovely example of just getting that on people's radar um as embedding some of this stuff earlier on if you're talking about web content um there's a quite a nice tool called accessibility insights which if you um google that is a similar accessibility checker i think it's from microsoft but that will help you assess the same set of principles for a you know web page or html content um i'd also like to mention that um there's an aspire list which is a really useful measure for for publishers to understand how how they're doing um and and to get a kind of flavor of kind of how how they might benchmark against other publishers um across the sector and i i think hughes who's on here now i've seen him pop up in the in the list so um any questions yeah give you a shout but that that would be a really a good way to check in and get an overall kind of feel of of how you're doing because we're all on a journey none of us have cracked this yet if the author's tool is microsoft words or indesign how can we ma e sh make how can we make that check more usable for an author is that what ian's told us so for the things that require a human check like reading order is that what you were just saying about the function that's next to the yeah yeah it's it's sorry oh and you go ahead you um yeah no so in microsoft word ben's right that that inbuilt ability for the author you know most of them are working in word um and the earlier you can start doing things obviously the better it can be an additive process then as the content proceeds through the life cycle to final publication but if you start somewhere then it only gets better and easier along the journey instead of trying to fix everything at the end so absolutely the inbuilt in word helps and then with regards to indesign you know there are similar best practices there as well so that you don't lose any of that particular you know work that the author happened to do um so there are best practices to carry that through the process and then you know i would not say that there's necessarily an accessibility checker for indesign but um whatever you create from indesign be it your pdf or an epub or some other digital export there are a variety of tools that could assist there um you know acrobat does have its own just like word has its own inbuilt um you know selfishly i'll mention our product as well we are able to to validate five different formats and the reason we we build our own uh validation is because there was a problem doing it at scale um you know one of the very first projects that we received at code mantra was i have a thousand pdf files can you tell me if they're compliant or not at that time we did not have our product and what did we do what everybody else and you know the industry at that time had to do which was download a standalone app deployed a handful of people to run these thousand files and a week later we finally had the results that was when a light bulb went off in my head that there's a fundamental problem we should not have to work for a week to figure out so um our product can do that at scale um along with the office formats word powerpoint and excel and you know full disclosure we have integrated daisy daisy has an awesome checker for epub so we have incorporated daisy's ace checker for epub and uh that's a wonderful tool for the epub format itself i'd like to learn know more about the software particularly the machine learning parts also things like epub conversion i can imagine this would be very good for libraries to make up for the deficiencies of publishers um so anything else about the software that you could share with us please um yeah so um we take great pride in in the software we you know cobunter's been around for nearly two decades and what that how that benefited us to solve this particular problem is we had processed such a large corpus of documents and different types of documents that ends up being a tremendous data lake for us to use for training our machine learning models [Music] as a result then we get good accuracy in those classifications of the content the headings the lists the tables and so on and so forth it's not perfect and so that's where you know we added on a user a ui to allow people to review the results and make adjustments to those so if it if it made a mistake and said everything was in heading two and it should have been a heading three it's easy enough to change that but the big advantage is that no one had to go through manually and identify each and every one of those things across the 100 page document or something so um couple the machine learning and the ability to predict those content types and build that structure along with the reading order that's the other component that's equally important to the structure um and then to finish it off is the ability to again check the compliance of the results all of it in a very scalable solution so please reach out i can get into more geek speak um i hope you can't tell from my face i'm not i'm lost but um yeah thank you so much um brilliant answers to all of the questions ben and ian thank you for giving up your time this lunch time it's just been really interesting i'm sure everyone's going to take something away that they can do that they can implement and make a difference here so um thank you so much thank you very much thank you very much laura thanks everyone bye bye