Amber Russell

So today, we're going to do an update. We previously presented on this in January, we being Cody Care and I. So we're going to talk about EBSCO's accessibility conformance, primarily EBSCOhost and EBSCO Discovery Service and others that sit on that platform.

So we'll do some intros. We'll do a high level on what ADA title two is. I imagine most of us know that, but I've got a little bit more about the history and then the changes that happened this year.

Going to share our audit results, for EBSCOhost that was just completed last week, talk about some next steps there, talk share some of the improvements that we've made in our last planning cycle, so the last three months of development that we've done, and updates to our documentation, share some content remediation numbers. And then Cody is going to walk us through a live screen reader demo using NVDA, with the new navigation in EBSCOhost.

So today, we have me, Amber Russell. I lead accessibility and globalization across EBSCO information services, so all of our products. And Cody Care, who is on my team, he's an accessibility engineer.

So this is me. I have a background in software consulting, building accessibility programs at organizations, doing training, and I was also a UX designer for many years, which kind of brought me into the accessibility space. I, as of yet, am not a librarian but that is a future goal.

I have my CPAC and have had it since twenty eighteen. It's certified professional accessibility core concepts, and that's through the IAAP. It's a certification that you can get. It's not a certification that anyone needs, but but it is a good one to get. And as I said, I lead accessibility and globalization across all of our product lines. I am based in Northern California.

So let's talk about ADA title two.

What does it cover? It covers discrimination boiled down by state and local government entities. I think most of us know this. The goal here is to ensure everyone has access to public programs, services, and activities. And that lines up with public schools, universities, and, you know, also important life things like banking or being able to pay a bill.

I pulled up the title two timeline and it was actually enacted in nineteen ninety by George W Bush.

I remember the Bush era. I'm old enough for that. I was not working in a professional capacity at that point in my life, so I don't remember the enactment of ADA title two, which actually went into effect in January of nineteen ninety two. So now we are twenty two years later, April twenty twenty four, the DOJ has now issued an update to ADA title two. And if you think about you know, I think about what I was doing in nineteen ninety two, which was playing the Oregon Trail on MS DOS and, you know, writing papers in WordPerfect, technology has changed a lot in the last twenty two years. And the way that we pay bills or go to school or read things is very different than what we were doing in nineteen ninety two.

So DOJ finally updated title two to bring all those digital applications under title two. And so in twenty twenty four, the effective date was meant to be April twenty fourth of twenty twenty six. Most of us were preparing for that. We were ready. EBSCO was ready. 

And then five days before it met was meant to go into effect, it was actually postponed a year, and I think there were mixed feelings about that. A relief, well, we can get more done. We can do more things, but also, you know, what does that mean in this coming year? So that's where we're at now.

EBSCO is in a great place. We were preparing for this. We were also preparing for, meeting WCAG two point one, AA because of the European Accessibility Act. We have many European customers, and so we've been on this trajectory. But now we've got even more time to do even more things.

And so now the update, the current effective date is April twenty sixth of twenty twenty seven.

So what does it require? It requires conformance with WCAG two point AA. WCAG is the web content accessibility guidelines. There is actually a more recent version of WCAG, which is two point two. And between two point one and two point two, there are six success criteria at the A and AA level. 

EBSCO’s gold standard is WCAG two two AA. The European Accessibility Act requires conformance with this. It's E N three zero one five four nine. Why do you care? Because they are actually updating to WCAG two two. And so we're trying to stay ahead of all of these trends.

Everything is backwards compatible. So if you see on our documentation that we meet WCAG two two AA, then we'll still meet WCAG two one and also two point o. So it's backwards and forwards compatible there.

How do you show conformance? You know, we can say, “great. We meet WCAG.” Cool. How do you prove that? And these are typically, documented in ACRs, accessibility conformance reports, often using the VPAT template. And the VPAT template is just a formatted document that's put out by the ITIC, which is a governmental or information organization and they've just created a template that's kind of become the gold standard.

And so that's your ACR VPAT, and that report is based on an audit that is done, preferably a third party audit, that is required by many institutions. That's what EBSCO does.

And then you've got your accessibility statement as well that's kind of a shortened version of where does your accessibility sit, what conformance level, what do I do if there's any issues, what do we do for, you know, improving accessibility throughout our products, etcetera.

And then the third thing is a road map. And the road map is kind of a trimmed down version of the ACR. And the road map will report on any issues that do not conform or partially conform and then provide an estimated remediation date.

So you can quickly look and see, okay. There's five issues here that are partially supported. These should be resolved in the next three months, so you're able to kind of plan ahead. And these are really just compliance documents. So I've got another poll here, which is: What has been the biggest obstacle in meeting WCAG two point one double a for your organization?

I'm watching the poll numbers here. And third party content is that's what I expected to see. And that is, you know, EBSCO, as an aggregator, that is our largest challenge too.

So, you know, for things that you have control over and, you know, for university, it's going to be your internal sites, your internal documentation. The things that you're able to change are much easier because you control those. You control the rights and the permissions, and you can, make updates to those. EBSCO as an aggregator has similar issues there with all of the different publishers.

We can control our UIs, our apps, anything that we're using within our products. But when it comes to that third party content, it's a little bit more challenging. Thanks for answering that question.

So last week, it finished. We had an audit on EBSCOhost. The first thing I want to talk about is understanding WCAG conformance. So when you're looking at an ACR, and, you know, if you're trying to understand, well, I need this product to have a hundred percent compliance. You're thinking about it from a compliance. We think about it from a conformance standpoint.

You want to see an absolutely clean ACR. You want to see that everything supports. And in an ideal world, that would be great. Everything supports always a hundred percent of the time.

But when you have software that is constantly releasing, as our products are, that becomes a little bit impossible to have. If something is constantly changing in the same way that there's kind of always small little bugs or inconsistencies in software, and we know that and we accept it. That's just part of life. The same exists for accessibility conformance. It's never done, and an ACR is based on an audit. So for example, our audit was done from August twenty eighth to September second. It's a short period of time.

And during that time, you know, the e-host profile that our auditors were testing, it was a third party vendor, wasn't changing, wasn't moving. But now a week later, if they were to audit it again, they might find a couple different things. And so, we're always doing the best that we can to have the most up to date reporting, and then keeping things, you know, updating in the background. But ACRs are just a snapshot in time of that short period of testing. The other thing is that when you're looking at this, you know, we tested and I'll get into this a little bit more, but we tested twenty three pages and, you know, different interactions with those. Includes modals and things like that.

For EBSCOhost, that's a pretty substantial slice of that. And we got, you know, all of our page templates. Oftentimes, when I'm reviewing, you know, vendor ACRs, I'll see, well, you tested two pages out of twenty. Is that a good sample size of your entire application, or were those just the two best pages? And so, you know, these are really simple. Maybe there's text only, not a lot of interaction. Then you can get that clean quote clean ACR or clean VPAT.

And so seeing something that says, you know, a hundred percent conformance, no exceptions, we meet every single success criteria is awesome, and it's really easy from a compliance perspective. But it's not always realistic.

And so, you know, the focus for me, for my team, for EBSCO, for our development teams, for our UX teams, is to build out the accessible foundation. So ensuring that our components which are, you know, repeatable, we use these throughout our application. The templates, the color palettes, those are all accessible, and that's our foundation. Those are the building blocks. And then when we put those together, then we start out with a much more accessible product.

So building new features, we know our modal is in good shape. Let's use that modal. We still continue to test. We still continue to resolve issues that do arise sometimes, you know, most of the time before we release them to our customers.

The important thing to understand though is that meeting WCAG is really just your absolute bare minimum that you can do. And so, you know, we test this at WCAG two two AA. There's a lot of areas where we meet the AAA criteria and exceed that as well, and that's great.

And so the goal is always, you know, to exceed WCAG, but just understanding that that's really the bare minimum that that any organization can be doing. And accessibility isn't done. It's not, k. We did our audit last year. Here's the report. We don't touch anything for the year until the following year. It's something that we're constantly, constantly working on.

So to actually talk about the audit scope that we did, we tested twenty three pages, includes all of our, you know, components, lots of different features. This tested the new navigation. You might remember we talking about this in the earlier webinar this year. So we tested, you know, all of the new navigation, new my preferences, really everything that was rolled out, all the filters. I'm trying to think if there was anything else big. I think those were the the biggest things there.

And the evaluation methods were, you know, automated tools, two screen readers. We did NVDA in Chrome and then VoiceOver in Safari, did contrast, lots of Zoom, keyboard only, and text spacing. So that includes that turns out to be one thousand two hundred and sixty five individual WCAG success criteria checks. So in WCAG two two, there's fifty five ish criteria. It's fifty five plus one, except parsing is gone. So, anyways, it's kind of a plus or minus there. And we have a pass rate of ninety one percent. 

So it's actually probably a little higher than that. We're going through and triaging each of these issues right now, and there's been a few false positives there. But overall, in really good shape. No major blockers.

No nothing that, you know, a user would get stuck or not be able to perform a task, which is really important.

So the primary issues that we came up with is that showed up were in info and relationships, and a lot of these are, not impacting users, but are, you know, broken ARIA links for something that is not, again, not impacting users, not screen reader users, no one. It's just kind of a compliance thing there. We will fix these. 

Name real values, similar things. We had a couple focus order ones, and then there's a couple status messages that that we're not announcing. So loading ones, once the page loads, it is announced, but just, you know, some more minor ones. And then we had a few reflow things. So zooming into four hundred percent, we have a couple things that are being truncated and not being cut off. So we're triaging issues right now.

Going to start remediation. Teams are going to start picking these things up as early as next week. And, at the end of this month, I will be posting an updated ACR for, for ehost and so it'll be ehost, EDS, BSI, and Novelist core collections. They all use those same page templates there. And within there, we should have estimated remediation dates for pretty much all of the open issues.

I see a question from Norma. Yes. It did include keyboard testing at two hundred and four hundred percent.

So the other initiatives that we've been doing, last week, actually we started two weeks ago. We've had a few this week. We've got a couple more next week. We're doing user testing. Our user researcher, Alicia, has been doing user testing with people with disabilities and a range of assistive technology. So we're mostly seeing Zoom and some text to speech. Sorry, speech to text.

I haven't seen a screen reader yet. Cody is constantly doing testing within our UIs with a screen reader, and so that was less important. But we wanted to see some other software that we might not be testing with this frequently. So I'm hope to have some results there soon.

And, and I just mentioned our third party audit there, so that's a big one.

So what have we resolved over the past few months?

So this was in the July through September timeline.

We have updated some issues. We had some accessible labels that weren't totally accurate, you know, matching the visual label there. So not a usability issue, not a user blocker, but definitely compliance thing, and so we've resolved that. We had a couple roles that we're not announcing correctly for some drop down components. We've resolved that.

And no missing announcements there. So we did miss a couple of those status messages like I missed or sort of loading messages, minor stuff there.

Keyboard navigation. We had some weird interactions. Still worked, but weren't directly, weren't working as expected in a couple places. So we've resolved that.

Updating labels and names. Again, a lot of these were accessible names versus visible labels, and then just cleaning up some of the noise for screen reader users and ARIA labels. So, you know, sometimes we had a couple that were repeating twice because, you know, it was it was a button and then an ARIA label had been added. So just some verbosity that was cleaned up and cleaned up the ebook access and some accessibility metadata as well. So a lot of kind of the background stuff was resolved over the past few months.

So where can you find all of this documentation? We've got an accessibility documentation page.

And within there, it's hard to show the whole page on here, but we've got the EBSCO platform, which is kind of our the most requested ACR. It's the EBSCOhost, EBSCO discovery service, BSI, Novel Score Collections, same page templates there, just template content changes. We've also got the accessibility statement and then a road map. So, again, these will be updated in the next few weeks by the end of this month.

You can pull out there. And then we've got, you know, all of our other products that we have recent ACRs, statements, and road maps for. So, you know, other products that you subscribe to, you'll be able to find them there. And then we've also got a lot of reseller products on there as well. And so we don't have all of them. Not all of our resellers, have been able to do an ACR yet. A lot of them are still in progress, but as we're getting those and working with them and I've been advising them and supporting them, those are showing up as well.

And then on the bottom screenshot is our accessibility quick start guide. So we've got links to EBSCO accessibility documentation. It's a screenshot above, which, is where the ACRs are and all that documentation. We've got an article on standardizing accessibility testing, and that kind of talks you through what our process is, for development and, you know, how my team works with the development teams and kind of just how that works throughout so you can understand, you know, what kind of testing are we doing. Are we being thorough? How does this happen?

We've got our digital accessibility statement for ADA title two, which you might need for compliance. That's. I worked on that with our legal team there, so feel free to grab that. We've got an accessibility navigation guide, which is what Cody put together, and it is a very robust walk through on how to do tasks with a screen reader.

Some of these will still reference the older navigation, but doing the actual, you know, searching for something filtering something will work the same there and that's really powerful. We've also got the ebook accessibility user guide and FAQs, so a lot of great information in there.

Information on content remediation and FAQs. And then we've the very bottom, we've got more regulations. So anytime there's, you know, regulations, where do we stand, what are we doing to prepare for that, I try to update that. And then we've got a link to our webinars too.

Here is a QR code that will link you directly to the quick start guide. I think Marjorie is going to put it out there too. Okay. So let's talk about content remediation.

In that poll, sounds like everyone is having a hard time with third party content. And I mentioned that EBSCO, you know, that's our challenge too. We can't guarantee that all of our content is going to meet the standards. 

We are working with publishers. We have been working with publishers. We will continue to work with publishers. But it's just not feasible at this point in time, for even publishers, especially the smaller ones that don't have all the resources to have every single piece of content meet standards.

So we do offer in-product remediation options, content remediation options. And this is, I do have a screenshot in there, it's called the accessibility support button. If you go into a viewer, Cody's going to demo this later, you can actually go into a viewer of a document. Maybe there's a PDF and it is not the right format. It's not working for a user for whatever reason. They can pop up in this form. It is an accessible form. Fill it out. It does prefilled information and request a different format.

And that will get sent to them. Journal articles, it's usually three to five days. Ebook process is is a little bit different. There's some publishers with ebooks that actually have to you have to request through the publisher. And so we're working with our customers on that to ensure that they get access to, for instance, textbooks as quickly as possible.

I pulled up our content remediation numbers for this year, or sorry, for the last year. So from September twenty twenty five to it was actually through August thirty first, so two September twenty twenty six. Soour total request, and this is request not pages, was sixty three hundred. Out of those sixty three hundred, forty eight hundred were ebook requests, which is pretty substantial.

So we had fifteen hundred and five journal requests. And out of those, I thought it was interesting, we have fifteen hundred unique institutions. And so, you know, out of our entire customer base, that's really not as many as I was expecting to see. Just a little over one submission per user and a little, for ebooks, almost four for journal articles, two and a half submissions per institution. So I thought this was kind of interesting.

I see a question in q and a. What are options when the publisher determines the PDF is too old and they won't remediate? We have a nineteen ninety eight penguin title and reached out for remediation, and eventually, we're told they won't do it. I'm assuming that we have no recourse.

Cheryl, request it through our platform. If it's an ebook, you know, you can you can circle back to the ebooks team or me directly, and we'll work with you. Usually, if the publisher says that they will not provide that to you, then the ebooks team will provide you with a Word document.

And, you know, legal has let us know that we need to provide accessible content to our customers as long as it is for personal use. So do want to stress that. So if you have a problem, please just reach out directly. Great question. 

For the items requested for remediation, does EBSCO make the remediated item available to all by default? No. We do not. I would love to do that, but we cannot do that. And I'll talk about journal articles first. Because oftentimes, the requested format is a Word doc. We can't put a Word doc back up on our platform. That's one reason. Another reason is that we've now kind of changed it a little bit, so an HTML version that didn't exist before, the formatting might have changed. And so there's different licensing and publisher agreements that we have and so we're not able to then update it on the platform itself.

You can, however, say you've got a course and you know you've got, you know, ten journal articles and maybe a textbook that, you know, you want your students to be using. You are welcome to request those and put those on a portal that is password protected and only available to your students so that you don't have to have the students request the same book thirty two times or the same article thirty two times times however many students. So that's something that you can definitely do.

Okay.

So how can you collaborate with us? I get so much information out of the webinars. The last one I did, you know, the questions that you ask help me inform product decisions and strategy decisions that, you know, I'm making. I'm always watching, you know, the accessibility landscape and trying to do my best to stay ahead of, you know, any regulations, anything else that's coming out. But I you know, I'm also not working at in a university or a library. And so I might miss things or miss giant tools that that you're using that I'm not as aware of. So just collaboration really helps us and helps me build better products.

So this is my team, me, Tina, who joined our team in February. She moved over from Stacks, which is another EBSCO product and is just a wonderful resource. She's been working really closely with our development teams on updating our component library and just making all of our baseline components really, really accessible. And then we've got Cody, who's our accessibility engineer and you'll hear from him shortly.

So ways to connect. I will be at Charleston this year. If anybody is there, would love to meet up with you. I'm also looking for co presenters to go to E R and L this year. I haven't been before and would really like to attend. There's some really interesting topics there. So if you are presenting or thinking about presenting, please reach out to me.

And then also EBSCO user group. I go every year. This coming year, it's in Phoenix, I believe it's on Horse Ranch. It looks pretty nice. So if you're going and, you know, want to co present on accessibility or globalization or anything that that interests you that kind of crosses those lines, I'd be really interested in doing that.

And ways to get involved. So, you know, I mentioned information is great. If you have an accessibility program office or, you know, a group of students that, you know, use assistive technology and would want to talk to our user research team or me or just share some information, that really helps us. So, and then, like I mentioned, any tool feedback, any tools that you're using that, you know, work well with EBSCO products or don't work well or that you would like to see work better. That's all information that that we would love to have.

That is it for me. I'm going to hand it over to Cody.

Cody Care

Hello. I am Cody Care. Well, first, thank you, Amber. What a wonderful presentation.

Yeah. I'm Cody Care. I'm an accessibility engineer here at EBSCO. I've been at the company for five years, almost five and a half. I have a background in computer science, and I am also a CPAC holder as of last year. And I am from North Shore, Massachusetts.

Today, we're going to do a, oh, important piece of context. I am a fully blind screen reader user. Been using screen readers for about thirteen, fourteen years. I specialize in NVDA on Windows and voice over on an iPhone.

Today, we're going to do a screen reader demo walking through searching for content. We're going to activate a couple filters and AI assisted search. We're going to navigate some content, save something, and take a look at actually accessing the content in the reader view.

Is there anything anyone would like to see that I didn't mention? Please put it in the q and a.

Let me start sharing my screen.

Amber, is it okay if I replace current share?

Amber Russell

Yep. You should be good. And I don't see anything in here that has requests for other things to look at.

Cody Care

Awesome. 

[Screen Reader Voice]

Screen sharing meeting controls window. Screen sharing meeting.

Cody Care

Alright. I'm going to lower the voice rate.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Rate thirty five, rate twenty, rate twenty. From Margaret Youngbred to everyone, I had to step away when Screen sharing meeting controls.

Cody Care

Does that feel like a good speed, Amber? Not too fast?

Amber Russell

Sounds great. 

Cody Care

Cool. Alright.

I'll tap.

[Screen Reader Voice]

BBSC or has research DB from managed by your organization.

Cody Care

Okay. I'm going to control home to make sure I'm at top of the screen.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Up control plus t.

Cody Care

And here we are on the basic 

[Screen Reader Voice]

Participants can now see your screen.

Press f six to view.

Cody Care

Control to silence.

[Screen Reader Voice]

BPSC

Cody Care

Okay. I'm on the right screen.

I so the first thing that we're going to do, we're on the basic search landing page for EBSCOhost. I'm going to press e to get down into the search field.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Extensions collapsed. Me, ten of twenty five. Toolbar.

Same page link skip to 

Cody Care

Sorry, I had my menu open. I'm going to press e to jump down to the search field.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Main landmark search, landmark search articles, books, journals, 

Cody Care

And then, say, before you search, you want to activate a couple filters with the screen reader.

That can be accomplished easily.

I'm going to tab 

[Screen Reader Voice]

From Marjorie Boyer.

Search button. Full text filter peer reviewed filter deactivated button.

Cody Care

We'll activate peer reviewed with the space bar.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Peer reviewed filter activated.

Cody Care

And there we go. We can hear a nice clean announcement and we'll tab forward to AI assisted search.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Select date range all day dash assisted search switch off on.

Cody Care

There we go. And, we'll press shift e to jump backward to the search field so we can do a search.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Search articles, books, journals, and more com.

Cody Care

Control to silence and we'll press enter.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Search articles, books, journals, and more combo box collapsed from Tom T.

Cody Care

Control to silence again, and we're going to look for dogs and with a boolean operator and mental health.

[Screen Reader Voice]

L b.

Cody Care

You always want to make sure your boolean operators, if you're in basic search, are done with capitals and or not.

And so 

[Screen Reader Voice]

A. Blank health.

Cody Care

Okay. We're going to press enter and do a search.

[Screen Reader Voice]

B b loading results alert slash c slash slash slash 

Cody Care

Control to silence.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Main landmark. You may also ask heading level three list. How can owning a dog improve mental health? Link, what are the psychological benefits of interacting with dogs? Link, are there specific dog breeds that often

Cody Care

Control to silence again, with AI assisted search on the screen reader is brought to questions that we can ask also to use AI assisted search. I'm going to press h, and we're going to jump or press one rather to jump to the level one heading of the page.

[Screen Reader Voice]

One dash ten of eight thousand and twenty eight total results result. Data ping info link opens in a new tab. Heading level one.

Cody Care

Control to silence and there we can hear the amount of results on the page and the amount of results in total. Very helpful information. And we're going to press h to navigate into the content, or into the list of results.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Is dog ownership associated with mental health? A population study of sixty eight thousand three hundred and sixty two adults living in England heading level three link.

Cody Care

And we're just doing this with the h key so I can press h to navigate by the headings of the different content.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Assistance dogs help reduce longitudinal evidence of the dogs and the good life a dog ownership for

Cody Care

Let's say, longitudinal. That was an interesting title. We'll shift h to go backward to it.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Dogs longitudinal evidence of the impact of dog ownership and dog walking on mental health dot heading level three visited link

Cody Care

And say that we are interested in this title and we want to save it to view it later from this title heading we can press shift tab.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Search landmark all results property page Tab control. All results tab selected one of five.

Cody Care

Seems like a screen reader error. Focus got shifted in a way that I was not expecting. Let me press the h key to get back down to the content.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Main landmark. You may also ask. Heading one dash ten of eight thousand and twenty is dog ownership assistance logged from Maryburn to all panelists.

Cody Care

Control to silence. Now from here, we can shift tab to the save button.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Tools for longitudinal. Save longitudinal evidence of the impact of dog ownership and dog walking on mental health toggle button not pressed. Save.

Cody Care

Here we are. And now we can press enter on it.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Unsave. Unsave longitudinal evidence of the impact of dog ownership and dog walking on mental health. Pressed. Dismiss added to your saved items. Sign in to your my e b s c o account to keep your saved items forever. Notifications alt plus t.

Cody Care

Control to silence. And there we got a toast message. That will go away once we go into the record detail view. So we'll press h. Now, yeah. Say we're interested in viewing more details about this title. We'll press h to get to its heading.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Longitudinal evidence of the impact of dog ownership and dog walk.

Cody Care

And we'll control to silence and then press enter. Okay. And now, we'll press one.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Mapping to top longitudinal evidence of the impact of dog ownership and dog walking on mental health heading level one.

Cody Care

We were already on the level one heading, but as you can see, we're at the top of the detail record page now. And from here we can press h to get into all kinds of information. Let's press h and see what we can find.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Details region details property page additional information heading level two. Title heading level three. 

Cody Care

Title. 

[Screen Reader Voice]

Authors heading level three. Affiliation heading level three. Source heading level three. Publication type heading level three.

Cody Care

And now once you find a heading that you want to look more into, you can press the down arrow key to see what information is under it.

[Screen Reader Voice]

List with one item journal article dash research tape out of list heading level three language.

Cody Care

And you can just keep on down arrowing through all the information.

[Screen Reader Voice]

From Mason Mammock to list with one item English.

Cody Care

And it's all fully accessible to the screen reader. Now let's say, let's read some content. So we can press shift one to go back to the h one of the page.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Longitudinal evidence of the impact of dog ownership and dog walking on mental health heading level one.

Cody Care

And from here we can press the b key to get to the access options button.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Plus one more button collapsed. Access options longitudinal evidence of the impact of dog ownership and dog walking on mental health menu button collapsed sub menu.

Cody Care

Here we are. Pressed it twice. Press enter here.

[Screen Reader Voice]

PDF one of two.

Cody Care

And we'll down arrow to HTML online full text.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Online full text two of two.

Cody Care

And press enter.

[Screen Reader Voice]

EBSCO alert. EBSCO. EBSCO document blank.

Cody Care

While it's loading, I'm just going to take a sip of my coffee.

Amber Russell

Hey, Cody. Question in, the q and a. Are the commands and hotkeys fairly universal through the software, or would there be a steep learning curve for people using this in EBSCO platforms or other platforms?

Cody Care

So the hotkeys that I'm using are universal to NVDA screen reader. There's a lot of similarities between NVDA and JAWS, and then there's a few other screen readers that share a very similar way of navigating, like with b to navigate to button or h for heading. And that will be the same on any website. Our platform is not any different than navigating Google or Facebook or any website that you would use a screen reader to navigate.

[Screen Reader Voice]

From Margaret Youngbrake to everyone, replying to quote at Margaret.

Cody Care

Are there any other questions?

Amber Russell

There are. Can you change the accent?

Cody Care

I sure can. I have a lot of different voices currently.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Voice Oliver enhanced.

Cody Care

Right now, we're using a lovely jet named Oliver, but I can press NVDA key, which is currently the caps lock key for me. The NVDA key is the modifier key for the screen reader, and it can be set to any key. No, there's three options, insert or the caps lock key and I can't remember the third one. But caps lock key control and then left and right arrows let you change some settings or navigate to different settings. And then up and down arrow with caps lock and control allows me to adjust options. It's how I lowered the rate of the voice, and it's also how I can 

[Screen Reader Voice]

[speaking in unidentified non-English language]

Cody Care

Well, that's in a language I'm not even sure which one that is.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Voice Karen enhanced.

Cody Care

Karen, an Australian voice.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Voice Leila in Voice Zoe dash ML enhanced dash English United States.

Cody Care

And so there's I have some United States ones. We'll stick with ZOE for now.

Amber Russell

One more oh, sorry, Cody.

Cody Care

No. Go.

Amber Russell

One more question. Do you need a special keyboard compatible with NVDA or JAWS?

Cody Care

Nope. Normal wireless keyboard Logitech that I'm using. I put little bump dots on some of the keys just to have little landmarks on the keyboard. But other than that, it's a totally normal setup.

Amber Russell

And last question, how does the screen reader handle chat conversations?

Cody Care

Chat conversations can be hard, depending on the platform that you're on. Some chat platforms auto update as new messages come in. They're pushed to the screen reader so I can hear new messages, which is what you're hearing Zoom do from time to time. It can be a little overwhelming if I'm trying to catch up with a conversation.

And like, you know, as I'm reading an older message, I'm getting constantly interrupted by new ones. But there are some platforms, Discord, I've used and it's a bit more easy to use. It's not constantly yelling new information at me but just depends on the platform.

Amber Russell

Thank you. That looks like we're good on questions for now.

Cody Care

Cool. Yeah. Anyone has anything else to ask, please. I love answering things. Okay. We should be at the top of the page in the reader view now.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Same page link. Skip to main content.

Cody Care

Here we are. And oh, that's right. I'm using a special speech engine that allows me to have voices set up for character sets and I have it set up to Oliver. So I am using Zoe. You might still hear Oliver from time to time.

So from here, at the top of the page, we can tab and get into the toolbar at the top of the reader view.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Notifications alt plus t region. Viewer and article tools banner landmark back button. Back.

Cody Care

A back button to bring us back to the results list.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Are the ask superscript beta toggle button not pressed?

Cody Care

Results list or the detail record page depending on which page you come to the reader view from. And then a save button.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Baseline save item toggle button pressed. Save item. Publication tools list with four items, site button, site.

Cody Care

A site button.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Button add to project.

Cody Care

Add to project.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Button share. Button download.

Cody Care

Share and download. So all these very useful things that you might want to use while navigating content, and we'll down arrow into another list of buttons.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Out of list viewer tools, list with five items, button translate.

Cody Care

And we have some other helpful buttons that have more to do with accessibility and globalization.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Button collapse table of contents.

Cody Care

Oh, a table of contents button. Very helpful.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Button publication contents.

Cody Care

Publication contents.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Button collapse listen.

Cody Care

And then listen. This is what I was looking for. This listen button opens up a text to speech tool. Say, maybe you have dyslexia. You don't need a screen reader, but reading can prove to be a bit trialsome. So you can use this listen feature to read it, have an AI generated voice read it for you.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Button accessibility support.

Cody Care

And then accessibility support. We'll get to that in a moment. So, first thing I want to do is we're just going to take a look that we can actually read the content of this article. From here, I can press h.

[Screen Reader Voice]

From narrative to media to every 

Cody Care

Control to silence. We can press h to jump into the content reader window.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Main landmark. Longitude. Jacob Nunnelly raised hand alert.

Cody Care

Up and down arrow.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Check the out of list main landmark heading level two. Longitudinal evidence. Jacob Nunnally has lowered hand alert. Out of one participant's hand lowered alert.

Cody Care

Sorry. Some of the automatic Zoom updates are happening. Forgive me for the interruptions. But yeah. So currently, we are on the title heading. I will up and down arrow.

[Screen Reader Voice]

The Out of list main landmark heading level two.

Longitudinal evidence of the impact of dog ownership and dog walking on mental health.

Cody Care

Oliver's here to say hello, and we can down arrow into the content.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Published in Journal of Public Health, June two thousand and twenty one by CUI, Y. Russell, and Evan. Air background emerging evidence supports the physical health and social benefits of dog ownership. This study examined the longitudinal effect of dog ownership and dog walking on mental health.

Cody Care

So we can read through the content and then we can press h to navigate by headings in the content, which is very great.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Background heading level three heading level three. 

Cody Care

Press H again. 

[Screen Reader Voice]

Methods heading level three heading level three.

Cody Care

Let's say we're interested in methods, we can down arrow.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Sample and procedure. The sample included participants from the residential environments reside project reside was a five dash year longitudinal study that commenced in two thousand and three to prospectively evaluate the impact of a new

Cody Care

So I'm just down arrowing through the content. Depending on the kind of reader you are you might just press NVDA key and the down arrow and that'll just start a read all.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Five dash year longitudinal study that commenced in two thousand and three to prospectively evaluate the impact of a new government planning policy on the health and world ash being of local residents in Perth, Western Australia dot thirty eight reside involved a cohort of adults.

Cody Care

Control to silence and that'll stop the read all.

So, yeah, we can get into content. We could read content. We can navigate through content a couple different ways. Now, say you find an article or ebook that is not accessible to the screen reader or another kind of assist technology, whether it's a braille display or speech to text. We can go to that accessibility support button, press shift b.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Viewer and article tools, banner landmark viewer tools list with five items accessibility support button

Cody Care

And we can press enter here.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Accessibility support for users with disabilities dialogue. Longitudinal evidence of the impact of dog ownership and dog walking on mental health dash e b s c o. Close button. Accessibility support

Cody Care

Control to silence, and that brings us to the top of the modal that opens. We are currently on the close button. And there's a helpful blurb talking about who, what population the successful 

[Screen Reader Voice]

From Amber Russell 

Cody Care

request form is for. And once we're in it, we can press the e key and navigate.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Section preferred name edit. Form landmark. Preferred name edit has auto 

Cody Care

You can press e key to jump to the preferred name. Press enter, Cody, and then we can tab forward.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Email address edit. Enter a maximum of three email address. 

Cody Care

C c a r e at dot com. That's my work email address. If anyone has any questions, feel free to reach out. And then we can tap forward again.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Institution edit read only. The dash dash admin accessibility audit.

Cody Care

And that is the profile that I'm currently using as the institution.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Format grouping. MSWORD radio button. Check. One of two.

Cody Care

And we can tab forward into the radio button group and use the arrow keys

[Screen Reader Voice]

HTML radio. MSWORD. HTML radio.

Cody Care

to select whatever format we want to choose, and then we tab forward again.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Privacy policy link.

Cody Care

See a privacy policy.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Counsel button.

Cody Care

And then we would tab to the submit button.

[Screen Reader Voice]

Submit button.

Cody Care

And we would press enter here, and that would send an remediation request to our teams, and they would get that back to you within three to five days, sometimes sooner.

That brings us to the end of what I had planned. Is there anything else anyone wanted to see?

Amber Russell

There's a question that, a couple questions in the chat. What’s the difference between down narrowing to hear content and using the text to speech button?

Cody Care

For me, I'm using a screen reader. A person with something like dyslexia might not need a screen reader. And so having the text to speech tool built into the platform would be 

[Screen Reader Voice]

From Marjorie Boy

Cody Care

would be extremely helpful for them just so they, you know, they don't need to get this other piece of software. Like, they can navigate to the page themselves and they can just have the text to speech tool. ReadSpeaker is what we use to read it for them.

Amber Russell

And another kind of general question about using hyphens and verbosity. So would it be a good thing to not use hyphens if possible? Could you just write well-being as one word instead of well dash being? Can you talk a little bit about just, like, screen reader verbosity and some of that stuff there?

Cody Care

Sure. I mean, for words that use hyphens, you can still definitely use them.

With the screen reader, there's multiple ways to change what you're hearing, particularly with NVDA and JAWS. I have a punctuation dictionary, I think it's called, where I can there are four levels to punctuation that you can hear, which is none, some, most, and all. And then for any symbol that you can type, you can adjust to be in one of those categories. So a screen reader user could put hyphens in the none never column or the none column, so you would never hear a hyphen. So you can keep using hyphens, the user has plenty of ways to sort of adjust what they're hearing.

Amber Russell

Okay. I'm curious if the AI ask feature helps with accessibility in any way.

Cody Care

It's a fully accessible thing to use. It doesn't necessarily assist a person with disabilities in any like, it's not an assistive or accessibility feature, ot's a feature that everyone is able to use. So if, you know, I'm a person with blindness, if I needed to do some research and I wanted to use the AI assisted tool, I could, but it wouldn't, like, give me any greater benefit.

Amber Russell

Okay. Is the request for remediation button live now? Yes. It is live, and it has been live since June of twenty twenty five.

Cody Care

Just in time for the EAA.

Amber Russell

Exactly. What about a better use of footnote signification? Can there be a way a screen reader says something like footnote twenty seven rather than just saying two dash seven or twenty dash seven without any context within the text? 

Cody Care

I don't think so. I think this would have to do with what the screen reader user's settings are, kind of what we talked about with punctuation, I think, whether or not you would hear those dashes and where you would hear them. Is that answering the question?

Amber Russell

Yeah. I think so.

I think there's a lot of interpretation too in the same way that, you know, as a sighted person, if you're reading something, you kind of add the dashes in your mind or you kind of interpret that. There are certain things that that Cody will hear as a screen reader user, and correct me if I'm wrong here, Cody, where he knows because of the context even though it's reading something out maybe a bit awkwardly because of, you know, knowing that it's a footnote or because of the context of where he's hearing those numbers or the formatted numbers, he would know that it is referencing, you know, twenty seven or two dot seven.

There's was an ongoing discussion actually in an accessibility group this week about using a dash and interpreting that dash with a screen reader to mean through, like, two through seven.

And the consensus was after a very spirited discussion that, you know, you shouldn't be adding additional context and words there, that it is up to, you know, the screen reader user or the writer. If they wanted it to say two dash seven or two through seven, that it should say through and to not change the meaning for a user who may not, you know, see the information that is on the screen. Any thoughts on that, Cody?

Cody Care

Um, I mean, you're right. It all depends on context. There's all sorts of you know, when I think of, like, the number one dot three, right, I think of a number one dot three being, like, one point three, or I also think of, one dot three in WCAG under the perceivable guideline. It all depends on the context these numbers are in and, like, or anything you're hearing is in. That's, you know. Is that helpful?

Amber Russell

Yeah. I think so. We're at five minutes to the end of the hour, and wondering if there are any more questions.

Cody Care

Yeah. If there's anything else anyone wants to see. I could do a flip. I won't, though.

Amber Russell

I don't think we need to see that.

Okay. I think we are at the end of our presentation, then. If you do have additional questions, you know, please reach out.

Marjorie, you will be sending out the deck. I will pass it back to you to do all that closing stuff. Thank you. 

Marjorie Boyer

Sure, yeah.

Amber Russell

Thank you.

Marjorie Boyer

Thank you to Amber and Cody and to everyone for taking time out of your day to attend this webinar.

Expect an email with a link to the session recording within the next week or so. And that wraps us up for the EBSCO accessibility conformance product updates and status here today. Thank you again for joining us, and we hope you have a great Thursday.

Cody Care

Yeah. Have a good Thursday, everybody.

Amber Russell

Bye.