Manifold & Accessibility

Karen Lauritsen of the Open Education Network (OEN) welcomes Elliott Stevens from the University of Washington Seattle to discuss key concepts for creating accessibility, strategies for working with faculty and student authors on prioritizing accessibility, and our wish list for Manifold's future updates. Elliott, who created Manifold Key Concepts for Accessibility, outlines this guidebook and other resources he's made to support undergraduate students in learning about digital accessibility, an important and transferable skill.

You can view the video recording of their discussion or keep reading for a full transcript.

Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.

Karen: Hello and welcome. My name's Karen Lauritsen. I'm the Senior Director of Publishing with the Open Education Network. Thanks for joining us today to talk about accessibility in Manifold. I'm going to start with some quick housekeeping. You may have already noticed this session is being recorded. The session is meant to be an informal conversation, and we hope that you will ask many questions in the chat. There will also be a chance to unmute and ask questions a bit later in our time together.

Before we get to Manifold specifics, I want to highlight additional opportunities to learn more about accessibility with the OEN. These include Tea Time sessions. Just this past Monday, we talked about how to build accessibility into your publishing workflow with Amanda Grey, and we'll have another session coming up in May. There are also two community conversations focused on accessibility, one of which is coming up later this month that's called Operationalizing Accessibility Best Practices, and ADA Title II. Jamie is going to drop the registration link for that session into the chat.

We're also getting ready to launch Pub101 at the end of the month. If you haven't participated or haven't heard about it, Pub101 is seven synchronous sessions that serve as an intro to publishing OER. There is a dedicated accessibility session that talks about how to make accessibility part of the process from the beginning, and anyone is welcome to join from the extended OEN community. Jamie is going to drop the Pub101 schedule into the chat. Some of you have participated before. Of course, you're welcome to participate again. We actually... overall might be too strong of a word, but we did review these synchronous sessions and eliminate some, combine others and add a couple of new ones. So there is some fresh, new content there in Pub101, that still complements the curriculum you'll find online.

Okay, now let's turn to Manifold. For some brief background, a couple of years ago, the OEN launched a Manifold pilot when we were selected to receive a Manifold service award. The idea was that the community could test and use Manifold, to see if it would be useful to them in creating OER. And we decided that if the community created more than 10 projects by March, 2025, that the OEN would offer Manifold beyond the pilot period. Well, I think most of you know that we met that goal months in advance. We now have around 35 published projects in our instance, which we are very excited about. If you want to see what your colleagues in OEN have published at their institution, Jamie is putting our OEN address into the chat now. Now, at the University of Washington Seattle, they have been using Manifold for a longer period of time. And today, we are joined by Elliott Stevens, the English Studies and Research Commons Librarian at the University of Washington Seattle.

UW has worked with the Manifold team on accessibility, and has offered faculty and students, Manifold and Pressbooks for some time now. And you may also be familiar with their guide, which we linked to, called Open Educational Resources and Open Textbooks: Manifold & Pressbooks: What's the Difference? It's a common question. So a couple of months ago, I was working on our brief, but hopefully helpful community publication checklist for all of you. This is a checklist for any of you who are getting ready to publish on our instance. It's designed to help you remember to check for some essential information before publishing your project. There are four items on that checklist. One is the agreement with the OEN, that you have read our community guidelines for publishing on Manifold, and you will accept them into your heart and publish with them at your institution. The second is that you have reviewed all of the content for openness that is appropriate to use and that it has an open license in the finished product.

Also, the third is that you have added metadata, so that it's clear that your institution is the publisher, that people can find your work, that the license is labeled and so on. And finally, that it is accessible, that you have done as much as you can to make the Manifold project accessible to your readers. Now, around the same time that I was working on this publication checklist, I received an email from a community member who was ready to publish and looking for more accessibility guidance. She really wanted to be sure that she was doing it right and she was looking for a specific how-to information. As many of you know, there was also ongoing conversation about how we can address new Title II accessibility regulations. So in all of that context, I did some research and came across a guide, and that is one that Elliott created and we'll talk a bit about today.

And Jamie is going to drop that link in the chat, called Manifold Key Concepts for Accessibility. Elliott shared with me, when we were planning this session, that a lot of his work usually involves instructors in English classes, or other classes in the arts and humanities, as well as students, and he's going to share some of his experience working with that community as well. And I'm just about to hand things over to Elliott, but I quickly want to do a survey, just so that we know where all of you are in your accessibility and Manifold journeys. So the first question here is, how much accessibility, knowledge and/or experience you have? This is self-reporting. It's anonymous. We just want to know how you feel about your grasp of accessibility.

We have a hundred percent participation, which is always super exciting. You should be able to see the results now. Most of you are reporting that you feel you have a moderate level of experience with accessibility. There's also some of you who are newer or beginning with accessibility, and at least one of you who feels that you have advanced knowledge. And now I'm going to go back and ask one more question. And that is to please describe your familiarity with Manifold. How would you describe it? Would you say, "I have zero experience with Manifold"? I would say I have low or beginner experience. Moderate. Maybe you've been looking around, you've created a project or added some content to a project. Or you've been doing this for a while, or you're a Power user. So far, I see zero advanced users. Which based on what I know of some people in this room, I think is very modest.

Okay, 90% participation rate. Can we get to a hundred? I'll give it a couple more seconds. All right. So most of you find yourselves in the middle, if you will. You are newer or newish to Manifold, or you've been using it for a period of time. By 18% of you have zero experience with Manifold, 45% have low experience or beginner experience, 27% have moderate experience with Manifold, and 9% report advanced familiarity with Manifold. So thanks so much for sharing that with us. It'll be helpful as we continue in our conversation today. And with that, I will hand things over to Elliott. Thanks for joining us.


Elliott: Well, thank you so much, Karen, for reaching out to me about this and for inviting me. And thank you to you all for being here. And here in the chat, here are my slides. And I apologize. I pretty much made the worst slides you could ever imagine for this presentation. They are so text heavy and so full of links. But part of my idea here was really just to kind of put something together where, maybe once this presentation is over, if there are things that you want to click on or things that you want to... I was almost thinking about my slides almost more like maybe a pamphlet than a slideshow, that these are things that you could consult.

And if you do want to reach out to me after this, I'd be happy to continue the conversation. I'm really, really interested in Manifold, and I'm really interested in the accessibility of Manifold. And I'm really interested in also concern, just about Manifold in the classroom, as an accessible platform for not just readers, but for makers. For people who want to make stuff, for people who want to publish. Especially students, and especially students who use assistive technology.

Let's see. I'll share my screen. So I'm calling this just, Where Did Manifold Key Concepts for Accessibility Come From? That's the text that I put together for certain reasons. And there is a link in it for the... You'll see, "Manifold Key Concepts for Accessibility." So if you do want to look at the text or consult the text. Or I will say that it's in screaming need of revision, and I'll talk about that a little bit in this presentation. Just it needs a lot of work. As it stands now, I probably should not even have it published. But I would say, where did it come from? So I would say, if I were... I didn't just take the poll, but I think if I were taking the poll, I would not rate myself as advanced knowledge for accessibility. I'm not an expert accessibility tester, I'm not someone who uses assistive technology.

And so there's definitely a lot that I don't know. But I definitely have a lot of interest in accessibility and in accessibility testing. So I would say... Let me check the chat and make sure. Okay. So I would say with regard to this background, as Karen said, and I see Matt Gold is here in this meeting, pretty much from 2018 to 2021, a group of us here in the University of Washington, we're meeting pretty regularly. Maybe not once a month, but definitely... I don't know, definitely multiple times a year. Maybe six times a year or something like that. We were meeting pretty frequently with Matt and Terrence from Manifold, to talk about accessibility testing, accessibility issues. I put a link here to the Manifold GitHub repository where you can report issues. And that's something I recommend to everyone who uses Manifold. If you ever notice an accessibility issue or have an accessibility question, that is a fantastic thing about the Manifold team, is that there is a place for you to log these issues and there's a place to start a discussion.

And they are responsive to those issues. And I was not the one who is doing this testing. At the University of Washington, we have a small unit of folks called UW Accessible Technologies, and they are expert in testing. And so, UW Accessible Technologies is led by someone named Hadi Rangin. Hadi is an expert in accessibility testing. And then he trains and works with undergraduate student workers, a lot of whom are computer science majors and interested in accessibility. And then they do a lot of testing. And so student workers, like there was a student worker Ava, and Zaygen, and Sasha, and Mikey, and Cynthia, and Alyssa. They were a lot of the people who were finding accessibility issues, logging those accessibility issues. And then we were talking to folks like Matt and Terrence about them. Sort of around when we stopped doing that in 2021 or so, I started working with the Digital Library Federation Accessibility Working Group.

If any of you are in the library world or are interested in the DLF, if you're looking for an accessibility working group to join, I highly recommend joining the DLF Accessibility Working Group. And what's really interesting about the DLF Accessibility Working Group is that they have developed a very simple accessibility audit, that people can do with pretty much any digital platform. And so if I click on this, there's these first steps that anyone can do to audit the accessibility of a platform. And so one is just, does the vendor or website have a page dedicated to accessibility? And so if the answer is yes, that's a good thing. But if the digital platform does not even have a page about accessibility, that's kind of a red flag. And so I think Scalar is a platform that we looked at. As far as I know, Scalar does not have a page that's dedicated to accessibility. Another thing is, does the vendor or website have a voluntary product accessibility template, a VPAT?

So again, if I'm looking at the Scalar webpages, there's no VPAT. And then it gets even deeper into some accessibility tests that you can do. So this is part of the work that we do in the Accessibility Working Group, and the Accessibility Working Group also writes up short reports about things. And so at least in the past, I want to say in the past year or so, we have looked at Scalar and Pressbooks and Manifold, and there's some short reports from the Accessibility Working Group. So this is a place where I feel like... I still don't feel like I'm an expert, but I feel like I've learned a lot about accessibility and things to look for. And then I put here, just as a heads-up, that the Library Accessibility Alliance also recently just published a report about Manifold accessibility. It's more from the perspective of the reader though. This report, I don't think really gets into the perspective of the maker of a Manifold book, but there is some reporting about that.

And then I would say the reason why I made the Manifold book that I made about key concepts for accessibility was, I just feel like there's a lack of documentation about how to make accessible projects with specific platforms. I feel like this is something I'm always looking for and I very rarely find. And so with Scaler, I think as I've already mentioned, there just aren't pages about accessibility, but there also aren't pages about how to make an accessible Scaler project. So maybe if I'm concerned about color contrast in Scaler, or keyboard navigation, or headings, or alt text, or link text, there's just nothing about how to do it specifically in Scaler. With Manifold, there is general accessibility documentation. So they do have an accessibility page, but there's nothing about specifically how to use Manifold, and to... How do I work with headings in Manifold? How do I work with the media player in Manifold? How do I work with alt text in Manifold? How do I make sure that an image has alt text in the Manifold book?

So that was something that I couldn't find, and that was part of the reason why I wanted to make my own book. There's this platform, Collection Builder, that I think is pretty interesting. They have a general accessibility documentation for Collection Builder, but nothing about how to make an accessible Collection Builder site. So if I'm wondering about headings in Collection Builder, if I'm wondering if their map visualization is accessible, there's nothing about that, whether or not these things are accessible or how to make them accessible. As far as I know, with Omeka, there's some general accessibility documentation, but I don't think there's something about how to specifically make Omeka accessible. Sometimes I use Omeka Classic, and I find that, as far as I know with Omeka Classic, I don't know how to put alt text into things. And so sometimes I have to hack my alt text by using captions as alt text, instead of being able to put alt text into an image.

I haven't used Quire a whole lot. But Quire, they have some accessibility principles. And so I think Quire is an interesting digital publishing platform. It's coming out of the Getty, so I think it has some promise. I'm really interested in just where Quire is going. But they don't really tell you how to do things specifically, specifically in their books. They give you some principles. So that's at least something, but it's not... To me, as someone who's not an expert at this stuff, I really need more help. I need documentation. I need a step-by-step how to make an accessible Quire book. Fulcrum has a general accessibility page. Fulcrum gives some guidance on how to make an accessible Fulcrum book. But I find that even their guidance, it's kind of like a grab bag of lots of links, lots of different things. To me at least, it's hard to parse.

And then Pressbooks has a general accessibility page, and they have some guidance about how to make an accessible Pressbook. But again, I don't think it's... It's not that great. It's not too detailed. I wish it were even more step-by-step. And so these are some of the platforms that I have been looking at over the years, and it's just to me, there's always something to be desired when it comes to, how does a maker make something with these platforms, and end up with something that's accessible? Some of these platforms do have accessibility features. And as a maker, you can ruin those features if you don't know what you're doing. Pressbooks out of the box, I think is very, very accessible. But I could be making a Pressbooks chapter and using headings in a weird way or not putting... With Pressbooks, it's very easy to put alt text into things, but if I don't know how to do that or what alt text even is, I'm not really taking advantage of the accessibility features, or I'm potentially ruining the accessibility of a Pressbook.

So I personally feel like this is a big problem for anyone who cares about accessibility and who wants to teach with these platforms. I think this is a big problem for anyone with a disability who simply wants to know and know fast, if they can use these platforms and how they can use them. And for me, my wish, I wish all of these platforms just had a tab someplace. And I wish the tab was something like, how to make an accessible version of our thing. I just wish that existed, just like a very simple recipe, a very simple step-by-step of how to make an accessible Pressbook, how to make an accessible Manifold book, how to make an accessible Collection Builder exhibit.

And then I would say this also, my desire to make this book. At the University of Washington, in the libraries, we have an accessibility working group, and for a minute, we had a subcommittee in our working group where we were thinking about doing just this with Manifold and Pressbooks. Like making a Pressbook about how to make an accessible Pressbook, and how to make a Manifold book about how to make an accessible Manifold book. And so a lot of this work came out of this working group that I'm in, and we were very much inspired by the University of British Columbia's Accessibility Toolkit.

So that was for me, where I got the ideas for the seven key concepts. I really wanted to not talk about a million key concepts, or I wanted to talk about the key concepts that I felt most comfortable with. So this thing out of UBC really helped me a lot. And the product of this working group was my colleague, Lauren Ray, who is an administrator for Pressbooks here at the University of Washington, Lauren ended up making this UW Library, Pressbook Accessibility Guide for Pressbooks, and I ended up making Manifold Key Concepts for Accessibility.
And so how does... Again, I kind of see this as a failed project, it didn't fully work out, but how does Manifold Key Concepts for Accessibility work? One thing that I really wanted to think about was really limiting the concepts. And so it's only seven concepts. There could probably be eight concepts or nine concepts, or twenty concepts. But I kind of felt like, if this is for the audience of maybe a faculty member who is going to teach with Manifold, or if this is for the audience of a student who is making a Manifold project, I wanted to limit it so that it doesn't get overwhelming.

And so that's a good thing. It's good to limit things, so it's not overwhelming. But maybe it's a bad thing because I left out important things. Or maybe I don't even know what I don't know. I am not an expert here. I'm doing my best. I'm just trying to... I just want more accessible Manifold books. And so I think it could probably be more concepts or fewer concepts, or better. I could have written about the concepts better. And then it was really, really important to me that this book explains accessibility in the context of the Manifold publishing platform. To me, it's not just enough to tell somebody, "Use the right headings. Use the right color contrast. Make sure to caption your videos." It was important for me to say, "This is how you use headings in Manifold. This is how you use alt text in Manifold. This is how you can think about captions in a media player, in Manifold."

And so with Manifold, if you want to make accessible headings, you kind of have to know how to prepare your Word Doc or Google Doc. If there are things that you don't know about formatting in your Word Doc or Google Doc, you could mess up accessibility in Manifold. And then I think with link text, some people don't know best practices about link text. And so you kind of have to tell people how to do their link text in a Word Doc or Google Doc, or I suppose in EPUB. I didn't really get too deep into EPUBs in my book.

But you have to tell people, if they want to make an accessible Manifold book, you have to tell them how to use link text in a Word doc or a Google Doc, before they bring that in. Same with alternative text, with the alt text. In a Manifold book, you need to tell people how to put in alt text in a Google Doc or a Word Doc, before they ingest the text. If I put alt text in my Google Doc, it's going to come over into my Manifold book. So that's something I need to tell people how to do.

I need to tell people about color contrast. If they're using certain colors, I might have to tell people how they can test... There aren't a lot of platforms that just test for color contrast. I don't think pressbooks does that, and Manifold doesn't do that. But I would have to tell people how to do that before they bring something into Manifold. I think captions and transcripts are especially tricky. I mean, certainly the Manifold media player is not making machine learning transcripts for people. And so I feel like with captions and transcripts, I need to tell people, "I really recommend using YouTube. Have your video be in YouTube. Have machine learning make the captions in your YouTube video, maybe edit your captions and make sure they're correct, and then embed the YouTube video into Manifold." And also, as far as I know, the YouTube player is more accessible than the built-in Manifold player. If someone is using assistive technology, that's something to think about.

And then, I know PDFs can't be brought in as an ingestible text, but I know PDFs can be brought in as resources in Manifold. And PDFs are kind of classic accessibility monsters, accessibility problems. And so people really need to know how to test their PDFs for accessibility. And then EPUBs are certainly not created equal. I mean, I think it was Zach Davis at Cast Iron Coding who told me years ago that, a lot of the EPUBs out of standardebooks.org are far better than the EPUBs out of Project Gutenberg. And so, there are some testers. I think it's like Daisy something, something. You can use this Daisy tester to test your EPUB. And sure enough, when I put in those Project Gutenberg EPUBs, they get very low scores. But if I often put in something from standardebooks.org, it gets a much better score.

So yeah, I mean mainly, in the documentation for Manifold, they're not necessarily telling teachers, makers or makers with disabilities, about how to do these things. And I think these are very important things for such audiences to know. Going into the future, or just what have I done, this Manifold Key Concepts for Accessibility guide, we do have a UW Libraries Manifold lib guide, or library guide, and so the book lives there. So for people who are interested in UW Libraries' Manifold, maybe they're finding it there. I've used this a little bit in my teaching, but I kind of ended up... I haven't used this as much as I thought I would, mainly because I feel like there's a lot of revision that I have to do, or there's some updating that I have to do to the book. Lately what I've been using maybe more than my Manifold Key Concepts book is, I just use Google Docs sometimes.

And so I met with a class, Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Middle Ages, and instead of using my full-on Manifold Key Concepts book, I use this lib guide. Oh no, this Google Doc. And so oftentimes, when I first meet students, to me it's very important to talk to students about accessibility, about privacy and about copyright. And so usually when I teach Manifold, I start off the conversation by asking students, what does digital accessibility mean to them? I ask students, what does privacy look like in the open internet? Do they have any concerns about privacy in the open internet? A lot of students these days have very deep concerns about being in an open internet project. And I think all students, if they're working on a project like a Manifold project, I think students should have the option to use a pseudonym or be anonymous, or opt out.

And that's something that sometimes is a new concept for, I find some professors. They want to require all students to be in the open internet. But I think that there are some issues there, especially if students are telling personal stories, or if they're telling the personal stories of others. And then copyright can just be a gigantic issue for a book. But it's also, I think a great transferable skill for students to learn about copyright, creative comments, fair use. And I find it is a delight and a pleasure to talk to undergraduate students about all these three things. At least at the University of Washington, we do have a disability studies minor, and the students know a ton about accessibility and digital accessibility. And sometimes when they're using platforms and they see that the platforms do not lend themselves to digital accessibility, they have a lot of questions and a lot of concerns.

And so I've really enjoyed talking to students about digital accessibility. And then for the Manifold part of this, I kind of walk students through preparing a Google Doc and ingesting the Google Doc. And usually when we talk about the Google Docs, we mainly talk about alt text, link text and headings. And so, I usually don't get to all seven key concepts in a class, but those are definitely the top three. And then sometimes we also talk about bringing in a YouTube video and captions and transcripts. With students, I'm not talking as much, I would say about color contrast, and I'm probably not talking as much about testing PDFs and EPUBs. Then another document that I've made, this is not so much Manifold specific, but this is talking about digital accessibility in general. I really rely on talking to students about top seven things for digital accessibility.

And so I could be talking to a class about Manifold. A lot of students at the University of Washington are making websites. And so, they might be making a WordPress site, or a Wix, or a Weebly site. They might be using Google sites to make a site. And so when I talk to students, I usually talk about these top seven things. And if I were to revise my Manifold book, I would probably make it these seven things instead of the other seven things that I have.

And so like I said, Key Concepts desperately needs revision. There are some links in it. There used to be this thing called the Totally Accessibility Tester. It's defunct, it doesn't work anymore. So that's a problem. Manifold... I'd say, "Now," but it's probably been well over a year that Manifold has had authoring capabilities. There is nothing in my book about that. And so that's a desperate need, is to talk about if you are using the authoring capabilities of Manifold, how to do that in a way that is accessible. I really love the No Mouse Challenge, and so the No Mouse Challenge is not included in my Key Concepts book. I would include the No Mouse Challenge. If you haven't heard about the No Mouse Challenge, it is the simplest but most elegant and devastating test of a website. Basically, you use things like tab to go forward, shift tab to go back, arrow keys, space bar, enter.

If you can navigate most of a website with the No Mouse Challenge, that's a good indication not only that the website works without a mouse, but also that the website has been designed hierarchically and in a way that's going to lend itself to accessibility, in a way that's going to work well with screen readers. If something fails the No Mouse Challenge, that's a big red flag. So maybe if I'm using a particular platform and it has a mapping tab, and maps are kind of notoriously difficult, I think for the No Mouse Challenge, if I can't get into the map at all with the No Mouse Challenge, or navigate the map, then that's a pretty good indication not only that the map is not accessible without a mouse, but also that it's just not accessible for a screen reader.

And then I made a couple of video tutorials in this Key Concepts book, but I think I would make more video tutorials. And I would pair those video tutorials up with transcripts and scene description. So I think I made one video tutorial about color contrast and maybe one video tutorial about headings, but I think I would make more of them and just do a much better job with them. So that's all I have. But thank you so much. That's kind of my quick overview of Key Concepts for Accessibility, and why I did it, and what's wrong with it, and maybe future steps that I can take or that others can take.


Karen: Thank you so much, Elliott. Appreciate that overview. While you were chatting, Morgan mentioned that, at the University of Oklahoma, they're setting up their own Manifold instance, and have been modeling a lot of their documentation on the University of Washington's.


Elliott: Oh, cool.


Karen: So thank you for all of your work sharing that under an open license.


Elliott: Yeah, totally. That's cool, Morgan.


Karen: Yeah. And then Rebel just mentioned that it's also good to use the built-in Windows screen reader.


Elliott: Oh, like as a test? Rebel, are you saying that's something to do as a test if you've made something?


Kestrel: Yeah, sorry. I'm not actually Rebel. I'm just using her link to stand in for her and take notes for her. I'm actually Kestrel, I just didn't realize that it had done that with the name. But yeah, I had been doing some accessibility testing for something else, a different platform that we use in Florida, and I discovered that a really good test is to use the built-in Windows screen reader. I forget what it's called. That is just there on your computer. You don't have to download anything new. It's just there. And it's easy to turn on and off. And then while you're using this, you can use the screen reader with the mouse, but if you do the No Mouse Challenge with the screen reader, that kind of gives you two axes of accessibility at the same time, with one test.


Elliott: Yeah, I haven't tried the Windows one. I'll have to try that. I know a free screen reader that anyone can download is called NVDA. So you can use NVDA, and kind of like I think what you're saying Kestrel, is like, you can do the No Mouse Challenge while the screen reader is running, and then you get a sense of just how noisy the feedback is. I think at Manifold, they do use voiceover quite a bit. And voiceover is in Macs. And so you can also, if you're using a Mac computer, use a voiceover to kind of see what is being said as you're doing the No Mouse Challenge. Because according to WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, things should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.

And I think sometimes when you're doing the No Mouse Challenge and you have the screen reader going, you can hear... Okay, I guess the accessibility here is somewhat perceivable and it's somewhat operable, but there is so much noise that's being read, is this even understandable? Is this... Or sometimes at the UW, the person who I mentioned earlier, Hadi Rangin, he often stresses the fact that something could be technically accessible, but not functional. And so technically, you could end up making something if you're someone who uses a screen reader, but the thing itself might be so not focused on the user that it's actually not functional. Or it would take you two times, if not ten times the amount of time. If you're someone with a disability who uses assistive technology, it might take you twice as long, if not ten times as long as to do something, as someone else. Which is an equity problem.


Kestrel: Yeah, that was one thing that I was finding with... When I was trying to navigate with the screen reader in the admin view of the platform I was testing was, it was because the admin view has so many menus and with so many things, it was really overwhelming to try to navigate anywhere in that view with the keyboard. Because you had to go through every single option and everything, every single menu to get down to the content of the page.


Elliott: Yeah, that's kind of why I wish the Library Accessibility Alliance had also looked at the maker side of Manifold. And because at least in the Digital Library Federation Accessibility Working Group, that was one comment that came up from people who... We have people who use NVDA, and the comment was that, "This is a lot." Technically, I can make a Manifold book, which is definitely better than something like Scalar. But part of the feeling was like, but the cognitive load is so great that it's very difficult. So I think that's a big takeaway that I've had is just, I've taught Manifold a bunch, but I've yet to be in a class where there is a student who uses assistive technology, who's in the class. And I've always been really, really curious about that. At what point will I be teaching Manifold and will there be a student who uses NVDA or JAWS to do their work? And will the student be able to do the assignment? Or will they not be able to do the assignment?

So it's like a question, but it's also a concern. Because I've had students who use it. I've worked with students sometimes who use Adobe... What is it? It's Adobe Premiere, to make videos. I remember being in a class where a student uses JAWS, and she was saying, "Oh yeah, I use Adobe Premiere all the time to make videos." And she's blind. So to me, that was interesting to know, that someone who uses assistive technology uses this platform, and they say that they like to use it. Or I know in the past, Zotero, the citation manager, I think had a reputation for being awful with assistive technology. But from version six to version seven, they've done a massive redesign for accessibility, and now it's the opposite. I have heard that people have said, "It's amazing to use Zotero, if you're someone who uses assistive technology. It's a big improvement." And I think part of that was Zotero was working with people who use assistive technology, to develop, to change, to update their tool.

Karen: Thank you, Kestrel, for raising that. And Elliott, for your thoughts. Laura has a question in the chat. Have you been looking for opportunities to leverage universal design for learning principles, into OERs? I've learned a lot chatting with my teaching and learning colleagues, who are focused on incorporating UDL concepts into our research guides, or into modules they are developing for online students.


Elliott: Yeah. Laura, I always get kind of confused about... I know UDL can mean... What do you mean? What would be an example? Or sometimes I get twisted around with... An example... I know sometimes things like captions are given in maybe an example of something that's somewhat universal, because a caption could be useful for someone who is deaf or hard of hearing, but a caption could also be useful for someone who is... I'm trying to learn Spanish, so I'll put on Spanish captions to learn. Or maybe I'm on the bus and I forgot my earbuds. And so, is that what you mean? Certain things that just are useful in lots of myriad ways?


Laura: Yeah, that's why I asked the question, because it's something I've also been confused about. But in a good way. We do need to be stretching and learning more about the intersection between accessibility and UDL, because sometimes they can be in conflict with each other. Sometimes you can make something accessible, and then you end up making it a less useful experience for everybody else. My understanding of UDL is that it's more focused on... Accessibility is almost like part of it, but it's focused on you almost designing for the edge cases of your users, and you end up benefiting everybody that's in between those edge cases. So I was just kind of curious if you'd had any thoughts about UDL, and how whether that work has informed your practice or not.


Elliott: I think I have two thoughts on that. One thing I've also noticed about universal design, like I said, sometimes I'm in classes where there are students who are disability studies minors. And so they're taking classes in disability studies. And in the realm... I'm not an expert in disability studies, but in disability studies, there are lots of criticisms too, of universal design. Some would say like, "Oh, for one thing, universal, this is kind of a fantasy. Things cannot be made to be universally accessible." Or also, I think there is also the argument that sometimes by universalizing something, or thinking you can universalize something, you are maybe kind of negating the specific histories and identities of people. So I would say that's something that's been a bit of an education for me, that universal... I used to kind of think of universal design as just this like, "Oh, it's just a happy, good thing. No issues whatsoever."

There are critiques of universal design. And then I think maybe, Laura, what I may be even more focused on with these seven key concepts is just like, I have a big concern about just Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 AA. I really, really would want these platforms, like Manifold or Scaler or Collection Builder, I would want them to be WCAG 2.1 AA rocks. Like solid. And WCAG is so focused on digital accessibility. And if you look at the WCAG web pages, they even say, "We are not covering everything. By making things up to a certain standard, there's a lot that we are not thinking about when it comes to neurodivergent people or neurodiverse people, or people with cognitive disability." So there's a lot... If you focus on digital accessibility in the WCAG context, without a doubt, you're going to factor out things or not consider things.

But I think with the design of this book that I made, and also just with focusing on the seven things, a lot of it is an effort to be really focused on WCAG, that Web Content Accessibility Guideline. And a lot of that is because we have the ADA Title II in our midst. By April 24th, 2026, these things need to be at that level. If you are associated with procurement, you need to be procuring things that are at that level. And if they are not at that level, that is a threat to your institution, that is a problem.

And so, that means that we need to work with companies and corporations and developers, to make sure that they are making things at that level. And a lot of developers are falling far short. They are not making things at the level of WCAG 2.1 AA. So I think that's why, if I had to focus on anything, it's going to be that. I'm in the library, where we have close to 700 databases and we have all these platforms. And so when I'm looking at the menu of digital platforms that we have for people, I am thinking about, what is on the menu that is WCAG 2.1 AA? And so I would be really concerned to use something like Scalar, but I would feel pretty good about using something like Pressbooks or WordPress.


Laura: Thank you. I appreciate it.


Karen: Thank you, Laura, for that question. And Elliott, for your comments. It reminds me of some of the work that the Library Publishing Coalition has been doing. Just last month, they published a blog post about their work investigating various publishing platforms for accessibility. So I'm going to put a link to that post in the chat. I don't think that Manifold is among them. It looks like it's OJS, Pressbooks, Digital Commons and Janeway. And they may be reaching out to Manifold and other platforms in the future, with that work.

There's a question here from Anne Marie. "Do you include any accessibility statements or information in Manifold projects, for the reader or user? For instance, do your projects indicate what accessibility features are in place?" While you answer that, Elliott, I'm going to go ahead and put a link in the chat. This was our conversation Monday at Tea Time. And Amanda Grey, who's at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, shared some example accessibility statements that they use. So I'm just going to put one of those in the chat. Over to you, Elliott.


Elliott: Yeah, that accessibility statement looks really cool. And Anne Marie, what... Do you include... You say, "What accessibility features are in place?" Are you saying there should be a statement that I should give, where I tell people what Manifold accessibility features are in place? Or I should be telling people what they have to include?


Anne Marie: I'm kind of thinking the idea of saying to a reader or user who happens upon a Manifold project you've published, "What accessibility work have you done on that project to make it as accessible as you can? And also, what are the features of Manifold?" I can link to ours, but I'm looking for some suggestions for how to improve it.


Elliott: That's interesting. So for every Manifold book that you publish, there's an accessibility statement that goes with the book?


Anne Marie: Yes. I started doing that actually because I got some communication from our campus accessibility office that they were working with students who needed alternative textbook formats. And they painted with very broad brush strokes and said basically, "All OER are terrible for accessibility." And I said, "Well, can you give me some specific examples? Are they some we have published? Are they some other institutions have published? We can improve accessibility of openly licensed things published elsewhere, but also, I want to make sure we're doing due diligence as an OER publisher." And so after that, I started including this accessibility statement as sort of transparency measure. Saying, "Here's what we've done. We're not perfect, we're not experts. But we have alt text in every image, we have heading styles for compatibility." Those types of things, just for transparency's sake. But like you, I don't consider myself an expert. And so I'm looking for ways to maybe improve that statement.


Elliott: Yeah, I mean that's really cool that you're linking to the Manifold documentation. But I would say, if there are things that you have done to enhance accessibility, then maybe that could be something to add. Or I think sometimes if there are things that are not... I mean, it's like, when you look at a VPAT, those voluntary product accessibility templates, they usually tell you what is accessible, and then what is also not accessible. So I think if there are maybe parts of a Manifold project that you know are not accessible, then maybe that's something that you would want to alert to people. So if a book really relies a lot on annotations, and if the annotations aren't accessible, so maybe that would be part of the statement. Is like, "The annotations are not accessible." Or if there's media that's been put... I don't know. So maybe there would be something about not only what is accessible, but what's not accessible.


Anne Marie: I like that idea of including known issues.


Kestrel: And maybe with the known issues, including alternative. "If you can't access the information from this specific location, here is an accessible Word Doc which has the same information in it, that hopefully is accessible to you." Or something.


Anne Marie: Yeah, downloadable versions or other formats, or so forth. And I like Amanda's KPU's link that Karen put in the chat for an example accessibility statement. Just kind of breezing through that, that's really a useful thing to crib from too. So that's great. Thanks everybody.


Karen: Well, we're closing in on an hour. Are there any other questions or reflections, or needs that you would like to talk about in the time we have remaining? Or any of your own stories working with students and faculty to increase accessibility of Manifold projects? I am just going to put a couple links that Jamie put in the chat at the start of the session. In case you missed it, there are more opportunities to talk about accessibility coming up at Community Conversation. I put the link to the registration there in the chat. And also at Pub101, which we'll be launching later this month, and has new sessions for your enjoyment. And so, even if you've participated in Pub101 in the past, you may want to check out the schedule and drop in on some new sessions. So please join me in thanking Elliott for joining us and talking about the guide, and all of your work in really thinking about the student and reader and instructor experience, both on the back end and on the reader side of the Manifold experience.

Really appreciate the time that you took to create the guide and to share your experience with us, and what you'd like to change. And I know that we often work together as a community, as Morgan said earlier in the chat. And so, as we all continue to develop these types of resources, I look forward to sharing them and promoting what all of you are doing to improve experiences for your educational community. So thanks again, Elliott, and thanks to all of you for making time in your day to join us. Look forward to seeing you again soon.


Elliott: Thanks. Thank you so much everybody.

END OF VIDEO