Okay. You made the game. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, everyone, for your patience this morning. As I was just saying to some of our presenters, it takes a lot of coordination to organize a fully inclusive event. And sadly, the technology is not where we wish it was at the moment, so it took us a few minutes more this morning. So just a quick announcement, a brief note about accessibility of this morning's webinar. ReadyTalk is providing us with live captions to this webinar, so participants who are using this service will open both the captioning page and the standard webcast page, and the captioning URL will be shared with all of you via chat box at the beginning of the webcast. We also promoted this during our webinar promotion. So good morning, and welcome to Working Together Research Libraries and Publishers on the Value of Inclusive Learning Resources. This is an accessibility webinar to foster library publisher collaboration on inclusive learning resources and to start a very important dialogue. During this webinar, we'll have five speakers including myself. We'll hear from Steven Spong, who is a librarian at OCAD University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. We'll hear from Laura Wood, Director of Tisch Library at Tufts University. We'll hear from Kim Brewster, who is a publisher and group product manager of the Higher Education Division for McGraw-Hill Education. And Robin Seaman, who is a Director of Content Acquisition at Benetech. Lastly, I will also deliver a few slides. I am Katya Periasowska, and I am the Visiting Program Officer for the Accessibility and Universal Design Working Group with the Association of Research Libraries. Each speaker has been asked to briefly introduce themselves at the beginning of their presentation. So in this webinar, each one of us will cover unique topics related to libraries and accessibility covering the following areas. We'll first start by looking at the legal frameworks on national and international level. We'll look at obligations and opportunities for publishers. We'll look at obligations and opportunities for research libraries, collaborative projects, and future next steps for research libraries. At this point, I'm going to hand a microphone over to Steven Spong, who will talk about legal framework. Okay, so good morning, and thank you for attending the webinar today. My name is Steven Spong, and I am a librarian at the Ontario College of Art and Design University of Toronto. I have a Dr. from Muscatall Law School and a Master's in Information from the University of Toronto. My interest in accessibility issues stem from both the professional and personal standpoint as I have a serious bilateral hearing loss from childhood, and I wanted to thank ARL for inviting me to speak today as I'm always happy to advocate on behalf of accessibility. So today I will be conducting a brief summary of some key legal frameworks that pertain to accessibility in Canada, the United States, and internationally. I am going to start with the Marrakesh Treaty, which is formally and rather descriptively known as the Marrakesh Treaty to facilitate access to published works by visually impaired persons and persons with spread disabilities. I will then move on to Ontario's Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act and then wrap up with a few words on the happy trust decision and the Americans with Disabilities Act. So the Marrakesh Treaty is a treaty that was signed to Marrakesh, Morocco on June 28, 2013, and it is intended to address the issue that is a lack of accessible material for users who are not only blind but who are unable to physically hold or manipulate a book or who have learning disabilities. This is an important distinction. As I have a glance, the treaty appears to be solely limited to blind users and I think that it's fair to say that there may be a latent perception that this is the case. It is not, and it is instead quite a bit broader. Given that at the moment it is thought that only 7% of published books are available in accessible formats, it is necessary that wherever possible a broader definition of accessibility be applied in order to try and close these gaps. The basic framework of the treaty is to create an exception to copyright in order to allow the creation of works that are accessible to users to require it. It also allows for the import and export of these works. So the Marrakesh Treaty is administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization which is more commonly referred to as WIPO. And from a copyright point of view the treaty is significant as it is the first international treaty that focuses on users' rights as opposed to creators' rights. This distinction highlights why there was resistance to the treaty from publishers in the film industry. The latter was successful in ensuring that audio-visual materials such as films do not fall under the definition of works under the treaty. In terms of what is covered, there is text-related illustration and audio formats, and so this includes audio books. In terms of the creation and delivery of accessible material, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, otherwise known as IFLA, was instrumental in lobbying to include libraries as an authorized body to undertake these tasks. The downside to all of this work however is that the treaty, while it has been signed, has not yet gone into effect and actually has a long way to go in order to cross that threshold. In order for the treaty to come into effect, 20 countries have to ratify it, and current ratifications total stands at 6, and this includes Uruguay, the United Arab Emirates, Mali, Paraguay, India, and El Salvador. Canada did not even sign it, which is particularly odd given that it played a significant role in the horse trading necessary to actually get a deal in the first place. Well, the United States did sign it in October of 2013, that was a decision that came from the White House. It's a two-thirds majority in the Senate, which given the current climate in Washington which suggests that the ratification is probably a long way off. In Canada's case, much of the language and frameworks that would be necessary for ratification of the treaty already exist due to the extensive updating of recuperate laws in 2012, which makes our recalcitrance even more puzzling. So now I'm going to move on to the AODA. So the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, which is more commonly known as AODA, was introduced in Ontario in 2005, but the regulation where the majority of the acts of substance is located was not released until 2011. This regulation is referred to as the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation, and it covers all of the obligations that are required to ensure accessibility across a wide array of businesses and not just libraries. Fortunately, the requirements are being rolled out gradually with the first set of obligations coming into effect on January 1st of 2012, and additional applications roll out on January 1st and will continue to do so until 2025. Unlike the Americans with Disabilities Act, which takes a more reactive approach to accessibility, the AODA is prescriptive. While there have not been any substantial comparative analyses of these to be sub-legislation, which is a situation I hope to rectify, if I were to highlight a single way in which they are operationally divergent, this reactive to prescriptive distinction would probably be the biggest difference between the two. While the AODA is a wide range of obligations, the ones that have the greatest impact on libraries relate to the provision of accessible material upon request. January 1st of this year saw the introduction of the obligation to provide upon request the provision or arrangement of accessible material to users. While there have been some discussions surrounding the wording in the regulations such as what constitutes a timely manner, the end result is still pretty clear. If somebody walks into your library and requests something in an accessible format, you need to provide it to them. There are some exceptions regarding archival and cinematographic works, but for the majority of the material, it does need to be provided. This definitely has an impact for publishers as the legislation states that the libraries are either to provide or arrange for accessible formats. I think it's easy to infer that arranging a copy would imply involving publishers. However, the caveat in section 12, subsection 1, subsection B of the regulation that states that the material should be provided at a, quote, cost more than regular costs also puts libraries in a tight spot. Should publishers try to leverage the requirement into additional revenue streams that are over and above what a conventional text would cost. Particularly when it's reasonable to assume that for recent current texts that are digitally born, they would have ready access to files that are compatible with screen readers. Legacy titles are a bit trickier since there are more costs associated with the conversion to accessible formats. It might make sense in these cases to go with an in-house or a social solution and the latter has been the case in Ontario. Bear in mind that all of these decisions and processes are occurring under the timely manner countdown and there are no easy answers to these issues, but it really is an area that is ripe for policy development and the creation of best practices. While the U of D is a dense piece of legislation that can actually spend this whole hour dissecting, I just want to briefly point to section 17 of the regulation which points at organizations that are producers of textbooks and other learning materials are required to provide accessible material institutions. The deadline for textbooks has passed this past January and other resources are in 2020. Unfortunately, there's a bit of cognitive dissonance with regard to publishers and libraries at the moment because the deadlines for compliance in various areas are different for private and public bodies. I expect as time goes on this will subside as everybody gets on the same page. Finally, I want to mention that the U of D is hardly an isolated piece of legislation in Canada. The province of Manukoba passed the Accessibility for Manukobans Act in 2013 and Nova Scotia is in public consultation phase for accessibility legislation which will probably be passed later this year or early next year. So there really is continued growth in the area of accessibility in Canada. I want to finish up by saying a few additional words about the Happy Cursed Decision and its relationship with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Last year's Happy Cursed Decision was enormously significant on a number of levels particularly as regards creation and provision of accessible material. I have reproduced a couple of key quotes from the lower court's Justice Bayer. While the Happy Cursed Decision was largely considered a victory for transformative use, which it certainly was, the significance of the victory for the creation of accessible text was also tremendous. Given that the Happy Cursed is creating an enormous database for screen reader-ready material, the loss of that resource would really have been quite devastating. It's also worth noting that Justice Bayer talks about the ideals espoused by ADA as opposed to compliance with specific requirements under the ADA. And this really is the juncture where the ADA and the AODA perhaps run parallel without ever fully meeting. As I mentioned previously, the ADA is not as prescriptive as the AODA when it comes to accessible materials in the educational sphere. While the creation and provision of accessible material is occurring in the United States, it is not as originally bound to legislative requirements for here in Ontario. However, and this is where things start to get a bit murky, the Happy Cursed Decision gives a stronger copyright foundation upon which the creation of accessible text can rest. We don't have a firmly established doctrine of transformative use in Canadian copyright law. And while our copyright legislation does discuss accessible material, it is not wholly clear the extent to which inhibition is a framework for the creation and dissemination of these materials. Even the way that our constitutional framework is set up, copyright law would trump AODA if there was a direct conflict that arose through litigation. And so there really has yet to be a fully fleshed out comparison of American and Canadian approaches to accessible materials or at least that I'm aware of. But as I hope I've made clear, there really is much to be discussed. And this scenario that I'm hoping to shift further light on moving forward is I am currently in the process of publishing a paper on the relationship between the AODA and the Canadian Copyright Act. And further to that I'm also working on a paper that will examine and contrast American and Canadian accessibility legislation and practices. So I'm going to stop there and so thank you very much for your time. Hi everyone. Thank you Stephen for getting us started. And I want to thank Katya and ARL for the invitation to join you today. My name is Laura Wood and I am the director of Tisch Library at Tufts University. I want to start with a disclaimer because I certainly am not an expert on these issues. Like many of you I'm trying to understand the landscape in several respects. I'm trying to understand it in terms of legal obligations of our schools in terms of meeting growing student needs and in terms of our professional values as librarians to provide access to content. I have a lot to learn but I'm delighted we're getting a little closer to a day when our universities may not panic if students disclose disabilities and when our university education is readily achievable for a more diverse student body. And I should also add that my comments and my slides, I'm using a US perspective and an academic library context because that's what I know so less familiar with the Canadian context. So with that said, if the ADA is from 1990, why is this suddenly so urgent? So one factor is that electronic information technologies or EITs are creating major new challenges but on top of that an increasing number of students with a wide range of accommodation requests are enrolling in our schools. Many of our schools have waited for enrolled students to materialize rather than prepare in advance and so they're scrambling to provide accommodations. Not surprisingly, students are encountering significant barriers and they're reaching out to advocacy organizations for support. Advocacy organizations have been very effective in the US in moving the federal government into action via the Office of Civil Rights, the Department of Education and the Department of Justice. Between 2009 and 2014, there have been over 7 complaints which have led to legal settlements with universities. By looking at those settlements, we can observe that particular issues are coming up again and again. This repetition in the settlement documents allows us to identify a set of emerging standards for our institutions. The settlements also make it clear that accessibility is a university-wide responsibility. The Office of Civil Rights is now initiating compliance reviews in the federal offices to verify the existence of policies and perhaps more importantly, to monitor compliance with those policies. At most colleges and universities, at least the ones I've been inquiring about, the staff responsible for providing accommodations and services are not in the library. As dedicated as those staff may be, they need allies and assistance from other units like the library and IT to be effective. This may not be until a specific issue comes up that the library is approached. The more we've done proactively, the better prepared will be to meet the needs of entering students. It's generally more effective to make things accessible in the first place than to try to accommodate in a reactive mode or to retrofit things. So to be proactive, we have to pay attention to procurement. Research libraries procure numerous formats. There's eBooks, journals, databases, software, hardware, services, and so on. And we work with external contractors as well to create databases, to create websites and other services. Accessible procurement is defined as a thought process that involves determining what is required for a product or service to be accessible and either finding ways to procure something that meets those requirements or documenting why this is not possible and what will be done if an accessible alternative is requested. Documentation is very important in this context as libraries are beginning to plan for accessibility audits. One approach is to develop a checklist of procurement considerations and provide assessment tools to help library staff determine how accessible a product is, what to test for, and how to communicate our own requirements to vendors or service providers. It's pretty important to keep in mind that US universities are responsible for the accessibility of all these things, not just our own digital platforms but the platforms and products of third-party providers. Therefore, it's only by holding our institutions accountable that federal agencies can place any pressure on the market for better products. Like it or not, we are stuck in the middle. So how do we find out if our content is accessible? The first way is we ask publishers. Vendors may or may not be knowledgeable about accessibility but in many ways it's up to us to create market pressure for them to be responsive. Anytime you are considering a new product, you can ask the vendor for a VPAT. The Voluntary Product Accessibility Template Form or VPAT is a template vendors can use to describe how their products meet accessibility guidelines. The link on this page is to the Information Technology Industry Council webpage where you can learn about VPAT's benefits and its limitations. Providing vendors with this link can also help them understand and complete a VPAT and I understand these slides will be available in at least one if not more format after the webinar. The second approach is we ask our users. Just as we do with other library issues, we need mechanisms for user feedback, both anecdotal and systematic. Can users find avenues to provide error reports? Can you develop processes for more focused user testing? In my opinion, coordinating feedback mechanisms with your Office for Disability Services is highly recommended. And thirdly, we can conduct our own evaluations. Ultimately, it will require that we develop a capacity to do our own evaluations, whether by developing in-house assessment capacity or using contracted services. In-house assessment means building a team of reviewers with the time and expertise to confirm or deny vendors' claims. Your University's IT or Disability Services Department may already have this capacity to some extent, but chances are it won't meet the needs of the library. Contracting services to conduct evaluations means outsourcing those reviews to a testing company and that there are quite a number that do this and I believe that's a growing area. A couple more comments about the VPATs. Smaller vendors and newer ones may not be aware of VPATs, so libraries can really help by encouraging them to complete them and that will then help other libraries as they evaluate products as well. Keep in mind that some vendors may complete a VPAT that declares significant limitations to the level of accessibility. They have to declare it, but they don't necessarily have to meet full accessibility guidelines. So the existence of a VPAT is not sufficient. For example, make sure that the VPAT is for the version of the product you're buying, such as with software. You need to make sure it's the right one. What if accessible procurement is not possible? So this is a very real concern, especially when faculty need specific content for their students and that happens to us all the time. Considerations will depend on what a library is looking to procure. However, documenting procurement decisions is important and likely will grow in importance, especially as it relates to accessibility compliance. In this early stage, it's not likely that many institutions or departments are concerning themselves with this kind of paperwork, but down the line we may need to be able to explain why we decided to purchase items that don't make accessibility standards. This means that your institution is responsible for documenting why an accessible format may not have been an option. This documentation will also help you with vendor assessment when making future partnership or procurement decisions. So if a product doesn't meet required standards, you can document steps taken to test accountability. You can document communication which had taken place between your institution and the vendor whose product is not accessible. And you can begin documenting a plan for obtaining an alternative format if one is requested. You may also want to consider communicating limitations back to faculty or other community members so that awareness of these concerns may increase. They certainly are uneven on my campus and so that kind of outreach is something we also may need to be attentive to. For digital resources, there are two important accessibility considerations. The accessibility of the file itself and platform specific considerations. Platform considerations include things like text equivalent for any graphical elements, keyboard navigation, proper labeling, and so on. This list is not nearly exhaustive, but it does give you an idea of some of the issues at stake. The WAVE tool linked here will assist you in evaluating websites. And if you're looking for video content, the PEAT resource may be helpful in evaluating video. Some organizations that may help with staff training include AHEAD, which is the Association for Higher Education and Disability, and AFIN, which stands for Access Technology Higher Education Network. I also recommend that through the W3.org website, you can find considerable resources for education as well as for standards. When purchasing, we are really determining what level of accessibility is required or what level of inaccessibility will be tolerated at your organization. And you'll need to decide if the interface of the content is not sufficiently accessible, if it's available on another platform, or if it could be locally loaded. If neither an alternative platform or local loading is an option, other options should be considered for making things accessible upon request. This may include but isn't limited to conversion-ready accessible formats provided by the vendor or digitization of a print copy. The bottom line is that both the content and the platform need to be fully accessible. When it comes to licensing resources, these are just two examples of how organizations can include accessibility in our licensed resources in the languages for our licenses. This is the text from Okol and the text from the CRL live license model, which was recently updated. It's possible that you or your colleagues have been using this or similar language in licenses for some time now, which would be terrific. And if so, it may be time to begin verifying compliance with our own license terms and checking up on these issues. When accessible, while accessible procurement is the ideal, the reality is that most of our institutions are resorting to reformatting and other means of accommodating accessibility requests. It can be a significant challenge for schools to meet these requests, especially for larger volumes of materials. Frequently, a disability service office is responsible, but let's assume for today that it's your library's job. The first thing that a library would do is try to establish if born digital accessible formats are available from the publisher directly, and if so, how quickly they are able to provide this material. Dealing with accessibility requests can often mean working on a very tight timeframe, so it's important to know who to contact at given publishing house and understand how quickly a request can be accommodated. If the publisher can't meet your timeframe, the library likely digitizes the material into an accessible format, unless of course you're outsourcing it. The nature of accessibility requests and the wide spectrum of disabilities means that even if material is digitized or digital copy comes from the publisher, the file may still need additional reformatting. Images, formulas, and special features may not meet your accommodation requirements, for example, and there are a wide variety of other reasons why additional work is very frequently needed. The languages used in the settlement documents is very specific. A person with a disability is afforded the opportunity to acquire the same information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as a person without a disability. The person must be able to obtain the information as fully, equally, and independently as a person without a disability. So if our students can only use resources with mediation, if they have to wait until tomorrow morning for help. If they have to navigate a thoroughly different online experience in the accessible version, then we are a far way from providing accessibility according to the standards from the Office of Civil Rights. This is why universal design is so vital. If we build accessibility in at the beginning, there are many advantages down the line that might be unexpected.  You can thank the ADA for all those curb cutouts, and there are many, many other reasons why accessible content will have other advantages for us down the line. It's my hope that we're actually making a cultural shift. I've learned that this can be described as a shift from the medical model to the environmental model. The person is not the problem. The problem we have is that the environment is not designed for the diversity of needs that we have. Before I sign off, I'd like to share some information about a planning project I hope will materialize in the near future, but I'm still waiting on final word for funding. Each of our institutions is meeting accessibility needs in some isolation. The reformatted materials made to meet your accommodation requests are being stored somewhere on your campus. It's a growing library that needs management. What if we could help our disability services staff with the management of the files they create for students, and enable them more sharing of those files between institutions? The recent legal opinions from the Haughty Trust case makes the timing very good for further action in this area. In partnership with colleagues at Brandeis University, Haughty Trust and Haughty Trust Research Center, the University of Illinois and the organization AHEAD, which is the Association for Higher Education and Disability, we hope to study and design infrastructure for shared repository services. And this is again looking at a US focus. After the initial research phase, we will be looking for volunteers from the library community to join working groups and think through what is needed to leverage our collective work. If it sounds like something you'd be interested in, please send me a note at this email address. If I have your name in contact, I can provide you with project updates in the future. Thanks for listening. Good morning. My name is Kim Brewster. I have worked in both legal and academic publishing for 24 years at Butterworths, Lexis, Nexus, and McGraw Hill Education. I'm currently a publisher and group product manager in the Higher Education Division. I manage 14 disciplines. More importantly and specific to today, I'm the chair of our Corporate Accessibility Committee which was formed in 2011. We have members from all divisions in Canada and we work in three separate subcommittees. We concentrate on product transformation of both our print and digital content, web accessibility of all our websites and platforms, and organizational compliance for internal and external processes for our internal and external customers and our physical environment. I'd like to talk a little bit about as a publisher, specifically in Canada, how we work as a partner. We have three main partners right now. First of all, we're working with campus disability offices. So students and instructors who require accessible files are requested to do so through their disability or accessibility offices on campus. We deal directly with those offices through our website links and supply any needed materials as they're requested. In specific instances, we may work directly with library representatives and or IT as needed. Our second partner is the ADA Committee in the U.S., so our partner at McGraw Hill Education in the U.S. We utilize and adopt solutions and processes as relevant for us. Our requirements are different in Canada. We're a little bit ahead of where they are in the U.S., but it makes sense for us to work together so that we're not recreating the wheel. So along with the U.S., we are aligning with and also aiming for the WCAG AA guidelines rather than in Canada the AODA requirements and in the U.S. the ADA requirements. What we found as we started working through a few years ago is that the WCAG requirements tend to be more advanced in technology. So some of the legislation as it's implemented and before it's implemented is the technology is going out of date. So we are aligning with WCAG along with the U.S. We also in Canada partner with the government of Ontario, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, and four other main publishers on the Arrow Initiative. For those not familiar, that's the Alternate Education Resources of Ontario. It's a web-based repository and through that all the publishers and all of the schools who are members of Arrow can ensure that digital copies of textbooks can be requested by students downloaded by publishers and converted to whichever format is needed. It's then stored and transferred to the disability offices at these institutions as they ask for them. It's a very secure environment and as each product is loaded it allows for a much quicker turnaround time. So since 2010 this has been a great project that we're hoping will go national. All of the Ontario Colleges and Universities I believe are now enrolled and it's a great way to prevent barriers right from the beginning because we now as a publisher proactively load all of our titles at the beginning of the year into the Arrow database. If I can ask someone to move the slide. Thank you, my controls aren't working. I just wanted to give a quick screenshot of what as a publisher we have done for our corporate accessibility site. Rather than clicking through all of the different screens, this is the main screen which lists what our commitment to accessibility as a company is. What our technology accessibility is for our platforms. How to report accessibility issues are all on this main screen. The next screen is accessible file requests and that's where the disability or accessibility office is on campus. Sorry, go back to the slide before. That's where they request the files directly through this link. We also list our accessibility plan which talks about how we interact with internal and external customers. What our commitment to training and our physical building environment. Our policies are listed here. We have some additional resources and we also have a feedback screen so that anyone who requests additional information or needs to point out something that we haven't seen yet, that's the screen. That's on our public facing website. We also have an internal accessibility site that we use internally and then we have a third site that we have launched through our connect platform. So anyone who is using our online technology there is also an accessibility site through the technology. To the next slide please. Thank you. So as a publisher when we talk about what content that we produce is affected by the bank requirements, if you start to look through all of the content that we produce, every piece of content that McGraw Hill produces is affected by the AODA. So not just our print products, our textbooks but our websites, all of our technology platforms, instructor supplements such as PowerPoints, test banks, instructor's manual, student supplements such as videos and DVDs, flash animations, our interactive assignments that we use for assessment online. Any of the PDFs that are downloadable or Excel files for example in an accounting book, every piece of content that we produce we need to look at accessibility. Next slide please. Thank you. So I'll talk when I get to the next slide about the specific publisher requirements I believe Steven touched on them earlier in the presentation today. But we look at our priorities at McGraw Hill as not only do we have to meet the legislative requirements but our big priority internally is that we need to improve the user experience. So most of our content is now accessible and it meets the legal requirements but is it easy to use? As Laura talked about it needs to be an equal opportunity for every student, for every customer. So do we always have an elegant solution for accessibility? Not always. The example I would point out here is that for some of our online products we have captioned videos for all of our new online products starting in 2014 but in order to view the captions video you need an extra click and that takes you out to a different screen. So we do have an accessible solution but for a student who requires that caption video they're having a different experience and we believe that the user experience needs to be the same for all students and that's what we're working towards. That is our priority. In order to do this we need to interact more and in a better way with our primary user, the consumer and that is the student. We have long relied on feedback from our customer which is the instructor but the consumer of the good is the student. The instructors rightly have a strong voice and advocacy for the students but what we're hearing is that we need to hear direct feedback, unfiltered. Not through the instructor's eyes of this is what we think our students need but from the students as the front end users telling us directly this is what we need, this is what is not working. So to that end we've been working directly with the students in testing our products which is where we get into roadblocks. We see with new technologies such as our adaptive learning or learn smart technology or our smart book adaptive e-books there's complications with programming and also with some interaction with assistive technologies. So this is where we're concentrating on making our products better. The example I give here is our e-books as of 2018 are all accessible. The content is tagged you know to not get into the whole technical side of it they are accessible files but if you access them through the platform one of the first things that could happen is a pop-up that tells you if there's any schedule of maintenance that's going to happen on this platform. For a visually impaired user the screen reader cannot read that pop-up so although the text that they could get to is completely accessible they can't get to the text if the pop-up is there. So these are the kind of technologies that we're struggling with because we don't always have complete control over the development of the platform. So we're working together with the US and with vendors and developers to try and get past these roadblocks. Next slide please. So how do our products comply? We consider student auxiliaries which are for us the videos and DVDs. We consider those part of our core product. So in accordance with the requirements anything that has produced in 2014 and forward is produced in an accessible fashion. All of the videos are captioned and the e-books are accessible. Moving forward we know that instructors, test banks, and power points are required for January 2020. We're beginning that process now so we've started to add tags to test bank questions. We are adding and looking at new programming for multiple choice questions and interactive questions for students. We're looking at how to make PowerPoints accessible although right now they're only for instructors. Some instructors share them with their students and so we want them to be accessible for everyone. So the guidelines that we're looking at now again not an exhaustive list but a short list of providing text equivalence is right off the top. So we provide alt tags on all of our images and long descriptions so that screen readers can read any images, figures, tables that are set within the e-book. Synchronizing multimedia so we have captions and transcripts for all videos and whether that is a separate video that is viewed in class or a video that is an embedded asset within an e-book, everything is captioned. One of our newer things is to looking towards not relying on color because what we realize when we started doing some testing with students is that someone who's color blind can't see if an arrow is green or red. So using the word stop rather than a red button. Something that sounds simple but we're looking at the design and color overall. We're using proper WCAG markup and style sheets so that our web pages are not readable because of the way they're formatted but they're readable because of the way that we have produced the content. The tables as I mentioned before need to be tagged but we also need to have meaningful row and column headers so that a screen reader can read the data properly. The one thing that's a bit more challenging for us as a publisher is the uniformity of web content that we link to our textbooks. Because we can't control external material, we have to limit the number of internal links that lead to material that may not be considered accessible. So we may have a list of links that link out to a YouTube video. Is the YouTube video captioned? Is it captioned properly? We can't control that so we're trying to limit the amount of material that we link out to. We're converting anything from flash to HTML5 which really helps with accessibility features on mobile devices. And we're looking at content such as the drag and drop question which is terrific interactive content but as we have discovered it cannot be made accessible. So we're looking at different ways of creating question forms that are accessible. We are also looking at tagging test questions and author training going forward. Enhancing our technology platforms. How best to serve mobility purposes. We are currently conducting quarterly audits of every website on our server to identify and correct issues as we go along. Next slide please. Thank you. Reasonable accommodation is something that was mentioned previously today and it's a question of the Ontario Library Association on a panel that came up about what does reasonable accommodation or time frame mean to a publisher? As a company for us reasonable accommodation means helping every student and instructor who asks. It isn't a question of do we help in the situation or don't we? We do. The answer is we do. So for every text we offer accessible PDFs and just to be clear we do not charge for providing any accessible files. That was the legal requirement for January 15, 2015 but most publishers have been offering the PDF files for about 8 years. I think the technology is a lot stronger and through a database like Arrow it's a lot quicker but we now supply within 48 hours of the request if the product has already been proactively loaded into the database and those PDFs can be used to create any alternate format or they can be used as is as a native PDF they can be used through the screen reader. The caveat here is that we do get requests for US products. We cannot store for privacy and permissions reasons. We cannot store those files here so when we get requests for US products we have to forward it to our US office and that can take up to 7 days but it's typically 4 to 5 days. From January 2014 forward every product that we create is accessible because we offer a digital product with every text. As I mentioned all new web content and internet websites we are conforming with WCAG and that was as of January 2014. There are still some stumbling blocks that we are working with. We're looking at solutions and equations, chemistry, problematic solutions, we're looking at universal design. Bottom line it's about customer needs so if one customer needs it then probably another customer will as well so if it's an older edition we go ahead and convert it. No questions asked if someone needs it we do it. Just the bottom line our message from a Braille Hill is that we don't like to see accessibility as a mandate. It's not the cost of doing business or responsibility and our goal is to go beyond compliance to look at it as an opportunity to reach all of our customers. So we don't look at as an add-on to product development. It's now part of the process from the beginning so that we are building products in an accessible way from the onset that will fit every customer. Not just an add-on, a bolt-on at the end to make this an accessible product. I think it's a fundamental shift in thinking and an opportunity for us to be a better corporate partner and part of the positive and proactive community of accessibility. Thank you. Great. This is Robin Seaman at Benetech. I'm the director of content acquisition and I work with the publishing community to support our Bookshare initiative. Oh, let's see here. I have to manage the slides. That's me. And Benetech is a technology nonprofit in Palo Alto, California. It has initiatives in global literacy of which Bookshare is the largest. It also has initiatives in human rights and the environment and a variety of other social ventures. Bookshare is the largest library in the world of digital books for people with print disabilities. We have 350,000 members, 330,000 books in our collection, and we work with over 500 publishers who donate their digital files to Bookshare. We started under a copyright law that allowed us to scan books without publisher permission and to make them available to US people with print disabilities defined as blindness, low vision, severe dyslexia, or other learning disabilities or mobility impairments that prevent somebody from being able to hold a book or turn the page. When I joined seven years ago, I started working with the publishing community and sent them to support our social mission by donating their digital files and saving us the time and the cost of doing the conversion work to an accessible format. And we've been really well received domestically and internationally. What publisher donated files allows us to do is to get the books out simultaneously as they're available to the peers of people with print disabilities so that when a new Harry Potter comes out, it's instantly available through Bookshare at 12.01 a.m. And we also are able with publisher permission to distribute outside the US internationally. And we have members in 60 countries around the world. And we have a very large initiative in Canada with the CNIB and with CELA, which I see that Michael is on the call today, Michael Saccone, who is our partner at CELA. Through this partnership, Canadians with print disabilities get free memberships to Bookshare and access to about 230,000 digital files that we have rights to distribute in Canada thanks to publisher permissions. I'm going to go really fast here. So I think we're all hearing a lot about born digital. Our mantra at Benetech is born accessible. And we coined this phrase and we are delighted to sort of see it going viral throughout the industry. We work with everybody, not just publishers, but everybody in the publishing ecosystem to try and help them make sure that their content is born accessible. We have an R&D center called Diagram that creates tools and guidelines and processes that we freely give away to publishers so that they can transform their workflows to ensure that their content is created more accessible from the get-go. Okay. We think we really saw a tipping point last year. Obviously EPUB 3, the born accessible movement really started taking off last year. And the Association of American Publishers in the U.S. in the fall of 2013 launched an EPUB 3 implementation project to try to really move publishers forward quickly and adopt an EPUB 3. One thing that we contributed to that effort and which has been widely picked up in the industry is a very simple document of top tips for accessible EPUB 3 that's available on our website, which I can give you a link to. And everyone has found it a refreshingly clear distillation of what are the basic 10, 12 tips you need to know to create accessible content. The tipping point we see reflected in major announcements happening regularly and widely committing to go to provide alt text for all its front-list ongoing Pearson, having an accessibility champion who basically pulls people, 50 people from across the company for twice weekly meetings about accessibility. Harper Collins O'Reilly's Shet in 2014 migrating to EPUB 3, it's a very different landscape than it was seven years ago. And this is also reflected in the incredible number of initiatives going on right now in the US and internationally. In the US, the book industry study group's accessible publishing working group was formed in December. I'm sharing that. It consists of about 20 to 25 people and its goal is to create a quick start guide that will allow publishers to quickly grasp what it means to be accessible. Some people say it's one of the most important initiatives they've seen the BISG launch. As everybody here has said, beautiful content is content that's born accessible. It enriches everyone's reading experience and the BISG is championing that in a major way. All these other initiatives I won't go into, but they are happening furiously around the world. Just in closing, from Benetech, our top tips. We have tools such as MathML Cloud, which is a tool that helps make math accessible. We have an image description training module to help publishers understand how to precisely describe images and graphics. And if you go to bornaccessible.org on our website, that will lead you to all sorts of fabulous tools. And that is it for me. This is an earlier slide, Katya. Thank you very much, Robin. That slide was a little surprised in the middle. I am Katya Periasowska and I am the visiting program officer with Accessibility and Universal Design Working Group of the Association of Research Libraries as well as the project manager. I'm a librarian who is responsible for a series of accessibility initiatives at Scholars Portal which is an operational arm of the Ontario Council of University Libraries to which I will refer by its acronym, OKL. So in my role at Scholars Portal, I'm in a series of different types of initiatives such as the Accessible Content ePortal, known as ACE. And it's a shared portal of accessible text, which is shared across our 21 member institutions. The Accessibility Toolkit for Libraries and the Report in Accessible Media Publication, Rome which was just released last month. In the following few slides I'll briefly talk about a couple of interesting projects and resources that I think you should all be aware of. So there is an amazing Arrow Web Accessibility Toolkit which was inspired by the following guiding philosophy to promote the principles of accessibility, universal design, and digital inclusion to help research libraries achieve digital accessibility and to connect research libraries with tools, people, and examples they need to provide accessible digital content. Research Libraries in Canada and the US are eager to learn more about how to make their learning environments more inclusive. And it is tools such as this one which are helping library staff in North America to develop core accessibility competencies in accessible web design, customer service, policy development. The path forward requires planning and collaboration across the research institutions motivating partnership, which is very important. Advocacy is also a very important piece of what we are as library staff and what we need to take on. We must advocate behalf of all library users and find a seamless solution, not start developing special services, but finding a seamless solution to ensure that learning environments which we are building are responsive and flexible to accommodate users of all abilities and learning styles. The Arrow Toolkit provides resources highlighting standards and best practices with regard to web accessibility, steps on how to foster an inclusive institution which includes policy revision, conducting audits, disability testing, training staff, and embedding accessibility into all areas of library from licenses to document production. In its effort to establish a community of practice, the Toolkit also provides a very valuable list of experts across Canada and the United States mainly, and their context as well as a list of sample policies across institutions. So this is a very, very useful research which could be consulted on an ongoing basis as institutions work towards improving their accessibility levels. As Stephen mentioned earlier in Ontario, research libraries are faced with specific requirements outlined in the Accessibility, Foreign Terrain, and Disabilities Act. And we are faced with a number of milestones for institutions of higher learning, such as recent January 1st, 2015 deadline to make all library materials accessible upon request. So to clip our consortium members, and I've mentioned before the 21 University Libraries in Ontario, with the knowledge and tools to be able to meet rolling deadlines, Okul has engaged in a number of research projects in the last three years. We developed the shared portal of Accessible Text known as ACE, which is a portal that has also extended its use for trial year starting January 1st, 2015 to all Ontario colleges as well. So we are growing pretty quickly and it's possible that one day we might expand our services beyond Ontario. But while ACE is limited to Ontario for the time being, Okul, I wanted to highlight some of the resources that we have that are useful and open to the general public. We've got the Accessibility Toolkit for Libraries and this was released in 2014. And the report on Accessible Media, which just came out in February 2015. There are three sections in the toolkit. We've got a section on Law and Administration which explains AOGA, but we also look at an international framework, we'll look at ADA and so on. We have a section on Public Services which highlights some of the best practices, learning existing resources, and there was a lot of original content that was written for that section. And then we also have a section for procurement, encouraging libraries to start thinking about buying accessibly as opposed to buying inaccessible content just because accessibility was not a consideration and then retroactively trying to make something more user friendly. And the Accessible Media report known as ROM is all about digital video. It's a key resource for teaching and learning in universities. We look at video use in classrooms a little bit, but mostly at the landscape and the use and provision of accessible multimedia services at Ontario University Libraries. So in this report it provides a detailed analysis of potential costs and benefits of a variety of approaches to video captioning and delivery of accessible media educational materials. We try to provide clarity on sharing video captioning under Canadian law. There were a lot of questions that we walked away with, some unanswered but some questions which we would like to encourage all of our schools to take to their own legal counsel. And then the bottom line, we wanted to find ways to continue assisting Ontario universities in becoming AODA compliant and perhaps going beyond the basic requirements. So this report contains environmental scan, market research, best practices, technology flows, options for libraries, and a very useful piece for everyone. It has a director of service providers across Canada and the United States as well as the software options. Much like the Accessibility Toolkit, a lot of its contents are applicable beyond the Ontario context. So this document was really designed to highlight some of the best practices that we learned about across different institutions. Moving away from resources and just looking at kind of more general frameworks of what libraries can really do, what kind of advocacy work can you do on campus. This is a really good example. A book was published very recently by Harvard University Press. It's called How Did You Get Here? And this book is a brilliant resource of information for people who are interested in accessibility for persons with disabilities in higher education. I did recently learn that Harvard University Press only released this book exclusively in print, making an important text on accessibility in higher education accessible to anyone with vision impairment, print disabled, someone with print disabled that struggles with manipulation of the physical book, excluding many from being able to access this valuable content. I know that an electronic version is coming out hopefully soon at some point. But this kind of highlighted for me the importance and the value of doing things right and promoting awareness for not creating separate services or separate solutions for certain user groups. If you're releasing this material, this book, you should be releasing it in all formats all at the same time. So how can academic libraries what can we do to raise awareness on campus to advocate on behalf of our users? I just put together a few thoughts that were kind of I was thinking about. So faculty who are publishing need to understand that they have a lot of power when selecting their publisher. They need to advise their publishing house that it's very important to them to make sure that their scholarship reaches the widest audience possible. And that means publishing accessible. University college libraries need to raise awareness about the value of inclusive scholarship. So as you're talking with different partners on campus to explain to them what your role is, what kind of new and exciting resources are coming up from the library, this is your chance to also start the accessibility dialogue. There's no one solution fits all. So the bookstore could request digital files to accompany all titles purchased in print. This would be the best case scenario, a really good solution to make sure that anything that's purchased in print that we know all of these materials are already digitally worn, that the bookstore requires the publisher to provide an accessible digital copy. And lastly, making format availability more transparent. We saw in the Harvard example that the initial release was just in print without any information about other formats. It's very important to make sure that materials that are accessible are very visible, and that the message is very consistent. And if you're planning to release a new and exciting book, try to consider releasing it in all formats possible. And I just have one more slide. This is something that we talked about a little bit before. We talked about VPATS and how valuable it is for libraries to encourage publishers to complete these templates in order to provide additional information to procurement officers across different institutions to have a better understanding of how accessible a product is. So libraries for universal accessibility Lua began their existence in 2010 at LLA Conference in Washington. In 2014, this group launched this wonderful blog style website which is designed as a forum space for library staff to share questions and expertise, establishing a community of practice and helping one another grow. This site also houses an extremely useful resource called VPAT Repository. So this voluntary product accessibility template repository which Lua talked about. Lua talked about VPATS earlier in this presentation and the value of collecting these from publishers. So sometimes publishers make VPATS documents available online. Sometimes you have to ask whether or not they might have one available and ideally they do. So this repository is a crowdsourced tool that also highlights future opportunities to collect and share data like dedicated accessibility contacts at a trying organization which sometimes can be hard to find on a publisher website. We could maybe try looking at future solutions for crowdsourcing information about internal and external audits which institutions have conducted to evaluate their current resources. We know that a lot of schools are doing these but trying to avoid that duplication where 20 different institutions have conducted their individual audits of the same type of resource, I think it would make so much more sense if we could all pull our resources together and share that information. So there is no need for institutions to pay for this work twice if it has already been done. And that pretty much concludes my part of the presentation and I do apologize if we went over 12 minutes past noon but if there are questions I think at least some of the presenters are still going to be available to take them. Just for those of you who are tuning in to the audio there was a question with regard to Kim's presentation and there was a reference to the 2020 Dadmines for Instructor Auxiliaries in the AODA requirements. So that is a specifically Canadian requirement that Kim was referring to. I think it's possible that this webinar was so jam packed with information that people are still absorbing some of the new things that they've heard about or they're adjusting some ideas. I don't see any questions coming in through chat. There are a lot of thumbs up which is great. I'm very happy that this webinar fulfilled expectations. Thank you all very much. This concludes our webinar for the day. We would like to thank everyone who was able to attend and we'll be in touch with you shortly with a copy of the recording hopefully within a...


How can guests access my courses? If you want some courses on your Moodle site to be visible to non logged in users, that is guests, then you need to enable guest access on the site as an administrator, and then enable it in the course that you want guests to access. This video explains the course settings for guest access. Watch our video on how can I allow guests on my Moodle for the administrator settings. As an administrator or course teacher, enter the course you want guests to access. Click the participants link from the nav drawer on the left. Note we are using the standard boost theme. And then from the icon click Enrollment Methods. Open the eye of guest access. This should be enough. But if you want to add a password, you can do this by clicking the settings icon and entering the password. We'll leave this for now. A non logged in user can now go straight to the course by clicking the link on your front page, or if you give them the course URL by clicking that. Make sure you read the policies documentation about setting a site policy for guests. To summarise, for guests to access your courses, you need to enable guest access for the site and for each course. Enable guest access in Enrollment Methods from the icon in the participants screen. And click the settings icon for guest access to add a password if desired.


The House of Squib presents Academy Award. Tonight Rex Harrison in Night Train. Every week Squib brings you Hollywood's finest. The great picture plays, the great actors and actresses, techniques and skills chosen from the honor roll of those who have won or been nominated for, the famous Golden Oscar of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. For generations the House of Squib has been known for the high quality and unfailing dependability of its products, each the result of a never-ending quest for perfection. Today the great family of Squib products reflects the tremendous advance of science in its contribution to human health and well-being. The name Squib stands for progress through research. Squib is a name you can trust. Tonight Squib brings to Academy Award the well-known screen actor Rex Harrison. You will hear Mr. Harrison in the role he created for the screen in the Thrilling Mystery Night Train. The picture which for the best original screen story of the year was nominated for the 1941 Academy Award. My real name is Randall, but I was known once as Major Hetzog. I have a number somewhere around the place and some newspaper clippings and a medal. Yes, I have about everything one needs, including nightmares to remind me that not so long ago I was one of those calm, nervous chaps the books described as a British agent. Right now I am addicted to gardening and I propose to cultivate the gentle passion for the rest of my days, unless of course they need me, which God forbid. My little excursion into darkest intrigue began about the time Mr. Chamberlain's umbrella failed to open at Munich and we entered that Gilbert and Sullivan era known then as the phony war. Now believe me, there was nothing phony about mine. Well, hello Randall. How are you? Fine. Sorry to bring you down to London tonight. You must apologize too for all the secrecy, but we've got a crisis again. I know. We were just discussing the Beaumarche affair. Yes, I... You slipped up badly there, didn't you? Yes, sir. Yes, we needed Beaumarche, frightfully you know.  Yes, well you see they were very convincing, posed as officers in the Royal Navy. They said they were to take him to dinner aboard Admiral somebody's ship. They'd dine him all right, but aboard one of their U-boats. I underestimated their nerve. Well, the war office has been stinking about it. They take the view that this arm of plating of Beaumarches will make all the difference in the coming war. And by tomorrow night Beaumarche will be in Berlin where they won't lose any time in putting the screws on the poor devil. Tomorrow night? That means he won't be at the Admiralty until... Let's see, Saturday morning. That's about it. Why? Nearly 48 hours. What are you driving at? Well, they got him out of England. Why shouldn't we get him back? Oh, that's quite impossible. Why? I know my way about. Speak German like a stormtrooper. I spent five years in Berlin. We might be in a shooting war before you get back. You know what that would mean. Yes, sir.  You agree? Well, I quite agree with you.  Take a complete change of air. Well, I must say this is mighty sporting of you, Randall, patriotic and all that. The highest tradition of the service. Right. Oh, it's nothing so noble as all that. And after all, gentlemen, I did block my copybook a bit. And then, of course, there's Beaumarche's daughter. Really? I say. Touch of romance, eh? Well, sort of. Gentlemen, I'll need some letters of introduction and that sort of thing.  Is there someone about who could draw up my will? It wasn't really so bad getting into their benighted country. I had some wonderful credentials, a beautiful uniform and the manners of a pig. My German was excellent and my Heil Hitler's were things of beauty. I called upon Commander Kampenfeld at the Admiralty in Berlin. This is to introduce to you Major Ulrich Herzog of Corps Engineers. Major Herzog is in Berlin an important technical mission for which he requires Admiralty assistance. I want to refer to certain technical evidence given before the naval heavy armaments 1935 Committee. If you will let me have a copy of the report, Commander. Certainly, Major. It will take only a moment. I have my own filing system here. Have you been in Berlin long, Major Herzog? Nine. I only left the Siegfried line last Tuesday. Things must be pretty hectic there. Ah, yeah. Yeah, indeed. I was there in a consultative capacity. Steel fortifications you possibly have heard. Oh, yes, yes, yes, of course. How is our steel? Crop plating is poor. That is why I am in Berlin. Do you realize that the steel used by the Czechs is better than anything we have got? But surely now that we control this color works? Not enough. If you let the only man who counted there slip through our fingers. Beaumusch. Yeah. Wonderful fellow on armor plating. Produced incredible results. And where is he? Working for Britain. No. Beaumusch is no longer in England. What? He was brought back to Germany only a few hours ago. In fact, Major, he's in this building right now. Well, this completely alters my plans. Perhaps you can arrange for me to see Habomash at once. I'm afraid it is impossible. But surely there is no harm in my asking him a few questions. It is beyond my province, Major. If you could get permission from Admiral von Hassenger, but nine, his office is like a kingdom of heaven. And if anything, a little bit more exclusive. But you do not mind trying, Commander. After all, I've always felt I'd more or less earned the right to get one foot at least in heaven. Anna, it is useless for your father to resist us like this. You must persuade him. You will both be given reasonable freedom. Freedom? Here? In time, you will see things the way I do. The way everyone in Germany does. I'm not a German. Germany is as much your country as it is ours.  We only wish to protect them. And you are protecting the people of Poland? That's enough. You have gone too far, Freiland von Masch. You will be placed in the concentration camp until your father comes to his senses. Must, must you drag my daughter into this? Achtung, the chief of naval staff, Vice Admiral von Hassenger. Well, Karl Marsen. Is this the way the Gestapo conducts the meeting? Here von Masch wringing his hands, his daughter in tears. Come, man, there must be more persuasive methods of getting valuable cooperation. Excellent to you. Oh, never mind. This is Major Herzog, the Corps of Engineers. Perhaps you've heard of him, the man behind the Siegfried Line. Hey, Herzog? Only one of the men, sir. The Fuhrer is responsible for the line as he is responsible for everything. I'd like to have you report, Marsen, now. Certainly, Admiral. You will remember me, Herr von Masch? I did not expect you to see you again so soon. And you, Freiland von Masch? I see you have not forgotten. It must be four years. Oh, yes. It must be. Just a moment, Major. I'm sorry, but I must ask Herr von Masch and Freiland von Masch to step into the other room. Guard, take them away. This way. Maybe we will meet again, Connecticut's Freiland. I thought it unwise, sir, to speak in front of von Masch. So far we've made no impression on him. I do not agree. He looks ten years older. Von Masch is not the one to be bullied in the cooperation. No. What would you suggest? I knew Freiland von Masch in Prague. She has a great influence on her father and is the one person who can make him change his mind. Oh, Marsen here has tried that. He is our Gestapo man who got the von Maschers out of England onto the very noses of British military intelligence. My congratulations, sir. Thank you, sir. But if I may say so, I do not think Herr Marsen is suitable person to influence the lady. Then who do you think would be more suitable? Myself, for instance. You? Why not? You saw the way she looked at me when I came in. I think if you were to spend a few hours with her, I might induce her to reason with her father. You knew her that well in Prague? It was spring, sir. Well, I think you're something of a dog, Major. My doubt, sir, whether the Major's qualities will make an impression on her, sir. I did not know that you were acquainted with my qualities, sir. Well, we let him try at no harm done. If he doesn't succeed, leave all the arrangements to me. This requires knowledge of maneuvers, eh, Major? Oh, quite admirable. Definitely. Good luck. Heil Hitler. Well, so far, so good. Miraculously good. I went to the hotel where the bowmashes were kept prisoners. I convinced them, especially Anna, that she'd have to play up to me to behave as if we were renewing an old love affair that began in Prague in the spring. Anna tells me now, or when I get around to asking her, that she was only acting then, but of course, that's the way of wives, isn't it? Anyway, I wasn't acting my part, at all. I meant it. One more thing, I shall have to spend the night here. That is necessary. Yes, yes, the place is absolutely crawling with Gestapo. Have you any sporting instinct? Why? I'll toss you who takes the couch and then out the room.  Don't you realize how much it depends on our getting out of Germany? No good is no good being intense about it. I don't like the, the, the facing of things. I don't like the facing of firing squad any better than you do. What do you mean? England may be at war with Germany tomorrow. Oh. Now just keep trying. Try to pretend you find me unbearably attractive. If a woman ever loved you like you love yourself, it would be history. Now what? I'll take it. Hello? German Admiralty. Hello? Ja? Headsock here? Ja, sir? Sorry to disturb you at this hour, Major Headsock. We have had to alter our plans. Orders have come from Munich. That bombage is to go there by first plane. But this is ridiculous. Can't that be delayed for a few hours? Impossible. The plane leaves in an hour. Fuehrer's orders. Heil Hitler. What is happening? They're sending a father to Munich at once. There's only one chance. Leave this hotel. Scuttle. It's an old German custom. But the guard's downstairs. We've gotten to the Admiralty. We'll get out of here. Get your clothes together. I'll tell your father. We'll leave in five minutes. I have been instructed, sir, to leave immediately with Herr Bumusch. I shall not require you. Well, sir, shall I get you a taxi, sir? I will call one myself. Wait. Steady. We've got to act as if you were under Hitler's orders. Look, we're trapped. Stop, oh, Chief Herr Marsen. Well? Well? I didn't expect you to be here in the lobby waiting, Major. I'm ordered to escort Herr Bumusch and his daughter to Munich. Really? The controller phoned me a few minutes ago, and I was about to drive them to the Admiralty myself. Orders were changed, sir. We are to take the train. Of course. The train. It leaves in 50 minutes. Very well. We are ready. You, sir? Certainly. Were you not told, I have the Admiral's authority to travel with them. You see, he feels it essential that Herr Bumusch be persuaded to comply with our wishes before he reaches headquarters. I was progressing extremely well with the full line Bumusch when this happened. I see. Very good, sir. Yes, excellent. This way, Herr Bumusch, your arm. My car for a line. The Führer is waiting. Now the House of Squibb presents part two of Academy Award starring Rex Harrison in Night Train. What is the matter, Herr Marsen? This is not a schedule stop for the express. I do not know, sir. Very unusual. But then these are unusual times. If you will escort Freyland and Herr Bumusch, I'll find you out to trouble. Of course. Come, my dear, we've got to get off here. But, darling, I thought the Führer was in such a hurry for us to arrive in Newnick. Shhh! One doesn't question the vagaries of the Führer. I beg your pardon, Major. What was that you said? I said one does not question the orders of the Führer. Of course not. Herr Hitler. Herr Hitler. Watch your step, Freyland. This way, Herr Bumusch. I say, um, did you notice that German officer who just came out of the train? Yes, Koldecker. Why? Well, my dear charters, I could have sworn it was old Dicky Randall. We were a-baited together. He played for the gentlemen once. Really? Hmm. Well, this is a German officer. How could he be Dicky Randall? Huh? Well, here they come. Why don't you ask him, old boy? Yes, I shall, old boy. I say, um, excuse me, old boy, but aren't you old Dicky Randall? May I hurt, sir? Call of engineers. Oh. Oh, right. Sorry. Dash it, I-I must say he looked like old Dicky. He's a tragic star. That man. You know him? Yes. Tell her to call it good. It was close. What will happen when we get to Munich? The car will be waiting. Probably a big crowd. I shall ask for a second car so we can be alone. No, they don't give it to us. They will. Because by that time, we shall be on the verge of persuading your father to work for Germany. But you, on the other hand, must be asking for time to think, to get the idea. Yes. But how can we... Well, we have only the chauffeur to deal with, and after that Switzerland. Switzerland? A long way from Munich. The only way out of this fortress. We shall have to make it. I say, uh, do you know why we stopped, old man? No, I don't. Why? I just had it from a trainman. Old England's declared war. Not really? Hmm. I say, I want to put a call to the Berlin. Huh? Why? I'll leave my golf sticks there. Can't leave them behind just because of war on you, no? Oh, here's a booth. Oh, excuse me. That German champion there. That's the one with old Dickie. If it was old Dickie? I say, try this extension. Yes, sir. This is Martin reporting, sir. I say, listen. Good. Major Herzog is not known to the war office. No officer of that name on the list. We believe him to be an enemy agent. Yes, sir. You will carry on with him to Munich. Let him think he's getting away with it. We will be waiting for you there. Very good. Interesting, what? Very. Herzog isn't Herzog.  Then if old Herzog isn't old Herzog, the chap might be... Right. Yes. He might jolly well be old Dickie Randall. Joe! Wash my hand. I say, if you're Dickie Randall, chap, you're betting on a sticky wicket. All right, Colick, I got your note. What is it? Oh, this is Charter's, an old friend of mine. How do you do? How do you do? Frightfully crowded here, what? What's it about? Well, I was phoning Berlin for my golf clubs. And old Charter's overheard that chap you were with. Looks like a Gestapo chap. He is a Gestapo chap. You know they're sending a military escort to rest you in Munich. Yes, yes. You see, you're Randall. Randall, aren't you? Yes, of course you are. And they know that you're not Herzog. Now, listen, I can't tell you everything. There isn't time. But I've got to get that old man and the girl out of the country at all costs. What, an official job? Are you two fellas game to help me? What, against Germany? Absolutely, old man. Back to the wall. Rather. Is the tea left? Yes, I think so. Well, there's no time for tea. We are coming into the Munich station. Enough of this comedy. There is no such person as Major Herzog. He is a British agent trying to get you and your father out of jail. Ulrich. Forget the Ulrich, darling. The Gestapo knows everything. Thank you.  Looks like it here, Beaumache. Don't you realize what this means? Yes, I do. But he's got a gun and I haven't. What do you take me for, Bulldog Drummond? Oh, I told you this would happen. Your scheme was absolutely childish. Why didn't you stay in England instead of coming over here and deliberately throwing your life away? Thank you, my sweet. Look out. Gestapo. Now give me that gun and get to sleep. So fast. I can move once in a while. You called for the guard, Major Herzog?  Okay, call the cut charters. You can carry the Gestapo into nothing apartment and lock the door. Very good, sir. I say, it looks like we struck a blow over old England already, eh?  There's a good fellow. Where are the Nazi guards? Oh, we found it very necessary to drop them off in the tunnel. Probably never be farmed. The military escort is coming. What do we do now? We bluff it through. I'll order Callica to drive. Then we'll make a dash for Switzerland. Heil Hitler. Heil Hitler. Order us from the Fifth Army headquarters for the arrest of Major Herzog. I fear you will need a stretcher. The prisoner tried to escape and I had to deal with him. You will find him in the last compartment. Coach 66. What transport have you? Two cars, sir. Excellent. I should take one. I am under orders to escort here and fire in Beaumont-Marche-Genevon-Contiche without delay. Very good, sir. Coach 66, you said, sir. Right. That'll be all. Heil Hitler. Heil Hitler. I say, oh, Dickie, we are being followed. Of course. I may be a bit silly, but how do we get across the Swiss frontier? Narrow road leads up to the top of the mountain. What's over the top? Switzerland. Everything in between. 6,000 feet drop. They're gaining on us. Well, shooting, I say, they can't do that. I hope you're right. Now, hold on. We'll turn here for the summit. Never mind the car. We've gained about five minutes on them. Here's the cable car. You mean we have to cross in that basket? That or nothing, darling. Yes, sir. We want to cross to Switzerland. Sorry, sir. We aren't war. I had orders yesterday to close the cable car. You have new orders from Gestapo headquarters in Munich. Yes, sir. But I must firm for verification. That'll have to be your verification. Now, in you go, darling. You too, hey, Beaumusch, quickly. I say, do we know how to operate this thing now? Perhaps we shouldn't have shot that chap. Well, we'll run it somehow. U-Chap's better pile in. I'll start the mechanism and try to keep those nuts as off until you get across. No, nothing stirring, old bean. All or nothing. We'll stay. Each orders? Of course. Nothing else a chap can do. Back to the wall. Come on, get started. U-Chap's going with the others. Carry on for me if anything happens. Remember, the Beaumashes must get to England. No, no, I won't leave without you.  I'm starting the motors. We can't leave you. Couldn't run out on old Dickie. Get going. That's an order. Darling! Look out, Randall. Here they come. Well, I know what has happened to him. But, my dear, we can't stay overnight atop this mountain even if we are in Switzerland. Poor old Dickie. They must have got him. Well, the shooting has stopped. I think we'd better carry on. Orders he gave, you know. Take the Beaumashes to England. Yes, yes, right. You are. It seems a shame there to leave old Dickie's body on Crouch's soil. After all, you know, he played for the gentleman. We don't know what happened. His fog closed down. But I can't see a cross. Oh, it's no fog, old girl. It's a cloud. A big old cumulus nosing around. Listen. I see. I see. It's the old cable car. Maybe those chaps mean to come across after us. I wish I had a gun. Now, take it easy, Mr Beaumache. Give them a bit of a reception. Hey, girl, look out. I used to shoot the guards, you know. Well, get back, girl. Get back. We'll need all the room. Take a position, charters. Right. I'm ready. And shoot when you see the red tips of their snouts. Steady on. Here it comes. Blast that cloud in our way. It's coming out of the cloud. Steady. Give them a hail, old boy. Hold there, I say. Or we shall commence hostilities. I can't see anyone for the cloud. Look out for a trick. Darling. Are you there? Hello, darling. Dickie. But, Harry, how did you get away from them? Pull me out of this thing and then cut the cables. You ready? Toe, not for questions now. I'll grab his hand. Now, charters. I'll blast the cable when he's safe aground. Hurry it up. We can't take forever. Well, here we are, Dickie. Grab my hand. Here we go. Look out, look out. Here goes the cable. I guess that takes care of everything. Except... Oh, darling. Yes, except the bride. You may tell the papers that the bride wore Adelweiss and the wedding march was yodeled by the quaint peasants in Alpine Attara. Ah, we shall show off. Old England's quite a walk from here. There's a new adventure and refreshment awaiting you in every tube of squibbdental cream. Until you try squibbdental cream yourself, you'll never know how pleasant or exhilarating a dentiferous can be. Its name tells you that squibbdental cream is a safe, pure, effective aid to better cleansing. But let your senses tell you how exhilarating squibbdental cream is. Brush it into lively, mint-frosted foam and note how squibbdental cream not only helps to brighten your smile, but leaves your whole mouth feeling young and alive, contributing to your sense of well-being. Too much to expect of a dentiferous? Not when it's squibbdental cream, one of the great family of squibb products. So give your charm the protection it deserves, the protection of pure, fragrant squibbdental cream. Taste, feel, and see the refreshing difference. Next Wednesday, another great picture. The House of Squib will present Academy Awards starring Greer Garson in Brief Encounter. The performance of Night Train was written for radio by Frank Wilson with an original musical score composed and conducted by Leith Stevens. Our producer-director is D. Engelbach. Rex Harrison appeared through the courtesy of 20th Century Fox and may soon be seen in their production of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. This is Hugh Brundage bidding you goodnight until next Wednesday at the same time when you're invited to listen again to Academy Award, presented by the House of Squibb, unnamed You Can't Trust. This is CBS, the Columbia Broadcasting System.


Finally, intended as a talk for folks who are going to be hacking on stuff, and the idea was to talk a little bit about what you can learn from Ruby about building applications that can then give you lots of users and give you a great user base because the Ruby community is kind of fantastic, and so there's a lot of things that you can learn from that. But since that isn't quite the target audience here today, I'm just going to talk about why Ruby is awesome and skip all the other stuff. How's that? Okay? All right. So I want to start with a quote, and this name should be familiar to you by now because this is what Winston was talking about, so Matt is the creator of Ruby, and so this is what he says about why he created the language. Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think by doing this, the machine will run fast. By doing this, the machine will run more effectively. By doing this, the machine will something, something. They're focusing on machines. But in fact, we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters and they are the slaves. So the point that he's trying to make is he's writing a language for people to use, right? Not for machines to use. So it's meant to make people happy. You're meant to be happy while you're developing in Ruby. And so Ruby is optimized for happiness, all right? There's lots of ways to use Ruby to optimize for your own happiness. No? Nothing? Okay, your developer's happiness. I'm more of these. If you've got theme builders, plugin writers, things like that, right? And you use the base. I think all of you need to go watch Despicable Me right now, like right this minute, okay? How do you do this? Okay. Obviously not. How do you optimize for happiness by using Ruby? So what do developers like to do the most? They like to build things, right? They like to hack things. They like to extend things. So the first thing you want to think about if you're building an application and the first thing that Ruby does really, really well is to make things extendable. What do I mean by this? So there's something in Ruby called metaprogramming. It's not just a Ruby thing, but Ruby does this really, really well. It makes it really, really easy. What do I mean by the same metaprogramming? So let's say I have something like this. I have an object, a cap, and what I want the cap to do is a whole bunch of things. But I don't really feel like writing a method each time I want the cap to do something. I don't really feel like saying define method, say, define method, like define method, eat, right? So what I can do is I can just do this, and Ruby is going to do this for me. So what metaprogramming basically means is that you are changing the way you're creating methods on the fly, as the code is being interpreted. So you can create your own methods. So I can now say cat says meow, and it will say meow. I can now say cat, I can tell the cat to look itself, and so on and so forth, right? So this is a very powerful idea. This feels like it's really simple, but this is a really powerful idea, because this is basically what powers Rails. It makes Rails a really awesome framework. So Rails has a lot of things like, has many, belongs to all kinds of things, all kinds of declarations that are not native to Ruby. And the reason that you can do that is because Ruby makes it really, really easy for you to write doing specific language, to write stuff like this. So Ruby is very, very cool that way. So if you are thinking of building a project, you... I'm obviously not suggesting you write your own programming language that will allow you to do stuff like this. But what I'm suggesting is that you want to think about how the stuff that you're writing will be easily extendable by other people. So Ruby makes itself really easily extendable by giving you the option to basically change the language to do whatever you want. And I think that's like the ultimate, ultimate extendability feature. But there's also other stuff you can do to make your stuff extendable. For instance, you can open source it, right? So you can just release it to the world and have people contribute stuff to it. Of course, that doesn't mean that if you open source stuff, then people will come, but it will be the first step along that journey. You could consider an API, you could consider putting in plugins. So RubyGems is kind of awesome. For those of you who are not that familiar with the Ruby community and the Ruby ecosystem, RubyGems have something like four billion downloads to date, and there's a RubyGem for practically everything, I think, if you look hard enough. So it's really cool because what it allows you to do is it allows you to reuse a lot of the code that other people have already written so you don't have to come up with all the stuff yourself. And the cool thing about RubyGems is that they're also really easy to write and package and distribute to other people. So it's a very easy way to get started and to start feeding things back into the community. And that is also cool from like a meta perspective. So it makes the Ruby community very vibrant and very active because it's so easy to contribute stuff. So there's always lots of people contributing new things. You could also consider user configuration. I was going to talk a little bit about how you could do user configuration with Ruby, but there's actually a great guide on how to do that, so I'm just going to point you into that instead. You can look up practicing ruby.com, which is here, and there's a great guide about writing configurable applications. So it talks about how to use... You can do this with Ruby specifically, you can do this with Ruby on its own, you can do this with YAML, and there's a whole bunch of different tips to make your application configurable so that you can release it to a larger audience. Again, to make the stuff that you're writing extendable. The second thing... If you wanted to... Good, okay. The second thing that Ruby does really, really well is it makes things expressive. Here's what I mean by expressive. So this is not expressive. These two are doing the exact same thing. Essentially, each loop is doing... This is Java, this is Ruby. So what this is doing is basically iterating over... It's a loop that's going over the same thing three times and it's printing out the value of X. So what Ruby does is it says, okay, take the number one up to the number three and do that. That's pretty straightforward, right? And that's what we mean when we say expressive. So expressive means it's really super easy to read, I was talking about this a little bit earlier. So Ruby is a very natural language. It's very predictable. Okay, and the cool thing about being predictable language is... Okay, so how many of you use Google instead of bookmarking things? Okay, for those of you in the front, there's one hand in the back. So I'm one of those people. Instead of bookmarking things, I just go to Google and I type in the search term because I know that Google is going to give me what I'm looking for if I type in those specific keywords, right? That's what I mean by predictability. I know that if I type wiki ruby, I'm going to go to the ruby wiki page, right? It's going to be the first result. I know that if I type just ruby, Google is smart enough to give me the Wikipedia page up, you know, up towards the top because it privileges that information. So it's a predictable kind of experience for me. And the ruby syntax is built along that principle. It's the principle of least surprise. So if you go through a ruby tutorial, for example, and these are a couple of good examples. So ruby monk and try ruby are great starting tutorials. I really, really like ruby monk. And what both of these guys do is instead of telling you, okay, try to use this method now, they will tell you to guess the method. So they won't tell you what the method is. They'll say, okay, what do you think the method should be? And they ask you to try it. And the point being that half the time you're going to get it right because it's very easy, it's very natural, it's very predictable, okay? Predictability doesn't mean that it's very consistent to what you're familiar with. So if you're coming from like a Java background or a PHP background, which is what I came from or a Python background, then maybe a little bit different. But it's consistent to its own world. So once you get used to that syntax, just like once you get used to how Google does things, it won't change. So it's a very comfortable environment. It's very consistent in its own domain. Rails is kind of the same. So Rails, and Winston was talking about Rails a little bit earlier, has a philosophy of convention over configuration, meaning that there are certain things that are there that are same defaults that you don't have to think about anymore. So rather than making things really configurable, it emphasizes that there are certain conventions, there are certain styles, there are certain norms, there are certain rules that you should follow. There's a Ruby style guide as well, which you can refer to, which spells out a lot of these things. So there are style guides within the community, just like there is the Go formator that also formats stuff for you. And the point of all of these is to make it a consistent experience for everyone. So if you are collaborating with a whole bunch of different people, then using the style guide will make sure that you guys are sort of... that you have the same code experience. Making things modular is a really great idea for making stuff popular because it simplifies decision making a lot. So if you're writing things in a very modular sort of architecture, it means that you're communicating less about the stuff that you have to do. So you're working on one thing, so your friend is working on something else, and all you have to do is send the output to whoever is working on the other stuff. So if I change all of my stuff here, it doesn't affect what the person who's working on their stuff is working on. And this is cool because this means that everyone can sort of work independently. So in Ruby, there's a lot of different examples of that, but what I wanted to highlight for you guys, because what we're talking about earlier is stuff like this. So Ruby is an interpreted language, right? Which means that you don't have to compile it. It's something that is compiled on the fly and interpreted for you, right? So the traditional interpreter used to be MRI. Now it's called something else. It means this is interpreted to C, to standard C libraries, but that's not the only way to do things. So you can also write Ruby, and you can have that to be interpreted into Java, which is JRuby, and that's super cool. So what JRuby does is it not only allows you to use Java libraries and to use Java code, but it's also better in terms of concurrency than the regular Ruby interpreter. So if you care about stuff like that, that's kind of cool. Or if you want to put Ruby on the mobile, you can also do that with MRuby. That's a relatively new project. The point being that you can use the same language, but on top of different systems, and this makes your decision making a lot more simple as well. So you don't have to decide, okay, if I want to write something in Java, then I have to learn a different language. Ruby makes it very simple for you. Number five, document everything. And I mean everything, including the kitchen sink. So if you are aiming to build a community around a project or something that you're developing, document not just your code, obviously that's important. And if you're writing things in an expressive way, documentation is still important, but slightly less important. But also document your style. We talked about that, how style is really important. Document the decisions that you're making in the project. Document your mistakes. I really wanted to put this picture up there. It's just really cute. But it's important to document the stuff that doesn't work well and the stuff that you've decided not to do, because then you don't make the same mistake again in the future. And it's a good idea to make that easily accessible. So a lot of open-source software projects, Ruby included, have a lot of this information up there in the open mailing list and things like that so that you can go through it and you can have a look and you can see that, okay, this has been done before. People have said that this is not a good idea. Let's not do that anymore. So it saves you a lot of time. And the last thing is make it easy to learn. So I think personally that Ruby is pretty easy to learn for all of the reasons that I've told you guys already. And if you are developing an application, it's also something to think about in terms of future development. So you want to make sure that your code base is not this monolithic thing that after you come back to it, after a few years, no one really knows how it works anymore. So because that makes bigger changes a lot trickier in the future. But if you follow the steps earlier that I mentioned, it's probably a little bit easier. And yeah, so if you want to learn Ruby, go to either tryruby.com or rubymump.com. Both of those are really awesome. The next after this will be the last breakout about PHP by Lester. Do you have any questions? There's like five minutes. Sorry? Okay, those are two different questions. So Ruby and Rails are two different beasts in my opinion. So I think that Ruby is really easy to get started with because it's a very natural language to learn. So personally, Ruby is a relatively new language for me. I came from a PHP background. Rails is a slightly different story. Rails is an amazing framework that allows you to do all kinds of awesome things. But it also has a steeper learning curve. So Rails is awesome. I wouldn't say it's not easy. I would say that it has a lot of assumptions behind it. So it requires a little bit more reading, a little bit more of getting into. Whereas with Ruby, you just sort of hit the ground running in my opinion at least. Are you a developer? Not yet. So no programming language? A bit of scissors. A bit of scissors. Okay, I mean, like you have seen earlier, they all read like English. So they are pretty easily understandable. I think it just takes time for you to get used to syntax, etc. Then of course you need to brush out the computer programming general concepts. If you give yourself one month intensive training, I think it works for all languages as well if you should be able to pick it up very easily. So Ruby is the language itself. You can go to tryruby.org and just learn all the syntax. It's not difficult. Rails is a little bit more complex than I had said, but there are also a lot of tons of tutorials and guides online as well to help you get started. In fact, you can get instant gratification in 10 minutes to build a block easily with Rails. If you want to know more, come to Rails for something. Yeah, that's what we got here. But in general, it's not that it's difficult. It's just that Rails has a few more assumptions about it. So you need to know a little bit more about model view controller, things, and you need to know a little bit more about... Is it like WordPress or what? Just take one or two months. You can do more with Rails, but with Rails after you have learned Rails. So WordPress is really like a CMS only. Yeah, so WordPress is really... It's better here. I'm trying to get some more WordPress here. Yeah, yeah. Rails is really like... you can do a lot more things with Rails. Rails is designed as a proper applications report. So it's designed to allow you to do amazing stuff, not just vlogs, like Vincent said. So Twitter was... Is it still running on Rails? Some parts of Rails is still on Rails. Yeah, so you can build massive, massive things that run fairly well, but it requires a little bit more of getting into it. I would start with Ruby and then move on from there. Do you use PHP or no? That's a true question, right? The right tool for the right job. Right? Yeah, so sometimes... The right tool for the right job. So the entire Rails and Ruby work does not have any PHP code in it? Yeah, Rails is written basically in Ruby. And Rails... What's the question? Some of the server side is like PHP, right? So if you are using Ruby on Rails, the server side will be Ruby. Everything will be Ruby. And the reason it works is because of the metaprogramming abilities that Ruby has. So it literally allows you to do almost anything you want with the language. You can extend the language in so many different ways, which is what makes Ruby awesome. So you can build your own framework if you want to. But at the same time, if you are building a web application, you can't run from HTML, CSS, JavaScript. So we're not saying that if you use Rails, you don't need to do CSS, HTML, JavaScript at all. You still need to do that, because front-end, definitely, you have to do those things. Just that your back-end will be powered by Ruby, just like you do with using code, and your back-end will be powered by code. Rails is not the only way to publish stuff on the web if you want to use Ruby as sort of the primary environment. You can also do things with Sinatra, which has a slightly smaller learning curve than Rails. It's not as powerful as Rails, because Rails is really this massive, awesome thing. But Sinatra is, I think, a little bit more accessible and teaches you some of the same basic concepts. So you can start with Sinatra, move on to Rails. That's another way of doing it. You can check out Sinatra as well. And if you have more questions, come find us at the Meetup.