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Segment:1 CASON LYNLEY: Introduction of Keynote Speaker.
CASON LYNLEY: Good morning. This morning's keynote, again, builds on the overall theme of the SSP annual meeting. As Ben said yesterday in his introduction to Dr. Yeshak, this year's annual meeting program committee focused on inviting keynote speakers who are either from a different part of the world, like Ethiopia, or who could offer a perspective that isn't always at the forefront as that of diverse learners, people who take in information differently from the majority.
CASON LYNLEY: It's my great pleasure to introduce Betsy Beaumon. Betsy is the CEO of Benetech, a nonprofit that transforms how people with disabilities read and learn, empowering organizations and communities with software for the social good and supporting one of the world's most vulnerable populations. For over 15 years, she has been active in issues of social change and technology.
CASON LYNLEY: She is a social entrepreneur and engineer whose mission is to leverage technology to build a more inclusive future. Betsy defined the concept of born accessible, where all digital content can be made accessible to everyone when created, and born inclusive, where all new tech, including AI, starts with inclusion. In addition to speaking at conferences around the world, Betsy has testified before the US Senate Committee on health, education, pensions, and labor, championing inclusion and access to information for everyone.
CASON LYNLEY: According to Betsy regarding her role, technology is just a tool. It can be used for good or evil. I try to make sure we know which is which. Please join me in welcoming Betsy Beaumon. [APPLAUSE, MUSIC PLAYING]
Segment:2 BETSY BEAUMONT: Why Inclusion Matters to Technology and Technology Matters to Inclusion.
BETSY BEAUMON: Thank you. Good morning. We noticed that we were rocking out here a little bit when we first got going, which is great. So I want to start out with a couple of stories. I want to introduce you to a couple of people. This is Junia and Catherine. Junia is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, specializing in urban sociology and race and ethnicity.
BETSY BEAUMON: Catherine received her PhD in clinical psychology from Purdue and is now retired as a professor of clinical psychology from the University of Wisconsin. These are successful people who sound a lot like your readers, writers, and colleagues, and they are. But they actually had to make it against the odds to get where they are. Because, in fact, Junia was diagnosed with dyslexia in elementary school and used assistive technology, including our Bookshare service, which you'll hear more about, to get through school all the way through her PhD.
BETSY BEAUMON: And she basically said she never would be where she is without that and other assistive technologies. Catherine, as you may now notice as I change the photo, is somebody who's been blind since birth. That is her with her guide dog walking along the sidewalk. And she actually used Bookshare for her clinical research. And now she's retired and has all the books that she wants to read for pleasure. I bet she probably keeps up with some of you guys, too, as a guess.
BETSY BEAUMON: But this is a story of people who were lucky, actually. They're lucky they were born in the United States. They're lucky that they've had access to all these critical technologies and supportive family, friends, colleagues, professors all the way through. And yet, even for them, they struggled. They struggled for recognition. People like Junia, who certainly does not-- you don't look at her and say, oh, yes, I know she has a disability.
BETSY BEAUMON: Which is great for her in many ways, but she also had to fight being recognized as somebody that needs any sort of assistance to do her work and to do her studies. People in their positions are often kept out of fields completely, and that's still true today even in places like the US or Western Europe. And it's not because people don't want them to succeed. It's mostly because of just lack of awareness.
BETSY BEAUMON: So we're going to talk about a lot of things today that really get to that awareness question. And I know some of you are super-duper aware and really working in this space, and others are saying, what are you even talking about? So I'm going to try to do a little bit for all of you. So who are we talking about globally? As Cason mentioned, we want to think about the whole world. And the whole world looks like one in seven people have a disability.
BETSY BEAUMON: That's a billion people. So this is not some tiny group that we-- well, we'll forget about them. That's a lot of people around the world. And if you want to talk about what's fair and what's happening, let's talk about employment rates. So 33% of working age people with disabilities are employed compared to 77% of the overall population. Less than half.
BETSY BEAUMON: Let's talk about college graduates. If you take people without disabilities, it's about 90% are employed. People with disabilities that are college graduates-- 50%. That's pretty scary. And to just go a little further, people with disabilities are underrepresented in the top 16 of the 20 fastest growing fields and they're overrepresented in the top 17 of the top 20 fastest declining occupations.
BETSY BEAUMON: And just to give you an idea, again, of numbers, in the US, we're talking about 15 million people of working age. So that's not the people that are in their 90s who have lost their vision. This is people 16 to 64. Again, I don't define working age. [LAUGHS] Let's talk about the global south.
BETSY BEAUMON: So we heard yesterday about Africa and some of the challenges around sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in publishing and in getting your work out there. Well, if you have a disability in the global south, you have an even bigger issue than the numbers that I just talked about, which were US numbers. The employment rates of people with disabilities in the generally global south is 10% to 20%.
BETSY BEAUMON: That's how many people are working, and there's lots of reasons for that. There's additional cultural stigma, there are less access typically to the kind of technologies that people like Junia and Catherine have had access to. So these are real issues, and the thing is, they're pretty solvable. That's the part that's both the consternation and the joy, is we can solve a lot of this.
BETSY BEAUMON: And the good news is that some of the global tech giants are starting to do that. And that's great because they have reach all over the world. And they're also looking at the global south and saying, these are my future employees. So they know where the growth is coming, as far as young people coming up. And even groups like SAP and Google have done work where they are introducing coding skills to millions of young people in Africa.
BETSY BEAUMON: And, in fact, they're including people who are deaf and hard of hearing in those coding camps in high numbers, which is great. So why is inclusion important? It's important for education, employment, self-esteem, and engagement. Students in low income countries heavily in poverty-- you could cut poverty by 12% if you solve that. 285 million people are visually impaired.
BETSY BEAUMON: 95% of all content is still locked in printed form. And less than half of all blind children receive an education. So countries really have to start thinking inclusive to transform. And digital on its own does not equal inclusive, and we're going to talk about that. Cason mentioned what one of those aspects are that I have jumped into pretty heavily, that let's make digital really be inclusive.
BETSY BEAUMON: And again, why is that important? Because everyone deserves possibilities. Everyone deserves a chance to be what you are, what Junia is, et cetera. So how do you do that? So tech can create possibilities, as I said. And I think there's a lot of opportunity for doing more of that. There are also opportunities to create road blocks, which is something that doesn't always get said in these sorts of venues.
BETSY BEAUMON: So we have to be careful to really do the good, not the evil side of that. And what's really important is that you can help create possibilities. You have the power knowing what a lot of you do to really help solve this problem, and to solve it today, not in 20 years. So I want to tell you another story about a young man named Kevin-- Kevin [INAUDIBLE].
BETSY BEAUMON: When Kevin was 6, he suffered a traumatic brain injury. And his parents really thought, oh, no, what now? Kevin suffered lots of issues from that. He had to relearn to read, he had to relearn to walk. He suffered a permanent optic impairment that leaves him heavily visually impaired. So what is a parent to do in that situation? And how do you think about the possibilities for Kevin? This is why this is so urgent.
BETSY BEAUMON: This kind of stuff happens and suddenly the parents are facing their six-year-old, who is maybe out of possibilities, at least that's what they thought. And we'll come back to Kevin. But I want to switch out to get a little bit to why I'm standing here, which is-- I'll go to when I was six years old. My life was a lot different than that.
BETSY BEAUMON: I was running around the mountains in Southern California. A little girl with tiny little pigtails playing, happy. My dad owned a family business and it was an amusement arcade, which meant that I got to go play games and ride on a little horse. Life was really good. My dad was also a very big influence on me. Cason mentioned that I'm an entrepreneur.
BETSY BEAUMON: He was a serial entrepreneur. And I just always saw, oh, whoa, this is cool. This creates lots of possibilities. It's how our family was living, but it also clearly was a passion for him. The other passion he had was education. And he told all of us-- I was the youngest of five-- that education was the pathway.
BETSY BEAUMON: And it was very clear, you will go to college. Which he didn't-- he did not graduate from high school, yet he was on our local school board. So he really lived those values. And one winter night when I was six, I woke up and the house was just crazy. There was a lot of noise, people were shouting. And I woke up to see my dad slumped in the corner on our winter boots that were on the heater and later found out that he had died of a heart attack in our kitchen.
BETSY BEAUMON: What that meant for me I didn't really know. I was six. But it could have meant a real problem, the end of possibilities. My mom wasn't working. We were all putting everything into the family business that my dad ran. But one thing that kept coming back through is education, education, education.
BETSY BEAUMON: And my mom, who was not so obviously into education as my dad, jumped in and she ended up running for his school board seat and winning and being on our local school board, as well, and saying, you're going to college. We eventually moved to San Diego. So I am home, so yay, San Diego. Because she looked at all of the colleges here, all of the opportunities, and all the possibilities that would create for especially my sister and I who were the little ones.
BETSY BEAUMON: That was awesome because I jumped in, loved it. I was particularly into math. So I remember in seventh grade I was doing algebra. And we had an algebra teacher stand up and say, you are all the future engineers. Now, I didn't know what that meant. Honestly, I thought engineers drove trains at that point. So I thought it was really cool that I was told I am the future something that I had to go ask about and figure out.
BETSY BEAUMON: And as time went on, that became a focus, then. Now all this idea of education had a focus to it. So obviously I did do that and became an engineer. But I also have always had this idea of entrepreneurship and how do you make the world a better place. And that is why I became an engineer, is to make the world a better place. It took me a while to get here, but that's really led me to now.
BETSY BEAUMON: So with that, I want to give you a little bit more about what we do and why we at Benetech are here. Overall, we empower communities with software for social good. We essentially focus on inclusion, equity, and justice. We work in a number of areas. So we do education and employment, and that's heavily focused on people with disabilities. And we connect people to information that they wouldn't get a connection to.
BETSY BEAUMON: So Bookshare is one of those services that we'll talk about a bit more. But it is access to information for people with disabilities. Our DIAGRAM Center says, well, OK, let's go beyond the words. Let's get into pictures, math, chemistry, and other fun areas that are actually harder to make accessible. And we have other areas as well. We work in human rights and poverty alleviation, Service Net.
BETSY BEAUMON: And the poverty side is all about strengthening the social safety net and how can we make services connect better to each other. There was just an article about our Bay Area pilot in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday because it really is a new way to make a difference, and, in fact, is very similar to my first startup. The other area that we look at is data for inclusion. How do we get people who aren't included more of a voice?
BETSY BEAUMON: Let's talk about the data that should represent them, and today, often doesn't. So people with disabilities and other marginalized people are often left out of data sets. And that becomes an issue, as we'll talk about, when you start talking about AI. We do some other work in human rights, including we are using AI to help on the justice side of things to look at the evidence from the war in Syria.
BETSY BEAUMON: Because this is one of the first times that there is overwhelming numbers of videos and photos and such because everybody walks around with a cell phone. Well, there are 8 million videos in the hands of about 25 different Syrian groups, and we're using AI to help figure out which ones are duplicates, which ones have important information in them so the UN can prosecute war crimes. But this is still all around those areas of inclusion, equity, and justice.
BETSY BEAUMON: So I want to talk about Bookshare particularly. And some of you know Bookshare. Can I have a little shout out for anybody who knows Bookshare and/or may be contributing to it? Yeah. I see some hands. All right. If we're inclusive, also give a little whoop or something so that somebody--
AUDIENCE: Whoop!
BETSY BEAUMON: All right. So what is Bookshare? Bookshare, other than being whoop-able, is the world's largest online library of e-books for people with reading barriers due to a disability. This is really anything that keeps you from seeing the words, essentially from your brain processing or decoding the words, or if you can't hold and manipulate a book.
BETSY BEAUMON: This is in copyright law. And there's actually an exception, it's Section 121 and the new 121(a), for lawyers in the room, that are all about why people like us as a nonprofit can make books accessible to people who probably aren't going to buy them if they can't use regular books. Bookshare's at scale. So as a social entrepreneur, it's really important to think about how do we scale up and have impact.
BETSY BEAUMON: So to date, Bookshare's had about 14 million downloads. We have over 700,000 e-books in the collection. We actually add about 5,000 of those every month, many of them from people like you who literally give us a digital feed. We convert them and make them available to over 665,000 members in over 80 countries. And among this group are part of our 870 publisher partners that make this happen.
BETSY BEAUMON: And these books are now available in 47 languages. So it's important to us to really solve that larger problem that I talked about. Not just the US-- a great majority of these are US students because we are the primary provider of e-books that are accessible to US students that qualify-- but to make this happen all around the world.
BETSY BEAUMON: And I want to say, again, a thank you. I'm just showing one little example here from Stanford University Press. The university presses have been amazing, and there is really not time to go into the whole list of all of you who share your books with Bookshare. But I just want to be here to say, thank you so much for that, because I hear all the time that people read them.
BETSY BEAUMON: The reason I'm highlighting this particular one is just I happened to be at an event at Stanford. Our office is in Palo Alto. And I was telling a lady what I do and she was telling me what she does. It was a human rights event, but she said, I've got this great book about to come out. And I said, oh, yeah, it would be great to have it in Bookshare.
BETSY BEAUMON: Who's your publisher? That's one of my questions I always ask-- who's the publisher? And she said Stanford University Press. And I said, no problem, it will be there-- it will be there on the day it's published. And that's true whether it's from Duke University Press or a number of others. And she was thrilled, and she actually went and told a bunch of people about that.
BETSY BEAUMON: Because in her mind, like this is, again, about rights and about justice and about equity. I want it back up for a second just to say what is Bookshare and how does it work because a lot of people who aren't familiar with it might ask that. Essentially, they're e-books, so they're in digital text. We take them in and put them out in EPUB 3 format. We can take in EPUB 2 or a bunch of other formats-- Word.
BETSY BEAUMON: And what we're doing is basically making sure that they can be read on specialized devices, like a Braille device. Many people say, how do you possibly read an e-book with Braille? There are actually electronic devices that pop up pins so that somebody can read our books in Braille. And one Braille book-- and I'm talking about a basic novel-- not some of the stuff you do, but a basic novel, like Harry Potter would stand about three feet high from the floor if you stack a printed Braille book.
BETSY BEAUMON: So I know people that are blind who are thrilled about the fact that they can have 1,000 Bookshare books in Braille in their Braille devices, just like you could have 1,000 other books in your computer. People also use laptops, tablets, phones, MP3 players, all kinds of stuff to access our books. For somebody who's dyslexic, it's really helpful if the words highlight as they are spoken, like reverse karaoke in a way.
BETSY BEAUMON: That's really helpful for processing. There's different color combinations. There's all of those things for somebody who's non-visual. A lot of blind people actually don't read Braille. It's only about 30% of people who are blind. So they use the audio version of those. And again, those could be in MP3 or, typically, they're just using them on their phone. So that's a little bit about how it happens when you come out and you then take, say, this Chinese and The Iron Road book and use it through Bookshare.
BETSY BEAUMON: I have a friend of mine whose mom I just got onto Bookshare because she is losing her vision. She typically reads three newspapers a day and a book a day. She has a couple of master's degrees. She's so excited. Oh, my goodness. It was like a kid in a candy store when I unleashed her on Bookshare after she got her doctor's signed authorization.
BETSY BEAUMON: So it means a lot to the people who have it, whether it's for school, for work, or for pleasure. So I mentioned DIAGRAM earlier. It's great to make text accessible, but there's so much else. There's lots of science and math diagrams, there's maps, there's charts of all kinds. So we also run a federally funded-- funded by the Department of Education-- DIAGRAM Center.
BETSY BEAUMON: And what's really special about the DIAGRAM Center is it's a community-- it's a large community of people who are really-- I always say-- big brains. And it's across academia, across literal people with disabilities, parents of kids with disabilities, tech people. And we all come together and work on the harder problems of how do you make something like the chloroplast stoma diagram fully accessible.
BETSY BEAUMON: Well, it turns out, you can. And one of the ways that we've done a lot of our work is to jump in early on technical standards, things like through the W3C, the web standards now, formally through the IDPF, so that formats like EPUB 3 actually have all of this stuff in it for how you make a picture accessible. But, of course, that's not the whole trick. You have to know the topic.
BETSY BEAUMON: You have to inform not just what the picture shows you, but what is it trying to convey to you. So I want to jump into three things. I want to cover the culture of inclusion, which we talked about a little, the possibilities and cautions of technology to do all this stuff, and then the role of everybody in this room, which for me, as a mission-driven person, is the most important part.
BETSY BEAUMON: So let's talk about the culture of inclusion a little bit more. So I started off several years ago at a publishing conference talking about bars, bedrooms, and baby carriages. And what do those have in common? Well, some people may say, well, if you have bars and bedrooms, you end up with baby carriages. But-- [LAUGHTER] That's not the intention, though, interesting.
BETSY BEAUMON: The actual point of this is that, in fact, all of those areas people use assistive technology that was invented and designed and put into action for people with disabilities. But you use it, for example, in the bar for closed captioning so that you know what's going on in the sports game. People use it in their bedrooms a lot so that they can watch a movie without keeping their partner awake.
BETSY BEAUMON: And baby carriages use curb cuts every single day, as do scooter riders, roller blades, bicyclists, you name it. And so this is really where these technologies came to be. So here, I'm showing Felix the Cat with closed captioning. And of course, for people who are blind, closed captions don't help, but audio descriptions of movies help. And if you pay attention, you'll now see a whole bunch of areas, including airplanes, which was part of my Senate testimony, that actually have closed captions and audio descriptions available for movies.
BETSY BEAUMON: And of course, as I mentioned, curb cuts are for people with wheelchairs originally and still used very much by those today. The thing is that it's so common to have accessible functions and functionality be useful that there's a whole theme called the curb cut effect. Because curb cuts actually have become so ubiquitous and so useful, that there's this concept now. There's really inclusion in laws everywhere.
BETSY BEAUMON: Many people in the US are familiar with the ADA, The Americans with Disabilities Act. And that is becoming more important again. Why? Because 10,000 people a day are turning 65, and 10,000 people a day in 10 years will be turning 75, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The leading edge of the Baby Boom already are in their 70s. So that's important.
BETSY BEAUMON: All of a sudden, all the building codes and houses are being retrofit. Why? Because they need to be more accessible. Wouldn't it have been easier if they were built that way in the first place? And that comes up a lot as we then talk about digital things, as well.
BETSY BEAUMON: Basically, the laws don't change everything. The ADA didn't come in and all of a sudden, every building was magically accessible to somebody in a wheelchair. We have to have those, but what we need to do is change the culture. We need to change how we look at our businesses and how we look at our products. And that's where I want to talk a little bit about the fundamental belief I have that technology, overall, that all things digital can actually be accessible and that we need to really jump on the power of accessibility.
BETSY BEAUMON: So let's talk about digital inclusion. It's critical for the modern world. Why? Because we live on the internet, on social media. Our learning materials, the data that's behind all of the work that we do, and think about the number of, just, tools that you use every day, these have to be inclusive for this curb cut effect to be true for digital materials.
BETSY BEAUMON: So all of these have to happen. There are some laws locally in the US and globally that help that. A lot of people that think about websites refer to Section 508 of the rehab code. And that is actually for government websites, really, but there's a lot of great guidelines in there about how do you make a website accessible. And that turns out to have a whole lot of commonality with how you make an e-book accessible.
BETSY BEAUMON: You have to have good structure that somebody listening to it on a screen reader can follow. You have to have descriptions of your pictures. You have to think about placement so that things don't jump around in a weird order. And you know what. Usually, just like the curb cut effect, it makes it a better publication or digital artifact.
BETSY BEAUMON: Where are we? So I'm going to do a few sections of where are we today. So where are we on consumer software? Unfortunately, most products just fail before the first line of code is ever written. Why? Because most people writing it don't think of this one billion people with disabilities as their users.
BETSY BEAUMON: They just don't think about them. It's not that they don't like them, they just don't know them or think about them. The good news is, as I mentioned earlier, some of the large tech companies who make platforms that a lot of other stuff is on really are thinking about it. So Apple, Microsoft, Google, and others are really doing a lot in the area of accessibility. And that's fantastic because, again, that's what a lot of software is built on.
BETSY BEAUMON: So if you look at your products from those companies, whether it's everything from PowerPoint to your iPhone to Word to your Android phone, you can turn on accessibility. Now, I would love to see more of these things a bit more obvious, a bit easier to jump back and forth. Because, frankly, I would like my phone to very seamlessly read me my emails while I'm driving. I don't have a print disability, but it'd be really useful. And you kind of can, but then you have to turn on all the accessibility.
BETSY BEAUMON: So I think they're getting there. But the fact that you can turn that stuff on today is a huge step forward. Why? Everybody's got their reasons. The CEO of Microsoft happens to have a child with a disability. All of a sudden, Microsoft is one of the world leaders at every level. They have an amazing chief accessibility officer.
BETSY BEAUMON: So they have somebody in the C-suite who's in charge of accessibility. No Microsoft product goes out the door anymore without her group having something to say about it and having testing. They also have an active hiring plan around that. So it just goes to show awareness and understanding can really lead to a lot of progress. What about in the world that we live in more and educational and business tools?
BETSY BEAUMON: Some business tools-- and we do this at Benetech-- sorry. We do a lot where we will say, great, we think we want to use ADP for our very many back office functions. Well, in fact, there were some things about ADP that were not accessible when we first looked at it. We pushed back. And not that we're big-- we're 85 people, but we actually got them to listen.
BETSY BEAUMON: Because they said, oh, that's something we really want to make better. So now our VP of human resources is on an accessibility and disability advisory board for that company, and they look at all aspects of their products. It's true of things like Zoom. Some of you know George Kershaw. George works part time for us and with us on everything.
BETSY BEAUMON: He explicitly said, I'm so thrilled to have such an accessible platform for doing all sorts of video and audio conferencing. So it does matter in those kind of tools. And again, there's a whole long list of groups that are doing great and a whole longer list of groups that aren't. So just think about it next time you use any sort of tool during your work. If I had to turn off my screen, would this work?
BETSY BEAUMON: How? Do I know how? Is it possible? When you think about it that way, it makes a big difference. And what if you're coding? What about the people who make software? This is a huge problem. Back in the '70s when a lot of this stuff was still-- these new languages is really text-based.
BETSY BEAUMON: So, in fact, a screen reader worked, and a lot of people who were blind or visually impaired were becoming software engineers. Awesome. That is a really highly paid and one of those advancing career paths. But guess what. In order to get a lot of other people, including people who are dyslexic, for example, more active in that, they became more visual.
BETSY BEAUMON: So now you have things like Scratch, where you can move big blocks around to create code and there's just a lot more visual clicking. So that's an area where it's gone backwards. And this is a challenge we always have. Like, yes, let's make it better for everybody. Don't give that up. But let's also make sure that we do things like the hybrid languages and structures that literally put both.
BETSY BEAUMON: So you have a text-based version and a visual version, and you can use whichever piece works for you. And it might work better for you one day than the other. Jupiter Lab, for example, we just did a code sprint a couple of weeks ago, where we get a bunch of volunteers together and Microsoft sponsored it and we had a whole bunch of people working on how to make this whole coding suite more accessible for the people who actually want to be coders.
BETSY BEAUMON: So this stuff is really important. And then we come to ed tech, which is a big area, obviously, and we're right in the middle of it. But yet, that's an area that, unfortunately, the last five years in its huge growth, has suffered from the we'll-worry-about-them-later syndrome in many cases. It's the, oh, yeah, we're a startup, we get it, we've heard about this stuff, but we don't really know much about accessibility, but we'll get to that-- we'll get to that when we get our next round of funding, we'll get to that when we get our next 2,500 schools onboard.
BETSY BEAUMON: And I keep saying, well, wait, you're selling to schools and you don't think you need accessibility now? Some of this is also education, and we do a lot of this. Why are those schools buying that? Now there are laws that say, in fact, if they buy that, they have to buy an equivalent other thing if it doesn't work for students. So I think there's this often happens, this two steps forward, one step back.
BETSY BEAUMON: So while you've now got Microsoft out there spanning the globe talking about accessibility, you have five new startups this week who don't know anything about it. So what's also great is a whole bunch of tech companies are working on how do you get more people with disabilities, but also who know about accessibility to learn about it in college. Because if you don't come in knowing about it, you're probably not going to code that way.
BETSY BEAUMON: And why is it important? Good reminder. We have people like Junia and Catherine who really, really do need this stuff. And I even ask sometimes, would they make it today? There are better tools for them in some ways and worse tools for them in others. So like all sorts of other things, this is something we can't just say, OK, check the box, it's done.
BETSY BEAUMON: We have to keep thinking as technology moves forward. So where are we on other data-driven solutions? AI's come up a couple of times, and there is so much promise. Things like home automation. I do a fair bit of speaking as well about what about people with severe intellectual disabilities who really need home care or some kind of assistance. Wow. If you have a fully automated home and sensors and fall sensors and things, you can really do a lot.
BETSY BEAUMON: And there is a absolute shortage of caregivers, and it's getting worse. And that is true for seniors and for people with severe disabilities. So there could be a whole safety net of technology that helps. It doesn't replace humans, but it could help. Maybe one human can now help a few people and not just one person they have to watch every minute. Awesome.
BETSY BEAUMON: Great. What is happening with their privacy? Oh, that. So it's collecting all this data about this vulnerable, say, 88-year-old senior. Hm, that could be bad. So this, again, is like, let's do it because it could be so good, but let's think about it and think carefully about how the data is used, who gets access to it, how we protect it, where it goes.
BETSY BEAUMON: Let's not sell it, please. So there's a whole bunch of this really good, potentially bad. We at Bookshare are working with companies in this area. We want to make sure that somebody on their Alexa or their Google Home can actually read Bookshare books. That's great. It's an assistive technology combined with a consumer technology that's really inexpensive, which is one of the advantages of that.
BETSY BEAUMON: A lot of assistive technologies can be expensive. So that's great. But we just have to keep thinking about it. AI has so many possibilities, as well. People are working on auto transcriptions for people who are deaf. AI can really, as it learns-- you do machine learning-- it can get better. There are assistance for people who are blind.
BETSY BEAUMON: There's something called Be My Eyes, where somebody who's blind has Google Glasses on and can go in and say, what am I looking at on the store shelf? And for right now, a human helps them. But they're collecting all that data. So pretty soon, a machine could help them at a tenth of the cost or less. So really cool. Again, what do you do with the data?
BETSY BEAUMON: But it's important. We're using AI not just for Syrian videos, but in math. So a lot of Bookshare books don't have math equations in them. It's how they come in some cases. But we're saying, well, if we scan a book, how do you effectively digitize math? How does it recognize that it's a math equation versus another kind of picture?
BETSY BEAUMON: And then, how do you effectively make sure that it's fully digitized so that it can be read out in MathML, math markup language, which is the typical way to make it accessible? So we're doing an AI-based project to do that, and it's showing a whole lot of promise. There are dangers in this, again. But there's more promise around smart cities. We're very worried right now about AI-- how it's used in hiring.
BETSY BEAUMON: Because if you use a data set that doesn't include everybody in it, people say, machines aren't biased. Data are biased, unfortunately. So it's kind of a garbage in, garbage out problem. As I explained to some politicians-- you have to explain at a very basic level-- these things eat data, you are what you eat. So if you eat data that is limited, you are going to have a very limited algorithm popping out of it.
BETSY BEAUMON: And people are worried about self-driving cars actually taking into account how long it takes somebody to get across the street with a walker. Now, the good news is, those have a lot of vision and cameras. I don't think they're going to mow them down. But there's some real concerns about that for very real reasons. So let's get into where we are on digital content.
BETSY BEAUMON: I mentioned a bit about Bookshare and how we're really great at text, and we're working on some of the other harder stuff. This is one of the biggest problems that you would see. So you have a digital content and you're rolling along. You're reading the text with your screen reader, and then all of a sudden, it just says image. That's useful, right? It's an image of what?
BETSY BEAUMON: We don't know. It could be an image like this, it could be a chart that gives you all kinds of data. And, in fact, funny-- data generated this chart. So maybe the data could be present to tell you what that image is. That'd be cool. It could be an image that looks more like this that's math that, again, you have to be able to say, how does it speak this effectively?
BETSY BEAUMON: And there are ways to do that. But again, the math can generate what the machine says. So this is one-- if I had to say one thing that would be think about this, it's thinking about your images of all kinds, whether it's graphics, whether it's math. And if all it says in a read-through is image, not so helpful. Now sometimes, it can also be in the text, and that's really helpful if it's all covered in the text.
BETSY BEAUMON: Then it's also still helpful if the reader knows that. It's great to maybe have a caption, which a screen reader can read. But don't repeat the caption. So if I'm studying for my finals and I'm reading through things five times, that's not helpful either because I still have to do what everybody else has to do and get through all the material.
BETSY BEAUMON: This also applies to chemistry. Chemistry is a whole other set of notation. And you can think about other notations that are not just text. There's work going on in all of these areas. Our DIAGRAM Center has people that are experts-- typically world experts in these areas of accessibility working on those. And I invite you, and I will invite you at the end as well, to look at DIAGRAMCenter.org-- spelled like an American e-r, not r-e.
BETSY BEAUMON: And that is-- it's really important. And DIAGRAM has a number of resources. And one of the most important parts of our community are publishers. And I say publishers in the broad sense, all of the digital organizations that work on content. We have quick start guide, there are image guidelines and samples, there's training. There's something called the DIAGRAM report which comes out every year in the August time frame that looks at new technologies and trends that affect educational work and says, where's that going, what can you do with it, what's the leading edge of how we can make sure that that's as inclusive as that can be.
BETSY BEAUMON: And so I highly recommend the publisher's section here. And again, this is a community. We also link out to things that are produced elsewhere, like the book industry study group has an amazing guide on accessibility that was just updated again this year. And I can't recommend that more for the how-to side of this. So if all these tools exist, why isn't this problem solved? Well, we're back to, some of the tools are still trying to catch up, make it so that it can be done cost effectively.
BETSY BEAUMON: But mostly, it's about lack of understanding, lack of knowledge. So we all need to spread the word and think about that culture of inclusion that we talked about. And essentially, we need you. If you think about, you are all thought leaders. You are not just doing your job in your little place. You're leaders. You are leaders in information, and I want to see such leaders standing up and saying, we're going to be inclusive.
BETSY BEAUMON: If I could make no other point in this whole talk, that would be it. So that gets us into, what can you do? How do you do this? So Cason mentioned that some years ago I came up with this term born accessible. Because I was at a publishing conference-- I think it was Tools of Change in New York.
BETSY BEAUMON: And I was sitting there hearing everybody talking about, oh-- now this is eight years ago-- things are going to be born digital. Like, really born digital. Not in a digital file, but born to be consumed digitally. And I'm like, so if it's born digital, it can be born accessible. Done. I knew that wasn't that easy, unfortunately.
BETSY BEAUMON: But at the same time, it was an aha moment. It basically said, well, that's the answer. I was running Bookshare at the time and said, Bookshare shouldn't exist, or Bookshare should be a library. It's a library. Great. I love libraries. Hello, to all the librarians. But a library shouldn't be, or isn't in the rest of the world, at least, the main place where people go to get their books.
BETSY BEAUMON: So let's make sure-- and also, coming from a for-profit background into the nonprofit world. You know what, if you want to sell your stuff, sell your stuff, but sell it to everybody in a way that will work for everybody. So that's where born accessible really came out. And then it was how to do it. So there's a whole chain.
BETSY BEAUMON: And you could all probably stand up and we could make a chain of all the things it takes to make something come to fruition, a piece of content. And that means you have to have standards to work with. You have to have things from the authors, the publishers, the conversion vendors, the distributors, the sellers. And then, what the heck do people read this on? So that's a lot.
BETSY BEAUMON: It's a lot that needs to come together. But that's why we have a lot of people working on it in the whole community, because it's coming. And EPUB 3 being brought into the world was truly one of those moments where I said, OK, now we've taken a gargantuan step. Why? Because it has all of accessibility features and functions, so to speak, in that standard.
BETSY BEAUMON: Again, it doesn't happen magically. People have to apply them, but there are ways to apply them. And that was really a great day. So one of the things you see here is a little seal that says Global Certified Accessible, Benetech. So what we've done is work with partners around the world and say, we can actually help you certify your content to say, as a third party, that it's accessible.
BETSY BEAUMON: And there's a whole process to that. There is a cost because we can't do it for free, unfortunately. But we will actually go through that and say, this is certified accessible. Our partners in the UK, the Royal National Institute For Blind People does that as well, Dedicon in the Netherlands, Vision Australia in Australia. And we've just got to get this ball rolling. Now, the good news is that people are in process.
BETSY BEAUMON: I'm happy to say we just recently announced the first group that has passed. This is all very new, so MacMillan learning is actually-- they've passed. And it's literally a production line. We don't do it title by title. We look at a bunch of titles and then say, OK, you've got it flowing.
BETSY BEAUMON: That production line is certified accessible. And there are more in process. Typically big groups right now, like Wiley, Mcgraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster are all in process, and we have many more groups interested. We have some other vendors who are working with us who are certified, Amnet and-- got to get that right-- New Gen. But there are more of you and more folks in the rest of your community who are working on that.
BETSY BEAUMON: So it's really important. Why is it important to do this? Well, we all are on the same mission. We want those possibilities. We want education, we want learning, we want knowledge transfer. Don't leave a billion people out. Now let's be fair. Some of those billion people could read your books because they're in a wheelchair, but can perfectly use your digital content.
BETSY BEAUMON: But don't leave hundreds of millions of people out either. It's still a lot. There's also some legal reasons. There really are more laws being passed in the US in terms of institutions of higher learning that are funded, say, by state funds and the content must be accessible. I'm a much bigger fan of carrots than sticks. So I'd rather say, let's help and do the right thing, and do it right.
BETSY BEAUMON: So that is key. So let's get to what-- sorry, wrong way. What can you do? So get certified. And we're happy to share all of these links and things. But if you go to Benetech.org, under Our Work, Born Accessible, you will quickly get to certification and how that's done.
BETSY BEAUMON: There's a guy named Michael Johnson-- Michael J-- letter J-- at Benetech.org. And for really near term stuff, there's an actual webinar coming up on June 4, if you want to attend that. We're working with another group on that, and it really goes into certification. Now, I still believe very much that we need Bookshare. One, because most of the books being certified aren't happening out in a lot of the world.
BETSY BEAUMON: So we need books share for a long time to come. And I believe in libraries. So if you haven't, I'd love to talk with you about contributing your books to Bookshare, as well. We're also working on Imageshare, which is about how do we make sure that accessible and preferably open content images are available, so that if you want to create something that has a heart diagram in it, why don't you use the accessible one.
BETSY BEAUMON: Somebody has already done the work. That's great. And we'd love professors and teachers and parents to be able to use this stuff, as well. So Imageshare is brand new. It's still kind of in an alpha mode, and we're getting content for that. So anybody that has especially open content stuff, I'd love to talk.
BETSY BEAUMON: So why do this? Again, let's get back to why this is important now. So earlier I mentioned Kevin, the boy who had a traumatic brain injury at six and had a whole different experience in life. Well, this is Kevin. Kevin's now in high school. Kevin, I am about to call an employee because he's going to intern for Benetech this summer.
BETSY BEAUMON: He is jamming along through school, and he is coming soon to a place that is going to tell him he needs to look at your content. And my question is, are you going to be ready for him? Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
Segment:3 Q and A.
CASON LYNLEY: We have a few minutes for questions. If anybody has questions, please raise your hand and we'll bring the microphone to you.
BETSY BEAUMON: Actually, I don't know if I can-- nope. I lost my links.
AUDIENCE: Hi. I'm from Wiley and actually work in our research journals business. I'm just curious if you have any plans to extend this to scholarly journal articles and the research world.
BETSY BEAUMON: I didn't know if that was going to be the first or the second question, but I knew it was going to be one of them. So there's some format questions. So I mentioned EPUB a lot. Most of the work in the field has been focused on that type of format. So really, the only issue at this point is just how well those specific journal formats can be converted and apply in this area.
BETSY BEAUMON: I would love to have every journal from every one of you in the room in Bookshare today. And I would be out there asking for it, other than the formatting questions. So I think Cason and I were talking about that as well. I think this is something that I'd love to have our team and some of you all dive in a little deeper. And there are other folks in the room, like Bill Kasdorf, who are doing a lot of work in this area in general and that I think he probably would have some good tips for you, specifically about journals.
BETSY BEAUMON: But it really is just a file format question mostly at this point. So would love to do it. Let's talk more. I'll get you to the right people on our team. And it would be very cool to actually get a little journal subgroup to talk about that. Because, yeah, we're missing so much. And all your books are great, but all your journals are really, really great.
BETSY BEAUMON: What else? OK. That's not allowed to be the only question. I said it'd be the first or second, but--
AUDIENCE: I've got a question, but I've actually got a comment first. From SSP's perspective, we may not have made this clear, but one of our sponsors is tagging all the videos and content to make it accessible, to make it readable, to make it discoverable. So all this content after the SSP's great. [APPLAUSE] That's something the board felt really strongly about. So the people at Cadmore Media, if you know any of those, they're the people doing that and they're doing a great job.
AUDIENCE: I have another couple of questions. One-- and this is really on a personal note for me. My son actually also has dyslexia, so I've looked a lot into this. There's a lot of creative skills that people who have dyslexia-- if you can engage them and get them things. But my question is, what's happening in the education system to help this?
AUDIENCE: It seems like schools are not really doing as much. Are you working to help that grassroots education side, too?
BETSY BEAUMON: Oh, absolutely. And I will say to your first point, there are some researchers, there are neurologists and special ed PhD people who have something called the dyslexic advantage. And there's websites, books, all kinds of stuff that actually talk about the neurology around dyslexia. And talk about leaving out some of the smartest kids in the class. Yeah.
BETSY BEAUMON: And you can start listing famous people that, because of their dyslexia, have become who they are. Not in spite of, but because of. And that's a really important point. And I think some tech companies are just starting to really think through neurodiversity on their teams. You have people around Silicon Valley on the autism spectrum, for sure. How do you balance that out?
BETSY BEAUMON: And to the school's point, in the US, it's well-recognized. Now, it varies by state, it varies by district, it sometimes varies by school. But part of what we do is raise our hands really high and say, it doesn't have to mean as a school that now you can't deal with this. We can give you resources to deal with this. So US is doing pretty well. And, again, it varies.
BETSY BEAUMON: One of the things in the law that just changed-- the law that we work under on the copyright side because of this global treaty, which is the Marrakesh Treaty that lets books cross borders, it also updated some things around how we talk about-- it used to be some schools would say, you have to go to a neurologist to diagnose dyslexia, whereas the neurologist would say, well, what does your reading specialist at school say?
BETSY BEAUMON: So that's improved drastically in just the last five years. So it's getting a lot better. It is not getting a lot better in a lot of other countries in the world. This is where we go around and we'll say, let's just talk about your students that are blind or have a motor physical disability. Because you say dyslexia, and they're just like, yeah, that fake thing.
BETSY BEAUMON: And we've had groups in some Asian countries say, well, dyslexia doesn't exist here. It does. So I think globally, it's not as pretty a picture. And we've worked in countries from India and Brazil and Kenya to try to help push it, though we're not typically the advocates of that. Though, we, again, are saying, look, you can include them, it doesn't have to be hard.
BETSY BEAUMON: And the great thing about born accessible is then it doesn't matter. I don't have to be identified. I just use the book and turn on the features that work for me. That's that other really important part of that. Because if I just have all these ways that the book can talk to me if it wants to talk to me, or if I want it to talk to me and the pictures are described, if I need that, I'll just start using it as long as I know they're there.
BETSY BEAUMON: So that's one of the other great reasons, is then you get out of this, well, I have to be diagnosed and I have to be different. No, you just have to use what works for you. So I think that's one of the biggest breakthroughs for undiagnosed people with dyslexia. There's also, by the way, a realization that there's a very high population of people with dyslexia and related learning disabilities in prison.
BETSY BEAUMON: Why? Because they failed in school because they were told they were stupid and just needed to try harder to read-- just keep trying harder. No, they just needed some decoding, and then they could have been the smartest kid in the class. So it's coming along, but, yes, there there's a lot going on in schools. We have over half a million kids that are dyslexic on Bookshare in the US today.
BETSY BEAUMON: So be hopeful. Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Hi. I'm Heather Staines from the MIT Knowledge Futures Group.
BETSY BEAUMON: Hi.
AUDIENCE: You didn't address this specifically, but I'm sure it's a subset under the visual impairments. But my previous company, one of our developers was colorblind and he really opened our eyes to navigation structures and things that we do where links change color and tabs change color. And he'd say, yeah, this just doesn't work for me. We'd say, let's make it green. And he'd be like, yeah, doesn't work for me. So I know there's some publishers working on things, specific colors or different contrasts in images.
AUDIENCE: And I wondered how often you're hearing about that being a challenge.
BETSY BEAUMON: Oh, yeah. It comes up all the time because, again, it's a much higher percentage of the population than you have people who are completely blind or even severely visually impaired. My brother-in-law is colorblind. I bet people in this room are colorblind. So, yes, in this world it comes up a lot. And there are, again, guidelines. Probably some of you would have better pointers to great guidelines about what you can and can't use or should and shouldn't use to make sure that you're serving people who are colorblind.
BETSY BEAUMON: But there's a couple of different kinds. There's the red/green. So, yes, it's a thing and it's something to really-- this brings up-- one of the main things is multi-modal. So if you just don't think of one mode for any information that's important to convey. So if you're using color-- I like color. I'm good with color.
BETSY BEAUMON: That's great. Use text. Use something else. Use it so that there are two ways at least to get at the same information. It's like describing an image. I'm super visual, as well. Well, a lot of people aren't. So how do you have a text version and a picture version?
BETSY BEAUMON: Make sure that the pictures have colors. If you can stay in the right range, you don't need to worry that you're going to then have somebody colorblind left out. But I would say the main thing to always keep in mind is multi-modality. If you think about that with all of your content, that gets you a long way.
AUDIENCE: Hi. My name is Allison Belan, and I'm with Duke University Press, proud participate in Bookshare.
BETSY BEAUMON: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: And what I'm thinking about is when our authors and editors and researchers are being trained in graduate school, they're trained in methods, they're trained in writing, making an argument. They're not trained currently, I don't think, in how to describe an image, how to describe a table such that it could be screen readable. And so I know that one of our big anxieties about trying to do this successfully is turning to our authors and asking them to do this work.
AUDIENCE: And I'm just wondering if there's any action happening at that level of intervention of training scholars in this new mode of creating knowledge.
BETSY BEAUMON: That's an amazingly good question. Not to my knowledge. And yet, we all talk about it a lot. Just like I mentioned, there's something called Teach Access, that tech companies are basically saying to colleges and universities, don't send us UX people, designers, engineers that don't know about accessibility. I think there's an opportunity to say, don't send us authors, don't send us people that are going to come work for us who don't know about that.
BETSY BEAUMON: And how can they know about that? Some of the resources I mentioned at the DIAGRAM Center include things like-- we have a whole image description training tool called Poet, and it gives you lots and lots of tips on how to describe different kinds of images. So there are tools available to do it. But then I think there has to be an industry academia flow that says it's important.
BETSY BEAUMON: Because employers and universities, et cetera, publishers are the customers of the schools that are training whoever we're talking about here, whether it's an author or on up. So, yeah, I think it's having a push to say it's important, and then just knowing how to find the tools to put it together. So I think that's a great question. And I've not heard about anything like that happening, and it would be a really good place to take this.
CASON LYNLEY: We have time for one more question.
BETSY BEAUMON: Oh, no. Man, you're going to ask a hard one, aren't you?
AUDIENCE: I'm going to help on Allison's question.
BETSY BEAUMON: Oh, please. Jump in, Bill.
AUDIENCE: Yeah. A resource that this community might want to know about is the University of Michigan Press. University of Michigan libraries has actually developed training guidelines for image description for their authors and editors based on the Poet training materials.
BETSY BEAUMON: Perfect.
AUDIENCE: But they've geared it to what that University Press needs. And it's very successful. And I think the thing that's key about it is that it's not either or. It's like, who does this? Does the author do it or does the editor do it? They both are trained to do it. So they get what they can get from the authors because the author knows why that image is in her book.
AUDIENCE: So she's not going to say it's a picture of a cow. She's going to say, here's what I'm trying to communicate by putting this picture in. But if they don't actually do the description in a useful way for accessibility, the editors know how to fix the copy. It's just copy editing.
BETSY BEAUMON: Yeah. It's a great point. We've had these discussions across all sort of levels of publishing about who is the best person or where's the best place or time to do things like image descriptions. And for sure, the further upstream you can go, the better because the author knows why they're defining that image to be there. I think about somewhere along the line, somebody is probably getting a designer to design the thing.
BETSY BEAUMON: And the very thing that they give the designer might be the best basis for the description. So the further upstream, the better. And thank you. Yes, University of Michigan. Good point. And it's great for us because a lot of what we're doing-- all of our stuff in DIAGRAM is open source.
BETSY BEAUMON: All the content is open content. We want it to be used. So I love that people like University of Michigan are using it because that's what it's there for. What else? What else can Bill Kasdorf answer for you?
CASON LYNLEY: I think that's all the time we have for questions, unfortunately. But thank you so much.
BETSY BEAUMON: Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
MELANIE DOLECHECK: We have a refreshment break now in the Pacific Ballroom downstairs in the Exhibit Hall, and then we'll start with our concurrent sessions. [MUSIC - THE ZOMBIES, "TIME OF THE SEASON"] It's the time of the season when love runs high. And this time, give it to me easy.
Segment:1 CASON LYNLEY: Introduction of Keynote Speaker.
CASON LYNLEY: Good morning. This morning's keynote, again, builds on the overall theme of the SSP annual meeting. As Ben said yesterday in his introduction to Dr. Yeshak, this year's annual meeting program committee focused on inviting keynote speakers who are either from a different part of the world, like Ethiopia, or who could offer a perspective that isn't always at the forefront as that of diverse learners, people who take in information differently from the majority.
CASON LYNLEY: It's my great pleasure to introduce Betsy Beaumon. Betsy is the CEO of Benetech, a nonprofit that transforms how people with disabilities read and learn, empowering organizations and communities with software for the social good and supporting one of the world's most vulnerable populations. For over 15 years, she has been active in issues of social change and technology.
CASON LYNLEY: She is a social entrepreneur and engineer whose mission is to leverage technology to build a more inclusive future. Betsy defined the concept of born accessible, where all digital content can be made accessible to everyone when created, and born inclusive, where all new tech, including AI, starts with inclusion. In addition to speaking at conferences around the world, Betsy has testified before the US Senate Committee on health, education, pensions, and labor, championing inclusion and access to information for everyone.
CASON LYNLEY: According to Betsy regarding her role, technology is just a tool. It can be used for good or evil. I try to make sure we know which is which. Please join me in welcoming Betsy Beaumon. [APPLAUSE, MUSIC PLAYING]
Segment:2 BETSY BEAUMONT: Why Inclusion Matters to Technology and Technology Matters to Inclusion.
BETSY BEAUMON: Thank you. Good morning. We noticed that we were rocking out here a little bit when we first got going, which is great. So I want to start out with a couple of stories. I want to introduce you to a couple of people. This is Junia and Catherine. Junia is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, specializing in urban sociology and race and ethnicity.
BETSY BEAUMON: Catherine received her PhD in clinical psychology from Purdue and is now retired as a professor of clinical psychology from the University of Wisconsin. These are successful people who sound a lot like your readers, writers, and colleagues, and they are. But they actually had to make it against the odds to get where they are. Because, in fact, Junia was diagnosed with dyslexia in elementary school and used assistive technology, including our Bookshare service, which you'll hear more about, to get through school all the way through her PhD.
BETSY BEAUMON: And she basically said she never would be where she is without that and other assistive technologies. Catherine, as you may now notice as I change the photo, is somebody who's been blind since birth. That is her with her guide dog walking along the sidewalk. And she actually used Bookshare for her clinical research. And now she's retired and has all the books that she wants to read for pleasure. I bet she probably keeps up with some of you guys, too, as a guess.
BETSY BEAUMON: But this is a story of people who were lucky, actually. They're lucky they were born in the United States. They're lucky that they've had access to all these critical technologies and supportive family, friends, colleagues, professors all the way through. And yet, even for them, they struggled. They struggled for recognition. People like Junia, who certainly does not-- you don't look at her and say, oh, yes, I know she has a disability.
BETSY BEAUMON: Which is great for her in many ways, but she also had to fight being recognized as somebody that needs any sort of assistance to do her work and to do her studies. People in their positions are often kept out of fields completely, and that's still true today even in places like the US or Western Europe. And it's not because people don't want them to succeed. It's mostly because of just lack of awareness.
BETSY BEAUMON: So we're going to talk about a lot of things today that really get to that awareness question. And I know some of you are super-duper aware and really working in this space, and others are saying, what are you even talking about? So I'm going to try to do a little bit for all of you. So who are we talking about globally? As Cason mentioned, we want to think about the whole world. And the whole world looks like one in seven people have a disability.
BETSY BEAUMON: That's a billion people. So this is not some tiny group that we-- well, we'll forget about them. That's a lot of people around the world. And if you want to talk about what's fair and what's happening, let's talk about employment rates. So 33% of working age people with disabilities are employed compared to 77% of the overall population. Less than half.
BETSY BEAUMON: Let's talk about college graduates. If you take people without disabilities, it's about 90% are employed. People with disabilities that are college graduates-- 50%. That's pretty scary. And to just go a little further, people with disabilities are underrepresented in the top 16 of the 20 fastest growing fields and they're overrepresented in the top 17 of the top 20 fastest declining occupations.
BETSY BEAUMON: And just to give you an idea, again, of numbers, in the US, we're talking about 15 million people of working age. So that's not the people that are in their 90s who have lost their vision. This is people 16 to 64. Again, I don't define working age. [LAUGHS] Let's talk about the global south.
BETSY BEAUMON: So we heard yesterday about Africa and some of the challenges around sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in publishing and in getting your work out there. Well, if you have a disability in the global south, you have an even bigger issue than the numbers that I just talked about, which were US numbers. The employment rates of people with disabilities in the generally global south is 10% to 20%.
BETSY BEAUMON: That's how many people are working, and there's lots of reasons for that. There's additional cultural stigma, there are less access typically to the kind of technologies that people like Junia and Catherine have had access to. So these are real issues, and the thing is, they're pretty solvable. That's the part that's both the consternation and the joy, is we can solve a lot of this.
BETSY BEAUMON: And the good news is that some of the global tech giants are starting to do that. And that's great because they have reach all over the world. And they're also looking at the global south and saying, these are my future employees. So they know where the growth is coming, as far as young people coming up. And even groups like SAP and Google have done work where they are introducing coding skills to millions of young people in Africa.
BETSY BEAUMON: And, in fact, they're including people who are deaf and hard of hearing in those coding camps in high numbers, which is great. So why is inclusion important? It's important for education, employment, self-esteem, and engagement. Students in low income countries heavily in poverty-- you could cut poverty by 12% if you solve that. 285 million people are visually impaired.
BETSY BEAUMON: 95% of all content is still locked in printed form. And less than half of all blind children receive an education. So countries really have to start thinking inclusive to transform. And digital on its own does not equal inclusive, and we're going to talk about that. Cason mentioned what one of those aspects are that I have jumped into pretty heavily, that let's make digital really be inclusive.
BETSY BEAUMON: And again, why is that important? Because everyone deserves possibilities. Everyone deserves a chance to be what you are, what Junia is, et cetera. So how do you do that? So tech can create possibilities, as I said. And I think there's a lot of opportunity for doing more of that. There are also opportunities to create road blocks, which is something that doesn't always get said in these sorts of venues.
BETSY BEAUMON: So we have to be careful to really do the good, not the evil side of that. And what's really important is that you can help create possibilities. You have the power knowing what a lot of you do to really help solve this problem, and to solve it today, not in 20 years. So I want to tell you another story about a young man named Kevin-- Kevin [INAUDIBLE].
BETSY BEAUMON: When Kevin was 6, he suffered a traumatic brain injury. And his parents really thought, oh, no, what now? Kevin suffered lots of issues from that. He had to relearn to read, he had to relearn to walk. He suffered a permanent optic impairment that leaves him heavily visually impaired. So what is a parent to do in that situation? And how do you think about the possibilities for Kevin? This is why this is so urgent.
BETSY BEAUMON: This kind of stuff happens and suddenly the parents are facing their six-year-old, who is maybe out of possibilities, at least that's what they thought. And we'll come back to Kevin. But I want to switch out to get a little bit to why I'm standing here, which is-- I'll go to when I was six years old. My life was a lot different than that.
BETSY BEAUMON: I was running around the mountains in Southern California. A little girl with tiny little pigtails playing, happy. My dad owned a family business and it was an amusement arcade, which meant that I got to go play games and ride on a little horse. Life was really good. My dad was also a very big influence on me. Cason mentioned that I'm an entrepreneur.
BETSY BEAUMON: He was a serial entrepreneur. And I just always saw, oh, whoa, this is cool. This creates lots of possibilities. It's how our family was living, but it also clearly was a passion for him. The other passion he had was education. And he told all of us-- I was the youngest of five-- that education was the pathway.
BETSY BEAUMON: And it was very clear, you will go to college. Which he didn't-- he did not graduate from high school, yet he was on our local school board. So he really lived those values. And one winter night when I was six, I woke up and the house was just crazy. There was a lot of noise, people were shouting. And I woke up to see my dad slumped in the corner on our winter boots that were on the heater and later found out that he had died of a heart attack in our kitchen.
BETSY BEAUMON: What that meant for me I didn't really know. I was six. But it could have meant a real problem, the end of possibilities. My mom wasn't working. We were all putting everything into the family business that my dad ran. But one thing that kept coming back through is education, education, education.
BETSY BEAUMON: And my mom, who was not so obviously into education as my dad, jumped in and she ended up running for his school board seat and winning and being on our local school board, as well, and saying, you're going to college. We eventually moved to San Diego. So I am home, so yay, San Diego. Because she looked at all of the colleges here, all of the opportunities, and all the possibilities that would create for especially my sister and I who were the little ones.
BETSY BEAUMON: That was awesome because I jumped in, loved it. I was particularly into math. So I remember in seventh grade I was doing algebra. And we had an algebra teacher stand up and say, you are all the future engineers. Now, I didn't know what that meant. Honestly, I thought engineers drove trains at that point. So I thought it was really cool that I was told I am the future something that I had to go ask about and figure out.
BETSY BEAUMON: And as time went on, that became a focus, then. Now all this idea of education had a focus to it. So obviously I did do that and became an engineer. But I also have always had this idea of entrepreneurship and how do you make the world a better place. And that is why I became an engineer, is to make the world a better place. It took me a while to get here, but that's really led me to now.
BETSY BEAUMON: So with that, I want to give you a little bit more about what we do and why we at Benetech are here. Overall, we empower communities with software for social good. We essentially focus on inclusion, equity, and justice. We work in a number of areas. So we do education and employment, and that's heavily focused on people with disabilities. And we connect people to information that they wouldn't get a connection to.
BETSY BEAUMON: So Bookshare is one of those services that we'll talk about a bit more. But it is access to information for people with disabilities. Our DIAGRAM Center says, well, OK, let's go beyond the words. Let's get into pictures, math, chemistry, and other fun areas that are actually harder to make accessible. And we have other areas as well. We work in human rights and poverty alleviation, Service Net.
BETSY BEAUMON: And the poverty side is all about strengthening the social safety net and how can we make services connect better to each other. There was just an article about our Bay Area pilot in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday because it really is a new way to make a difference, and, in fact, is very similar to my first startup. The other area that we look at is data for inclusion. How do we get people who aren't included more of a voice?
BETSY BEAUMON: Let's talk about the data that should represent them, and today, often doesn't. So people with disabilities and other marginalized people are often left out of data sets. And that becomes an issue, as we'll talk about, when you start talking about AI. We do some other work in human rights, including we are using AI to help on the justice side of things to look at the evidence from the war in Syria.
BETSY BEAUMON: Because this is one of the first times that there is overwhelming numbers of videos and photos and such because everybody walks around with a cell phone. Well, there are 8 million videos in the hands of about 25 different Syrian groups, and we're using AI to help figure out which ones are duplicates, which ones have important information in them so the UN can prosecute war crimes. But this is still all around those areas of inclusion, equity, and justice.
BETSY BEAUMON: So I want to talk about Bookshare particularly. And some of you know Bookshare. Can I have a little shout out for anybody who knows Bookshare and/or may be contributing to it? Yeah. I see some hands. All right. If we're inclusive, also give a little whoop or something so that somebody--
AUDIENCE: Whoop!
BETSY BEAUMON: All right. So what is Bookshare? Bookshare, other than being whoop-able, is the world's largest online library of e-books for people with reading barriers due to a disability. This is really anything that keeps you from seeing the words, essentially from your brain processing or decoding the words, or if you can't hold and manipulate a book.
BETSY BEAUMON: This is in copyright law. And there's actually an exception, it's Section 121 and the new 121(a), for lawyers in the room, that are all about why people like us as a nonprofit can make books accessible to people who probably aren't going to buy them if they can't use regular books. Bookshare's at scale. So as a social entrepreneur, it's really important to think about how do we scale up and have impact.
BETSY BEAUMON: So to date, Bookshare's had about 14 million downloads. We have over 700,000 e-books in the collection. We actually add about 5,000 of those every month, many of them from people like you who literally give us a digital feed. We convert them and make them available to over 665,000 members in over 80 countries. And among this group are part of our 870 publisher partners that make this happen.
BETSY BEAUMON: And these books are now available in 47 languages. So it's important to us to really solve that larger problem that I talked about. Not just the US-- a great majority of these are US students because we are the primary provider of e-books that are accessible to US students that qualify-- but to make this happen all around the world.
BETSY BEAUMON: And I want to say, again, a thank you. I'm just showing one little example here from Stanford University Press. The university presses have been amazing, and there is really not time to go into the whole list of all of you who share your books with Bookshare. But I just want to be here to say, thank you so much for that, because I hear all the time that people read them.
BETSY BEAUMON: The reason I'm highlighting this particular one is just I happened to be at an event at Stanford. Our office is in Palo Alto. And I was telling a lady what I do and she was telling me what she does. It was a human rights event, but she said, I've got this great book about to come out. And I said, oh, yeah, it would be great to have it in Bookshare.
BETSY BEAUMON: Who's your publisher? That's one of my questions I always ask-- who's the publisher? And she said Stanford University Press. And I said, no problem, it will be there-- it will be there on the day it's published. And that's true whether it's from Duke University Press or a number of others. And she was thrilled, and she actually went and told a bunch of people about that.
BETSY BEAUMON: Because in her mind, like this is, again, about rights and about justice and about equity. I want it back up for a second just to say what is Bookshare and how does it work because a lot of people who aren't familiar with it might ask that. Essentially, they're e-books, so they're in digital text. We take them in and put them out in EPUB 3 format. We can take in EPUB 2 or a bunch of other formats-- Word.
BETSY BEAUMON: And what we're doing is basically making sure that they can be read on specialized devices, like a Braille device. Many people say, how do you possibly read an e-book with Braille? There are actually electronic devices that pop up pins so that somebody can read our books in Braille. And one Braille book-- and I'm talking about a basic novel-- not some of the stuff you do, but a basic novel, like Harry Potter would stand about three feet high from the floor if you stack a printed Braille book.
BETSY BEAUMON: So I know people that are blind who are thrilled about the fact that they can have 1,000 Bookshare books in Braille in their Braille devices, just like you could have 1,000 other books in your computer. People also use laptops, tablets, phones, MP3 players, all kinds of stuff to access our books. For somebody who's dyslexic, it's really helpful if the words highlight as they are spoken, like reverse karaoke in a way.
BETSY BEAUMON: That's really helpful for processing. There's different color combinations. There's all of those things for somebody who's non-visual. A lot of blind people actually don't read Braille. It's only about 30% of people who are blind. So they use the audio version of those. And again, those could be in MP3 or, typically, they're just using them on their phone. So that's a little bit about how it happens when you come out and you then take, say, this Chinese and The Iron Road book and use it through Bookshare.
BETSY BEAUMON: I have a friend of mine whose mom I just got onto Bookshare because she is losing her vision. She typically reads three newspapers a day and a book a day. She has a couple of master's degrees. She's so excited. Oh, my goodness. It was like a kid in a candy store when I unleashed her on Bookshare after she got her doctor's signed authorization.
BETSY BEAUMON: So it means a lot to the people who have it, whether it's for school, for work, or for pleasure. So I mentioned DIAGRAM earlier. It's great to make text accessible, but there's so much else. There's lots of science and math diagrams, there's maps, there's charts of all kinds. So we also run a federally funded-- funded by the Department of Education-- DIAGRAM Center.
BETSY BEAUMON: And what's really special about the DIAGRAM Center is it's a community-- it's a large community of people who are really-- I always say-- big brains. And it's across academia, across literal people with disabilities, parents of kids with disabilities, tech people. And we all come together and work on the harder problems of how do you make something like the chloroplast stoma diagram fully accessible.
BETSY BEAUMON: Well, it turns out, you can. And one of the ways that we've done a lot of our work is to jump in early on technical standards, things like through the W3C, the web standards now, formally through the IDPF, so that formats like EPUB 3 actually have all of this stuff in it for how you make a picture accessible. But, of course, that's not the whole trick. You have to know the topic.
BETSY BEAUMON: You have to inform not just what the picture shows you, but what is it trying to convey to you. So I want to jump into three things. I want to cover the culture of inclusion, which we talked about a little, the possibilities and cautions of technology to do all this stuff, and then the role of everybody in this room, which for me, as a mission-driven person, is the most important part.
BETSY BEAUMON: So let's talk about the culture of inclusion a little bit more. So I started off several years ago at a publishing conference talking about bars, bedrooms, and baby carriages. And what do those have in common? Well, some people may say, well, if you have bars and bedrooms, you end up with baby carriages. But-- [LAUGHTER] That's not the intention, though, interesting.
BETSY BEAUMON: The actual point of this is that, in fact, all of those areas people use assistive technology that was invented and designed and put into action for people with disabilities. But you use it, for example, in the bar for closed captioning so that you know what's going on in the sports game. People use it in their bedrooms a lot so that they can watch a movie without keeping their partner awake.
BETSY BEAUMON: And baby carriages use curb cuts every single day, as do scooter riders, roller blades, bicyclists, you name it. And so this is really where these technologies came to be. So here, I'm showing Felix the Cat with closed captioning. And of course, for people who are blind, closed captions don't help, but audio descriptions of movies help. And if you pay attention, you'll now see a whole bunch of areas, including airplanes, which was part of my Senate testimony, that actually have closed captions and audio descriptions available for movies.
BETSY BEAUMON: And of course, as I mentioned, curb cuts are for people with wheelchairs originally and still used very much by those today. The thing is that it's so common to have accessible functions and functionality be useful that there's a whole theme called the curb cut effect. Because curb cuts actually have become so ubiquitous and so useful, that there's this concept now. There's really inclusion in laws everywhere.
BETSY BEAUMON: Many people in the US are familiar with the ADA, The Americans with Disabilities Act. And that is becoming more important again. Why? Because 10,000 people a day are turning 65, and 10,000 people a day in 10 years will be turning 75, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The leading edge of the Baby Boom already are in their 70s. So that's important.
BETSY BEAUMON: All of a sudden, all the building codes and houses are being retrofit. Why? Because they need to be more accessible. Wouldn't it have been easier if they were built that way in the first place? And that comes up a lot as we then talk about digital things, as well.
BETSY BEAUMON: Basically, the laws don't change everything. The ADA didn't come in and all of a sudden, every building was magically accessible to somebody in a wheelchair. We have to have those, but what we need to do is change the culture. We need to change how we look at our businesses and how we look at our products. And that's where I want to talk a little bit about the fundamental belief I have that technology, overall, that all things digital can actually be accessible and that we need to really jump on the power of accessibility.
BETSY BEAUMON: So let's talk about digital inclusion. It's critical for the modern world. Why? Because we live on the internet, on social media. Our learning materials, the data that's behind all of the work that we do, and think about the number of, just, tools that you use every day, these have to be inclusive for this curb cut effect to be true for digital materials.
BETSY BEAUMON: So all of these have to happen. There are some laws locally in the US and globally that help that. A lot of people that think about websites refer to Section 508 of the rehab code. And that is actually for government websites, really, but there's a lot of great guidelines in there about how do you make a website accessible. And that turns out to have a whole lot of commonality with how you make an e-book accessible.
BETSY BEAUMON: You have to have good structure that somebody listening to it on a screen reader can follow. You have to have descriptions of your pictures. You have to think about placement so that things don't jump around in a weird order. And you know what. Usually, just like the curb cut effect, it makes it a better publication or digital artifact.
BETSY BEAUMON: Where are we? So I'm going to do a few sections of where are we today. So where are we on consumer software? Unfortunately, most products just fail before the first line of code is ever written. Why? Because most people writing it don't think of this one billion people with disabilities as their users.
BETSY BEAUMON: They just don't think about them. It's not that they don't like them, they just don't know them or think about them. The good news is, as I mentioned earlier, some of the large tech companies who make platforms that a lot of other stuff is on really are thinking about it. So Apple, Microsoft, Google, and others are really doing a lot in the area of accessibility. And that's fantastic because, again, that's what a lot of software is built on.
BETSY BEAUMON: So if you look at your products from those companies, whether it's everything from PowerPoint to your iPhone to Word to your Android phone, you can turn on accessibility. Now, I would love to see more of these things a bit more obvious, a bit easier to jump back and forth. Because, frankly, I would like my phone to very seamlessly read me my emails while I'm driving. I don't have a print disability, but it'd be really useful. And you kind of can, but then you have to turn on all the accessibility.
BETSY BEAUMON: So I think they're getting there. But the fact that you can turn that stuff on today is a huge step forward. Why? Everybody's got their reasons. The CEO of Microsoft happens to have a child with a disability. All of a sudden, Microsoft is one of the world leaders at every level. They have an amazing chief accessibility officer.
BETSY BEAUMON: So they have somebody in the C-suite who's in charge of accessibility. No Microsoft product goes out the door anymore without her group having something to say about it and having testing. They also have an active hiring plan around that. So it just goes to show awareness and understanding can really lead to a lot of progress. What about in the world that we live in more and educational and business tools?
BETSY BEAUMON: Some business tools-- and we do this at Benetech-- sorry. We do a lot where we will say, great, we think we want to use ADP for our very many back office functions. Well, in fact, there were some things about ADP that were not accessible when we first looked at it. We pushed back. And not that we're big-- we're 85 people, but we actually got them to listen.
BETSY BEAUMON: Because they said, oh, that's something we really want to make better. So now our VP of human resources is on an accessibility and disability advisory board for that company, and they look at all aspects of their products. It's true of things like Zoom. Some of you know George Kershaw. George works part time for us and with us on everything.
BETSY BEAUMON: He explicitly said, I'm so thrilled to have such an accessible platform for doing all sorts of video and audio conferencing. So it does matter in those kind of tools. And again, there's a whole long list of groups that are doing great and a whole longer list of groups that aren't. So just think about it next time you use any sort of tool during your work. If I had to turn off my screen, would this work?
BETSY BEAUMON: How? Do I know how? Is it possible? When you think about it that way, it makes a big difference. And what if you're coding? What about the people who make software? This is a huge problem. Back in the '70s when a lot of this stuff was still-- these new languages is really text-based.
BETSY BEAUMON: So, in fact, a screen reader worked, and a lot of people who were blind or visually impaired were becoming software engineers. Awesome. That is a really highly paid and one of those advancing career paths. But guess what. In order to get a lot of other people, including people who are dyslexic, for example, more active in that, they became more visual.
BETSY BEAUMON: So now you have things like Scratch, where you can move big blocks around to create code and there's just a lot more visual clicking. So that's an area where it's gone backwards. And this is a challenge we always have. Like, yes, let's make it better for everybody. Don't give that up. But let's also make sure that we do things like the hybrid languages and structures that literally put both.
BETSY BEAUMON: So you have a text-based version and a visual version, and you can use whichever piece works for you. And it might work better for you one day than the other. Jupiter Lab, for example, we just did a code sprint a couple of weeks ago, where we get a bunch of volunteers together and Microsoft sponsored it and we had a whole bunch of people working on how to make this whole coding suite more accessible for the people who actually want to be coders.
BETSY BEAUMON: So this stuff is really important. And then we come to ed tech, which is a big area, obviously, and we're right in the middle of it. But yet, that's an area that, unfortunately, the last five years in its huge growth, has suffered from the we'll-worry-about-them-later syndrome in many cases. It's the, oh, yeah, we're a startup, we get it, we've heard about this stuff, but we don't really know much about accessibility, but we'll get to that-- we'll get to that when we get our next round of funding, we'll get to that when we get our next 2,500 schools onboard.
BETSY BEAUMON: And I keep saying, well, wait, you're selling to schools and you don't think you need accessibility now? Some of this is also education, and we do a lot of this. Why are those schools buying that? Now there are laws that say, in fact, if they buy that, they have to buy an equivalent other thing if it doesn't work for students. So I think there's this often happens, this two steps forward, one step back.
BETSY BEAUMON: So while you've now got Microsoft out there spanning the globe talking about accessibility, you have five new startups this week who don't know anything about it. So what's also great is a whole bunch of tech companies are working on how do you get more people with disabilities, but also who know about accessibility to learn about it in college. Because if you don't come in knowing about it, you're probably not going to code that way.
BETSY BEAUMON: And why is it important? Good reminder. We have people like Junia and Catherine who really, really do need this stuff. And I even ask sometimes, would they make it today? There are better tools for them in some ways and worse tools for them in others. So like all sorts of other things, this is something we can't just say, OK, check the box, it's done.
BETSY BEAUMON: We have to keep thinking as technology moves forward. So where are we on other data-driven solutions? AI's come up a couple of times, and there is so much promise. Things like home automation. I do a fair bit of speaking as well about what about people with severe intellectual disabilities who really need home care or some kind of assistance. Wow. If you have a fully automated home and sensors and fall sensors and things, you can really do a lot.
BETSY BEAUMON: And there is a absolute shortage of caregivers, and it's getting worse. And that is true for seniors and for people with severe disabilities. So there could be a whole safety net of technology that helps. It doesn't replace humans, but it could help. Maybe one human can now help a few people and not just one person they have to watch every minute. Awesome.
BETSY BEAUMON: Great. What is happening with their privacy? Oh, that. So it's collecting all this data about this vulnerable, say, 88-year-old senior. Hm, that could be bad. So this, again, is like, let's do it because it could be so good, but let's think about it and think carefully about how the data is used, who gets access to it, how we protect it, where it goes.
BETSY BEAUMON: Let's not sell it, please. So there's a whole bunch of this really good, potentially bad. We at Bookshare are working with companies in this area. We want to make sure that somebody on their Alexa or their Google Home can actually read Bookshare books. That's great. It's an assistive technology combined with a consumer technology that's really inexpensive, which is one of the advantages of that.
BETSY BEAUMON: A lot of assistive technologies can be expensive. So that's great. But we just have to keep thinking about it. AI has so many possibilities, as well. People are working on auto transcriptions for people who are deaf. AI can really, as it learns-- you do machine learning-- it can get better. There are assistance for people who are blind.
BETSY BEAUMON: There's something called Be My Eyes, where somebody who's blind has Google Glasses on and can go in and say, what am I looking at on the store shelf? And for right now, a human helps them. But they're collecting all that data. So pretty soon, a machine could help them at a tenth of the cost or less. So really cool. Again, what do you do with the data?
BETSY BEAUMON: But it's important. We're using AI not just for Syrian videos, but in math. So a lot of Bookshare books don't have math equations in them. It's how they come in some cases. But we're saying, well, if we scan a book, how do you effectively digitize math? How does it recognize that it's a math equation versus another kind of picture?
BETSY BEAUMON: And then, how do you effectively make sure that it's fully digitized so that it can be read out in MathML, math markup language, which is the typical way to make it accessible? So we're doing an AI-based project to do that, and it's showing a whole lot of promise. There are dangers in this, again. But there's more promise around smart cities. We're very worried right now about AI-- how it's used in hiring.
BETSY BEAUMON: Because if you use a data set that doesn't include everybody in it, people say, machines aren't biased. Data are biased, unfortunately. So it's kind of a garbage in, garbage out problem. As I explained to some politicians-- you have to explain at a very basic level-- these things eat data, you are what you eat. So if you eat data that is limited, you are going to have a very limited algorithm popping out of it.
BETSY BEAUMON: And people are worried about self-driving cars actually taking into account how long it takes somebody to get across the street with a walker. Now, the good news is, those have a lot of vision and cameras. I don't think they're going to mow them down. But there's some real concerns about that for very real reasons. So let's get into where we are on digital content.
BETSY BEAUMON: I mentioned a bit about Bookshare and how we're really great at text, and we're working on some of the other harder stuff. This is one of the biggest problems that you would see. So you have a digital content and you're rolling along. You're reading the text with your screen reader, and then all of a sudden, it just says image. That's useful, right? It's an image of what?
BETSY BEAUMON: We don't know. It could be an image like this, it could be a chart that gives you all kinds of data. And, in fact, funny-- data generated this chart. So maybe the data could be present to tell you what that image is. That'd be cool. It could be an image that looks more like this that's math that, again, you have to be able to say, how does it speak this effectively?
BETSY BEAUMON: And there are ways to do that. But again, the math can generate what the machine says. So this is one-- if I had to say one thing that would be think about this, it's thinking about your images of all kinds, whether it's graphics, whether it's math. And if all it says in a read-through is image, not so helpful. Now sometimes, it can also be in the text, and that's really helpful if it's all covered in the text.
BETSY BEAUMON: Then it's also still helpful if the reader knows that. It's great to maybe have a caption, which a screen reader can read. But don't repeat the caption. So if I'm studying for my finals and I'm reading through things five times, that's not helpful either because I still have to do what everybody else has to do and get through all the material.
BETSY BEAUMON: This also applies to chemistry. Chemistry is a whole other set of notation. And you can think about other notations that are not just text. There's work going on in all of these areas. Our DIAGRAM Center has people that are experts-- typically world experts in these areas of accessibility working on those. And I invite you, and I will invite you at the end as well, to look at DIAGRAMCenter.org-- spelled like an American e-r, not r-e.
BETSY BEAUMON: And that is-- it's really important. And DIAGRAM has a number of resources. And one of the most important parts of our community are publishers. And I say publishers in the broad sense, all of the digital organizations that work on content. We have quick start guide, there are image guidelines and samples, there's training. There's something called the DIAGRAM report which comes out every year in the August time frame that looks at new technologies and trends that affect educational work and says, where's that going, what can you do with it, what's the leading edge of how we can make sure that that's as inclusive as that can be.
BETSY BEAUMON: And so I highly recommend the publisher's section here. And again, this is a community. We also link out to things that are produced elsewhere, like the book industry study group has an amazing guide on accessibility that was just updated again this year. And I can't recommend that more for the how-to side of this. So if all these tools exist, why isn't this problem solved? Well, we're back to, some of the tools are still trying to catch up, make it so that it can be done cost effectively.
BETSY BEAUMON: But mostly, it's about lack of understanding, lack of knowledge. So we all need to spread the word and think about that culture of inclusion that we talked about. And essentially, we need you. If you think about, you are all thought leaders. You are not just doing your job in your little place. You're leaders. You are leaders in information, and I want to see such leaders standing up and saying, we're going to be inclusive.
BETSY BEAUMON: If I could make no other point in this whole talk, that would be it. So that gets us into, what can you do? How do you do this? So Cason mentioned that some years ago I came up with this term born accessible. Because I was at a publishing conference-- I think it was Tools of Change in New York.
BETSY BEAUMON: And I was sitting there hearing everybody talking about, oh-- now this is eight years ago-- things are going to be born digital. Like, really born digital. Not in a digital file, but born to be consumed digitally. And I'm like, so if it's born digital, it can be born accessible. Done. I knew that wasn't that easy, unfortunately.
BETSY BEAUMON: But at the same time, it was an aha moment. It basically said, well, that's the answer. I was running Bookshare at the time and said, Bookshare shouldn't exist, or Bookshare should be a library. It's a library. Great. I love libraries. Hello, to all the librarians. But a library shouldn't be, or isn't in the rest of the world, at least, the main place where people go to get their books.
BETSY BEAUMON: So let's make sure-- and also, coming from a for-profit background into the nonprofit world. You know what, if you want to sell your stuff, sell your stuff, but sell it to everybody in a way that will work for everybody. So that's where born accessible really came out. And then it was how to do it. So there's a whole chain.
BETSY BEAUMON: And you could all probably stand up and we could make a chain of all the things it takes to make something come to fruition, a piece of content. And that means you have to have standards to work with. You have to have things from the authors, the publishers, the conversion vendors, the distributors, the sellers. And then, what the heck do people read this on? So that's a lot.
BETSY BEAUMON: It's a lot that needs to come together. But that's why we have a lot of people working on it in the whole community, because it's coming. And EPUB 3 being brought into the world was truly one of those moments where I said, OK, now we've taken a gargantuan step. Why? Because it has all of accessibility features and functions, so to speak, in that standard.
BETSY BEAUMON: Again, it doesn't happen magically. People have to apply them, but there are ways to apply them. And that was really a great day. So one of the things you see here is a little seal that says Global Certified Accessible, Benetech. So what we've done is work with partners around the world and say, we can actually help you certify your content to say, as a third party, that it's accessible.
BETSY BEAUMON: And there's a whole process to that. There is a cost because we can't do it for free, unfortunately. But we will actually go through that and say, this is certified accessible. Our partners in the UK, the Royal National Institute For Blind People does that as well, Dedicon in the Netherlands, Vision Australia in Australia. And we've just got to get this ball rolling. Now, the good news is that people are in process.
BETSY BEAUMON: I'm happy to say we just recently announced the first group that has passed. This is all very new, so MacMillan learning is actually-- they've passed. And it's literally a production line. We don't do it title by title. We look at a bunch of titles and then say, OK, you've got it flowing.
BETSY BEAUMON: That production line is certified accessible. And there are more in process. Typically big groups right now, like Wiley, Mcgraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster are all in process, and we have many more groups interested. We have some other vendors who are working with us who are certified, Amnet and-- got to get that right-- New Gen. But there are more of you and more folks in the rest of your community who are working on that.
BETSY BEAUMON: So it's really important. Why is it important to do this? Well, we all are on the same mission. We want those possibilities. We want education, we want learning, we want knowledge transfer. Don't leave a billion people out. Now let's be fair. Some of those billion people could read your books because they're in a wheelchair, but can perfectly use your digital content.
BETSY BEAUMON: But don't leave hundreds of millions of people out either. It's still a lot. There's also some legal reasons. There really are more laws being passed in the US in terms of institutions of higher learning that are funded, say, by state funds and the content must be accessible. I'm a much bigger fan of carrots than sticks. So I'd rather say, let's help and do the right thing, and do it right.
BETSY BEAUMON: So that is key. So let's get to what-- sorry, wrong way. What can you do? So get certified. And we're happy to share all of these links and things. But if you go to Benetech.org, under Our Work, Born Accessible, you will quickly get to certification and how that's done.
BETSY BEAUMON: There's a guy named Michael Johnson-- Michael J-- letter J-- at Benetech.org. And for really near term stuff, there's an actual webinar coming up on June 4, if you want to attend that. We're working with another group on that, and it really goes into certification. Now, I still believe very much that we need Bookshare. One, because most of the books being certified aren't happening out in a lot of the world.
BETSY BEAUMON: So we need books share for a long time to come. And I believe in libraries. So if you haven't, I'd love to talk with you about contributing your books to Bookshare, as well. We're also working on Imageshare, which is about how do we make sure that accessible and preferably open content images are available, so that if you want to create something that has a heart diagram in it, why don't you use the accessible one.
BETSY BEAUMON: Somebody has already done the work. That's great. And we'd love professors and teachers and parents to be able to use this stuff, as well. So Imageshare is brand new. It's still kind of in an alpha mode, and we're getting content for that. So anybody that has especially open content stuff, I'd love to talk.
BETSY BEAUMON: So why do this? Again, let's get back to why this is important now. So earlier I mentioned Kevin, the boy who had a traumatic brain injury at six and had a whole different experience in life. Well, this is Kevin. Kevin's now in high school. Kevin, I am about to call an employee because he's going to intern for Benetech this summer.
BETSY BEAUMON: He is jamming along through school, and he is coming soon to a place that is going to tell him he needs to look at your content. And my question is, are you going to be ready for him? Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
Segment:3 Q and A.
CASON LYNLEY: We have a few minutes for questions. If anybody has questions, please raise your hand and we'll bring the microphone to you.
BETSY BEAUMON: Actually, I don't know if I can-- nope. I lost my links.
AUDIENCE: Hi. I'm from Wiley and actually work in our research journals business. I'm just curious if you have any plans to extend this to scholarly journal articles and the research world.
BETSY BEAUMON: I didn't know if that was going to be the first or the second question, but I knew it was going to be one of them. So there's some format questions. So I mentioned EPUB a lot. Most of the work in the field has been focused on that type of format. So really, the only issue at this point is just how well those specific journal formats can be converted and apply in this area.
BETSY BEAUMON: I would love to have every journal from every one of you in the room in Bookshare today. And I would be out there asking for it, other than the formatting questions. So I think Cason and I were talking about that as well. I think this is something that I'd love to have our team and some of you all dive in a little deeper. And there are other folks in the room, like Bill Kasdorf, who are doing a lot of work in this area in general and that I think he probably would have some good tips for you, specifically about journals.
BETSY BEAUMON: But it really is just a file format question mostly at this point. So would love to do it. Let's talk more. I'll get you to the right people on our team. And it would be very cool to actually get a little journal subgroup to talk about that. Because, yeah, we're missing so much. And all your books are great, but all your journals are really, really great.
BETSY BEAUMON: What else? OK. That's not allowed to be the only question. I said it'd be the first or second, but--
AUDIENCE: I've got a question, but I've actually got a comment first. From SSP's perspective, we may not have made this clear, but one of our sponsors is tagging all the videos and content to make it accessible, to make it readable, to make it discoverable. So all this content after the SSP's great. [APPLAUSE] That's something the board felt really strongly about. So the people at Cadmore Media, if you know any of those, they're the people doing that and they're doing a great job.
AUDIENCE: I have another couple of questions. One-- and this is really on a personal note for me. My son actually also has dyslexia, so I've looked a lot into this. There's a lot of creative skills that people who have dyslexia-- if you can engage them and get them things. But my question is, what's happening in the education system to help this?
AUDIENCE: It seems like schools are not really doing as much. Are you working to help that grassroots education side, too?
BETSY BEAUMON: Oh, absolutely. And I will say to your first point, there are some researchers, there are neurologists and special ed PhD people who have something called the dyslexic advantage. And there's websites, books, all kinds of stuff that actually talk about the neurology around dyslexia. And talk about leaving out some of the smartest kids in the class. Yeah.
BETSY BEAUMON: And you can start listing famous people that, because of their dyslexia, have become who they are. Not in spite of, but because of. And that's a really important point. And I think some tech companies are just starting to really think through neurodiversity on their teams. You have people around Silicon Valley on the autism spectrum, for sure. How do you balance that out?
BETSY BEAUMON: And to the school's point, in the US, it's well-recognized. Now, it varies by state, it varies by district, it sometimes varies by school. But part of what we do is raise our hands really high and say, it doesn't have to mean as a school that now you can't deal with this. We can give you resources to deal with this. So US is doing pretty well. And, again, it varies.
BETSY BEAUMON: One of the things in the law that just changed-- the law that we work under on the copyright side because of this global treaty, which is the Marrakesh Treaty that lets books cross borders, it also updated some things around how we talk about-- it used to be some schools would say, you have to go to a neurologist to diagnose dyslexia, whereas the neurologist would say, well, what does your reading specialist at school say?
BETSY BEAUMON: So that's improved drastically in just the last five years. So it's getting a lot better. It is not getting a lot better in a lot of other countries in the world. This is where we go around and we'll say, let's just talk about your students that are blind or have a motor physical disability. Because you say dyslexia, and they're just like, yeah, that fake thing.
BETSY BEAUMON: And we've had groups in some Asian countries say, well, dyslexia doesn't exist here. It does. So I think globally, it's not as pretty a picture. And we've worked in countries from India and Brazil and Kenya to try to help push it, though we're not typically the advocates of that. Though, we, again, are saying, look, you can include them, it doesn't have to be hard.
BETSY BEAUMON: And the great thing about born accessible is then it doesn't matter. I don't have to be identified. I just use the book and turn on the features that work for me. That's that other really important part of that. Because if I just have all these ways that the book can talk to me if it wants to talk to me, or if I want it to talk to me and the pictures are described, if I need that, I'll just start using it as long as I know they're there.
BETSY BEAUMON: So that's one of the other great reasons, is then you get out of this, well, I have to be diagnosed and I have to be different. No, you just have to use what works for you. So I think that's one of the biggest breakthroughs for undiagnosed people with dyslexia. There's also, by the way, a realization that there's a very high population of people with dyslexia and related learning disabilities in prison.
BETSY BEAUMON: Why? Because they failed in school because they were told they were stupid and just needed to try harder to read-- just keep trying harder. No, they just needed some decoding, and then they could have been the smartest kid in the class. So it's coming along, but, yes, there there's a lot going on in schools. We have over half a million kids that are dyslexic on Bookshare in the US today.
BETSY BEAUMON: So be hopeful. Yeah?
AUDIENCE: Hi. I'm Heather Staines from the MIT Knowledge Futures Group.
BETSY BEAUMON: Hi.
AUDIENCE: You didn't address this specifically, but I'm sure it's a subset under the visual impairments. But my previous company, one of our developers was colorblind and he really opened our eyes to navigation structures and things that we do where links change color and tabs change color. And he'd say, yeah, this just doesn't work for me. We'd say, let's make it green. And he'd be like, yeah, doesn't work for me. So I know there's some publishers working on things, specific colors or different contrasts in images.
AUDIENCE: And I wondered how often you're hearing about that being a challenge.
BETSY BEAUMON: Oh, yeah. It comes up all the time because, again, it's a much higher percentage of the population than you have people who are completely blind or even severely visually impaired. My brother-in-law is colorblind. I bet people in this room are colorblind. So, yes, in this world it comes up a lot. And there are, again, guidelines. Probably some of you would have better pointers to great guidelines about what you can and can't use or should and shouldn't use to make sure that you're serving people who are colorblind.
BETSY BEAUMON: But there's a couple of different kinds. There's the red/green. So, yes, it's a thing and it's something to really-- this brings up-- one of the main things is multi-modal. So if you just don't think of one mode for any information that's important to convey. So if you're using color-- I like color. I'm good with color.
BETSY BEAUMON: That's great. Use text. Use something else. Use it so that there are two ways at least to get at the same information. It's like describing an image. I'm super visual, as well. Well, a lot of people aren't. So how do you have a text version and a picture version?
BETSY BEAUMON: Make sure that the pictures have colors. If you can stay in the right range, you don't need to worry that you're going to then have somebody colorblind left out. But I would say the main thing to always keep in mind is multi-modality. If you think about that with all of your content, that gets you a long way.
AUDIENCE: Hi. My name is Allison Belan, and I'm with Duke University Press, proud participate in Bookshare.
BETSY BEAUMON: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: And what I'm thinking about is when our authors and editors and researchers are being trained in graduate school, they're trained in methods, they're trained in writing, making an argument. They're not trained currently, I don't think, in how to describe an image, how to describe a table such that it could be screen readable. And so I know that one of our big anxieties about trying to do this successfully is turning to our authors and asking them to do this work.
AUDIENCE: And I'm just wondering if there's any action happening at that level of intervention of training scholars in this new mode of creating knowledge.
BETSY BEAUMON: That's an amazingly good question. Not to my knowledge. And yet, we all talk about it a lot. Just like I mentioned, there's something called Teach Access, that tech companies are basically saying to colleges and universities, don't send us UX people, designers, engineers that don't know about accessibility. I think there's an opportunity to say, don't send us authors, don't send us people that are going to come work for us who don't know about that.
BETSY BEAUMON: And how can they know about that? Some of the resources I mentioned at the DIAGRAM Center include things like-- we have a whole image description training tool called Poet, and it gives you lots and lots of tips on how to describe different kinds of images. So there are tools available to do it. But then I think there has to be an industry academia flow that says it's important.
BETSY BEAUMON: Because employers and universities, et cetera, publishers are the customers of the schools that are training whoever we're talking about here, whether it's an author or on up. So, yeah, I think it's having a push to say it's important, and then just knowing how to find the tools to put it together. So I think that's a great question. And I've not heard about anything like that happening, and it would be a really good place to take this.
CASON LYNLEY: We have time for one more question.
BETSY BEAUMON: Oh, no. Man, you're going to ask a hard one, aren't you?
AUDIENCE: I'm going to help on Allison's question.
BETSY BEAUMON: Oh, please. Jump in, Bill.
AUDIENCE: Yeah. A resource that this community might want to know about is the University of Michigan Press. University of Michigan libraries has actually developed training guidelines for image description for their authors and editors based on the Poet training materials.
BETSY BEAUMON: Perfect.
AUDIENCE: But they've geared it to what that University Press needs. And it's very successful. And I think the thing that's key about it is that it's not either or. It's like, who does this? Does the author do it or does the editor do it? They both are trained to do it. So they get what they can get from the authors because the author knows why that image is in her book.
AUDIENCE: So she's not going to say it's a picture of a cow. She's going to say, here's what I'm trying to communicate by putting this picture in. But if they don't actually do the description in a useful way for accessibility, the editors know how to fix the copy. It's just copy editing.
BETSY BEAUMON: Yeah. It's a great point. We've had these discussions across all sort of levels of publishing about who is the best person or where's the best place or time to do things like image descriptions. And for sure, the further upstream you can go, the better because the author knows why they're defining that image to be there. I think about somewhere along the line, somebody is probably getting a designer to design the thing.
BETSY BEAUMON: And the very thing that they give the designer might be the best basis for the description. So the further upstream, the better. And thank you. Yes, University of Michigan. Good point. And it's great for us because a lot of what we're doing-- all of our stuff in DIAGRAM is open source.
BETSY BEAUMON: All the content is open content. We want it to be used. So I love that people like University of Michigan are using it because that's what it's there for. What else? What else can Bill Kasdorf answer for you?
CASON LYNLEY: I think that's all the time we have for questions, unfortunately. But thank you so much.
BETSY BEAUMON: Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
MELANIE DOLECHECK: We have a refreshment break now in the Pacific Ballroom downstairs in the Exhibit Hall, and then we'll start with our concurrent sessions. [MUSIC - THE ZOMBIES, "TIME OF THE SEASON"] It's the time of the season when love runs high. And this time, give it to me easy.
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