The Secret of NIMAS Opportunities with XML-Based Accessibility Specifications for Pre K-12 and Higher Education Content
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The Secret of NIMAS Opportunities With XML-Based Accessibility Specifications for Pre K-12 and Higher Education Content by John Parsons A white paper from ABOUT US Cenveo Publisher Services provides content and technology solutions and services to publishers. Serving the publishing industry for more than 125 years, CONTENTS Cenveo delivers a full-range of technology, content, and delivery 3 One Source; Many Outcomes solutions that escalate revenue 3 Enter NIMAS and streamline workflows while ensuring editorial integrity. Cenveo 4 Creating NIMAS File Sets Publisher Services is an industry 5 Long-Term Benefits for Publishers leader in XML-early workflow solutions, content development, 5 Collaboration project and author management, 6 A Continuing Journey editorial, production, automated 6 Conclusion transformations, delivery services for print and on-line products, and 7 What About EPUB? so much more. 8 Resources To learn more about Cenveo and schedule a personal consultation with a publishing specialist, please visit cenveopublisherservices.com. John Parsons ([email protected]) is a writer and consultant based in Seattle, WA. Formerly the Editorial Director of The Seybold Report, he is the author of numerous articles, white papers, and research reports on publishing and digital media. ince the early nineteenth century invention of text-to-speech variety—is third, followed by “digital braille, the concept of making written content text,” a general category encompassing any text and Savailable to the blind or visually impaired has image descriptions that can be rendered by specialized been a noble aspiration of civilized society. Making or even general-purpose digital devices. that concept a practical reality is another matter. Even as new, more automated, technologies arise, the Since each of these four output choices follows challenges of accessibility remain formidable. predictable rules and logic, there is a definable way to use a structured “master file” approach—creating the The rise of digital media has made the problem more content once, and outputting as needed to as many acute because digital is an intensely visual medium. formats as the market requires, with minimal manual In his 2012 book Accessible EPUB 3 (O’Reilly/Tools intervention. of Change), author Matt Garrish cites the phrase “digital famine,” meaning that only about 5% of books Enter NIMAS produced are ever made available in an accessible format. “Although there are signs that this rate is AEM is the developer of the National Instructional beginning to tick upward with more ebooks being Materials Accessibility Standard or NIMAS (pronounced produced, the overall percentage of books that “nye-mas”), an XML-based specification for organizing become available in accessible form remains abysmally and structuring textbook and other educational content. small.” NIMAS is in turn a subset of an older XML standard known as Digital Accessible Information SYstem, or For pre K-12 and higher education, the accessibility DAISY, used to create Digital Talking Books or DTBs. gap has dire consequences. Print-only educational Books stored in NIMAS XML can be easily rendered materials can be a significant barrier to participation in any of the four basic output formats, and made and achievement. However, accessibility can mean available to schools or programs for visually impaired. significantly different approaches. According to a Since 2006, NIMAS data have been stored in a recent report from the American Foundation for the federally mandated repository, the National Instructional Blind (AFB), not all those aged 21 and younger who Materials Access Center, or NIMAC. The files are not are legally blind use the same reading medium. Only available directly to the public, but are provided by 9% use braille, while 29% are visual readers, 9% are NIMAC to authorized entities within each state, who auditory readers, and 18% are pre-readers; alarmingly, work with teachers and parents at the local level. 35% are non-readers. In other words, compensating for visual impairment can take many forms: tactile, In the U.S., schools receiving federal funding support auditory, and assisted or enhanced visual techniques are required to provide materials in NIMAS format, for those with partial sight. and to facilitate the resulting output formats for their students. Educational publishers must also meet that One Source; Many Outcomes requirement, in order to sell to institutions bound by the federal mandate. Increasingly, publishers are looking Thankfully, these differences all point to a data-centric for ways not only to meet the compliance requirement approach, which can resolve the accessibility issue but also to increase the output flexibility of their overall for publishers. Content, including images with rich, operations. descriptive metadata, is almost all created digitally. By authoring or converting this digital source data to a structured, machine-readable format, publishers can output to multiple formats as a matter of economic feasibility and even profitability—not just because accessibility is a compliance mandate. According to the National Center for Accessible Educational Materials (AEM), there are four major specialized output formats for adapting printed instructional material to the diverse needs of the visually impaired. The first is braille, an alphabet of dot patterns that can be embossed on paper or rendered via a display device. Large print is self-explanatory—and theoretically most adaptable to ebooks and other digital display media. Audio—particularly the computerized © 2015 Cenveo Publisher Services 3 Creating NIMAS File Sets then uses tools to validate the resulting XML against the NIMAS schema, as well as against a series of business Because the intent of NIMAS is to facilitate the rules, which are designed to check the file beyond accessibility of textbooks and other printed materials, simple compliance with the NIMAS standard. it has naturally fallen to content service providers to do the NIMAS conversion work. Yogesh Jedhe, Business The team works with subject matter experts to make Manager at Cenveo Publisher Services, outlined the sure that image description fields are populated with basic process. “The input is often a combination of alternate text that truly help a visually impaired student. Word files, hard copy, PDFs, application files, or XML— Other elements, such as math equations in MathML, depending on the publisher,” he said. “We also receive are captured in such a way that they accurately and existing metadata for the publication.” Paralleling the effectively convey information to the visually impaired. print production process, Cenveo teams leverage our robust transformation technology tools to extract data NIMAS compliant files created by Jedhe’s group are from the source files, apply and edit XML as needed, rigorously tested and refined using a Cenveo-developed and process and tag images. Finally, a team of content tool. However, the company stresses that the object analysts at Cenveo will spend the time to make sure is not simply to create technically valid files, but to that the elements that require human judgment, like ensure that the resulting content will communicate image descriptions, are created in a way that aligns information to a visually impaired student as effectively with the true intent of the NIMAS standard. The team as its core counterpart does to other students. So far, 4 © 2015 Cenveo Publisher Services According to a recent report from the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), not all those ages 21 and younger who are legally blind use the same reading medium. the company has converted more than 5000 books for discoverable, down the road.” He noted that while all publishers like Cengage Learning, Carnegie Learning, publishers believe that serving the needs of visually Goodheart-Willcox, and others. disabled individuals is the right thing to do, it can create budget concerns. Long-Term Benefits for Publishers One key factor for publishers to measure the value of Cenveo’s Senior Vice President of Content Solutions, great NIMAS compliant files is the discoverability of their Kevin Burns, reiterated the importance of creating content. “Search engines are visually disabled too,” he “great” NIMAS compliant files instead of “good enough” said, pointing out that enormous costs can be incurred files. “There is a distinction between a valid NIMAS by publishers simply because the limited metadata for compliant file and a great one,” he said. “You can a particular asset is insufficient to find it for subsequent have a NIMAS compliant file that is valid but doesn’t re-use—or for developing related content. “Having really achieve the spirit or the goal of what the content content that is easily discoverable, especially non-text is supposed to be. What happens too often is that content, is all about making the meaning and context budgets demand, or conversion teams choose to do for an asset discoverable, which is exactly what things whatever is easiest (i.e., cheapest) instead of doing the like long descriptions in NIMAS compliant files are all right thing to create a good NIMAS compliant file.” about.” A common example is the long description for Discoverability and content repurposing may well be images—a NIMAS requirement for any visual element the financial drivers for managed content practices in a book. If the published caption or call-outs in the that will—as a side benefit—result in better NIMAS main text (words meant to enhance a sighted person’s compliant files. “Large publishers can realize seven- understanding of an image) is simply copied and pasted figure savings if their content is more broadly into the long description field, it isn’t truly meaningful for discoverable and easily repurposable,” Burns said, someone visually impaired. Although this certainly saves “avoiding the need to re-create content for each new on costs, and the resulting file will be NIMAS compliant product.” because there is something in that field, but in some cases words could have little or no utility to someone Collaboration who cannot see the image clearly, or at all.