Episode 229 - How to Make Your Work Accessible with Michael Johnson
March 12, 2024
"The impact that you're going to have on somebody's life is incredible. It's 20 plus percent of the population. I'm not saying all 20 percent of those people are going to buy your book, but I am saying they're not buying your ebook now because they simply can't read it. So there's a lot of commercial value there too." —Michael Johnson
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Authors, who would like to tap into another 20% of the reading population? You can do that by making your works accessible to the community of potential readers with print disabilities.
Michael Johnson discusses HOW TO MAKE YOUR WORK ACCESSIBLE, including the requirements of digital accessibility, such as making images and graphs and charts accessible; tools and services for accommodating accessibility; IP financial and rights considerations; SEO benefits; and the impact of AI. Michael talks about both the social obligations of making work accessible as well as the financial benefits of doing so—there’s a substantial audience out there eager for more accessible content.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
Michael Johnson discusses HOW TO MAKE YOUR WORK ACCESSIBLE, including the requirements of digital accessibility, such as making images and graphs and charts accessible; tools and services for accommodating accessibility; IP financial and rights considerations; SEO benefits; and the impact of AI. Michael talks about both the social obligations of making work accessible as well as the financial benefits of doing so—there’s a substantial audience out there eager for more accessible content.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
Listen to the full episode ...
Listen to and watch the interview ...
Michael Johnson is a seasoned executive with almost 40 years of experience in the technology, publishing, and distribution markets. He is the Vice President of Content at Benetech, working with publishers, conversion houses, technology platforms, and booksellers to help them understand and implement processes that allow for accessible content to get from authors all the way through to the end reader.
Links
Michael’s Links:
https://bornaccessible.benetech.org
Mentioned in episode:
https://authors.sounded.com/
https://www.vitalsource.com/
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
https://bornaccessible.benetech.org
Mentioned in episode:
https://authors.sounded.com/
https://www.vitalsource.com/
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Michael! Is your work accessible in the ways Michael described? If not, what is a first step you’re going to take to make them so?
Please post your comments on YouTube--and I'd love it if you would subscribe while you're there!
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AI-generated Summary
This episode of "The Indy Author Podcast" features Michael Johnson, Vice President of Content at Benetech, discussing the importance of making digital content accessible for people with print disabilities. Johnson, with nearly four decades of experience in technology, publishing, and distribution markets, emphasizes the necessity of creating digital books that can be easily consumed by individuals facing challenges such as blindness, low vision, dyslexia, and other disabilities.
He details the role of conversion houses in transforming manuscripts into digital formats, highlighting the critical nature of this process in achieving accessibility. Johnson outlines key issues in digital accessibility, including the need for alt text descriptions for images and graphs, accommodating mathematical and scientific content, and maintaining print page fidelity in digital formats to ensure that readers can navigate texts as intended.
Additionally, Johnson discusses the tools and standards required for creating accessible digital content, such as the use of specific markup languages and platforms like Microsoft Word and DAISY Consortium's tools. He addresses the accessibility of print books, mentioning large print and braille as alternatives, and explores the financial and rights considerations for authors and publishers looking to make their works accessible.
The conversation also touches on the impact of AI in improving accessibility, particularly in audiobook production, and the potential for digital braille to offer on-demand access for readers. Johnson concludes by highlighting the commercial value and social justice importance of making digital content accessible, suggesting that reaching the underserved market of readers with disabilities not only aligns with authors' desires to be read but also offers significant untapped commercial potential.
He details the role of conversion houses in transforming manuscripts into digital formats, highlighting the critical nature of this process in achieving accessibility. Johnson outlines key issues in digital accessibility, including the need for alt text descriptions for images and graphs, accommodating mathematical and scientific content, and maintaining print page fidelity in digital formats to ensure that readers can navigate texts as intended.
Additionally, Johnson discusses the tools and standards required for creating accessible digital content, such as the use of specific markup languages and platforms like Microsoft Word and DAISY Consortium's tools. He addresses the accessibility of print books, mentioning large print and braille as alternatives, and explores the financial and rights considerations for authors and publishers looking to make their works accessible.
The conversation also touches on the impact of AI in improving accessibility, particularly in audiobook production, and the potential for digital braille to offer on-demand access for readers. Johnson concludes by highlighting the commercial value and social justice importance of making digital content accessible, suggesting that reaching the underserved market of readers with disabilities not only aligns with authors' desires to be read but also offers significant untapped commercial potential.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to "The Indy Author Podcast." Today my guest is Michael Johnson. Hey, Michael, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Michael: Doing great. Thanks for having me.
Meet Michael Johnson
[00:00:08] Matty: I am pleased to have you here, and to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Michael is a seasoned executive with almost 40 years of experience in the technology, publishing, and distribution markets. He's the Vice President of Content at Benetech, working with publishers, conversion houses, technology platforms, and booksellers to help them understand and implement processes that allow for accessible content to get from authors all the way through to the end reader. And that is what we are going to be talking about with Michael today: achieving accessibility for your work.
What is a "conversion house"?
[00:00:36] Matty: But before we dive into that, or maybe as a way of diving into that, I had mentioned in your bio that you have done work with conversion houses. What is a conversion house?
[00:00:47] Michael: Okay, that's a great opening question. Most publishers in the world no longer handle their own end-to-consumer or reader process. They're not printing their own books anymore. They've been contracting out for decades to printing houses in various parts of the world, and they rarely do their own conversion from manuscript to an eBook for your Kindle store or any of those types of things. So, there's a subset of the publishing ecosystem that takes publisher files, typically InDesign files, or perhaps files from Vellum or a platform like that, and turns them into the various eBook formats. So when I say conversion houses, that's what I mean: they convert manuscripts into digital content.
What is digital accessibility?
[00:01:33] Matty: And I can see how those kinds of services would have a key role to play in accessibility. But I think to lead us into our conversation about accessibility, can you just describe a little bit, when you say accessibility in terms of books, what are some of the things that you're talking about there?
[00:01:50] Michael: When you talk about accessibility at Benetech or anywhere in the digital world, what we're referring to is making the books readable by people who have a print disability. A print disability might be blindness, low vision, dyslexia, color blindness, or any of a host of other muscular, skeletal, or neurological challenges, which basically means if I handed somebody my phone and it had an eBook on it, would they be able to read it? If the answer is no, the odds are there's some sort of print disability getting in their way. There are a number of ways to make a digital book accessible to those types of readers. By the way, those types of readers represent between 22 and 25 percent of the Earth's population, so it's a significant number. When we talk about digital accessibility, we're talking about some key issues.
Making images accessible
[00:02:39] Michael: The first one is around images. These could be simple images, like a picture of a dragon at a chapter heading, or more detailed images if it's a biographical work. Maybe you have a picture of George Washington or Sojourner Truth, whoever your biography is about. And these images need to be described so that people with different visual challenges can still understand what the image is.
[00:03:27] Michael: So the rule of thumb there is if the image is part of the comprehension of what we're talking about, then it's critically important to do an alt text description or perhaps a long description so that a reader with a visual challenge would still be able to get that comprehension from the image.
Making graphs and charts accessible
[00:03:27] Michael: The next thing would be anything that has to do with math, science, accounting, or any sort of numbers, like charts and graphs. A lot of this shows up in science fiction because people are talking about breaking space barriers, magical time travel, and other things, and there's often math involved. Not always included in the books, but when they are, anything around math, formulas, tables, charts, those sorts of things need to be made accessible.
[00:03:52] Matty: Is that a matter of helping someone who is visually impaired absorb the information, or is it about converting that information, like in a table, into some other format to make it more accessible to more people?
[00:04:15] Michael: No, it's not about repurposing the image itself. Some might say, for example, pie charts are easier to understand than bar graphs. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about whatever the image happens to be, you can use specific markup language as you're creating the manuscript that describes the image. If it's a pie chart, you could say, "This is a pie chart representing population counts. The largest part of the pie is blue, representing 52%," and so on. It's additional information as part of the image description.
Accommodating print page fidelity
[00:04:49] Michael: And the last one, which may seem mundane but is really important, is print page fidelity. If the page numbers are important in your book, then you mark them as such so that the reader who's reading in a digital format can follow along with the pages. Typically, if it's a mystery, sci-fi, romance, or family history, the page numbers aren't that important. But if you're publishing an economic treatise or something where the page numbers are referenced, like "see the chart on page 26," the digital copy needs to know where print page 26 is. So when the reader goes to page 26, they're not on page 17 in the digital copy because you didn't align the page numbers.
[00:05:41] Matty: I'm intrigued by that last point because I imagine that in many cases, if people were doing this without accessibility in mind, they might replace what would have been a page number with a link that takes someone to that data. Is that still accessible? Are you describing a different scenario that isn't accommodated by that kind of link that would adjust according to how the information was displaying on the person's e-reader?
[00:06:12] Michael: Well, you asked a Boolean question there, either-or, and the answer to both is yes. People still do link in their digital copies to other parts of the book. The danger is you either have to let the reader know, "I'm taking you away now, and I haven't provided a way for you to come back," at which point the reader can make their own bookmark or whatever it is in their book so they can click back to it. In terms of print page fidelity, what I'm talking about is literally having markings in the book that indicate "this is print page 26," "this is print page 27," so that the reader can navigate that way.
Tools for accommodating accessibility
[00:06:47] Matty: And what tools would authors use to do this? If someone has a package like Vellum, which is very commonly used, especially in the indie author world, are there built-in things in a package like Vellum, or is it something you have to add on?
[00:07:01] Michael: We have not done an in-depth analysis of Vellum, but I have had a few exchanges with them, and some of your indie authors have published on Vellum, and I've seen some of the output. It is certainly possible to do these things in Vellum. How one does it, I don't honestly know because we have not analyzed the Vellum platform. These things are easily done in Word, which has pretty good accessibility markup, and there's a free tool available from the DAISY Consortium called Word to EPUB, so you can take your Word file, run it through accessibility checkers built into Microsoft Word, and then convert it to EPUB, which you can usually upload to most eBook services. I've seen output from Vellum that is very accessible.
[00:08:01] Matty: I do know that being a Vellum user myself, they support the provision of alt text for images. So I'm sure they accommodate those other things as well, but I haven't done that myself. So, I have some to-dos coming out of this.
Accessibility in print
[00:08:21] Matty: We've been talking exclusively about eBooks so far. Is there an accessibility aspect to print books as well? Like, I have large print editions of my books. Is that a world you get into at all, outside of eBooks?
[00:08:36] Michael: Benetech does not. We are a digital-first, digital-only organization, and our focus is on making digital content available for the print disabled. There are two main choices for people with reading challenges: large print and braille. There are still many blind people who read braille. The American Printing House creates braille, and the Library of Congress has the National Library Service, which is a massive braille production workshop. Those are a couple of entities, the American Printing House and the NLS, where your authors could make a query to get their books produced in that way. But we don't do any physical, so I don't have details about that.
[00:09:27] Matty: Yeah, I found, just to share my own experience, that getting large print books is quite easy. The only added expense for me was the brief amount of time I had to spend in a tool like Vellum, which was hardly any time at all, just a couple of clicks to create an interior version that was large print. Then, a little bit of extra money with my book cover designer to create a design that was large print-specific with a large print badge on it. If you do that at the same time as your standard print cover, it's not very much extra because they're working on it anyway.
I found that I haven't been advertising it as much as I did when I first put them out, but it's one of those things that serves a new population, as you're saying. Especially if one is writing in a genre where the demographic might skew towards people who are looking for larger print, then it's a worthwhile thing to do and quite easy.
[00:10:21] Michael: That was very gently phrased.
Braille book production
[00:10:24] Matty: Can you talk a little bit more about the braille production process?
[00:10:30] Michael: I can talk about it in general, certainly. Most people are familiar with what Braille is — a series of raised dots that enable communication. The American Printing House and the National Library Service inside the Library of Congress are probably the two largest braille producers, but there are other blindness organizations with braille creation capabilities as well. Just a word to the wise: a large print book is much bigger, not just in footprint but also in pagination, than a traditional print book. A braille book is huge, typically given away under various government stipulations and processes. The National Library Services, for example, gives away their books, and I believe the APH does as well, though I'm not certain.
There's also digital braille, which brings Benetech back into the conversation with the electronic braille format (EBF). Imagine a blind person, who doesn't necessarily have to be blind as almost all Braille users are, with their hands on a Braille display. This is how they send emails and perform other computer tasks. With digital Braille, the keys pop up as if they're reading a print book, so they can lay their fingers on the display and the Braille appears. Benetech has a collection called Bookshare with 1.25 million titles, and any of those titles are available to our members in Braille. We do the Braille translation on the fly. It's not a physical production, but we do offer a digital braille format for our members.
IP financial and rights considerations
[00:12:18] Matty: If authors want to make their books available in these kinds of formats, is it something where they're granting rights to an organization to create that, or are they paying to have it done? What's the financial side of that? Or the rights side of it also?
[00:12:35] Michael: When it comes to Benetech, there's a donation agreement, and authors must sign it. There are no payments involved; neither we nor you pay anything. We handle the conversion for free, and the Braille copy is available to our members at no cost. We are a charity and receive some funding from the federal government, but a significant portion of our funding comes from various foundations and individuals who donate to us.
There is an agreement in place to protect the author's rights, and we have our own security measures to ensure that only qualified users can access the content on Benetech.
Most authors who are not associated with a publishing house contribute content because they want to reach readers who benefit from these services. The best recommendation is from one reader to another, saying, "I read this book, you're going to love it."
We have completed 29 million downloads in the 20 years we've had the service, so a lot of people are reading our books. Authors, individual people, small presses, and even some of the largest presses in the world, with a total of 900 publishers and almost 2,000 imprints, donate content to us. We add about 10,000 titles a month. So, in our situation, there is no cost for conversion and no revenue generation; neither we nor the authors make money from these distributions.
Most other Braille production houses do incur significant costs for creating physical Braille books. I don't believe the Library of Congress charges for these conversions, although they certainly bear the cost of production. For physical Braille inquiries, one would have to consult the American Printing House (APH) or the National Library Service. However, since we are a digital-only organization, I can't provide details on their processes.
Creating digital editions on the fly
[00:14:38] Matty: Creating a physical Braille book can be financially and time-consuming, and there may need to be an assessment process to prioritize which books to convert. If you're offering digital Braille versions, do you need to prioritize among the books submitted for conversion?
[00:15:13] Michael: At Benetech, we translate Braille on the fly. We accept EPUB files into our collection, and when a qualified member requests a particular book in Braille, they initiate the process. Our servers perform the translation, which takes some time, and then we provide the member with a link to download the Braille file. We only translate books when a reader requests them.
Terms to address authors’ and publishers’ rights concerns
[00:15:51] Matty: And as you were putting together the contract that you sign with the author or the agreement, a lot of people, knowing there are bad players out there, would be concerned about signing over rights and may feel nervous about that. Can you talk a little bit about what is or is not included in the contracts to accommodate authors' or publishers' concerns about that?
[00:16:14] Michael: Sure. The donation agreements were co-written by the American Association of Publishers. So that's the publishing world speaking. I realize that's not the independent publishing world, but that's the big folks, and we had guidance from them on what publishing houses and authors would demand.
It's a very straightforward agreement, if such a thing can be true in legal terms. Basically, the person asserts that they have the necessary copyright permission to donate the file, and we confirm that we will only use the book to make it more accessible, and only qualified members of Bookshare, who have a certified print disability, will have access to it.
We do not hyperdistribute, so we won't put the book anywhere other than Bookshare. Some authors and publishers give us worldwide rights, some only English language rights or North American rights, or other specific distributions, similar to the typical publishing rights matrix. There are no royalty statements because there are no royalties since there are no sales. The arrangements are not exclusive, so authors can distribute their books elsewhere as they wish. It's about as harmless as a legal document could be.
[00:17:30] Matty: If someone has an update to their ePub, what is the process for updating it on Bookshare?
[00:18:00] Michael: You would use the traditional feeds you use anywhere in your distribution channel, typically ONIX for that sort of thing. You can inform us if a book is out of publication or if there's a new edition and request us to use the updated version. While I'm oversimplifying the process, that's the general idea.
Accommodating the desired reading experience
[00:18:27] Matty: Accommodating readers who are blind versus those who are dyslexic can be quite different. Does Benetech address both kinds of needs? And if yes, what are the differences, and how do you accommodate them?
[00:18:43] Michael: Yes, we serve all of those print disability categories mentioned earlier, and it really becomes not just about the certified print disability but also about the intended reading experience of the individual.
[00:20:18] Matty: I can imagine that AI is making a huge difference. Certainly, the availability of AI-generated voices is going to make the production of new audiobooks much easier. Can you speak to how AI is being used to improve accessibility?
[00:20:34] Michael: There are a couple of things there. You mentioned AI as it relates to voices. There's a very interesting group, I have no connection, I just find them interesting, called Sounded. S-O-U-N-D-E-D, Sounded.com, and they have very good audiobook technology. They also do a tremendous job protecting the voice actor themselves.
So what they do is they get a voice actor, sign a contract with them. One of their founders is a lawyer who's very sensitive to rights and permissions. So they get the voice actor to agree to say, yes, I understand I'm going to do what you asked me to do, get my voice recorded.
And if you use my voice downstream in a commercial enterprise, then I get paid. So that's one thing. They use that voice and then apply artificial intelligence to take that specific person's voice and apply it to a textbook. They're not just reading a text and having what we used to call Microsoft Bob read it to you.
Even though those synthetic voices are getting much better, this is not that. This is an actual human's voice used in an enhanced way. So that's one thing I think every author, every publishing company should look at that group, Sounded.com. We use artificial intelligence to try and correct machine correctable things for accessibility.
I'll give you a specific example. We are far away from AI being able to solve the problem around image descriptions. Here's just a quick story, right? We're going to have three books. Each of the three books has a picture of the Eiffel Tower. The first book is a cookbook, and at the chapter header around soufflé, someone in editorial thought it would be interesting to have a picture of the Eiffel Tower.
Not teaching me how to make a soufflé, not teaching me what kind of eggs to use, whether I want them at room temperature or straight out of the fridge, there's no information being conveyed; it's an affectation. So, you can do two things. You could mark it as "Image: Eiffel Tower," which is probably just going to annoy people because it's a cookbook; what do I care about that?
Or, you can specifically mark it to say this is a decorative image, and the assistive technology would just ignore it. A lot of blind people read cookbooks, so if you just mark it as a decorative image, then the screen reader will just pretend it's not there. That's one thing. The exact same picture in a different book, in a travelogue book, whether it's a Frommer's type travelogue thing, or whether it's my own personal travel, or whatever it is I'm writing this book about, and now we're on the chapter about what to do in Paris.
Okay, the picture of the Eiffel Tower makes sense. So you say "Image: Eiffel Tower" and then you're going to add a long description. Maybe something interesting about Gustave Eiffel. Maybe it says don't go on Tuesdays; they're closed. I don't know what you're going to say, but something which says it is the Eiffel Tower and here's why I bothered to put the picture of the Eiffel Tower in this chapter.
So again, we're trying to convey knowledge. The third book, the same picture. Maddy, you could have taken the picture. They could have got it from Getty. I don't care where it came from. The same picture, but this is an engineering book. And the picture of the Eiffel Tower is there because we're going to be discussing the tensile strength of structural steel.
So AI is not going to be able to understand. AI could probably say it's the Eiffel Tower with growing degrees of accuracy, but I don't know how AI is going to be able to say, well, the author probably meant this. That's just, that's not a thing, right? AI is useful to us, right? When it comes to things like math and chemistry because the AI can read those formulas if they're in a good format and then translate in a long description to say, "X squared equals Y plus 4Z."
Okay, AI can take that, which might actually be a picture, a PNG or something that the publisher put in the file, and perhaps turn that in. So we do use AI in those circumstances, but to use AI to solve the image problem, to use AI to solve the print page correlation problem, I just, we're not seeing anything about it, and I spend a fair amount of my time talking to these guys.
I just had a talk yesterday with a firm that's focusing on image descriptions. And it's happening. It's better on the web in February of 2024 than it was in February 2023, and it'll be better in 2025, but there's a long way to go. Machines don't actually learn, despite what people tell you. So, we do use it.
It is helpful in certain circumstances, but with my simple Eiffel Tower example, I hope you understand that there's much work to be done yet.
[00:25:10] Matty: Yeah, it seems like the most immediate, practical benefit for people with reading disabilities would be the easier and cheaper availability of audiobooks. And, in the face of people who hate AI, one of the arguments I've made on authors' panels and things like that is that I think the positive side of this is that there are many books that would never have been available in audio had it not been for AI, not that it's suddenly going to displace all the human narrators.
Like I still hire a human narrator for my fiction books, but I do make my nonfiction books available, when I can, via AI-generated narration because those are books that wouldn't be available in audio otherwise.
[00:25:55] Michael: You're absolutely right. And we've been producing DAISY audiobooks for a very long time. The disability community and the accessibility community have been working in the audio space for quite some time, not forever, but for many years.
What is DAISY?
[00:26:15] Matty: You had mentioned DAISY a couple of times. Can you discuss in a little more detail what that is?
[00:26:20] Michael: Sure. The DAISY Consortium is a global organization focused on accessibility standards. I happen to be on the board at DAISY, representing Benetech. I can't even remember how many countries are involved, but there are scores of countries that participate in DAISY projects worldwide. The primary focus of most DAISY organizations is on people who are blind, but not exclusively.
Benetech, for example, covers a wide range of disabilities. So, we interact with the World Wide Web Consortium and the EPUB standards. Actually, the organization is very heavily involved with all sorts of digital and accessibility standards.
Accessibility best practices beyond books
[00:26:59] Matty: And I wanted to also jump back to something we talked about earlier, which is accommodating people with dyslexia. I have read that certain fonts are easier for people with dyslexia to read. Independent of books, if someone is, say, putting together a PowerPoint presentation or something like that, do you have advice on how they can make that more accessible with relatively simple to implement changes, like using one font over another?
[00:27:27] Michael: This becomes a religious debate, to be honest. I usually stick with Times New Roman because most of the people I interact with seem to think that Times New Roman is okay. However, everyone has their own personal preference. The important thing around disability and font choice is not to lock it up in a file, like a PDF, where I can change the font size but can't change the font itself.
So, if you have a properly done digital file, the user should be able to change the font to one that is suitable for them. PDF, of course, doesn't allow for that. But PDF has been a staple for many years, and it does an excellent job of taking a picture of pages.
The issue, of course, is that blind people can't see pictures, so it's not useful from an accessibility standpoint. There are some things that make PDFs more accessible, but really, EPUB is the answer. And EPUB is what the distribution channels want, anyway.
All Microsoft tools have built-in accessibility checkers and aids to help you ensure your documents are accessible. The big challenge with PowerPoints is reading order. So, you know, have you done a good job of defining headings, subheadings, bullet points, and so on? The accessibility checker will help you a great deal with those things.
[00:28:47] Matty: Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like, what is the significance of defining those elements clearly?
[00:28:53] Michael: Sure. Reading order is critically important for people who are blind or have low vision because the PowerPoint is essentially an image. If the image is not effectively described and the content's consumption order is not clear, especially with a complex slide that has a graph here, some words there, and various other elements, it can be confusing. Those with print disabilities, whether they're blind, have low vision, or dyslexia, need built-in navigation that allows keyboard use, as clicking is not an option for those who cannot see where to click. The slide should be structured logically, just as one would order a table or headers.
Imagine you're in a classroom, like in my early days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and you have a pointer, tapping it against the board to direct attention. You want the user's focus to follow the flow of information you intend to convey. That's what I mean by reading order.
[00:30:26] Matty: I can imagine that for both books and presentations, the trend of placing headers at the bottom of the page can be problematic.
[00:30:37] Michael: Yes, and please avoid doing things like having a header three without a header two. Assistive technology does not handle that well.
[00:30:45] Matty: Interesting.
[00:30:46] Michael: It's not that hard to count to three. You know, it's H1, H2, H3. It's really not that complicated.
Next steps for making your work accessible
[00:30:51] Matty: Don't skip any numbers. So, Michael, if someone has listened to this and they're enthusiastic about making their books available to a broader audience, what steps would you recommend they take or what resources would you suggest they use to do that?
[00:31:05] Michael: Well, certainly, we're here to reach the disability audience. My email is [email protected]. Anyone can reach out with questions. Michael La Ronn, one of your members, is an accessibility superhero. So, you know, ask him questions. He's probably already built a YouTube channel about it or something. He's on top of things. That's another good resource. The DAISY Consortium is an excellent resource. If you make your books accessible, you can deliver them to Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and others, and much of your work will translate across these platforms.
I can't speak for what Amazon or Barnes & Noble are up to, but they are certainly aware of, and will accept, EPUBs. They are quietly rolling out more accessibility features to their reading environments. Through the generosity of a company called VitalSource, Benetech even has its own ebook retail store, which is exclusively for accessible ebooks.
[00:32:52] Matty: Okay. Well, Michael, thank you so much for sharing that information. That's an area that is new to me and, I'm sure, to some of the other listeners as well. So thank you for giving us a glimpse into that.
If there are any other places you would like to send people to learn more about you and what you do, please let us know.
[00:33:14] Michael: Yes, benetech.org is the main site for the organization. There's a ton of information there, including some really compelling stories about how lives are changed when readers who previously couldn't access books now can. That's basically why I left my commercial work to join a charity. You read some of those stories, and it's clear it's not that hard to do, and the impact you're going to have on someone's life is incredible. And again, it's over 20% of the population. So, I'm not saying all 20% of those people will buy your book, but I am saying they're not buying your ebook now because they simply can't read it. There's a lot of commercial value there too.
SEO benefits
[00:33:53] Michael: There's also the group of people who decide what you see when you search for things on the internet. I talk to those people all the time, and they are delving into your ebook files, your EPUB files, and taking those alternative texts and long descriptions and using them. So, when someone searches for, say, Sojourner Truth, if you were doing work on slavery, civil rights, or the Underground Railroad, and you might not have Sojourner Truth in your book title or in your ONIX feed, but if you have an image of Sojourner Truth in your book and you've described it with your alt text, that will start to surface when people search for it. So there's that aspect too.
You should do it for the social justice reason, of course. Independent authors typically have struggled their entire lives to be heard and to get published, and we're trying to reach readers who have struggled their whole lives to get books they want to read, so it's a natural match to me. There's the social justice part, but there's also a lot of commercial value, a huge marketplace that is being underserved, and also the challenge we all face as authors: just getting people to know about our work. It's hard enough to write a book and get it published, even if you self-publish. But to get people to know that you did it is even harder. So this is another opportunity.
[00:35:20] Matty: Yeah, well, obviously, you've said all the things that are going to really attract the attention of authors everywhere. So, Michael, thank you so much.
[00:35:27] Michael: Well, thanks for having me. It's been fun.
[00:00:06] Michael: Doing great. Thanks for having me.
Meet Michael Johnson
[00:00:08] Matty: I am pleased to have you here, and to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Michael is a seasoned executive with almost 40 years of experience in the technology, publishing, and distribution markets. He's the Vice President of Content at Benetech, working with publishers, conversion houses, technology platforms, and booksellers to help them understand and implement processes that allow for accessible content to get from authors all the way through to the end reader. And that is what we are going to be talking about with Michael today: achieving accessibility for your work.
What is a "conversion house"?
[00:00:36] Matty: But before we dive into that, or maybe as a way of diving into that, I had mentioned in your bio that you have done work with conversion houses. What is a conversion house?
[00:00:47] Michael: Okay, that's a great opening question. Most publishers in the world no longer handle their own end-to-consumer or reader process. They're not printing their own books anymore. They've been contracting out for decades to printing houses in various parts of the world, and they rarely do their own conversion from manuscript to an eBook for your Kindle store or any of those types of things. So, there's a subset of the publishing ecosystem that takes publisher files, typically InDesign files, or perhaps files from Vellum or a platform like that, and turns them into the various eBook formats. So when I say conversion houses, that's what I mean: they convert manuscripts into digital content.
What is digital accessibility?
[00:01:33] Matty: And I can see how those kinds of services would have a key role to play in accessibility. But I think to lead us into our conversation about accessibility, can you just describe a little bit, when you say accessibility in terms of books, what are some of the things that you're talking about there?
[00:01:50] Michael: When you talk about accessibility at Benetech or anywhere in the digital world, what we're referring to is making the books readable by people who have a print disability. A print disability might be blindness, low vision, dyslexia, color blindness, or any of a host of other muscular, skeletal, or neurological challenges, which basically means if I handed somebody my phone and it had an eBook on it, would they be able to read it? If the answer is no, the odds are there's some sort of print disability getting in their way. There are a number of ways to make a digital book accessible to those types of readers. By the way, those types of readers represent between 22 and 25 percent of the Earth's population, so it's a significant number. When we talk about digital accessibility, we're talking about some key issues.
Making images accessible
[00:02:39] Michael: The first one is around images. These could be simple images, like a picture of a dragon at a chapter heading, or more detailed images if it's a biographical work. Maybe you have a picture of George Washington or Sojourner Truth, whoever your biography is about. And these images need to be described so that people with different visual challenges can still understand what the image is.
[00:03:27] Michael: So the rule of thumb there is if the image is part of the comprehension of what we're talking about, then it's critically important to do an alt text description or perhaps a long description so that a reader with a visual challenge would still be able to get that comprehension from the image.
Making graphs and charts accessible
[00:03:27] Michael: The next thing would be anything that has to do with math, science, accounting, or any sort of numbers, like charts and graphs. A lot of this shows up in science fiction because people are talking about breaking space barriers, magical time travel, and other things, and there's often math involved. Not always included in the books, but when they are, anything around math, formulas, tables, charts, those sorts of things need to be made accessible.
[00:03:52] Matty: Is that a matter of helping someone who is visually impaired absorb the information, or is it about converting that information, like in a table, into some other format to make it more accessible to more people?
[00:04:15] Michael: No, it's not about repurposing the image itself. Some might say, for example, pie charts are easier to understand than bar graphs. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about whatever the image happens to be, you can use specific markup language as you're creating the manuscript that describes the image. If it's a pie chart, you could say, "This is a pie chart representing population counts. The largest part of the pie is blue, representing 52%," and so on. It's additional information as part of the image description.
Accommodating print page fidelity
[00:04:49] Michael: And the last one, which may seem mundane but is really important, is print page fidelity. If the page numbers are important in your book, then you mark them as such so that the reader who's reading in a digital format can follow along with the pages. Typically, if it's a mystery, sci-fi, romance, or family history, the page numbers aren't that important. But if you're publishing an economic treatise or something where the page numbers are referenced, like "see the chart on page 26," the digital copy needs to know where print page 26 is. So when the reader goes to page 26, they're not on page 17 in the digital copy because you didn't align the page numbers.
[00:05:41] Matty: I'm intrigued by that last point because I imagine that in many cases, if people were doing this without accessibility in mind, they might replace what would have been a page number with a link that takes someone to that data. Is that still accessible? Are you describing a different scenario that isn't accommodated by that kind of link that would adjust according to how the information was displaying on the person's e-reader?
[00:06:12] Michael: Well, you asked a Boolean question there, either-or, and the answer to both is yes. People still do link in their digital copies to other parts of the book. The danger is you either have to let the reader know, "I'm taking you away now, and I haven't provided a way for you to come back," at which point the reader can make their own bookmark or whatever it is in their book so they can click back to it. In terms of print page fidelity, what I'm talking about is literally having markings in the book that indicate "this is print page 26," "this is print page 27," so that the reader can navigate that way.
Tools for accommodating accessibility
[00:06:47] Matty: And what tools would authors use to do this? If someone has a package like Vellum, which is very commonly used, especially in the indie author world, are there built-in things in a package like Vellum, or is it something you have to add on?
[00:07:01] Michael: We have not done an in-depth analysis of Vellum, but I have had a few exchanges with them, and some of your indie authors have published on Vellum, and I've seen some of the output. It is certainly possible to do these things in Vellum. How one does it, I don't honestly know because we have not analyzed the Vellum platform. These things are easily done in Word, which has pretty good accessibility markup, and there's a free tool available from the DAISY Consortium called Word to EPUB, so you can take your Word file, run it through accessibility checkers built into Microsoft Word, and then convert it to EPUB, which you can usually upload to most eBook services. I've seen output from Vellum that is very accessible.
[00:08:01] Matty: I do know that being a Vellum user myself, they support the provision of alt text for images. So I'm sure they accommodate those other things as well, but I haven't done that myself. So, I have some to-dos coming out of this.
Accessibility in print
[00:08:21] Matty: We've been talking exclusively about eBooks so far. Is there an accessibility aspect to print books as well? Like, I have large print editions of my books. Is that a world you get into at all, outside of eBooks?
[00:08:36] Michael: Benetech does not. We are a digital-first, digital-only organization, and our focus is on making digital content available for the print disabled. There are two main choices for people with reading challenges: large print and braille. There are still many blind people who read braille. The American Printing House creates braille, and the Library of Congress has the National Library Service, which is a massive braille production workshop. Those are a couple of entities, the American Printing House and the NLS, where your authors could make a query to get their books produced in that way. But we don't do any physical, so I don't have details about that.
[00:09:27] Matty: Yeah, I found, just to share my own experience, that getting large print books is quite easy. The only added expense for me was the brief amount of time I had to spend in a tool like Vellum, which was hardly any time at all, just a couple of clicks to create an interior version that was large print. Then, a little bit of extra money with my book cover designer to create a design that was large print-specific with a large print badge on it. If you do that at the same time as your standard print cover, it's not very much extra because they're working on it anyway.
I found that I haven't been advertising it as much as I did when I first put them out, but it's one of those things that serves a new population, as you're saying. Especially if one is writing in a genre where the demographic might skew towards people who are looking for larger print, then it's a worthwhile thing to do and quite easy.
[00:10:21] Michael: That was very gently phrased.
Braille book production
[00:10:24] Matty: Can you talk a little bit more about the braille production process?
[00:10:30] Michael: I can talk about it in general, certainly. Most people are familiar with what Braille is — a series of raised dots that enable communication. The American Printing House and the National Library Service inside the Library of Congress are probably the two largest braille producers, but there are other blindness organizations with braille creation capabilities as well. Just a word to the wise: a large print book is much bigger, not just in footprint but also in pagination, than a traditional print book. A braille book is huge, typically given away under various government stipulations and processes. The National Library Services, for example, gives away their books, and I believe the APH does as well, though I'm not certain.
There's also digital braille, which brings Benetech back into the conversation with the electronic braille format (EBF). Imagine a blind person, who doesn't necessarily have to be blind as almost all Braille users are, with their hands on a Braille display. This is how they send emails and perform other computer tasks. With digital Braille, the keys pop up as if they're reading a print book, so they can lay their fingers on the display and the Braille appears. Benetech has a collection called Bookshare with 1.25 million titles, and any of those titles are available to our members in Braille. We do the Braille translation on the fly. It's not a physical production, but we do offer a digital braille format for our members.
IP financial and rights considerations
[00:12:18] Matty: If authors want to make their books available in these kinds of formats, is it something where they're granting rights to an organization to create that, or are they paying to have it done? What's the financial side of that? Or the rights side of it also?
[00:12:35] Michael: When it comes to Benetech, there's a donation agreement, and authors must sign it. There are no payments involved; neither we nor you pay anything. We handle the conversion for free, and the Braille copy is available to our members at no cost. We are a charity and receive some funding from the federal government, but a significant portion of our funding comes from various foundations and individuals who donate to us.
There is an agreement in place to protect the author's rights, and we have our own security measures to ensure that only qualified users can access the content on Benetech.
Most authors who are not associated with a publishing house contribute content because they want to reach readers who benefit from these services. The best recommendation is from one reader to another, saying, "I read this book, you're going to love it."
We have completed 29 million downloads in the 20 years we've had the service, so a lot of people are reading our books. Authors, individual people, small presses, and even some of the largest presses in the world, with a total of 900 publishers and almost 2,000 imprints, donate content to us. We add about 10,000 titles a month. So, in our situation, there is no cost for conversion and no revenue generation; neither we nor the authors make money from these distributions.
Most other Braille production houses do incur significant costs for creating physical Braille books. I don't believe the Library of Congress charges for these conversions, although they certainly bear the cost of production. For physical Braille inquiries, one would have to consult the American Printing House (APH) or the National Library Service. However, since we are a digital-only organization, I can't provide details on their processes.
Creating digital editions on the fly
[00:14:38] Matty: Creating a physical Braille book can be financially and time-consuming, and there may need to be an assessment process to prioritize which books to convert. If you're offering digital Braille versions, do you need to prioritize among the books submitted for conversion?
[00:15:13] Michael: At Benetech, we translate Braille on the fly. We accept EPUB files into our collection, and when a qualified member requests a particular book in Braille, they initiate the process. Our servers perform the translation, which takes some time, and then we provide the member with a link to download the Braille file. We only translate books when a reader requests them.
Terms to address authors’ and publishers’ rights concerns
[00:15:51] Matty: And as you were putting together the contract that you sign with the author or the agreement, a lot of people, knowing there are bad players out there, would be concerned about signing over rights and may feel nervous about that. Can you talk a little bit about what is or is not included in the contracts to accommodate authors' or publishers' concerns about that?
[00:16:14] Michael: Sure. The donation agreements were co-written by the American Association of Publishers. So that's the publishing world speaking. I realize that's not the independent publishing world, but that's the big folks, and we had guidance from them on what publishing houses and authors would demand.
It's a very straightforward agreement, if such a thing can be true in legal terms. Basically, the person asserts that they have the necessary copyright permission to donate the file, and we confirm that we will only use the book to make it more accessible, and only qualified members of Bookshare, who have a certified print disability, will have access to it.
We do not hyperdistribute, so we won't put the book anywhere other than Bookshare. Some authors and publishers give us worldwide rights, some only English language rights or North American rights, or other specific distributions, similar to the typical publishing rights matrix. There are no royalty statements because there are no royalties since there are no sales. The arrangements are not exclusive, so authors can distribute their books elsewhere as they wish. It's about as harmless as a legal document could be.
[00:17:30] Matty: If someone has an update to their ePub, what is the process for updating it on Bookshare?
[00:18:00] Michael: You would use the traditional feeds you use anywhere in your distribution channel, typically ONIX for that sort of thing. You can inform us if a book is out of publication or if there's a new edition and request us to use the updated version. While I'm oversimplifying the process, that's the general idea.
Accommodating the desired reading experience
[00:18:27] Matty: Accommodating readers who are blind versus those who are dyslexic can be quite different. Does Benetech address both kinds of needs? And if yes, what are the differences, and how do you accommodate them?
[00:18:43] Michael: Yes, we serve all of those print disability categories mentioned earlier, and it really becomes not just about the certified print disability but also about the intended reading experience of the individual.
[00:20:18] Matty: I can imagine that AI is making a huge difference. Certainly, the availability of AI-generated voices is going to make the production of new audiobooks much easier. Can you speak to how AI is being used to improve accessibility?
[00:20:34] Michael: There are a couple of things there. You mentioned AI as it relates to voices. There's a very interesting group, I have no connection, I just find them interesting, called Sounded. S-O-U-N-D-E-D, Sounded.com, and they have very good audiobook technology. They also do a tremendous job protecting the voice actor themselves.
So what they do is they get a voice actor, sign a contract with them. One of their founders is a lawyer who's very sensitive to rights and permissions. So they get the voice actor to agree to say, yes, I understand I'm going to do what you asked me to do, get my voice recorded.
And if you use my voice downstream in a commercial enterprise, then I get paid. So that's one thing. They use that voice and then apply artificial intelligence to take that specific person's voice and apply it to a textbook. They're not just reading a text and having what we used to call Microsoft Bob read it to you.
Even though those synthetic voices are getting much better, this is not that. This is an actual human's voice used in an enhanced way. So that's one thing I think every author, every publishing company should look at that group, Sounded.com. We use artificial intelligence to try and correct machine correctable things for accessibility.
I'll give you a specific example. We are far away from AI being able to solve the problem around image descriptions. Here's just a quick story, right? We're going to have three books. Each of the three books has a picture of the Eiffel Tower. The first book is a cookbook, and at the chapter header around soufflé, someone in editorial thought it would be interesting to have a picture of the Eiffel Tower.
Not teaching me how to make a soufflé, not teaching me what kind of eggs to use, whether I want them at room temperature or straight out of the fridge, there's no information being conveyed; it's an affectation. So, you can do two things. You could mark it as "Image: Eiffel Tower," which is probably just going to annoy people because it's a cookbook; what do I care about that?
Or, you can specifically mark it to say this is a decorative image, and the assistive technology would just ignore it. A lot of blind people read cookbooks, so if you just mark it as a decorative image, then the screen reader will just pretend it's not there. That's one thing. The exact same picture in a different book, in a travelogue book, whether it's a Frommer's type travelogue thing, or whether it's my own personal travel, or whatever it is I'm writing this book about, and now we're on the chapter about what to do in Paris.
Okay, the picture of the Eiffel Tower makes sense. So you say "Image: Eiffel Tower" and then you're going to add a long description. Maybe something interesting about Gustave Eiffel. Maybe it says don't go on Tuesdays; they're closed. I don't know what you're going to say, but something which says it is the Eiffel Tower and here's why I bothered to put the picture of the Eiffel Tower in this chapter.
So again, we're trying to convey knowledge. The third book, the same picture. Maddy, you could have taken the picture. They could have got it from Getty. I don't care where it came from. The same picture, but this is an engineering book. And the picture of the Eiffel Tower is there because we're going to be discussing the tensile strength of structural steel.
So AI is not going to be able to understand. AI could probably say it's the Eiffel Tower with growing degrees of accuracy, but I don't know how AI is going to be able to say, well, the author probably meant this. That's just, that's not a thing, right? AI is useful to us, right? When it comes to things like math and chemistry because the AI can read those formulas if they're in a good format and then translate in a long description to say, "X squared equals Y plus 4Z."
Okay, AI can take that, which might actually be a picture, a PNG or something that the publisher put in the file, and perhaps turn that in. So we do use AI in those circumstances, but to use AI to solve the image problem, to use AI to solve the print page correlation problem, I just, we're not seeing anything about it, and I spend a fair amount of my time talking to these guys.
I just had a talk yesterday with a firm that's focusing on image descriptions. And it's happening. It's better on the web in February of 2024 than it was in February 2023, and it'll be better in 2025, but there's a long way to go. Machines don't actually learn, despite what people tell you. So, we do use it.
It is helpful in certain circumstances, but with my simple Eiffel Tower example, I hope you understand that there's much work to be done yet.
[00:25:10] Matty: Yeah, it seems like the most immediate, practical benefit for people with reading disabilities would be the easier and cheaper availability of audiobooks. And, in the face of people who hate AI, one of the arguments I've made on authors' panels and things like that is that I think the positive side of this is that there are many books that would never have been available in audio had it not been for AI, not that it's suddenly going to displace all the human narrators.
Like I still hire a human narrator for my fiction books, but I do make my nonfiction books available, when I can, via AI-generated narration because those are books that wouldn't be available in audio otherwise.
[00:25:55] Michael: You're absolutely right. And we've been producing DAISY audiobooks for a very long time. The disability community and the accessibility community have been working in the audio space for quite some time, not forever, but for many years.
What is DAISY?
[00:26:15] Matty: You had mentioned DAISY a couple of times. Can you discuss in a little more detail what that is?
[00:26:20] Michael: Sure. The DAISY Consortium is a global organization focused on accessibility standards. I happen to be on the board at DAISY, representing Benetech. I can't even remember how many countries are involved, but there are scores of countries that participate in DAISY projects worldwide. The primary focus of most DAISY organizations is on people who are blind, but not exclusively.
Benetech, for example, covers a wide range of disabilities. So, we interact with the World Wide Web Consortium and the EPUB standards. Actually, the organization is very heavily involved with all sorts of digital and accessibility standards.
Accessibility best practices beyond books
[00:26:59] Matty: And I wanted to also jump back to something we talked about earlier, which is accommodating people with dyslexia. I have read that certain fonts are easier for people with dyslexia to read. Independent of books, if someone is, say, putting together a PowerPoint presentation or something like that, do you have advice on how they can make that more accessible with relatively simple to implement changes, like using one font over another?
[00:27:27] Michael: This becomes a religious debate, to be honest. I usually stick with Times New Roman because most of the people I interact with seem to think that Times New Roman is okay. However, everyone has their own personal preference. The important thing around disability and font choice is not to lock it up in a file, like a PDF, where I can change the font size but can't change the font itself.
So, if you have a properly done digital file, the user should be able to change the font to one that is suitable for them. PDF, of course, doesn't allow for that. But PDF has been a staple for many years, and it does an excellent job of taking a picture of pages.
The issue, of course, is that blind people can't see pictures, so it's not useful from an accessibility standpoint. There are some things that make PDFs more accessible, but really, EPUB is the answer. And EPUB is what the distribution channels want, anyway.
All Microsoft tools have built-in accessibility checkers and aids to help you ensure your documents are accessible. The big challenge with PowerPoints is reading order. So, you know, have you done a good job of defining headings, subheadings, bullet points, and so on? The accessibility checker will help you a great deal with those things.
[00:28:47] Matty: Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like, what is the significance of defining those elements clearly?
[00:28:53] Michael: Sure. Reading order is critically important for people who are blind or have low vision because the PowerPoint is essentially an image. If the image is not effectively described and the content's consumption order is not clear, especially with a complex slide that has a graph here, some words there, and various other elements, it can be confusing. Those with print disabilities, whether they're blind, have low vision, or dyslexia, need built-in navigation that allows keyboard use, as clicking is not an option for those who cannot see where to click. The slide should be structured logically, just as one would order a table or headers.
Imagine you're in a classroom, like in my early days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and you have a pointer, tapping it against the board to direct attention. You want the user's focus to follow the flow of information you intend to convey. That's what I mean by reading order.
[00:30:26] Matty: I can imagine that for both books and presentations, the trend of placing headers at the bottom of the page can be problematic.
[00:30:37] Michael: Yes, and please avoid doing things like having a header three without a header two. Assistive technology does not handle that well.
[00:30:45] Matty: Interesting.
[00:30:46] Michael: It's not that hard to count to three. You know, it's H1, H2, H3. It's really not that complicated.
Next steps for making your work accessible
[00:30:51] Matty: Don't skip any numbers. So, Michael, if someone has listened to this and they're enthusiastic about making their books available to a broader audience, what steps would you recommend they take or what resources would you suggest they use to do that?
[00:31:05] Michael: Well, certainly, we're here to reach the disability audience. My email is [email protected]. Anyone can reach out with questions. Michael La Ronn, one of your members, is an accessibility superhero. So, you know, ask him questions. He's probably already built a YouTube channel about it or something. He's on top of things. That's another good resource. The DAISY Consortium is an excellent resource. If you make your books accessible, you can deliver them to Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and others, and much of your work will translate across these platforms.
I can't speak for what Amazon or Barnes & Noble are up to, but they are certainly aware of, and will accept, EPUBs. They are quietly rolling out more accessibility features to their reading environments. Through the generosity of a company called VitalSource, Benetech even has its own ebook retail store, which is exclusively for accessible ebooks.
[00:32:52] Matty: Okay. Well, Michael, thank you so much for sharing that information. That's an area that is new to me and, I'm sure, to some of the other listeners as well. So thank you for giving us a glimpse into that.
If there are any other places you would like to send people to learn more about you and what you do, please let us know.
[00:33:14] Michael: Yes, benetech.org is the main site for the organization. There's a ton of information there, including some really compelling stories about how lives are changed when readers who previously couldn't access books now can. That's basically why I left my commercial work to join a charity. You read some of those stories, and it's clear it's not that hard to do, and the impact you're going to have on someone's life is incredible. And again, it's over 20% of the population. So, I'm not saying all 20% of those people will buy your book, but I am saying they're not buying your ebook now because they simply can't read it. There's a lot of commercial value there too.
SEO benefits
[00:33:53] Michael: There's also the group of people who decide what you see when you search for things on the internet. I talk to those people all the time, and they are delving into your ebook files, your EPUB files, and taking those alternative texts and long descriptions and using them. So, when someone searches for, say, Sojourner Truth, if you were doing work on slavery, civil rights, or the Underground Railroad, and you might not have Sojourner Truth in your book title or in your ONIX feed, but if you have an image of Sojourner Truth in your book and you've described it with your alt text, that will start to surface when people search for it. So there's that aspect too.
You should do it for the social justice reason, of course. Independent authors typically have struggled their entire lives to be heard and to get published, and we're trying to reach readers who have struggled their whole lives to get books they want to read, so it's a natural match to me. There's the social justice part, but there's also a lot of commercial value, a huge marketplace that is being underserved, and also the challenge we all face as authors: just getting people to know about our work. It's hard enough to write a book and get it published, even if you self-publish. But to get people to know that you did it is even harder. So this is another opportunity.
[00:35:20] Matty: Yeah, well, obviously, you've said all the things that are going to really attract the attention of authors everywhere. So, Michael, thank you so much.
[00:35:27] Michael: Well, thanks for having me. It's been fun.
