Illinois Web Accessibility Conference and Expo: Session 1 – Keynote Speaker Trasan, Senior Yahoo Accessibility Manager

Why does a conversation about making content accessible to all always end up talking about people with disabilities? For most people, technology use is a choice (grab a book, hop in the car, etc). For people with disabilities, technologies is not a choice, but essential for everything, even up to cooking (microwave oven with tactile labels, audio alerts to know something is charging/finished charging). But accessibility makes life easier for everyone but for some people it doesn't just make life easier, it makes it possible.

He speaks at every new hire presentation. Firs they see the Benefits people (work hard, get shares, there excited about getting rich). They show lots of videos, and then give them a few tests. One it to give them a test to write a bunch of numbers (huge random numbers in the millions) then they describe what each of those are (number of people who are blind, how much disabled users spend each year, etc.) and this gets their attention. They just do this to make sure the concept of accessibility is in their mind from the first day.

They always ask right away how many disabled people use yahoo. Then he has to explain to them why this is a bad question- if you don't design accessible products to begin with, you won't attract any of those users anyway. And besides, we don't ask how many customers are Chinese, but we make a Chinese language site. And you'll never be able to collect this information because browsers don't indicate if users are employing screen readers or other assistive technologies.

They complain that making accessible stuff is hard! And he admits it can be, but finds that most of the time the majority of accessibility issues are very easy to fix. He wishes there were more advanced problems to deal with, because it would be more challenging. They spend lots of time with simple things ("where is the alt text for your images")- questions and problems that we should be beyond by now.

Myth 1: Accessible design means you can't have a very visual based layout/presentation. No- If you design correctly from the start- lay out content first and then put visual design on top, and then you do almost anything you want with the visual part.

Myth 2: I have to meet every accessibility guidelines out there (a testing tool that spits out 300 possible errors/problems per page). Guidelines are just there to help keep you on the right track. What we are aiming for is making web sites usable for everyone. If you only comply with 1 guideline, and your site is functionally accessible, then you're good.

Myth 3:I have no idea how assistive technologies like screen readers work- so I can't tell what is a good, useful accessible design, even when I try to use a screen reader. If something doesn't feel native to you (screen reader) then it is hard to test what you've built. They actually don't test correctly- they still indicate things on screen that must be seen, that they use the mouse (so maybe for that development you remove the mouse and turn off the screen). You must involve the actual users of the technologies you've been building for, like a screen reader. [This is the same as non-assistive technology users to test a site, and Neilson's rules of usability testing on the cheap would apply here too).

Finally, just a quick note- if dealing with accessibility becomes to mundane, you're not going to enjoy whatever it is your doing. So find the part of accessibility (designing pictures, html markup, dynamic content, testing users etc). Find the accessibility versions of that that interest you, and work on those. That might mean using testing tools on you products, interacting with real accessible technology users, etc.

[Jon interrupted to ask HIM to move along to demo, because we were running out of time]

With Web 2.0, we are pushing the boundaries of the users online experience, and that has made a lot of screen reader users very unhappy (because these new tools haven't been designed to be accessible).

He is using (and yahoo looses a lot) called MVDA, an open source screen reader for windows. The reason he isn't using JAWS is because MVDA is free and open source * you can download and play with it) and it tends to be the most precise of all screen readers- it's not forgiving. MVDA won't guess anything, unlike JAWS and other commercial products that will guess. That leads developers to believe that they've made a universally accessible site, when really they've just made a site that works with JAWS.

Demo of the current yahoo home page. Shows the new "My Favorites" module too, that allows [iGoogle like] portal experience. First how do we make this accessible for keyboard only users, then screen reader users. First notify users that when they type, something has come up on the screen. For instance- search suggestions are available for the auto-suggest drop down box that a sighted users could just see. [Although I think after the first X number of characters it should stop telling the user]. They did this with ARIA compliant markup for the live region (the input box). And an audible alert to return to the search box first (press escape key to return to search, up down to go through suggestions, right arrow to move to related materials). Every time the move between panels, there is an audible alert telling them which region they are in, and instruction on how to move back to their previous areas. Also a ton of audible alerts to explain how to move to different regions (first results, etc) after a search has returned results.

And there "intelligent searches" extends to after the search (search for this term in Wikipedia) and those links also give audible results). Those search refinement have keyboard shortcuts assigned, so users can quickly re-execute searches in specific highly used domains.

Talk about the hover feature on the yahoo mail option. That hover option doesn't work with screen readers, so they introduced additional links so you could expand those preview panels from the keyboard. He demoed a link to all things digital. He hits enter and the content area (search results area) with content from all things digital (well, in this case the demo failed, but still had content- sorry this isn't working right now). But when they click that link, focus is also moved to the beginning of that content area. When the user moves out of that preview area, they are returned to the full list of preview options. Their yahoo preview actually makes a more accessible version of the Facebook content than Facebook itself (because they scare that content and then present it in their own data wrappers/templates). They give the users a message about the content loading, or not being loaded, using ARIA live regions. They do this with a "close link" option, attached to the red X close window button/link. [I wonder why they didn't announce a keyboard shortcut for going back to the list as you enter the dynamic content region, rather than having to use so many tabs to click- like click ctrl and up or down arrow to move through the my favorites links, or just click ctrl+shift+alt+enter toe return to your previous position in the my favorites list].

Q: Are their preference for screen reader users to control how much audible feedback they get though Yahoo? A. No - They don't have anything built in to their site for preferences on what is being read or not, they leave that up to the screen reader preferences.

Q What toolkits are you using to develop this- or are you developing your own. A. This design is using YUI 3. yuiblog.com for more information on this. Check developer.yahoo.com as well for yahoo specific development. This new home page only went live a week ago, so they haven't blogged much about it yet (it was in development).

Q. How do you convey the shortcut keys to regular users? A. All via the help documentation, not anywhere on the page (status bar, etc)/ Yahoo feels every pixel counts- since they're an add driven company. So space for that type of on-screen prompting isn't available).

Q. Do you foresee a time that something very graphical, like yahoo PIPES, can be made to be accessible? A. Yes, eventually, absolutely. PIPES is only in maintenance mode now, which is why it isn't. But if you apply ARIA and good usable design, it's possible. For instance, the latest firebug, which is very complex and visually oriented, is 100% accessible now.

Q: Regarding advertisements- since they are revenue based, do they have to do something to make the ads accessible? A. That's an ongoing effort of hi, getting them in that mindset. Now it depends on the site. For the yahoo font page, more so but not 100%. He currently is trying to get at least alt content for ads, describing the content beyond "flash ad here." Right now the problem is the third party developers aren't providing enough meta-data for yahoo to intercept and remediate. Right now they markup up iframes as ads, allow screen reader users to skip them. But they really can't turn away a one million dollar ad from a company because it's not accessible.

Q: When adding instructions for navigation, in going through this process, did the navigation get improved over-all (for non-screen reader users). Yes, they found that users really appreciated they were guiding them. [I think Nick was asking about non-assistive technology user, and the speaker answer about testing with screen reader users).

Q: Suggestions for how sighted user can experiment with screen reading software? Start by browsing the web for some excellent screen reader videos. For sighted people- nothing is as powerful as watching a video of an actual user trying to user their product with a screen reader. He's made one video for that online as well (shameless plug, so search for his)/ Download MVDA and play with it. Finally, get together with an actual screen reader user and take some notes. You'd be surprised how much you can learn in a short period of time.

First thoughts on: Nicholas et al, Student digital information-seeking behavior in context

Journal of Documentation 66.1 (2009): p106-132. doi: 10.1108/00220410910926149 (University of Illinois Access)

Why should you read this: There's plenty of data in here to compare student versus staff/faculty aggregate use of e-journals and e-books. I didn't find the detailed level of transactional analysis I was hoping for: examining individual user's paths through the library web site and these resources, and back, but I'm not exactly disappointed by this. That level of sophisticated user behavior monitoring requires an extraordinary amount of information collecting at the point of use (often requiring tracking users using cookies, and applying this tracking across multiple domains, many out of the libraries control), not to mention exhaustive vetting by IRBs and full disclosure to potential participants. This level of study is something I hope to see being generated in the near future, and I wouldn't be at all shocked to see it come from Nicholas et al. :)

In brief: Deep log analysis of a community of users (students, teachers, researchers) from the four year long Virtual Scholar program, consisting of more than three million transactions. This study analyzes users' actual interactions with two e-journal (Syngery- Blackwell, 700 journals and OhioLINK, 6000 journals) and one e-book collection (Oxford Scholarship online, 1200 titles). The researchers contrast their own findings of pervious research that generally has relied on self-selected/reported research methods (and less in-depth transactional log analysis). Also includes a very good lit review. "The university studied [regarding Synergy] has more than 2,500 full-time faculty members, slightly less than 3,000 full-time members of staff and about 9,800 students of which about 4,000 are undergraduates." p. 119 " University College London was studied with regards to Oxford Scholarship Online. University College London " has more than 4,000 academic and research staff and about 19,000 students of which more than a third are at graduate level." p. 125

Interesting quotes and my thoughts:

Highlights from their excellent review of the literature:

"students… were more likely to undertake longer online sessions." p. 106

"The literature shows that undergraduate students opt for the easiest and most convenient method of information seeking (Valentine, 1993), and appreciate the time saving characteristics of electronic resources (Dalgleish and Hall, 2000). Students are said to rely heavily on simple search engines, such as Google to find what they want. (Dalgleish and Hall, 2000; Becker, 2003; Drabenstott, 2003)." p. 108

" The young web users tended to examine briefly the first few hits on the initial results pages before performing new searches, rather than examining every hit in detail." p. 108-9

" Prabha et al. … showed that undergraduate and graduate students tend to stop looking for information when they find the required number of sources for an assignment." P. 109

And highlights from their research/findings

"In terms of the type of page viewed, surprisingly perhaps, undergraduates proved to be the biggest viewers of abstracts… The use of PDFs increased as users moved up the academic scale… Perhaps undergraduates were much more interested in cutting and pasting, something much easier to do in HTML format?" p. 114

My own experience with undergraduates makes me think this might be because undergraduates sometimes consider an abstract "enough" information (satisficing). In a study I'm currently conducting, several undergraduates explained to me that they often just looked for good sources (meaning sources their instructors had indicated were acceptable, not necessarily any analysis they were doing to determine quality for themselves) to cite. They went on to explain that they had, in the past, simply attributed some statement in a written assignment for a class to a likely article based simply on reading the abstract. They indicated that they did this because they were confident that their instructor would not perform a detailed enough analysis of their paper to discover that they had not actually accessed, let alone read, the materials they were citing (and were more confident this would be the case if an item wasn't easily accessible online).

" Most Synergy sessions did not feature the use of the internal search facility but of those that did undergraduates, as might have been expected, were the most likely to use it… Undergraduates undertook the greatest number of searches, 10 per cent of all sessions saw more than ten searches being conducted. What is not clear is whether this constituted effective searching or not" p.115-116

"While nearly two-thirds (65 per cent) of staff searches used advance search… this was true of just over half (54 per cent) of searches conducted by students. Students were more likely to undertake a search using only a simple search." p. 124

"A third of UCL usage related to the student halls of residence network, which considering that the Oxford books were monographs (thought to be more suitable for staff) rather than text books, showed a strong interest in e-books amongst students, something which conflicts with the findings of others (Anuradha and Usha, 2006)." P.125-6

I don't see this finding at all in conflict with the findings of Anuradha and Usha. To make such a claim would require comparing this particular population's use of e-books against their use of print books, especially given the extremely small size of the e-book collection (1200 titles) compared to the UCL print collection of nearly one million volumes. In fact, I now feel the need to go dig up my old notes (from my pre blogging days :) on Anuradha and Usha's work. Since those are already written, they'll get posted before this review. There, done. See my post First thoughts on: Anuradha and Usha, Use of e-books in an academic and research environment: A case study from the Indian Institute of Science. The only fact I can draw from this data is that students seem to use more e-books than staff do (at least students in residence halls and staff in their offices- who knows about staff use from home or off-site office/coffee shops, etc) and not that students, generally, use e-books in any substantial sense when compared to their use of print books (or other electronic information sources, like free web sites, electronic journals, etc)

"Finally, students were more likely to find OSO titles via the Library catalogue… [than]… staff." p. 126

This is more evidence that, for undergraduate students at least, it is vitally important to make sure that access to e-books is provided via the catalog, or via whatever tool is the default/go-to tool for students when looking for library provided information. This could just as easily be a meta/federated search tool that incorporated book the library print and electronic bibliographic information, e-journal collections, and librarian generated electronic content, rather than a traditional catalog, so long as it was the primary tool for locating information- something most likely facilitated by making it the most prominent search (or only search) off the library's web site.

"Thus the usage profile [for the use of e-journals] of undergraduates is that they conduct many sessions but do not view a lot of pages during a session… This all fits the picture of students as "bouncers" established by the authors (Nicholaset al., 2007). However, this turned out not to be the case with e-books where students viewed more pages in a session than staff. This could be because e-books are a more appropriate form of e-resource to students, which seems logical." p. 128

"In regard to full-text viewing, the Synergy study showed that the use of PDFs increased as users moved up the academic scale, from undergraduate to professor/teacher." P. 128

"The OhioLINK study showed that students were more likely to record long online sessions lasting more than 15 minutes… Students were much more likely to read online than other academic groups and this was partly to do with personal preferences and partly to do with the print charges students are faced with in many institutions… a survey conducted by Outsell … found that undergraduates were more willing to rely on electronic resources than graduates and faculty, with approximately half using electronic resources exclusively or almost exclusively. A survey carried out at the University of Strathclyde… found that the majority of [student]users (94 per cent) read them on-screen." p. 129

" Overall… e-resource use… is on the increase and there is a reliance on simple searching, and students get better at searching as their skills as they progress to the higher stages of their studies." p.129

"It would be a mistake to believe that it is only students' information seeking that has been fundamentally shaped by huge digital choice…Virtual Scholar research has shown that a considerable number of users exhibit a bouncing/flicking behaviour, which sees searching conducted horizontally, rather than vertically. Power browsing and viewing appear to be the norm for many; reading appears to be undertaken only occasionally online, probably undertaken offline and in some cases not done at all." p.129-30

First thoughts on: Anuradha and Usha, Use of e-books in an academic and research environment: A case study from the Indian Institute of Science.

Program 40.1 (2006): p 48-62. doi: 10.1108/00330330610646807 (University of Illinois Access)

A quick note: I'm sorry that this doesn't quite follow my normal review style. I actually dredged this up from notes I took over two years ago on this article. I wanted to post them, though, because an article I'm reviewing right this moment (and am about to post a review for :) mentions this article and indicates that their own research is at odds with Anuradha and Usha's- an assertion I don't agree with. Rather than trying to just take a few excerpts from these notes and post them in the other review, I decided to just go ahead and post all my notes for this article. By the way, if you ever are wondering if I have notes on a publication regarding e-books (in particular academic e-books) on hand- well, I probably do. Just fire off an email or blog comment and I'll dig through my older notes for you.

Why should you read this: This is definitely a must-read for anyone interested in e-book use in academic libraries.

In Brief: Analysis of a 27 question e-mailed user survey of patrons of the Indian Institute of Science's 2,200+ active researchers (students and faculty) to which 101 responded in 2004 about their use of and feelings about e-books in general and several library trials from the publisher/vendors ebrary, Kluwer and Engineering Village. Starts with a good introduction to what e-books have been defined as in the past (50-51).

Key Quotes & My Thoughts:

Anuradha and Usha found, in their 27 question e-mailed user survey of patrons of the Indian Institute of Science's 2,200+ active researchers use of ebrary, Kluwer and Engineering Village that, "like all internet-based resource, e-books break down geographic barriers" (Anuradha and Usha, 49) which is true, in so much as too people at two different locations can access an e-book equally well, provided, of course, that they both can access the internet where they are. If they are not, then it is unlikely they will be able to use the e-book as easily as a traditional paper book. Although getting access initially to the book is enhanced, in cases where e-books can't be used offline, the print book, once initially obtained from the library, provides more consistently reliable continual access than most e-books, do to the unnecessary restrictions most e-book providers place on the ability to save or print e-books contents for offline viewing, even in those places without internet access. Anuradha and Usha summarize their own research and list the many real and potential advantages e-books have offered for several years now to both librarians and patrons but immediately acknowledge that "In spite of these advantages, e-books are still not very popular." Among the possible reasons they list for this are "limited availability of titles… difficulty in accessing computers or the internet… problems with printing and downloading" (Anuradha and Usha, 51).

Of the respondents (101) 60 had used e-books. Of these 60, 52 indicated that they would want to use/read e-books from the Library (54). This is not surprising, given then computer science, technology and other STM electronic publications generate more use than other subjects in most of the literature. What is surprising is that although 87 percent of the respondents who had used e-books at some point wanted to use e-books from the library, but that of the 55 respondents who gave an answer to the question "Overall how satisfied are you with eBooks?" none said they where extremely satisfied, while 37% said they here very satisfied, but 55% stated they where only somewhat satisfied while 8% where unsatisfied (Anuradha and Usha, 55). That means that although on the one hand this study indicates that 87% of the surveyed population wants to use library e-books, of those that have used them, fully 63% aren't satisfied with the e-books they have used. This, despite the fact that 70% would definitely recommend, and another 17% probably recommend, e-books to others. These seemingly incongruous findings might be accounted for when you consider the reasons they commonly gave for using e-books, and about what features of e-books that impressed respondents, the clear consensus of useful features were: search tools to locate words or quotes (72%) and instant access to content (63) followed by mobility (50%) (Anuradha and Usha, 56), so there are clearly features that are unique to the e-book as a location independent access as compared to the print book. However, mobility is a more difficult concept to define. Mobility as it pertains to e-books is usually tied to the DRM methods employed to protect the publishers content rights management and distribution interest. In all of the publishers listed in this study, there is no possibility for downloading e-books to a device that could later be used at a location that does not have access to the internet.

Among the respondents reasons for not using e-books, at the top of the lists where the fact that they where "hard to read/browse" at 22%, "lack of familiarity with products" at 19%, "used to reading print books and no wish to change" at 18% and cost at 17%. Another interesting reason, considering that all of these researchers have a high reported access and use of computer, with 100 having used a computer for over a year, and 80 percent having used computers for more than five years is that 11 percent reported difficulty in accessing computers/internet. This would seem to indicate that although they can access a computer and the internet periodically, it is not ubiquitous enough for them that they can always easily access they e-books under the format and conditions they where being provided by the publishers investigated in this survey… all publishers who subscribe to the "online or internet based" as opposed to "offline" (50).

"The main features of e-books that were disliked were the incompatibility between different suppliers,, lack of user friendliness of interfaces, the problems associated with usernames and passwords, and the variety of devices available in the market" (58).

"Thus, by carrying out user education, publicity, raising awareness about the software/hardware used for e-books, increasing bandwidth and making e-book reader devices available along with e-books through the libraries, the use of e-books can be increased" (59).

Web Accessibility for Online Learning

Web Accessibility for Online Learning, written by Hadi Rangin, Web Design and Accessibility Specialist for the Illinois Center for Information Technology and Web Accessibility, Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES) (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is a must read for anyone creating online course materials. You can meet Hadi in person at the upcoming Illinois Web Accessibility Conference and Expo on September 29th at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center in Urbana, Illinois.

New Apple iPod products out, but where's my 32/64 gig nano?

Ah Apple, how you wound me. So often you give me what I need (let's see, I own, or have owned, six- maybe seven - iPod variants over the years). And what I need now is a small, flash based MP3 player. I just love my 16 gig nano, but it's out of room. I had waited with bated breath for today's iPod rollout, expecting to see a new 32 gig (and maybe even a 64 gig) nano. And instead you just cram new features into the same old shell. A (video) camera, a larger screen, fm support (and recording) are all neat, but you could have just left those areas for the Touch (which is the bells and whistles model anyway). What I need is a single purpose device (mp3 player) that is super small, with enough flash based storage for all my content and a reasonable battery life. 32 gigs will do for my music, but now that I'm using Audible (after they finally upped their audio quality to the "enhanced" – which for me means tolerable – audio format) I need 64. I'll keep an eye out for the rest of the day. Maybe more models are yet to be announced? Hope, hope, hope…

Upcoming Event at the University of Illinois: Illinois Web Accessibility Conference and Expo

The Illinois Web Accessibility Conference and Expo is an all day event Tuesday, September 29th at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center at the University of Illinois. $50 (early registration, $75 after Sept. 22. Metered parking available $0,75/hour or get an all day parking pass for $9.00 from the Campus Parking Department)

Keynote Speaker: Victor Tsaran, Senior Accessibility Program Manager at Yahoo.

This will be the best bang for the buck as far as a accessibility conferences go (the price includes a boxed lunch)! And, if you're interested, I'll be part of one of the panel discussions (the Content Management Systems II: Illinois Efforts panel), so stop by and heckle me. :)

First thoughts on: Soules, The shifting landscape of e-books

New Library World 110.1/2 (2009): p7-21. doi: 10.1108/03074800910928559 (University of Illinois Access)

Why should you read this: This is a pretty good summary and comparison of the most salient and striking findings of the ebrary surveys. I also enjoyed the author's own insights gained from on-the-ground interactions with users, librarians, and library staff. If you haven't read the ebrary surveys yourself (and don't feeling like wading through them) this article serves as a pretty good surrogate. It's also well written and a generally pleasurable read.

In Brief: Review of the some findings in the 2007-2008 ebrary e-book survey of libraries, librarians, and users about their perceptions and use of e-books, with added information provided from the author's own experiences.

My thoughts:

I understand the author's desire to see the teaching of the advanced features of e-book not supported (or at least certainly frowned upon :) in the print world- like annotating and highlighting text, or the automatic creation of citations, or any cool, useful feature that would, once taught, drive students to use e-books. However, at this point in the evolution and adoption of the e-book, that just doesn't seem practical. Every vendor/publisher platform offers different variations of "advanced features," and e-books as content are very transitory at this point (see the author's mention of a chapter of one e-book being revoked, or e-books moving between platforms from year to year). On the other hand, if we do come to a point where there is a standard file format for e-books that users can download and permanently archive (similar to a PDF, but based on something more flexible and non-proprietary, like the open .epub standard as a delivery format and not, as it seems more likely to become, an industry storage/exchange format that gets converted to a proprietary format for delivery to end users) then at that point we can start to teach advanced ways to interact with e-books (like highlighting and annotating). Once those features can easily be overlaid onto e-books, independent of the platform they were hosted on/delivered through, in a completely publisher/vendor agnostic way (think of the various open standards that dictate how web content is authored, and how any number of web browser and other application can easily manipulate this content in any way), then, at that point, we should rush out and start teaching users how these advanced approaches can make their digital consumption easier and richer (at the same time :) than print consumption. Once we get to that point (_sigh_, I mean if) then librarians and instructors can begin to offer lessons on the advanced manipulation of texts, knowing that the tool they are teaching (say the Zotero of e-book markup and manipulation) will remain available to their students for use indefinitely (okay, I know that's never going to happen, where talking about file formats and electronic devices after all) or at least for a reasonably long period of time, then we teach them how.

Interesting quote: "Fundamentally important is the need to broaden the concept of an e-book" p.10

Interesting quote: "Ability for more than one student to use an e-book at the same time… When students reach the [license based access] limit, they do not know why… They do not connect e-books with the concept of circulation. They are used to entering databases without a user limit." P. 13

Interesting quote: "The students… basically want to cut and paste into their research papers, print for easier reading or reading when online is not practical (on public transit, for example), or download to use later… One [barrier to this use] is clearly copyright and publisher concerns." p.13

Interesting quote: "There are a couple of other drivers that will influence how soon students become fully used to e-books. One of these is the textbook market." p.14

Interesting quote: "Thus, the tide appears to be shifting generally in science, humanities, and social sciences, with e-books undergoing a slow evolution rather than a dramatic revolution." p.15

Interesting quote: "Faculty does think that there are too many technical restrictions on e-books, citing printing, number of users, etc." p.16

Interesting quote: "e-books currently tend to be more expensive than print books." P.17

Interesting quote: "Despite the issues and despite slower-than-expected evolution, e-books prevail" p.19

Warning- nitpicking and good-natured ribbing follows. I have a slight issue with the word choice here. I don't feel that e-books, at this point, have really lived up to the hype to the point where I'd see them as deserving of the term prevail, as in
"effectual or efficacious; successful." If we consider the generally obsolete use of the term, "to become very strong; to gain vigour or force; to increase in strength," well, that I'll give the academic e-book market. They have been gaining force/popularity/prominence, just not at the rate we'd like (and keep getting promised).

I do concur with the authors conclusion that the ascendency of the e-book in general (and academic use/prominence in academic libraries in particular) is happening now, and will displace print books eventually, although the exact format of and method of delivery/access may change dramatically before we get to that point. The author, wisely (unlike many pervious e-books proselytizers) is not lured into making predictions on just when this might happen.