Few books and journals are published in a properly accessible form. For most people with print disabilities, special versions of those books and journal articles need to be created, often at great effort and expense by the Disability Services Offices at educational institutions or other post-publication service providers.
This is especially regrettable because modern standards of accessibility employ file formats and standards that publishers and their partners already use routinely–primarily EPUB and HTML, along with Web Accessibility standards like WCAG and ARIA. Today, standard editorial and production workflows already provide files that meet many accessibility requirements and can incorporate features often omitted, such as the creation of proper image descriptions.
In this webinar, Bill Kasdorf will provide an overview of today’s accessibility standards as well as widely available tools and services that make it easier for publishers to make their publications born accessible. Then Jon McGlone and Jillian Downey from Michigan Publishing will describe how the University of Michigan Press has incorporated accessibility into the systems and workflows used to produce and disseminate scholarly books. They will discuss the technical issues that needed to be addressed, the solutions they’ve employed, and the workflow and cultural changes involved, providing a real-world example of a scholarly press working to get accessibility right from the start.
