09. Open Accessibility
This book, organised into six chapters, contains a knowledge base, guidance and planning models that will support small open access publishers to improve their accessibility. If this is your first time here, we suggest you go straight to our navigation help page 'Start Here', where we present a range of routes in to our advice depending on your needs.
After this, the first 3 chapters, 'Principles of Open Accessibility', 'Legislation' and 'Standards', are knowledge-based and are intended to inform. We present moral-, ethical-, legal and standards-based justifications for producing accessible books and websites, making some suggested interpretations and recommendations which, however, should not be seen as constituting legal advice.
Chapter 4 provides advice for planning to achieve accessibility at a small- or medium-sized open access press. It firstly showcases existing planning models, before describing our own model, '10 Steps to Creating Custom Accessibility Roadmaps', which is grouped into four sections: 'Preparation', 'Analysis and Auditing', 'Implementation' and 'Improvements and Benchmarking'. Each of the 10 steps contains extensive guidance and links to external resources.
Chapter 5 contains collated examples of other press's work that is either published online or has been anonymised and that we have permission to share.
Finally, in chapter 6, we present our planning tool and checklist as downloadable documents that can be used by publishers, a section or task at a time to plan and deliver work.
We hope you find these resources useful and that they will help you to improve accessibility as much as is possible.
Authors:
Open Book Futures Work Package 5 - Accessibility
Rupert Gatti, Joanne Fitzpatrick, Jordy Findanis
00 Start Here!
Contents Map
I want to learn about legal minimum requirements for accessibility
This is a great place to start. We have summarised accessibility legislation here: 02 Accessibili...
I want to go beyond the legal minimum or explore alternatives to legal compliance
Brilliant, accessibility is so much more than legal requirements, and it could be that going beyo...
I understand legislative requirements, but not other technical details
Right, so you get that most legislation requires adherence to some version of WCAG at level AA in...
I understand most of the technical details, but I don't know where to start working on improvements
That's a really good achievement, and great to hear you're ready to get to work. We have curated ...
Have you got any checklists?
Sure we have! Checklists are a useful part of auditing, being a manual process of looking at each...
How is everyone else handling and interpreting this?
Accessibility is complicated, and often depends on deciding on interpretations using your best ju...
I've got a bit lost and I want to understand what resources are available overall
The Open Book Futures Accessibility Tools Courses to complete Guidance documents and knowledge ...
01 Principles of Open Accessibility
The Principles of Open Accessibility serve as statements providing moral and ethical reasons to e...
02 Accessibility Legislation
This chapter includes information on accessibility legislation in the UK, the EU and the US. The ...
UK
Relevant Acts Equality Act 2010 is the legislation that states both public and private bodies ca...
EU
Relevant Acts The European Accessibility Act (EAA) is the legislation that states some products ...
Ireland
Relevant Acts Ireland is subject to the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and the EU Web Accessib...
US
Relevant Acts The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is the legislation that states both ‘sta...
Australia
Australia Relevant Acts The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA) is the main legislation th...
03 Accessibility Standards
This chapter, organised into four areas, summarises specific standards that enable accessibility....
Digital Content Standards
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standard...
Digital Document Standards
Accessible EPUBs EPUB Accessibility 1.1 addresses two key needs in the EPUB® ecosystem: eva...
Metadata Standards that include accessibility tags
There are two ways that metadata accompanies a publication. In the first are digital publication ...
Markup languages that allow provision of accessibility features and tools
HTML Living Standard Hyper Text Markup Language is the ubiquitous web page Markup standard, with...
04 Planning for Accessibility
This section contains our advice for planning to achieve accessibility at a small open access pre...
Guidance
The following are a curated list of available guidance documents and knowledge bases for accessib...
Models, Frameworks and Charters
The following are a curated list of available planning models or frameworks for achieving accessi...
The OBF Open Accessibility Strategic Planning Model '10 Steps to Creating Custom Accessibility Roadmaps'
Considering what your accessibility goals are, and forming a plan or roadmap to achieve them, is ...
A Preparation
01 Accountability
Appoint a person to co-ordinate accessibility, who could be a dedicated accessibility professiona...
Certification
textBOX ASPIRElist for publishers Benetech’s Global Certificated Accessible (GCA) F...
02 Training
Plan technical digital accessibility training and support the identified staff to develop skills....
03 Identify Objectives
Once relevant staff have been identified and trained, some organisational accessibility objective...
B Analysis and Auditing
04 Baseline Auditing
Audit the current accessibility of all aspects of the organisation, including the frontlist and b...
Automated Testing
There are many proprietary and open source tools available to audit accessibility using automated...
Manual Checking
Checklist for manual checking You can download this checklist, produced by us, in a spreadsheet ...
Assistive Technology Tests
We recommend running at least a sample of eBooks through assistive technology in order to double ...
End user testing from print disabled people
While not common for small presses, and likely this is beyond available capacity, best practice w...
05 Available and Required Capacity and Budget
Improving accessibility requires dedicated time and money, and a full consideration of where this...
C Implementation
06 Documentation
Capturing the results of identifying objectives, auditing, and analysing resources might happen a...
Accessibility Policy
Having a documented policy about how you want the organisation to handle accessibility might be a...
Author Guidelines
If not already, including accessibility requirements within author submission guidelines is recom...
07 Plan Work
We recommend that frontlist and backlist/remediation are considered separately, and that separate...
Book files Frontlist / Born Accessible
This type of work concerns making accessibility improvements to books that are about to be publis...
Book files Backlist / Remediation
This type of work concerns making accessibility improvements to books that have already been publ...
The Website functionality
1. Front end for readers Your public facing website is also included within accessibility legisl...
08 Public Statements
Publish accessibility statements and roadmaps on the organisation's website, and include VPATs an...
Accessibility Statements
UK, EU and US legislation all require an accessibility statement to be published on the organisat...
VPATs
The ITI Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) is a free template that translates access...
D Improvements and Benchmarking
05 Example Work from other Publishers
Accessibility Statements
https://www.openbookpublishers.com/libraries/accessibility https://lup.be/accessibility/ https:...
Author Guidelines
Submission Accessibility Guidelines at JSTOR Publishers
Frequently Asked Questions, Known Complexities and Example Solutions
Accessibility Statements in Metadata - should this be at the individual book or whole publisher c...
Other
Accessibility FAQ for Books at JSTOR Publishers
06 The Open Book Futures Accessibility Tools
Our customised tools include the following frameworks: 1. Strategic Planning Model and Self Asse...