09. Open Accessibility
This book contains a knowledge base, guidance and planning models that will support small diamond open access publishers to improve their accessibility. It is organised into 6 chapters.
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, and we make some suggested interpretations and recommendations that do not constitute legal advice.
Chapter 4 contains our advice for planning to achieve accessibility at a small diamond OA press; firstly showcasing existing planning models, before describing our own. Our model '10 Steps to Creating Custom Accessibility Roadmaps' has 10 steps grouped into 4 sections: Preparation, Analysis & Auditing, Implementation and Improvements & 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 the materials here useful, and that it helps you to improve accessibility as much as is possible.
Authors:
Open Book Futures Work Package 5 - Accessibility
Rupert Gatti, Joanne Fitzpatrick, Jordy Findanis
01 Principles of Open Accessibility
The 'Principles of Open Accessibility' serve as statements of moral and ethical reasons to provid...
02 Accessibility Legislation
This chapter includes information on accessibility legislation and is organised into countries. T...
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 ...
US
Relevant Acts The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is the legislation that states both ‘sta...
03 Accessibility Standards
This chapter summarises specific standards that enable accessibility, and is organised into four ...
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 Strategic Planning for Accessibility
This section contains our advice for planning to achieve accessibility at a small diamond OA pres...
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
06 The Open Book Futures Accessibility Tools
Our customised tools include the following frameworks: 1. Strategic Planning Model and Self Asse...