A Preparation

• 01 Accountability
• Certification
• 02 Training
• 03 Identify Objectives

01 Accountability

Appoint a person to co-ordinate accessibility, who could be a dedicated accessibility professional or someone who has a wider portfolio of work that includes accessibility too. However, it's also important to remember that some accessibility work will be completed by almost everyone at an organisation.

It is possible to delegate responsibility to third party providers of remediation services through Certification or getting external professionals to complete some of the Frontlist, Backlist and Website work. 

Certification

• Benetech’s Global Certificated Accessible (GCA)

• Fondazione LIA's Ebook quality assurance

 

02 Training

Plan technical digital accessibility training and support the identified staff to develop skills. 

 

Introductory Guidelines and Courses

• Accessible Books Consortium’s Accessible Publishing Best Practice Guidelines for Publishers

• Accessible Books Consortium’s Course on Accessible Publishing Concepts

• Accessible Publishing Learning Network’s Introduction to Born-Accessible Ebook Production

• Books without barriers: a practical guide to inclusive publishing

• DAISY Accessible Publishing Knowledge Base

• DAISY’s Inclusive Publishing Initiative

• Publishing Accessibility Action Group

• Inclusive Publishing in Australia: An Introductory Guide

• The ASPIRE guide to accessible PDFs part 1: a user’s guide to negotiating PDFs

• The ASPIRE guide to accessible PDFs part 2: creating (or improving) PDFs

• The ASPIRE guide to accessible PDFs part 3: accessible PDFs in education – create, test, cry…

• EPUB 3.3 W3C Recommendation

• Accessible Publishing Knowledge Base EPUB

• Department for Education Accessibility and inclusive design manual Training

03 Identify Objectives

Once relevant staff have been identified and trained, some organisational accessibility objectives can be devised through requirements gathering exercises. Any organisation should aim to meet legal minimum requirements, but it's possible to be exempt from that (this requires work to evidence), and you may decide to go beyond in some areas if it fits with your organisational values. Also, your readership might already have made accessibility requests you haven't been able to meet yet, or you could survey your end users to capture this 'reader voice' in terms of accessibility requirements. Finally, it's possible there are some community or discipline specific considerations to include as well.