Accessibility Policy
Having a documented policy about how you want the organisation to handle accessibility might be a useful tool. If your press has more individuals involved, uses external partners more often or doesn't yet have a strong organisational buy in for accessibility, then it might be helpful to set expectations in a formal policy. It is not common for small diamond publishers to have one. Even so, an accessibility policy can help all stakeholders to understand exactly how they support accessibility with their work, and why they should be doing this. An accessibility policy is not the same as an accessibility statement, and is more of an internal document (while statements are public), but it can be shared alongside the statement, or include a lot of the same text.
Some recommended things to include in an accessibility policy are:
- A statement on the organisation's commitment to accessibility.
- The scope of the policy, to include book files, web pages and submission platforms.
- A statement that accessibility work is completed by all individuals involved in the organisation and is everybody's role. You could include the named person with overall responsibility for accessibility as well.
- The legal minimum standards you are working with, and a statement that all book files and the website will have a plan in place to achieve this standard.
- Your approach to achieving this work, for example, by working closely with authors, procuring third party systems or using the services of external partners.
- Details of where you are not in control of the accessibility of content i.e. third party providers.
- How everyone at the organisation will be trained in accessibility.
- How often you plan to do auditing work to benchmark improvements and progress along the roadmap.
- Time and budget investments that are planning to be made.
- How accessibility will be evidenced and checked.
- How the accessibility statement, and any other systematic documentation, will be created and kept up to date.
- Contact details for feedback and additional accessibility requests.
More information:
W3C Developing Organizational Policies on Web Accessibility
Accessible.org - How to Write an Accessibility Policy
Gov.UK Sample accessible documents policy
Examples:
Oxford Brookes University Accessibility Policy
University of Reading Digital Accessibility Policy