Guidance

The following are a curated list of available guidance documents and knowledge bases for accessible publishing. They are neither courses to complete, or models/frameworks to structure planning work or checklists to structure auditing and remediation. all of which are available in other areas of this Open Accessibility book. Instead they are details of established best practice that serve as introductions to accessible publishing, authored by key organisations within the more general publishing space.

Accessible Books Consortium - Best Practice Guidelines for Publishers

Accessible Books Consortium - Starter Kit

Accessible Publishing Learning Network - Introduction to Born-Accessible Ebook Production

Accessible Publishing Learning Network - Ebook Workflow Guide: In-house Production of Born-Accessible Ebooks

Accessible Publishing Learning Network - Quality Assurance of Completed Ebooks

Accessible Publishing Learning Network - Introduction to Accessible Ebook Production – Reflowable Ebooks

Accessible Publishing Learning Network - Introduction to Third-party Production of Born-Accessible Ebooks

DAISY Accessible Publishing Knowledge Base

Association of University Presses - Accessibility Guidance

Association of Learning Technologists (ALT) Special Interest Group for Accessibility - A coherent approach for academic publishing

AccessiblePublishing.ca - Accessible Publishing Best Practices

Institute of Professional Editors Limited - Books without barriers: a practical guide to inclusive publishing

Benetech - Creating Accessible Books from the Start

Fondazione LIA - E-books for all

TextBox - ASPIRE papers

Round Table - Guidelines for Producing Accessible E-text

Australian Inclusive Publishing Initiative - Inclusive Publishing in Australia: An Introductory Guide

DAISY - Accessible Music Publishing

DAISY - Position Statement: When to use plain text or images instead of MathML

Guidance for Procurement

Libraries may use established guidance to assess your publisher output for accessibility, so it's helpful to know what the contents of the guidance is.

Make Things Accessible has a range of guidance available within their Accessibility Passport project, in particular the Procurement Accessibility Guidance which contains a Requirements Template. The template consists of 8 aspects that suppliers need to describe, not all of which would be relevant to a small press, for example, the 5th one asks suppliers to describe 'plug-ins' used to make their platform accessible and is only relevant to IT solutions.

In the US, there is an automated tool based on the Section 508 legislation requirements that would allow librarians to select relevant aspects and output their selections as legal boiler plate text. Again it is designed for IT solutions but some of it is relevant to publishers and librarians. Section 508 Accessibility Requirements Tool (ART)

There are also some standard licensing agreements with US and International versions available from the Big Ten Academic Alliance: Library E-Resource Accessibility - Standardised License Language