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Auditing Advice

Audit the current accessibility of all aspects of the organisation, including the frontlist and backlist book files, the website functionality and the backend submission platform. You could complete this yourself using self auditing, or employ an external auditor. You could also look at assessing current organisational knowledge, attitudes towards and motivations for engaging with accessibility work.

Automated Testing

Manual Checking

Assistive Technology Tests

End user testing from print disabled people

Automated Testing

There are many proprietary and open source tools available to audit accessibility using automated testing. Below we have collated our top picks for open source tools, however many publishers may have budget to purchase a tool to do this, therefore, we have included links to other curated lists of accessibility tools from recommended sources. It's important to note that automated testing is only part of the process and can only take you so far, as many accessibility features require human assessment, for example, automated tools can check for the presence of ALT text, but can only guess at it's quality, for example length or matching the file name, and full quality checking will always need a human.

Top Picks:

EPUBs

Ace by Daisy: https://daisy.org/activities/software/ace/

Smart by Daisy: https://smart.daisy.org/

PDFs

PAC (Pdf Accessibility Checker): https://pac.pdf-accessibility.org/en

HTML and Web Pages

Wave Browser extensions https://wave.webaim.org/extension/

Accessibility Checker: https://accessibilitychecker.org/

More tools:

https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/tools/list/

https://accessibility-manual.dwp.gov.uk/tools-and-resources

https://github.com/ediblecode/accessibility-resources?tab=readme-ov-file#checkers

https://www.a11yproject.com/resources/#tools