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

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:

Manual checking

EPUBs and PDFs

HTML and Web Pages

For HTML books and web pages, you would need to consider all of WCAG AA, rather than just the selected checklist above, which only includes aspects of standards that apply to ebook files that need to be manually checked. Below are a list of already available widely used full WCAG based checklists:

WebAIM's WCAG 2 Checklist

Checklist of Checkpoints for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

Deque Accessibility Developer's Guide