Discussing accessibility with small publishers

The current situation for academic librarians tasked with content acquisition is changing very fast, and has multiple drivers for this change. One is the widely reported higher education funding crisis, meaning that content and subscription budgets are a focus point for making savings. Additionally, the deals for libraries from the big 5 academic publishers, which in the UK are negotiated nationally, are increasingly unaffordable, and have less than ideal terms and conditions attached to them. Alongside these significant considerations are other factors, such as a strong objective in the sector to diversify reading lists and content, an increase in the volume of published academic materials and the increased significance of alternative publication types, such as datasets and code.

One result of all of these changes is that librarians are much more likely to ingest or acquire content from a larger number of small publishers, and have a different relationship with them, that is less about purchasing or subscribing to content, and more about investing. This changes the nature of the relationship between librarians and publishers, and this in turn changes how you might approach ensuring accessibility requirements are met.

Some small publishers, especially the ones that encompass the Open Book Collective, have a different set of values and a different mission to many others, who are either driven by profit like the big 5, or who are perpetuating existing publication practices such as relying on prestige, administering book processing charges or focusing on growth. Alternative organisational objectives include purposefully scaling small to promote bibliodiversity, offering diamond open access with no charges to read or publish, and operating under alternative not for profit funding models that partially draw on library content budgets to sustain themselves.

For librarians engaging with these publishers, this means two things: 1. You are no longer a purchaser or subscriber of a product, but an investor and key stakeholder in building new models and infrastructures that work for everyone, and 2. You are talking to a very small organisation with very limited resources.

For both of these reasons, it might help to modify your approach to making sure your accessibility requirements are met. Librarians are very used to making sure the products and platforms they subscribe to are the best they can be. They are already heavily engaged with customer representatives and product managers at vendor organisations, and consistently demand better services through submitting feature requests, reporting bugs, attending user events and where this is not forthcoming, changing suppliers or ceasing to subscribe.

This is firm and professional management of this type of product relationship, and the nature of the requirements include accessibility. Librarians will demand platforms and content are accessible, insisting on seeing evidence of this as part of an overall consideration of products and services, and pushing for individual accessibility requests to be actioned, and rightly so.

However, this strong approach might not always be appropriate for an investor rather than customer relationship with a very small organisation. It is possible for some small publishers to be exempt from accessibility legislation due to their size (called a micro organisation in EU law) or because remediation is a disproportionate burden for them, in which case the evidence will be of their exemption. This means that any strict criteria you have may need to be relaxed, for example all library material having to comply with WCAG AA is not realistic, as not even laws demand this.

Continuing, the type of evidence of accessibility that you will accept may need to be considered. While we offer small presses advice on completing VPATs, our advice is that they complete this based on existing knowledge of their own workflows, rather than completing a full audit and perhaps using a dedicated accessibility consultant to do that, like much larger profit driven publishers will be able to provide. A VPAT completed in this way has to be sufficient for your needs. Some presses may not have completed a VPAT at all due to time constraints, and so an accessibility statement will contain the same information, although in a less convenient format for yourselves, and we advise that this is accepted as an alternative, and within a time scale that is reasonable.

As an investor, something else to consider is how the press is funded, as you will be invested in and care about it's long term financial health more than you would that of a much larger publisher. When considering accessibility requests from individual users, be prepared that a small publisher may need to decline actioning that due to time, cost or other constraints that are much more likely to be a disproportionate burden on them. As a partner and stakeholder, there might be something that can be done by the library that can take some of this burden away, such as producing an accessible format yourselves or offering other solutions. Librarians should share this responsibility in this situation and see it as both parties supporting a shared interest and investment, rather than other situations were libraries are being charged a premium and it can be seen to be doing some of the work themselves they are paying others to do.