Guidance

The following are a curated list of available guidance documents and knowledge bases for accessible publishing. 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
• Association of University Presses - Accessibility Guidance (members only)
• PKP - Creating Accessible Content: A Guide for Editors and Authors

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