The theme for this year’s University Press Week is #StepUP, and there is no better way for UNDP to step up than by making our publications more accessible to our readers. Find out from Matt Dowd, managing editor and member of our accessibility committee, how UNDP has already taken big steps toward updating our workflows and processes for accessibility and is preparing for the future of academic publishing.
Why is there a lot of talk about “accessibility” among university presses?
There is a lot of talk right now about accessibility because of the imminent requirement from the European Accessibility Act (EAA) for electronic books sold in the European Union to be “accessible.” This effectively means that the books must be in ePub3 format and include a variety of materials that will assist people with disabilities to more fully access the content.
How has UNDP changed their processes to address accessibility?
In many ways, UNDP was already producing books that fulfilled many of the requirements for accessibility. Starting several years ago, we began to make available nearly all of our new books in ePub versions, which allows readers to adjust the font and font size when reading on an electronic device. We also made sure our books had clear structures (parts, chapters, subheadings, and so forth), allowing for easy navigation through the ePub.
With all that, however, we did have to make additional changes for the new accessibility requirements. We now provide to the conversion vendor “alt text,” which are short descriptions of all graphic elements in our books, including the cover, illustrations, charts, and graphs. We inspect and edit tables so that screen readers properly convey the data. We provide an extended table of contents to further improve navigation. We “tag” our files to indicate when the text switches to another language so that assistive reading software knows which dictionary to use to speak the words. And we require ePubs to be in the ePub3 format, which means they will be accessible by a wide variety of electronic readers and assistive reading software.
Further explanation of these changes can be found in our Manuscript and Graphics Preparation Guidelines, available via UNDP’s website at https://undpress.nd.edu/for-authors/. The accessibility portion of the guidelines fall on pages 22 to 27, and include links to more extensive online resources.
What still has to be worked out?
We have begun asking authors to provide alt text because they know best what features of a graphic element are most important to the argument of the book, but we still sometimes have to produce or refine alt text in-house. Language tagging is time-consuming, and so we’re still trying to sort out the best way to accomplish this. The means to provide metadata to vendors and consumers so that customers know about the features of our accessible ePubs is still being worked out with our partners who provide and use this data. And remediating our backlist titles, which were created long before these requirements were known, will be an ongoing process, likely for years.
Why did UNDP make these changes?
Though the immediate cause for developing new workflows and processes was to meet the requirements of the EAA, UNDP firmly believes that it is in the best interests of society to make accessible the quality scholarship and academic work that we publish to as many people as possible. By providing more accessible products, we can reach a broader audience, work to break down the barriers to published materials, and disseminate valuable knowledge ever more widely.