A focus on accessibility

NISO Plus 2021
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This topic is for discussion of “A focus on accessibility.” To go back to this session in Sched, click here.

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Hello everyone, I’m Suze, Head of Public Engagement at Digital Science. Excited to be hosting our amazing panellists during this session! If you have any questions before, during or after the screening, please add them here and I’ll try my best to get a response for you.

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A few resources shared by our attendees and speakers:

WebAIM

ANDI Accessibility Testing Tool

deque Browser Extensions

WAVE Browser Extensions

Coblis – Color Blindness Simulator

NV Access

Ace by DAISY

European Accessibility Act

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Want to cross reference the related session Accessibility and ebooks - strategies for ensuring it is done well – some similar discussions there.

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Are there ways to create scans of library materials in EPUB format, particularly when scanning materials for our own collections for reserves or interlibrary loan? My library uses PDF by default and doesn’t necessarily make them searchable, so there’s already challenges there.

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This was a great session, highly recommend for anyone working with creating or evaluating content.

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So excited to see you all here, and apologies again for the technical hitch! Let’s keep the chat going. I’ll add in any questions I made a note of that may not make it over here, and let’s keep working together to overcome these challenges and breakdown those barriers to accessibility in our wonderful industry. Thanks again to our panellists and to wonderful Kimberley, you are my hero! I also wish I hadn’t had to cut you short, Michael - please continue your thoughts here!

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There a few tools out there like WordToEPUB from DAISY WordToEPUB - The DAISY Consortium that are both FREE and useful. PDF presents another level of challenge.

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Yes, as was alluded to in the chat earlier, the first challenge with PDF is merely having text available and ensuring they are not just an image of text. Then all of the semantic structure needed for accessibility beyond that is another challenge. One step I would recommend is using format (EPUB or an HTML-based full text) as part of your content selection criteria.

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I’m curious to hear from Barry if Codemantra does any conversion to EPUB or HTML. The norm in the remediation vendor space seems to be output to PDF.

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Lot’s of great questions posed during the Q+A:

  • Are there guidelines and practices specific to sharing/publishing research data. Granted, that’s a wide range of file formats, structure, etc.?

  • What are solutions to the difficulty of accessing PDFs? There are cases where content providers can only offer PDFs (like when limited resources mean articles don’t always have an HTML full text version).

  • Thoughts on how to cover costs when there is commitment to the cause, but lack of funding?

  • How about content that has been published years ago? Is it legally required to make that accessible, or does the regulation only apply to publications going forward?

  • Are some of you using AI tech to enhance accessibility?

  • Should the publisher bear the responsibility of offering EPUB or does that fall on the library/platform to do PDF>EPUB conversion?

  • Are there ways to create scans of library materials in EPUB format, particularly when scanning materials for our own collections for reserves or interlibrary loan? My library uses PDF by default and doesn’t necessarily make them searchable, so there’s already challenges there.

  • The question of accessible content is often a supply chain issue from the perspective of a Library like ours. While we create some content, many of our resources come from vendors. It can feel challenging to shape change as one of the last links in the chain. From the prospective of publishers and aggregators, how can a Library help shape these conversations in an effective way?

  • I used to work in higher education libraries in the UK, and at that time, we had to make accessibility arrangements for every single resource a student needed to access, to the point where if several students wanted the same item, we had to digitise it separately for each of them. I could not understand why the law did not apply to the publisher of the content, putting the onus on them to make their content accessible from the start. Does anyone have any insight into why this is so, and whether collective pressure could be applied to change it?

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We do convert to accessible EPUB format. Actually we work with many different types of formats. You are correct that the norm does seem to be PDF and hence the reason we have built a platform leveraging AI to remediate them. As many people have already stated, it is a challenge from both a technical and cost standpoint. It’s just like anything else in electronic publishing, if the input file is well structured, then the converted (accessible) file will be easier and less costly to create.