Advancing Digital Accessibility for Scientific and Technical Publications

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The DAISY Consortium, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) are pleased to announce that they are partnering to support and advance the accessibility of scientific and technical publications to people with disabilities through a series of virtual public forums. Building on work initiated in 2024 by the U.S. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), these meetings will seek to advance the goal of ensuring the digital accessibility of content.

Recognizing that advancing accessibility is a community effort, the three organizations will work to bring representatives from publishers, research societies, libraries, US Federal Agencies, and institutional and government repository hosts, and others around the world together to share knowledge and support best practices. With a long history of leadership in both promoting accessibility and engaging the information and publishing communities, DAISY, W3C, and NISO are well positioned to pursue the vision for a more open, accessible, and inclusive future for science and innovation. Building upon the voluntary commitments of the three organizations, the effort will initially focus on the priority areas identified by OSTP:

  • Meet and surpass federal requirements for digital accessibility of publications.
  • Promote awareness of barriers to digital accessibility, advance training to reduce such barriers, and increase accountability for improving the digital accessibility of publications.
  • Promote improvement and use of platforms, apps, testing tools, and resources that facilitate the design, creation, production, interoperability, and user experience of accessible publications.

The goals of this initiative are to continue to build community around this effort, support ongoing voluntary actions, share knowledge, and help to catalyze support for the continuing advancement of best practices regarding the accessibility of scientific and technical content. 
The first meeting in this webinar series will be held on Tuesday, December 17 at 10:00–11:30 am Eastern Standard Time (US/Canada). The event is open to the public and all are welcome to participate by completing the webinar registration form. Organizations that would like to share their own voluntary commitments regarding this initiative during the public event are encouraged to note this on the registration page.

About the Organizations

The DAISY Consortium

The DAISY Consortium is a not-for-profit global collective of organizations committed to delivering worldwide change to achieve the common vision that “People have equal access to information and knowledge regardless of disability.” DAISY contributes to mainstream standards, develops guidelines to promote best practices, raises awareness of accessible reading systems and supports open standards and tools for inclusive publishing.

NISO

Based in Baltimore, MD, NISO’s mission is to build knowledge, foster discussion, and advance authoritative standards development through collaboration among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional communities. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages with libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire life cycle of information standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). 

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international public-interest non-profit organization where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. Founded by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and led by President & CEO Seth Dobbs and a Board of Directors, the Web Consortium’s mission is to lead the web to its full potential.