Accessible Ebook Best Practices Published in Finland

The Accessibility Library Celia, in collaboration with the Finnish Publishers Association, has released a guide titled “Saavutettavan e-kirjan hyvät käytännöt”, or “Accessible Ebook Best Practices”. This guide is designed to help publishers and ebook producers in understanding and implementing the European Accessibility Act’s requirements for ebooks.

The guide offers practical advice and recommendations on various aspects of the editorial process, including selecting the appropriate format, ensuring proper navigation and semantic markup, implementing accessible CSS, and managing images. It also covers quality assurance and details how to handle accessibility metadata.

This initiative was a collaborative effort involving members from the Accessibility Library Celia, the Finnish Publishers Association, and representatives from trade, scholarly, and technical publishing companies, as well as ebook producers.

The best practices guide is currently available in Finnish at https://julkaisekaikille.fi/saavutettava-e-kirja/saavutettavan-e-kirjan-hyvat-kaytannot/. It is scheduled to be translated into Swedish later this year.

Our thanks to Miia Kirsi (Celia) for this update on preparations being made in Scandanavia. Readers may also be interested in the EAA 2021 Finnish case study that has more details about this market.