And The Winner Is….

/in /by

The DAISY Consortium were delighted to be part of the Digital Book World 2019 Awards, with the DAISY Award for Accessibility in Publishing. It’s been great to see accessibility put under the spotlight at such a high-profile event, and our thanks to the Digital Book World team for their commitment to this important topic and making this award possible.

We have had some incredibly interesting discussions throughout this process, finding the decision making very difficult at every stage—deciding the finalists, and particularly in selecting a winner. All of the entrants have done wonderful work in progressing the accessibility of published materials for people with print disabilities and should be applauded. We would have loved to present awards to everyone! Our finalists were:

  • Hachette Livre, winner of the International Excellence Award for Accessibility at the London Book Fair 2018 and a passionate adopter of EPUB 3 and Ace by DAISY which is a standard part of their workflow. You can read more about their initiatives at our interview with Luc Audrain
  • Kogan Page, producing born accessible EPUB 3 publications having reworked their schema and workflows to ensure full accessible content. You can read more about their extraordinary commitment to accessibility in their case study: https://inclusivepublishing.org/blog/accessibility-in-publishing-a-case-study-from-kogan–page/
  • Macmillan Learning are the first publisher to gain Benetech GCA accreditation with their born accessible publications. Read more about this at  https://inclusivepublishing.org/blog/rachel-comerford-the-trailblazer-behind-macmillan-learning/
  • and for their ongoing commitment to accessibility, including innovative work on accessibility metadata, ensuring for the first time that essential information about the accessibility of titles is preserved and made available to consumers in their book selection process together with their commitment to the needs of students within their Bookshelf reading app, we are thrilled to announce that our winner is VitalSource. Further information on the outstanding work being delivered is available at http://www.daisy.org/planet-2019-04#a4.

The DAISY Consortium were also very excited to be awarded an Outstanding Achievement Award for their work on the Ace by DAISY EPUB accessibility checking tool.  Ace is a free open source tool available as a command line tool and as a desktop application. It can be integrated at any point in the ebook production workflow and ensures that EPUB files conform with the EPUB Accessibility Specification. Our congratulations to the development team behind Ace for this achievement.

For the full list of all the winners at the DBW Awards Ceremony see the announcement press release.