a11y accessibility Archives - Inclusive Publishing

EU Accessibility Act: Update (W)

Published at December 8, 2021/in Articles /by Sarah Hilderley

In our series of free weekly webinars December 1st saw a session focused on the European Accessibility Act giving us a chance to check-in and find out the latest updates as we prepare for the act.

This page contains:

Full Video of the Webinar
Speaker Information
Session Overview
Related Resources

Full Video of the Webinar

Speakers

Richard Orme, DAISY Consortium—host and chair
Antoine Fobe, European Blind Union
Cristina Mussinellim, The LIA Foundation
Thomas Kahlisch, dzb lesen

with contributions from:

Louis Marle, Albin Michel, France
Oscar Heslinga, Inginitas Learning, Netherlands
Jonas Lillqvist, Svenska Litteratursällskapet, Finland

Session Overview

This webinar discussed the implementation progress and latest developments in EAA legislation which is already shaping practices in Europe and around the world. Many organizations that sell into Europe are having to adapt their practices to comply with the new accessibility requirements.

The European Accessibility Act: Why, What and When?

Antoine Forbe began the webinar by giving us an essential refresher to the EAA, reminding us that it is essential for approx 80 million people in Europe who rely on accessible content. It became necessary to develop a single, coherent set of accessibility rules and in 2015 the European Commission proposed a wide-reaching accessibility act. After long periods of negotiation, the EAA was adopted in 2019, creating an obligation for member states to ensure that selected products and services placed in the EU market comply with accessibility requirements. There are many benefits, including:

For Businesses

A reduction in costs for the production of accessible goods
Easier cross border trading
Marketing opportunities for accessible products and services

For Citizens

More accessible products in the market
Competitively priced products
Fewer barriers to access
More jobs where accessibility expertise is needed

The act is not truly horizontal in that it applies to only a select list of products and services, with specific emphasis on digital. It does, however, bring a comprehensive set of minimum accessibility requirements that all businesses must respect and this is a wonderful step in the right direction. The act will have a wide impact on the publishing industry throughout the supply chain.

Requiring national transposition by June 2022, the EAA is in fact a directive, the entry into force date is 2025.

Update on Technical Developments

Cristina Mussinelli spoke to us about digital publishing standards that are important in meeting the requirements of the EAA directive.

EPUB offers the greatest opportunity for the econtent itself and a new version, EPUB 3.3, is due to be published soon. Accessibility requirements are one of the main areas of focus within the standard and it is accompanied by EPUB Accessibility 1.1, an accessibility specification together with the Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Module 1.1.

Metadata standards are vital for the end-user in order to inform the reader about accessible content. The following standards need to be adhered to: schema.org within the EPUB package, ONIX to directly inform the retailer and coming soon, a standardized method of describing content accessibility from W3C.

Work and research have been completed to make sure that these standards are robust enough to meet the requirements of the EAA.

For retailers and libraries, the W3C has recently published the User Experience Guide for Displaying Accessibility Metadata 1.0

Work continues in this area to look at other ebook formats, all the various departments in the publishing supply chain and a focus on end user awareness.

DAISY’s EU Inclusive Publishing Initiative

Thomas Kahlisch explained the work of The DAISY Consortium and its efforts to improve collaboration between the organizations involved in the EAA and the publishing industry via a community network.

Areas of focus include: guidance, survey, case studies and signposting of resources. The survey was sent out to all EU countries and we have heard back from 14 (74% of the market). The complete findings will be published in January 2022 but results already show that countries are at very different stages in their preparation for the EAA. Some countries have steering groups which help to connect and collaborate both nationally and internationally.

Case studies from Finland, The Netherlands, Germany and Italy look more closely at some of the preparatory details and materials that are already being used and we look forward to publishing more of these country-specific studies as part of the EU Inclusive Publishing Initiative.

Thomas finished by drawing attention to the variety of resources available on this good work at Inclusive Publishing’s EAA Resource page which includes details of how to collaborate with the EU Inclusive Publishing Initiative.

Publisher Voices

Previous webinars about the EAA have emphasized the importance of starting to prepare now for 2025 and many publishers have begun their journey towards accessible publishing already. We heard from Luis Marle, Albin Michel, France; Oscar Heslinga, Inginitas Learning, Netherlands; Jonas Lillqvist, Svenska Litteratursällskapet, Finland on the progress they have been making, informing us of some of the lessons they learned on the way. Please take the time to listen to their extremely useful advice.

Related Resources

PowerPoint slide deck (2MB)
Full transcript Word document (34KB)

Legislation Resources

EU Directive 2019/882 on the Accessibility Requirements for Products and Services – Legislation that came into force in 2019 defining the various elements of the European Accessibility Act and their implementation schedule. Available in 24 languages.
Introduction to the European Accessibility Act – Video introduction to the Act from the European Commission, English with captions.
The European Accessibility Act—Consideration for the Publishing Industry and Benefits to Consumers Globally Previous DAISY webinar recording and write-up focused on the European Accessibility Act and implications for publishing and reading.
European Disability Forum Video: Advocating for strong national adoption of the European Accessibility Act
European Disability Forum Toolkit for the Transposition of the EAA
European Commission Factsheet on the EAA (PDF)

Standards and Technical Developments

Communication Activities

DAISY European Inclusive Publishing Forum
Inclusive Publishing EU Resources page
EAA Adoption Case Studies:
- Case Study 1: Finland
- Case Study 2: The Netherlands
- Case Study 3: Germany
- Case Study 4: Italy

Discover the other webinars we’re running!

A Round Up of Celebrations, Awareness Building and Commitment to GAAD 2021

Published at May 31, 2021/in Articles /by Sarah Hilderley

Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2021 (#GAAD) took place on May 20 this year and we put together some tools and resources to encourage partners, publishers and industry bodies to promote awareness from home offices during lockdown. Building on activities from previous years we saw our industry actively up their game this year and get more involved in educating colleagues and customers who are busy playing their part to increase the availability of digital content to people with print disabilities, despite the challenges of a global pandemic. Congrats to all who took the time and made the effort to reaffirm their commitment to accessible publishing by marking this event in some way.

Our Publisher’s Toolkit saw large numbers taking part in our fun Accessibility Quiz – slightly more challenging than last year and it was great to see so many comments on social media about the questions! You can still access the quiz and use it to promote awareness and to compliment other accessibility activities that you may have in mind for your colleagues. In fact, all of our suggestions are appropriate for any time so please carry on the good work!

A Few of the Events Held this Year

Inclusive Publishing Partner RedShelf celebrated GAAD with the webinar: Accessibility Metadata – A Digital Textbook Superhero. Focusing on the “unsung hero of digital content”, RedShelf emphasised how good accessibility metadata is crucial for a successful course materials strategy.
Kogan-Page took the opportunity to post a case-study on the occasion of GAAD entitled, Accessible Learning: Why eLearning is Not Always Enough a first-hand learning experience from Esi Hardy, a disability inclusion expert.
Mc-Graw Hill used their blog platform Behind the Cube to introduce their accessibility team and to delve into what accessibility means to this department – a great way to increase awareness in-house and to promote the activities of the accessibility team. In addition, the article Creating Accessible Experiences For All Learners was published to coincide with GAAD 2021, including a video to create further discussion.

This Global Accessibility Awareness Day, McGraw Hill acknowledges the importance of accessibility and the responsibility we have to ensure all learners can use our content.

Hederis, book production platform, made sure that their customers and readers knew about their commitment to accessible publishing with the publication of 3 articles in the run up to GAAD together with the launch of a new alt text editor for @HederisApp.

Blackboard honored the occasion with an “empathy excercise” for their Student Advisory Council which they describe in their blog post Honoring GAAD: Our Student Advisory Council Reflects
In celebration of GAAD, Deque offered free training with its basic accessibility fundamentals bootcamp.

Links and Resources

The following links were published for GAAD – they might not all be publishing related but we think there are some valuable take-aways here for our industry:

In the UK, The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Assistive Technology published this article on their activities over the past year and this includes some useful resources for learning environments.
In Australia, the New South Wales Government published an inciteful interview with inclusive design Greg Alchin entitled: Creating a Life Without Barriers
Gareth Ford Williams’ blog piece: The Little Book of Accessibility includes “quips, tips, affirmations, and truths that have helped shape the BBC’s strategy and embed accessibility into its culture.”
BBC Access All Areas: Accessibility Awareness
AI is Terrible at Writing Alt Text Thomas Smith on GAAD for One Zero blog

These are just a few of the fantastic events that took place throughout the day and we hope to be able to build on our toolkit for next year and prepare more resources for you to use. In addition to publishing industry events there was a huge effort worldwide from other digital organizations and we’d welcome feedback on news and information from other sources that may be of interest to our readers.

Free Webinar: WordToEPUB Extended Tutorial – Accessible EPUB in Seconds

July 29th, 2020

Published at July 7, 2020/in Upcoming events /by Sarah Hilderley

You can start making accessible EPUBs after just a few seconds with Microsoft Word and the free WordToEPUB tool from the DAISY Consortium, but you can also achieve much more. This practical session will demonstrate how to get started with WordToEPUB and introduce some of the features beyond the effective one-click solution, including custom styling, page numbering control, content with multiple languages, adding a cover image and customizing metadata.

Date