Topic description
Accessibility is about equitable access. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) defines accessibility as “the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities. Accessibility can be viewed as the ‘ability to access’ and benefit from some system or entity. The concept focuses on enabling access for people with disabilities, or enabling access through the use of assistive technology; however, research and development in accessibility brings benefits to everyone.”1 Equal access to library-published materials requires publishers to change their existing practices thoughtfully and deliberately. Historically, people used methods such as braille or audio to accommodate readers, requiring a process of conversion. Today, with digital publications, assistive technology (such as screen readers, text-to-speech tools, voice commands, and others) can be incorporated throughout the development of a publishing project to provide immediate access. Unfortunately, the practical success of these technologies relies not only on their own sophistication but also on the willingness of content and even platform creators to format their work so that assistive technologies can interact with it.
Much of the conversation around accessibility has historically focused on compliance with the applicable policy landscape. More recent scholarship has reframed accessibility as both a moral imperative and integral to the core function of academic publishing: the broad dissemination of quality research. In Accessibility & Publishing, for instance, Rosen (2018) observes that “[w]hile the movement for accessible publishing is a call for equal access and social justice, it is equally a push for content of the greatest quality and for research with the broadest impact” (p. 4).
Significant work has been done to understand the scope and scale of barriers to accessing digital scholarly materials, surveying existing resources, and assessing their accessibility. However, questions of how to implement or adapt workflows to produce products that conform to those standards and how to assess the success and sustainability of those workflows remain pressing. Publishers must also broaden the scope of their accessibility efforts beyond the focus of the final product: assessing whether publishing platforms are accessible for editors on the back end in addition to readers on the front end, partnering with software developers to integrate accessibility improvements into their development roadmaps, training authors to incorporate accessibility best practices into authoring processes, and widening the focus to address the accessibility of datasets and visualizations. Many library publishers—indeed, publishers of all types—are only in the early stages of transforming practices to ensure the degree of accessibility necessary for the greatest quality, highest impact publications.
1 Disabled World. ADA accessibility terms and definitions. [accessed February 12, 2024]. https://www.disabled-world.com/definitions/ada-glossary.php.
Research questions
- How can library publishers enact and assess workflows, ensuring accessibility?
- What are the most effective training strategies for library publishing staff, editorial staff, and authors working towards accessibility?
- How can library publishers work with platform developers to ensure accessibility for staff, editors, and authors?
- What barriers exist, and what incentives could be implemented to move the accessibility conversation from a compliance focus to an access-for-all focus?
- What are the standards and best practices for ensuring the accessibility of new publishing platforms and non-traditional research outputs?
- How can publishers improve and/or mitigate accessibility solutions to not create additional harm for people from racial and ethnic minorities, women, or LGBTQ+ individuals?
- What are the opportunities and limits of accessibility solutions that rely on AI?
Relevant resources
Bennett, C. L., Gleason, C., Scheuerman, M. K., Bigham, J. P., Guo, A., & To, A. (2021, May). “It’s complicated”: Negotiating accessibility and (mis) representation in image descriptions of race, gender, and disability. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-19). https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jbigham/pubs/pdfs/2021/description-representations.pdf
Borchard, L., Biondo, M., Kutay, S., Morck, D., & Weiss, A. P. (2015). Making journals accessible front & back: Examining open journal systems at CSU Northridge. OCLC Systems & Services, 31(1), 35–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/OCLC-02-2014-0013
Çakir, A. (2016). Usability and accessibility of portable document format. Behaviour & Information Technology 35(4), 324–334. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2016.1159049
Dobson, V., & McNaught, A. (2017). Crowdsourcing e-book accessibility information and the impact on staff development. Insights, 30(2), 61–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1629/uksg.358
Fulton, C. (2011). Web accessibility, libraries, and the law. Information Technology and Libraries, 30(1), 34–43. https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v30i1.3043
Johnson, M. W., & Abumeeiz, S. (2023). The Limits of Inclusion in Open Access: Accessible Access, Universal Design, and Open Educational Resources. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.14399
Kasdorf, B. (2018). Why accessibility is hard and how to make it easier: Lessons from publishers. Learned Publishing, 31(1), 11–18. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1146
Koenecke, A., Nam, A., Lake, E., Nudell, J., Quartey, M., Mengesha, Z., Toups, C., Rickford, J. R., Jurafsky, D., & Goel, S. (2020). Racial disparities in automated speech recognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(14), 7684–7689. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1915768117
Manis, C, & Alexander, H. (2018). The secrets of failing better: Accessible publishing at SAGE. A case study. Learned Publishing, 31(1), 63–68. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1138
Mune, C. (2016). Are e-books for everyone? An evaluation of academic e-book platforms’ accessibility features. Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship, 28(3), 172–182. https://doi.org/10.1080/1941126X.2016.1200927
Rosen, S. (2017). Toolkit to support the description of visual resources for accessibility in arts & humanities publications. VRA Bulletin, 44(1), Article 6. https://online.vraweb.org/index.php/vrab/article/view/44
Rothberg, M. (2018). Publishing with accessibility standards from the inside out [Special issue on accessibility in scholarly publishing]. Learned Publishing, 31(1), 45–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/leap.1149
Ward-Sutton, C., Williams, N. F., Moore, C. L., & Manyibe, E. O. (2020). Assistive technology access and usage barriers among African Americans with disabilities: A review of the literature and policy. Journal of Applied Rehabilitation Counseling, 51(2), 115–133. https://doi.org/10.1891/JARC-D-19-00011