July 11, 2025

Second round of our platform accessibility investigation

About these investigations: LPC has been taking an all-hands-on-deck approach to web accessibility for the last year. The updates to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act – as well as similar regulations in other parts of the world – are aligned with our values as a community, but will take substantial effort to comply with for most library publishers. To support this work, LPC has teamed up with the Library Accessibility Alliance to provide a variety of professional development opportunities. Looking outward, we are also using our position as a community hub to investigate one of the elements of web accessibility that library publishers can’t control individually – publishing platforms. 

Round one: See our February 12 blog post for a description of our methods and the results of our first round of investigations, which included OJS, Pressbooks, and Janeway. After the blog post was published, we hosted a series of community calls – one for each platform – so LPC members could speak directly with platform developers and representatives about accessibility. 

Round two: This post is reporting out on our second round of platform outreach, in which we contacted DSpace, Omeka, Fulcrum, Manifold, and Digital Commons (again). 

The question set: We used the same set of questions as round one: 

Testing

• What technical or legal conformance standard have you adopted for your product(s)?

• How do you test for accessibility?

• Do you test all areas of your platform (e.g. reader interface, author interface, editorial interface, admin interface) and your user-facing documentation (including online product documentation and help/support resources)? 

Development

• Do you have a development roadmap for increasing accessibility? Can you share it? 

• Do you have a process for collecting and responding to user reports of accessibility errors? Are those reports treated as bugs or feature requests?

• Do you have a process for development contributors to submit fixes for accessibility issues? 

Content and customizations

• How do you support/encourage users in creating accessible content? 

• How do you support/encourage developers to maintain accessibility in local customizations? 

Documentation

• Does your company have an internal digital accessibility policy (or equivalent) and public accessibility statement? If so, please provide the URL.
• Do you have a VPAT or other accessibility information on your website? If so, provide a URL. If not, can you provide your latest Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) or Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR)?

Responses: We received full responses from DSpace, Omeka, and Fulcrum. Manifold asked to respond in the fall once they finish a round of development. Digital Commons continues to not get back to us. 

Results: The responses received from the three platforms were very similar to those provided by PKP, Pressbooks, and Janeway. A summary of previous platform responses can be found in this blog post.  A notable difference between the two groups is related to content and customizations. Currently, only Fulcrum provides resources to help users create accessible content (Omeka and DSpace indicated that they are exploring additional ways to encourage/support accessibility).

• Accessibility information

• All three platforms have publicly available accessibility information (DSpace, Omeka, Fulcrum). 

• • Fulcrum provides a public accessibility roadmap; DSpace incorporates accessibility features into the roadmap for major releases.
  • All platforms have publicly available VPATs (Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates): DSpace, Omeka, Fulcrum

We will share the full answers from each platform with the LPC community via email. 

Next steps: We will follow up with Manifold in the fall and will share their responses with the community. 

December 18, 2024

How has the field changed in the last 10 years? An excerpt from the 2024 Library Publishing Directory

Editor’s note: As much as we love the searchable online interface for the Library Publishing Directory, it doesn’t include the introduction found in the print, PDF, and EPUB versions. Each year, the Directory‘s introduction includes a ‘state of the field’ based on that year’s data that highlights trends and new developments in library publishing as reported by the programs that contribute their information. To make it easier to find, we are republishing that portion of the introduction here.

By the LPC Directory Committee

Key Findings/Overview

In recognition of the Library Publishing Directory’s 10 year anniversary, we took this opportunity to look back at the first Directory from 2014 and to highlight some of the trends and developments we identified in the data from 2014 to 2024.

In this year’s edition of the Directory, we received responses from 179 publishers in 18 countries, and 167 long-form responses are featured in the Directory. The number of respondents has grown gradually since the first Library Publishing Directory in 2014, when 116 library publishers completed the survey. We also see a much higher number in the unique institutions that have participated in the last decade: in the Directory‘s lifetime 383 library programs have responded to the call for entries. Most respondents (92%) represent academic libraries, which is consistent with previous years. Of the remaining respondents, 5% identified their institution type as consortia, 1% as member organizations, and 2% as other.

The survey itself has grown and changed over the years, beginning with just two main sections, Overview and Publishing Activities, in 2014. By 2024 it has grown to include sections on each publishing program’s organization and oversight, partnerships, technologies and services, program highlights, and most recently, policies.

The information we wanted as a community in the first half of the Directory’s life focused on what services to offer, what technologies balance functionality and sustainability, and the quantity of resources, human or otherwise, to dedicate to these efforts. More recently, the community is asking questions about managing existing services, formalizing policies, working in collaboration within and outside of our institutions, and sustaining the people that make all this happen.

In comparing the 2014 and 2024 survey results, we identified a number of positive trends in terms of staffing, technology use, geographic diversity, and publishing program expansion and stability. These positive trends are highlighted here and explained in more detail in the relevant sections below:

• The Directory has become much more geographically diverse, with publishers from 18 countries contributing in 2024 compared to 5 countries in 2014. 
• The median age of respondents’ programs has increased 100% from 7 years to 14 years, even as dozens of newly established programs have contributed to the Directory. For example, 53 of the 2024 respondents’ programs did not yet exist when the first Directory was published.
• In 2014, 61% of respondents were using a proprietary platform for at least one of their publishing initiatives. In 2024, however, less than half (47%) of respondents were using a proprietary platform.
• Staffing at library publishers has increased 33% from a median of 1.5 FTE in 2014 to 2 FTE in 2024.
• A typical library publisher added one service between 2014 and 2024, with a median of 10 services offered in 2024 compared to 9 in 2014. The number of possible services identified by the survey increased significantly (29%) over the decade, from 24 to 31.
• Although services increased in multiple areas, the reported provision of traditional library services such as cataloging and metadata decreased by over 10%.

(more…)