LPC Blog

The Library Publishing Coalition Blog is used to share news and updates about the LPC and the Library Publishing Forum, to draw attention to items of interest to the community, and to publish informal commentaries by LPC members and friends.

February 12, 2025

LPC investigates publishing platform accessibility

By

by Melanie Schlosser and Shannon Kipphut-Smith

LPC is taking an all-hands-on-deck approach to web accessibility this 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, including  webinars and a themed Documentation Month. 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. 

Creating a list of platforms

With the support of LPC’s Board, a small group of staff and volunteers from both communities made a list of the most-used platforms (based on data from the Library Publishing Directory) and identified a subset of particular interest. The criteria for inclusion were: 

  • The software is in a stable, production version and is still being developed and supported. (Example: We excluded PubPub upon hearing from the PubPub team that they are in the process of moving away from their legacy platform and developing a new one.)
  • The software is publishing-specific. (Example: We included Digital Commons, because it has specific publishing functionality, but excluded DSpace as a repository platform that is incidentally used for publishing.)
  • The software is widely used or emerging (Example: Janeway and Scalar had the same number of users in the Directory [13 each], but Janeway is a new platform that is rapidly growing its user base within library publishing.)

The final list of platforms to investigate was: 

There are a number of other platforms used by our community (including some that were developed by community members, like Manifold), and we hope to reach more of them in a second round of the process. This abbreviated list was a jumping off point to allow us to try out this process. 

Developing a question set

With this list of platforms in mind, the group turned to creating a standard set of questions about web accessibility that we could send to each of them. Drawing upon the work of the Library Accessibility Alliance Vendor Relations Team, we settled on the following: 

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)?

We also asked the platforms whether we could share their answers with our community. 

Responses

We sent the questions to each platform in November, with the option to answer via email or in a Google Doc we set up for them. We received substantive answers to all questions from OJS, Pressbooks, and Janeway. We weren’t able to get any answers from Digital Commons staff, or even to communicate directly with developers or accessibility staff (all of our communications went through an account manager). 

Results

Although each platform has different approaches and workflows to addressing accessibility, there are several common shared characteristics, including:

Testing

  • All platforms have adopted the WCAG 2.1 or 2.2 standards. Levels of compliance vary, ranging from A to AAA (no platform reported being fully AA or AAA compliant).
  • Platforms use a combination of automated and manual testing. All perform some testing in-house; Janeway and Pressbooks also use contractors for additional testing.
  • All platforms prioritize accessibility work on the reader-facing interface, with varying levels of progress on documentation and production interface.

Development

  • All platforms have publicly available accessibility roadmaps. (PKP, Pressbooks, Janeway) 
  • All platforms have a process for collecting and responding to user reports of accessibility errors. Typically, these are treated as bugs.
  • All platforms have a process for development contributors to submit fixes for accessibility issues. They often follow the same process as for fixing other types of bugs.

Content and customizations

  • All platforms provide training material and documentation to help users create accessible content. 
  • Platforms acknowledge that they cannot control how local customizations maintain accessibility, but do provide developers with documentation and training and hope that including accessibility features in the base code are retained.

Documentation

Full responses from each platform will be shared with the LPC community. 

Next steps

We plan to invite PKP, Pressbooks, and Janeway staff to LPC community calls this spring, to give them a chance to speak directly with our community about platform accessibility. As mentioned above, we would also like to send out a second round of questions, including some of the less widely used platforms and those (like Digital Commons) who we weren’t able to get answers from in round one.