Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Katherine Klosek, Simon Holt, Katherine McColgan, and Judy Russell. Katherine Klosek has led the Association of Research Libraries (ARL)’s information policy and advocacy portfolio since 2020, and serves as staff lead to ARL’s Advocacy and Public Policy Committee. Simon Holt is Head of Content Accessibility at Elsevier. He has worked in Scholarly Communications for over 15 years, working across books and journals. He is an advocate for disability inclusion and accessible publishing in the scholarly communications industry, and is a current SSP Board Member. Katherine McColgan is Katherine is the Manager, Administration and Programs at the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. Judy Russell is the Dean of University Libraries at the University of Florida.

According to the Accessible Books Consortium, less than 10% of published works globally include features that allow them to be used by people with perceptual disabilities. That means that most publications are effectively unavailable to users with disabilities. Less than 10% of publications have accessibility metadata, such as image descriptions (i.e., alt-text), and therefore preventing screen-reader users from accessing critical information. In other words, 90% of publications are not provided in accessible formats, which allow users with disabilities to customize colors, spacing, and font size. Most audio/video content is missing captions and transcripts, rendering that information unavailable to users with vision impairments.

The authors of this post spoke together at the 2024 Charleston Library Conference in a panel session about how libraries and publishers can work together to improve the availability of accessible published content for people with disabilities. Much has changed since then, but the principles of collaborating together toward more inclusive publishing practices remain the same. The most pervasive lesson in these collaborations is the importance of sharing information and working together toward improving accessibility in scholarly communications. Here are seven recommendations to support the cross-sector collaboration necessary to improve the accessibility of content in our communities.

Embrace national initiatives to accelerate accessible publishing

Legislation with specific deadlines and standards, as well as consequences for failing to meet these standards, offers objective criteria for libraries and publishers to work together toward providing equitable access to digital works.

For instance, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) harmonizes accessibility requirements among countries in the European Union (EU) for a range of products and services, including specific requirements for eBooks and e-readers that publishers must meet by 28 June 2025. This will lead to more “born accessible” eBooks that include accessibility features at the time of production. The EAA applies to publishers based in the EU as well as publishers that offer titles in the EU market. Since most publishers sell to global markets, the EAA will likely have a global influence.

In the US, Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was updated in April 2024 to incorporate standards for state and local governments to follow when making web content accessible; most entities have until April 24, 2026 to comply. ADA is current federal law, and publicly-funded entities are required to meet these obligations despite any action that the current US presidential administration may take to dilute, delay, or even overturn Title II. (Note: The US Disability Rights attorney Lainey Feingold provided a comprehensive update on the current situation and also runs a well-regarded blog with regular updates on accessibility and disability law in the US and beyond).

Under ADA Title II, the legal onus is on state and local government entities – including publicly funded universities – to protect individuals with disabilities from discrimination and ensure equitable learning experiences. Licensing electronic scholarly resources that are already in accessible formats – or born accessible – is the most efficient and effective way to ensure that students with disabilities can access works that they need for courses and research at the same time as their peers. For other categories of web content, like digitized special collections, libraries must prioritize remediation. ARL published these helpful guidelines to support libraries and publishers in their approaches to the new legislation.

The distinct scope and jurisdiction of the EAA and ADA offer opportunities for libraries and publishers to experiment with and collaborate on impactful solutions to provide equitable access to digital works. Government support can catalyze systemic change by directly funding the acceleration of accessible publishing activities. For instance, Canada invested $22.8 million in the Canada Book Fund to run a pilot project (2020 – 2024) to “support sustainable production and distribution of accessible digital books by Canadian independent publishers.” It is also likely that the EAA will help grow the market for accessible books globally, which could benefit Canadian publishers.

Test publications and share results

Library / publisher cooperation can accelerate the remediation of inaccessible content and offers opportunities to share knowledge about what effectively increases the amount of accessible content in our sector. A growing number of research libraries are also publishers or have formal relationships with their institution’s university press, which lends even more opportunity for collaboration between libraries and publishers.

For instance, University of Florida Smathers Libraries have a longstanding commitment to information services for people with disabilities and the accessibility of books. The Libraries own press, LibraryPress@UF, is an imprint of University of Florida Press. It primarily publishes open access books and journals. As part of a pilot project of research libraries in the US and Canada that were interested in implementing the Marrakesh Treaty, LibraryPress began testing the books it publishes, and found that some of the books were failing accessibility tests with errors that appeared to be introduced in the final processing. LibraryPress recommitted to testing all its content for accessibility before it is published and encourages other publishers to do the same.

The Library Accessibility Alliance contracts with consulting companies to evaluate the accessibility content of e-resource vendors, and shares the results with libraries, vendors, and the public. Several organizations provide free resources to help validate accessible publications and highlight accessibility errors that need fixing. DAISY’s ACE ePub validation checker and Adobe’s PDF accessibility checker are good examples of tools, whilst the Diagram Centre’s Image Description guidelines, also come highly recommended.

Engage people who have accessibility needs

“Nothing about us without us” is a slogan by the disability community about including people with disabilities in conversations about policies and issues that affect them.  A truly accessible publishing program is one that directly engages with readers with accessibility needs to validate whether features rolled out effectively work for the intended audience(s), just like with any other new product feature. This could mean, for example, testing alt-text with end users to ensure it is fit for purpose or testing screen readers on all products and platforms. To this end, Elsevier is currently facilitating focus groups with readers with accessibility needs to  solicit feedback on its alt-text offering and continually improve its accuracy, completeness, and relevance

It is also important to consider the flexibility of the content produced, recognizing that individuals have different learning needs and preferences. An accessible publication means the reader can consume the content however they choose — whether reading with their eyes, listening with their ears, or feeling with their fingers (via Braille, for example). This is why XML-based models such as JATS are so important to accessibility, because they allow multi-model consumption. The aim is to allow maximum flexibility within each format, for example, the ability to customize color contrast, font color, line spacing, and text size. ePub is the most flexible file type as it enables reflowable content, but it is not optimized for books intended for fixed layouts.

Raise awareness of accessibility metadata

One of the most important features of the EAA is the requirement that eBooks include detailed metadata to describe their accessibility features. The lack of information about accessibility features creates challenges for people with disabilities who require books or scholarly journals with accessibility features. While work is underway for greater standardization and cross-domain interoperability, there is still a lot of uncertainty when it comes to accessibility metadata in library catalogues and discovery platforms – which would benefit from publishers and libraries aligning related terminology and practices.

Libraries have expertise in management and conversion of structured metadata, and several international initiatives are underway to improve accessibility metadata. MARC 21 has fields specifically dedicated for recording accessibility metadata: 341 and 532. The need for ongoing development and refining of these fields continues as their use increases. In recent years, ONIX schemas have been developed – in particular List 196 – with a good overview provided by the DAISY Consortium. A report on eBook accessibility metadata best practices has been published by Canada Unbound, and is a helpful resource for both publishers and libraries alike.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Accessibility Remediation Metadata working group is developing a metadata model for remediation information, to support the identification and reuse of remediated resources. In addition, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Accessibility Metadata Network is developing best practices for recording accessibility metadata, along with work on crosswalks from other accessibility metadata schemas, on consistent terminology, and a statement of principles to support advocacy for the use of accessibility metadata.

Working together, libraries and publishers can identify gaps in metadata infrastructure, including metadata for scholarly journals — and opportunities to refine standards. Libraries can raise awareness of the role of accessibility metadata in library catalogs and continue to work with publishers and library service platforms to index and display the data.

Leverage technology to improve accessibility

As technology is always evolving, so are opportunities to add accessibility features like tagging, captions, and audio descriptions at the time of publication. Technology could even make new processes possible, like automating accessible ePub creation at scale.

As AI becomes more mature and accurate, publishers could potentially harness this technology to advance these efforts at scale. Whilst outsourcing wholesale to AI is neither possible nor desirable, it absolutely is worth saying that automation (using Generative AI or otherwise) can be a tremendous labor-saving tool that can, for example, help draft image descriptions or video captions (for later human review), or to automate the tagging of PDFs or validate files for accessibility using a rules-based approach.

These are not replacements for human quality checking, and AI generated content on its own cannot be assumed to be flawlessly accurate. However, when properly structured and supervised, the use of automation within workflows and to create multi modal outputs (for example, producing text captions and transcripts for video content) can make scholarly content accessible to a readership for whom it would otherwise be completely unusable. By aligning around common standards and using industry tools as mentioned above, both publishers and libraries can make more content accessible at a greater scale than has ever been the case before. In the future, it is possible that technology could improve accessibility in the submission process by generating draft image descriptions that authors could edit and refine.

Approach challenges collectively

Journal content is not explicitly covered by the EAA, since the term mentioned in the Act is ‘eBooks’, but it is certainly within the scope of ADA Title II. Licensing journals in accessible formats is the best way to meet the needs of people with disabilities and comply with US disability law. But making journals accessible presents unique challenges, like the scale, volume, and complexity of published articles. The question remains, how to realistically add accessibility features like alt-text, without delaying science? This is a problem to address as an industry and community.

The EAA does also apply to a publisher’s backlist, which can be time intensive and complex to remediate and a daunting task for publishers of all sizes. Challenges also remain on how to do this in a scalable way, while maintaining publishing quality. For instance, automating alt-text could be an easy way to remediate a volume of books, but there needs to be humans in the loop to make sure the content is accurate, relevant, and complete. For the LibraryPress@UF, the scale of the backlist is smaller but still a challenge. Through the testing described earlier in this article, LibraryPress aims to lessen the backlist problem  by eliminating the production of content that is not accessible, and to set an example so that they are not asking publishers to do something that they are not doing themselves.

There are also several industry-led initiatives designed to grow and share accessible publications. The Access Text Network, for example, includes 19 publishers who make publisher files available to Disability Services Offices (DSOs) at universities so that they can be made accessible. RNIB Bookshare (UK), Benetech Bookshare (US), AERO (Canada) and Vision Australia similarly allow access to publisher files for the purposes of accessibility accommodations. Several publishers also offer services where institutions are able to request files directly for the purposes of accessibility remediation. Project EMMA is a co-operative of libraries who share accessible materials with one another in the USA.

Publishers who are interested in both sharing and gaining knowledge on accessibility work can consider joining industry working groups such as the UK Publishing Accessibility Action Group (PAAG), BIC Focus on Accessibility Group, or the Library Accessibility Alliance (LAA). In addition, publishing industry associations like the STM Association host valuable accessibility resources.

There are many resources available for guidance, such as was highlighted in an October 2024 webinar on Global Laws and Initiatives for Accessible Publishing, where Monica Halil Lövblad, head of the Accessible Books Consortium (ABC), shared the ABC Course on Accessible Publishing Concepts, and ABC Charter for Accessible Publishing.

Imagine what comes next

Libraries and publishers are working toward the same aim – to make content accessible for people with disabilities. Accessibility is not a competitive sport, and we encourage open dialogue and conversation, as well as acknowledgement that we will experiment, collaborate, and iterate. In particular, there are three areas that we can focus on together as we approach this work:

• Engage with one another on priorities and pain points to ensure that they key priorities are met. Publishers with Library Advisory Boards, for example – consider adding an Accessibility Librarian to your Board.
• Be clear about your approach to accessibility – consider putting together a statement outlining your response to the EAA and ADA Title II legislation so everyone knows what they can expect from your content. Here is an example from Elsevier.
• Work with your librarian colleagues – consider how you can engage with people with disabilities to validate the accessibility features you are adding to your content, so you know these are fit for purpose.