Posted December 17, 2024

Behind the Scenes – Inclusive Publishing Expert

For people who aren’t familiar with accessible publishing, can you give us a quick overview of what accessible publishing is?

So, this is a big question, but how I want to answer that is that accessible publishing is publishing for every single one of a book’s potential readers, including people with print disabilities.

So, it means paying attention to the entirety of the marketplace because print-disabled readers can be up to 20% of the population at any given point in time. It’s an elastic number, it ebbs and flows as people cycle in and out of situational disabilities, but if you’re publishing accessibly then you are paying attention to the entire market and catering to the needs of everybody who might want to read your content.

What are some of the most common barriers that print-disabled readers face when trying to access books?

It can be really hard to find books that are accessible and to figure out which ones are going to suit your needs. I’ve spoken to loads of print-disabled readers in my life who download a sample of an ebook, see if it will work with their assistive technology and then buy it or borrow it. Or they actually buy or borrow it and then return it and get a refund when it doesn’t work with their assistive technologies.

So, finding books that meet their needs means finding books that have accessibility metadata in them and that metadata is exposed at the retailer level. And that’s fairly rare, to be honest. More and more publishers are putting energy and attention into accessibility metadata but displaying that metadata is an ongoing challenge and we’re not quite there yet.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that you are one of the leading experts in accessible publishing in Canada. Almost everything that I know about accessible ebooks is from watching your various online tutorials. What drew you into a career in accessible publishing and how did you train for it?

One thing I do want to say is that the accessible publishing space in Canada is built on collaboration, and this is critical to success. I call myself an accessibility busybody because I just like to make sure things are moving and gently nudge things in the right direction so that the needs of readers with print disabilities are front and center. It doesn’t always work, but I try.

I’m delighted to hear that you’ve learned a lot from those tutorials. That’s great. I regularly regret that some of those courses are locked behind a paywall because that means that not everybody can access them. Last year, I re-recorded some of my courses, and they’re now openly available on the APLN (Accessible Publishing Learning Network) and on my YouTube channel, so they’re not behind the paywall. I like to do research and think through issues in accessible publishing and then make them openly available because I operate on the principle that a rising tide lifts all boats. So, the more this knowledge about how to publish accessibly is openly available and everyone can benefit from it, then the more accessible content there is in the marketplace. That’s my hope anyway.

And so, what drew me to a career in accessible publishing and how did I train for it? Training? What training? Mostly it’s a lot of research and development, getting angry, banging my head against my desk, and then figuring something out. There was not really any formal training but I’m always learning. I think that’s really important because the space changes constantly. It is vibrant and it evolves and standards adjust to new realities.

I got into accessible publishing partly through helping to program the ebookcraft conference that was part of BookNet Canada’s Tech Forum. We ran workshops and keynote presentations. Through the course of programming, I became really interested in accessible publishing and offering a well-thought-out and fully fledged set of talks and workshops around publishing that included accessibility. As part of that, I was contacted by NNELS (National Network for Equitable Library Service) to help out with what they did, and boy, I love NNELS so much. They were such innovators in the space.

I also think it’s important to say out loud that I’m not a disabled person and that doesn’t mean that I don’t have empathy and some understanding of the space, but people with the lived experience of a print disability will always know more about the space than I do. And so, it’s really important to always involve people with the lived experience of a disability in the testing or creation or thinking through problems because their experience trumps almost everything that I know in general.

You said that the accessibility space is constantly evolving. How much do you think has changed since you started working in the accessibility space?

When I first started making ebooks we were not paying any attention to accessibility. And now I think that if you’re not paying attention to accessibility then you have your head stuck in the sand. Everybody is thinking about and talking about accessibility in some way, shape, or form. I think most publishers are now aware and put thought and intention into image descriptions. Years ago, I would say it was the rare publisher who was aware of image descriptions. So that’s the evolution of thinking about accessibility in these spaces — it’s just more front and centre.

I know that the EU Accessibility Act goes into effect next year. Canada has done some work to invest in accessible publishing in the country but how do you think Canada ranks against other countries in terms of accessibility?

Yeah, the European Accessibility Act is due to effect seismic change in book publishing. How it gets enforced is an open question and there are a lot of unknowns, but it will impact Canadian publishers. There’s no question about it.

I think partly because of the Accessible Book Initiative, which ran from 2019 to March 2024 and was a giant pot of money that was used to help build capacity for accessible publishing in Canada, Canadian publishers are in pretty good shape.

That funding meant that folks could write and put thought and research into how to solve accessible publishing problems. eBOUND Canada got a healthy grant to think through accessibility metadata and how to implement it a little bit better. A lot of publishers used that money to make audiobooks, to help work at workflow kinks in-house, or to hire NNELS to help them with testing. The main thing that the Accessible Book Initiative did was raise awareness of accessibility issues so I think among countries in the world Canada is fairly well-positioned.

Well, it’s good to hear. What are the biggest challenges the industry is still facing to make books accessible for everyone?

I think the other side of the coin of the Accessible Books Initiative is that the grant money wasn’t tied to using Canadian labour so a ton of that work went overseas. We’re relying on cheap foreign labor and we’re not capable of solving our own problems.

What is your hope for the future of accessible publishing and how can readers, authors, and publishers contribute to that goal?

One of my near-term hopes is that the end of the Accessible Books Initiative from the Department of Canadian Heritage does not mean that publishers stop paying attention to accessibility. I am so nervous that publishers will say, “Okay, that was fun, but we’re done and we’re going to just carry on how we have done in the past.” It makes me nervous that the grants and the support have gone away.

I would love to see some kind of accessibility legislation in this country that governs the commercial marketplace and pushes people to do better because what I find is that sticks work quite well. Carrots are nice, but sticks work even better. The business case is there and it’s solid: 20% of your readership has print disabilities and when you make an accessible ebook that ebook is better for everyone who wants to read it, not just the print-disabled readers. Even though the business case is really clear, the sticks do come in handy and I wish Canada had a few sticks up its sleeve.

One of my long-term hopes is that we put folks like NNELS and CELA (Centre for Equitable Library Access) out of business so that these organizations don’t have to use the copyright exemption to make accessible formats for their clients because accessible formats already exist in the marketplace and people with print disabilities can buy or borrow them easily already.

If folks want more or want to hear about things that change around accessible publishing, then I would strongly recommend signing up for the APLN newsletter. I’d also recommend inclusivepublishing.org, a website run by the Daisy Consortium, which is a major player in the accessible publishing space. They have a series of webinars that are useful, as well as their inclusive publishing newsletter.