It was our pleasure to get Stacy Scott on to the February UKAAF webinar. Stacy is Accessibility Manager at leading international book and specialist professional journals publisher Taylor & Francis. As a blind Maths graduate, she has deep insight into the challenges faced by learners with a print disability. She is well-known for her strong commitment to breaking down barriers and improving the availability of accessible education and building opportunity for independent study for everyone.
In my conversation with Stacy, we talked about her employers’ Accessibility policies—which she said is “second to none”, and was actually one of the things that attracted her to work there, and is measured by objective criteria like the Aspire metric, where it scored 100%.
Nonetheless, as we reviewed, sadly anyone with vision impairment trying to use journals as a student or in their work still faces many hurdles. While her employer has made 360,000 journals fully accessible, she notes that, “I think anyone with a vision or a print impairment would agree that it’s a minefield and it’s very, very difficult.” A particular issue that still needs work across the sector is labelling of diagrams, for example.
We then reviewed Stacy’s extensive experience with RNIB and its very popular Bookshare programme. Stacy explained that after a lot of voluntary work overseas, RNIB seemed the perfect place to try and pursue her desire to make education truly open to everyone. There, she faced the challenge to persuade publishers to give fully accessible texts, which eventually led to over 1,100 book producers being able to get their products on to the platform. A big factor in that success, she says, was collaboration with accessibility champions in many sectors, especially education: “We really used customers and stakeholders to help build on our knowledge and decide what provision we needed to offer.”
The sector needs more of all our feedback!
After a discussion about EPUB formats and PDF, we pivoted to talk about her current role as chair of the accessibility action group of the Publishers Association. Stacy was full of praise for the spirit of co-operation and mutual support she finds there: “The thing that’s really great about the accessibility action group is it’s a very harmonious and collaborative space where publishers are of one mind and one goal– to make content accessible and available for everybody despite their reading requirements.”
That means, she says, that more and more electronic books and content is getting out there—she quoted figures suggesting 57,000 downloads in 2021 alone, across over 36,000 individual titles. However, she does think accessible publishing would get even further along with more direct feedback and guidance from users. Definitely one to think about there.
We finished by some crystal ball gazing. Here, Stacy’s very enthusiastic about the potential of metadata, which contains all the content of a book in terms of the identifiers but now needs to be expanded to include accessibility information too. However, again, there’s great willingness to do this, but as she warns, “I think that is something that’s starting to happen, but it’s got a long way to go.”
Another area she wants to see more progress in is work on that image problem. “I think we could all agree that there is absolutely no point in studying a subject and reading a book if it then says, the most important thing is this diagram or this chart here is the main thing that you need to know. And that chart just says ‘image’ because that’s all it’s going to say if you are using text-to-speech, or it will have no description at all.”
My final question before Q&A with attendees was about technology in the form of improving sight accessibility and the rising popularity of audiobooks. We then had a couple of interesting questions, including on how to promote accessibility even more in publishing; one of Stacy’s useful ideas here is for companies to have more dedicated, full-time staff on the problem like herself at her employer.
All in all, an excellent conversation with a real expert and dedicated accessibility champion. I think anyone interested in education and accessibility really would benefit from listening in to the full debate, which is HERE on our YouTube channel.
Webinar Transcripts: PDF, DOCX, BRF
Roger
