As we kick start 2021, I wanted to just quickly reach out and offer best wishes to all of our great UKAAF allies and supporters. With 2020 behind us, we’re excited about the prospects for 2021 here at the DAISY Consortium.
If you’re not familiar with DAISY, it’s an international non-profit organisation whose purpose is very closely aligned to UKAAF—it’s all around access to information for people with print disabilities. We were started by specialist libraries for people who are blind, low vision, physically disabled or have other specific reading disabilities such as Dyslexia. We’re a very international team: I am based in the UK but my colleagues are in Canada, US, India, Belgium, France, Kenya and Brazil.
Our mission aligns very closely with that of UKAAF. We support our member organisations with tools and technologies and standards. We also work to extend the understanding and the practice of making accessible documents. In both industrialised and developing countries, we train people on how to use these production techniques. By supporting government agencies and community groups in Nigeria, for example, children who previously haven’t had accessible schoolbooks are now able to get read digital books on audio player, mobile phone or electronic Braille display. Or that same document can be printed out with a braille embosser.
Over the decades, there’s been great progress in standards and best practice for accessibility, all developed in a collaborative and open way at the international level, but our job is definitely not ‘done’ yet, which is why we value our relationship with supporters like UKAAF so much. We’re both members, for example, of the UK Accessibility Action Group, an initiative of the Publishers Association, and if you are working in the publishing industry, we would very much encourage you to join its Accessibility Action Group.
An important role for UKAAF is supporting the publishing industry to make sure that publications that are born digital, are also born accessible. I foresee a lot of work on this front in 2021, to really ramp up understanding of accessible production processes amongst publishers and amongst the wealth of service companies that support them.
‘Now we’ve got textbook publishers submitting content from their production workflow for public review in a forum to be critiqued for accessibility’
There’s a huge amount of work going on internationally—in the US for example, many universities have it in their contracts that textbooks need to be accessible. Due in part to legal cases taken by students with disabilities, we’ve seen a very dramatic uptake in Higher Education basically demanding accessible eBooks as part of the textbook and library infrastructure, which in turn, then places a big demand on publishers.
The Canadian government has established an initiative to support their publishers in developing new skills and implementing the latest technologies to ensure accessible book production. And since the European Accessibility Act requires that ebooks in the EU to be accessible, they are funding several projects to provide training and support to European publishers on accessibility practices.
So what’s the story for the UK? Well, we’re a nation that buys a lot of books, we buy a lot online, and we’re digital savvy as a population compared to many other countries. Perhaps we’ve heard the term too many times in 2020, but in many respects our publishing industry is world beating. So top of my 2021 wish list is extra support from the government to drive a change programme for UK publishing, benefitting millions of UK readers with disabilities, and enabling UK publishers to sell into markets with new accessibility requirements. We don’t need $23 million like the Canadian Government provided. For a far more modest sum, with professional organisations such as the Publishers Association, the expertise of UKAAF and the commitment and creativity demonstrated by members of the Accessibility Action Group, we could be very optimistic about a very Happy New Year for accessible book publishing!
UKAAF board member and CEO of The DAISY Consortium
