Accessible Publishing, Best Practice Guidelines for Publishers :
“Today at the London Book Fair, EDItEUR, the International standards organisation, launched “Accessible Publishing”, a set of best practice guidelines and advice to support publishers around the world in their endeavours to make their books accessible to people with print impairment.
It is estimated that at least 10% of people in the developed world and 15% in the developing world have some degree of print impairment. These may be visual impairments, dyslexia, motor disabilities or age related macular degeneration any of which can seriously affect the ability to read. The publishing landscape is increasingly user-oriented; ensuring published content is accessible by all potential readers is more and more important. Today’s readership needs to be able to consume content using a variety of different technologies and publishing’s metamorphosis from a print-dominated into a mixed and inexorably into a digitally-led industry presents an unprecedented opportunity to offer publications to the widest possible audience. These guidelines encourage publishers to make their mainstream publications as accessible as possible so that full access becomes the norm.
This straightforward document explains how publishers can tackle both the organisational and technical aspects of accessibility. Sarah Hilderley, the author of the guidelines and herself an experienced publisher, points out “We are closer than we sometimes think to being able to make all our publications accessible to a much wider audience. Already, ebook reading devices are making a much wider variety of titles available in “large print” than have ever been available in the past. We can use the flexibility of interface that digital publishing offers us to make mainstream content much more widely accessible than it could ever be in print.”
YS Chi, President of the International Publishers Association, said “While giving priority to accessibility is an important way for publishers to be socially responsible, it can lead to business opportunities as well. It just makes sense.”
The guidelines form part of a joint project, the Enabling Technologies Framework, which EDItEUR is delivering in collaboration with the DAISY Consortium. The framework project is funded by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) under its visually impaired persons (VIP) initiative to facilitate access to copyrighted works for people with print disabilities. The Guidelines have been endorsed by the International Publishers Association, the Federation of European Publishers and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM).”
Press Release : http://www.alpsp.org/ForceDownload.asp?id=1837
Guidelines : http://www.editeur.org/109/Enabling-Technologies-Framework/