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Academic Insights for the Thinking World

Accessibility in academic publishing: more than just compliance

If you’re lucky enough to be able to simply open a webpage and engage with the content hosted there, the likelihood is that you rarely think about what it would be like if you couldn’t do that. What if you were visually impaired but the page was indecipherable to your screen reader? What if you were colour blind and struggled to pick out buttons or interactive elements on a page? What if a physical disability meant you use your keyboard to navigate webpages, but it refused to select the area of the page that you need to access?

Accessibility is one of the fundamental principles of publishing and disseminating content in a world where the majority of our interactions take place through digital means. At its heart, accessible design is about ensuring all content and digital functionality are available to everyone regardless of physical or cognitive impairment or device used. However, accessibility is not just an ambition: in many jurisdictions it is now a legal requirement with legislation stating that materials cannot be adopted by institutions like universities without meeting a certain accessibility level. This has made accessibility a significant focus area for academic publishers and libraries alike.

“Accessible design is about ensuring all content and digital functionality are available to everyone regardless of physical or cognitive impairment or device used.”

At Oxford University Press (OUP), we realized that we were facing some challenges around accessibility a few years ago. The issue was really brought home to us when we engaged with librarian colleagues at the Open University who invited us to see some of the issues for ourselves. As Claire Grace, Head of Content & Licensing at the Open University, explains, “Some products are essential for certain qualifications or accreditations and if they are not accessible it makes it difficult for a large number of our users to be successful in their studies. We have to try to find workarounds but, in some cases, this is impossible, so we have to support students individually or risk causing dissatisfaction or even legal complaints.”

What we witnessed in our meetings with the Open University was very revealing: faculty members who couldn’t use content published by Oxford, even on our then-new platform, Oxford Academic, because it wouldn’t work properly with a screen reader and wouldn’t fully allow for keyboard-only navigation. We left that meeting with the stark realisation that what we were offering was just not good enough. From that point, OUP has made accessibility a core strategic priority.

So, what does addressing accessibility needs entail? Our first task was to examine every aspect of our existing digital platforms where users need to navigate or engage with content, and to understand what development would be required to deliver a universally accessible experience. But, as well as seeking to achieve compliance with the guidelines, our overarching aim has always been to consider accessibility, usability, and inclusion as three strands of the same goal—to deliver digital platforms that work for all users.

We made a huge number of changes to areas such as page and menu navigation, tables and images, form functionality, modals behaviour, and colour contrast so that all elements can be accessed by a screen reader and navigated via keyboard. For example, we realised that both the “advanced search” and “communications preferences” functionality couldn’t be used properly through keyboard-only navigation meaning that users were unable to perform the most powerful searches or let us know how to contact them. Once you begin to interrogate your platforms with accessibility in mind, you uncover a huge amount of progress that can be made.

“Accessibility is not a one-off activity. It has to be embedded as a strategic and operational priority in an organisation.”

An important aspect of this was transparency about the work we were doing. A regularly updated accessibility statement shows not only a commitment to accessibility as a goal but provides practical information for users and librarians.

But progress doesn’t stop here. Ensuring content and platforms offer the highest level of accessibility is an ongoing (and never-ending) process and an ever more important one. As Claire explains, “accessibility is not a one-off activity. It has to be embedded as a strategic and operational priority in an organisation so that everything is designed to accessible principles, staff are trained in accessibility awareness, and funds are put in place to support the delivery of this strategy.”

Making accessibility a strategic priority doesn’t just benefit a subset of users, but all users. The continued transition to digital solutions in academic publishing has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and our response cannot simply be to make sure content is available online—it must be accessible to everyone who needs to use it. As new user requirements emerge, or new features and functionality are developed, publishers have a responsibility to consider all possible accessibility scenarios to ensure no group is left behind.

version of this article was previously published in UKSG eNews in April 2021.

Featured image by ComMkt

Recent Comments

  1. Clancette Clift

    I am a person with accessibility problems, which bar me from studying online.
    I have tried & found myself completely incapable of navigating through various ‘normal’ simple exercises
    even though i have the ability to learn new processes , i’m unable to carry them out.

  2. Clancette Clift

    Unless shown how one to one, with time for me to re-write the instruction in my own language.
    Until i’ve ‘translated’ the English used into ‘English understood by me’, i find myself unable to move to the next instruction.
    It is an exhausting problem for me.

  3. professional writers

    I believe all the academic content has to be available online. Because sometimes it simply impossible to travel to that one library where the only copy of the requested book is available. Online resources would ease up academic activities a lot.

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