How to put accessibility into action on your scholarly publishing platform
Making your content accessible to everyone regardless of ability isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the best business move. Across the globe, accessibility laws and regulations will continue to increase. Plus, accessibility benefits not only those with a disability, but your entire audience, offering a better user experience. It also does wonders for your content’s discoverability as accessibility improvements ensure high-quality indexing and search engine optimization. While accessibility matters greatly, it can be tricky to get right across your content.
Why accessibility is so important
Accessibility likely goes further than you realize and affects just about everyone. We don’t just make our content accessible for people with permanent disabilities, though about 16% of the population has some form of disability (and that’s likely an undercount due to underreporting). Enhancing your digital presence will also help people with temporary disabilities like a broken arm, people with situation disabilities like those on a loud train, and anyone with limited access to the internet. And it’s not just websites, these principles and legal requirements apply to software, webinars, and apps – anything digital, essentially.
The key point here is that everyone benefits from fully accessible content. We all use features that weren’t necessarily designed for us, such as Siri and closed captions.
From the legal side, the U.S., EU, and Canada all have specific requirements for accessibility that are increasing both in scope and in geographic area as other countries add legislation supporting those with disabilities. It’s important to approach your entire digital presence with accessibility in mind because it’s better for business and customers while also necessary in avoiding legal trouble and fines.
How to make your content accessible
First, and foremost, the best way to make your content accessible is to provide customers with tools that they’re able to use to make their lives much easier, and ensure your content works the best they can with those tools. For example, ensuring HTML is rendered with markup that can be read by machines, and screen readers can identify elements and what they represent, in the right order that makes sense to the end user.
A usability study is also a great way to ensure that customers in the real world are able to access your content. A great example of this is from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) who conducted a comprehensive usability study to check the ASCE Library hosted on the Atypon Experience Platform. ASCE’s Publications & Standards division serves as a prolific content hub that caters to an array of audiences, including practitioners in the field, academic researchers, early career engineers, students, non-native English speakers, and anyone interested in civil engineering.
By intentionally including people with disabilities in the study, they were able to garner insights on habits, usage, and gaps. The primary goal of the study was to ensure that all customers, regardless of their background or abilities, could access the site and its resources seamlessly. That’s just one piece of making a platform fully accessible but an important and useful one.
Many of the suggested changes have already been implemented into the library to improve user experience but there is much more to come. That includes staff training, guidelines and roadmaps, and communication framework for members.
One of ASCE’s fundamental beliefs is that all content should be accessible to everyone no matter their access, ability, or language, and they’re striving to make that a reality.
Where Atypon tools can improve accessibility
Atypon uses a suite of tools to help publishers like ASCE become fully accessible, but it’s not a one-time solution. Accessibility standards continuously evolve and legislation updates with them. We’re particularly investing in a few specific areas that will yield big results by focusing both on the content side and the site side.
For content, we have improved the eReader, implemented AXEL technology, and enhanced our Digital Objects, notably a new video player built using Cloudflare. Across our platform, we’re strategically using AI to fill in the gaps. These changes allow content to be accessible, discoverable, and flowable (meaning it adapts to different screens) — the ultimate goal for any publisher.
On the site side, we have standardized our new themes in UX 3.0 tech that specifically meets or exceeds WCAG 2.2 level AA compliance. To ensure that we don’t waver from this, we perform checks as a part of every release.
What should you do next to improve your accessibility
Part of our standard workflow when setting up a new client is to generate a VPAT report, and we can work with you to produce a more comprehensive accessibility report if needed. The first and most crucial step is to understand your status and address specific issues. It’s also crucial that the underlying software easily facilitates accessibility sitewide, including non-scholarly content. If you’re interested in this or any other accessibility resources, contact our team.
Watch our webinar
To learn more, watch our webinar on-demand where we dive deeper into digital accessibility in practice and forthcoming policies that are making accessibility mandatory.