Accessible Publishing ensures equal access to books, teaching material and curriculums for people with disabilities. Publishers providing books in accessible format, have the business opportunity of servicing the needs of this target audience.
What is Accessible Publishing?
Accessible publishing is an approach to publishing books that is designed to provide books and other texts in alternative formats that support or replace the reading process. These include a variety of large fonts, special fonts for certain types of reading disabilities, Braille, e-books, automated audiobooks, daisies and digital conversation books.
At 247 Accessible Documents, we work with publishers to convert a high-volume of books, brochures, magazines, journals and curriculum into accessible format fully tested by people with disabilities.
Fast Check
According to the World Blind Union, about 90% of the material published today is not used by visually impaired people. We believe that by ignoring a significant part of the world’s population, you are not making content available to everyone.
What we often forget is that when you get a book and open it, whether you are an English or a French reader you can read a book which is in a language you speak. The screen reader must know the language to interpret the book when the same book is opened by a screen reader. It is impossible to say whether it is French because it uses the Latin alphabet, or whether it is written in English because it starts with the English dictionary, and it will sound strange.
The COVID 19 pandemic has brought light to the access gap that prevents people with vision and hearing impairments from using technology and enjoying the same ease of use as so many of us. It is a huge market because people can live, make money and spend money to use information and have access to it.
Why Accessible Publishing is a must?
The aim of barrier-free publications is to make reading as easy as possible for those who have difficulty in doing so. These include blind or visually impaired people, people with learning disabilities and people learning languages. Accessible publishing gives people the choice to read in different formats and use the format that suits them, including making it easier for them to read, enabling them to absorb information better.
Another important focus is to provide access for consumers with metadata, so that books that meet the standard are easy to find for consumers. These are the metadata embedded in e-books that, in addition to the ONIX codes for travel e-books and audio books, describe their accessibility in detail. This metadata should be made available to consumers in a meaningful way so that readers can find a book that meets their needs with little or no effort.
Opportunity Knocks
This is a golden age to make books and information accessible for people with pressure disabilities, such as the blind or dyslexic. Improved technologies in the areas of VIP readers and accessibility software, as well as the continuous development and production of software, products and formats, will make more content accessible to visually impaired people than ever before. The tools, technologies and expertise are in place to enable publishers to start producing and publishing accessible publications today.
What are we doing to make such information accessible?
Why choose us?
The Accessible Books Consortium (ABC) points out the enormous and prohibitive costs involved in converting published material into accessible products during the publishing and publishing process. Awareness of the need to work in this area is higher than ever, and that is a good thing.
247 Accessible Documents ensures that your textbooks and ancillary teaching materials are made accessible to all and adheres to accessibility standards and guidelines such as ADA, AODA, Section 508, and Section 504. Write to sales@247accessibledocuments.com to help us support you.
