Accessibility as a Civil Right
/by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
In October, the United States Supreme Court handed down an order stating that it would not take up a plea from Domino’s pizza chain to reverse a decision in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals stating that the company must make its website accessible to people with disabilities. This lawsuit is one of many that have been brought in the last two years against fashion designers, art galleries, gyms, grocery stores, among other companies in a variety of industries, which host websites featuring content which is inaccessible to the visually impaired.
Under Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act, any business with at least 15 full-time employees which operates for 20 or more weeks every year must provide accommodations for those with disabilities. As the marketplace is going from a physical to a digital one and more content—from news to research—is being read more online than off, it has become vital for those hosting the content to adapt to accessible content.
Unfortunately, website owners and content creators are still relatively slow to change their digital presence. Their reasons for not making those changes range from cost to time constraints, but what companies may not realize is that they are leaving an enormous chunk of the market out of their business by not creating accessible content. According to a study by The Lancet Global Health, 253 million people worldwide suffer from impaired vision, whether blindness or severe vision impairment.
For publishers, this issue has become even more vital. Each year, digital publishing claims a larger market share, yet accessibility hasn’t been fully implemented across the industry. In a piece in Scholarly Kitchen, Lettie Conrad, North American editor of Learned Publishing, noted “accessible publishing is central to the mission of academic publishing, and to the vision of most publishing organizations. So, it’s high time to bring accessibility out of the margins and into our daily lives.”
Publishers must take those steps before lawsuits like those we’ve seen in other industries force their hands and require them to make these changes all at once in a more costly way. What publishers may not realize is that some technology and formatting is already capable of helping implement these changes. And, more importantly, that making these changes can help not only with visually impaired readers but can also help with discoverability due to enhanced metadata, improving the reader experience for all readers, and even giving a competitive edge as libraries and other facilities seek out accessible content. In our white paper Accessibility for Publishers, we aim to help publishers make that leap, not only be defining what accessible content is, but outlining how publishers can make these changes simply and easily through some technology or systems they are already using:
EPUB3: The most widely supported XML-based eBook format independent of a specific platform
HTML5: The current version of the markup language that is the cornerstone of the Internet
XML-first Workflow: This practice helps content creators simultaneously deliver print, online, and EPUB files
Layout and Design: A well-thought-out approach to content layout, including a logical reading order, goes a long way not only for readers with disabilities, but for all users
Alt Text or Alt Attributes: An essential trait for accessibility that involves including meaningful description for important non-text items
Closed Captioning: This practice is a must for all video content, benefitting not only disabled readers but also users who watch countless hours of videos in a library or the workplace
Well-Structured Metadata: This is a crucial step, often overlooked, which assists from a semantics point of view and aids content discovery
MathML: This is a mathematical markup language for describing mathematical notations and capturing structure in documents
WCAG 2.1: The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specify how to make web content accessibile
As more of our lives move to the digital space, it is crucial to any and every industry, particularly content-based industries, that they provide a way for any user or reader to engage without friction. Unfortunately, as seen by the lawsuits, it has not been top priority for many industries. For publishers, it should be of the utmost in order to ensure that all readers, researchers, and students have the ability to connect with the information they need and want.
KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (formerly Cenveo Publisher Services) is the industry leader in editorial and production services for every stage of the content lifecycle. We are your source for intelligent automation, high-speed publishing, accessibility compliance, digital learning solutions and more. Email us at info@kwglobal.com.
