Developing a Culture of Accessibility

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Developing a Culture of Accessibility

Accessibility has been the buzzword in publishing over the last several years as the industry embraces the need to make its content available to all readers. We at KGL have previously highlighted innovations in accessibility in K-12 learning and also potential hazards of not making scholarly content accessible.

As we look to the future, most specifically 2025 when the requirements of the European Accessibility Act will be enforced, we want to focus on the important steps and perhaps changes in corporate culture publishers need to take in order to make their content available for all readers.

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Confessions of an Accidental Editor

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Confessions of an Accidental Editor

KGL’s Peter Olson blogs how an English major wound up copyediting science journals, what he has learned over his long career, and where to start to become an STEM journal copyeditor.

Copyediting is referred to by some as “the accidental profession,” and this pretty much sums up my own odyssey—and I’m not alone. If you were to survey the legion of copyeditors working today, many of them would reveal their secret identities as English Literature majors who, in sidestepping a career in academia, fell backwards into the vortex of copyediting—only to find that it was their true calling all along.

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Designing Your User Experience Strategy: Part 1

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Designing Your User Experience Strategy: Part 1

Tracey Greene is the Chief Creative Director at Digital Artisans, KGL PubFactory’s lead design partner. In this three-part blog post series, Tracey shares valuable insights into maximizing discoverability and accessibility when creating your digital content platform.

Your website platform should be available to every person on any device. The following are critical considerations in a “mobile-first” world for maximizing discoverability and accessibility when creating the optimal user experience for journeys across all of your digital content.

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Fast-Tracking COVID-19 Research

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Fast-Tracking COVID-19 Research

Five Questions for Debbie McClanahan, KGL’s VP of Journal Publishing Services

I wanted to look deeper into other areas of the research workflow that can be expedited in the cause of helping authors and publishers vet and distribute important discoveries. So I consulted one of our internal experts, KGL’s Debbie McClanahan, VP of Journal Publishing Services, to draw on her decades of experience helping academic publishers take their content from accepted manuscript to copyedited, typeset and verified articles available for download.

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Digital Equality for Distance Learning

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Digital Equality for Distance Learning

Accessible content ensures that students with disabilities don’t fall behind during the Great Shutdown

Here at KGL, we have long championed accessibility in publishing. Ensuring that your books, journals, digital products, websites and other content are either remediated or “born accessible” is essential to readers with disabilities. Many publishers by now appreciate that the same technologies and guidelines that improve access to materials for people with visual or hearing impairments, limited mobility, perceptual and cognitive differences can also open opportunities to better reach and serve all users. But if there has ever been a time to acknowledge the consequences of digital equality, it is the great experiment in distance learning of 2020.

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Accessibility as a Civil Right

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Accessibility as a Civil Right

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.

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The Case for a New Alt Text Strategy

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The Case for a New Alt Text Strategy

In recent years, Alt Text—a contextual description that conveys information on the appearance and function of an image or graphic in digital content—has become a hot topic for publishers. A common practice in education publishing where accessibility standards come in to play, there has been a wider awakening regarding the art and benefits of applying effective Alt Text for publishers and authors, particularly in the STM domain.

While many refer to the challenges involved in getting it right, publishers shouldn’t be intimidated by the basics, but rather begin to apply image accessibility as part of a successful online content strategy.

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Educating the Netflix Generation: Digital-First Strategies for Textbooks Take Hold

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Educating the Netflix Generation: Digital-First Strategies for Textbooks Take Hold

Publishing giant Pearson boldly announced recently that it was moving towards a digital-first strategy, thus rendering the century old traditional textbook model as good as dead. Meanwhile, higher education specialist Cengage has been steadily expanding its online textbook subscription offering globally, experimenting with new cost-effective digital distribution models to cater to the Netflix and Spotify generation.

There are a number of reasons why, in this day and age, digital-first strategies make more sense than ever for education publishers.

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AI and NLP for Publishers: How Artificial Intelligence & Natural Language Processing Are Transforming Scholarly Communications

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AI and NLP for Publishers: How Artificial Intelligence & Natural Language Processing Are Transforming Scholarly Communications

For scholarly publishers, AI capabilities have advanced to a degree that they can actually automate significant portions of their workflows, with massive implications for their businesses, their authors and the research community. In our latest report, AI and NLP for Publishers, we explore how AI and NLP are being used today in scholarly publishing and how it may impact the evolution of research. We also explore how the technology works and how publishers like Taylor & Francis are, with the help of KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd., realizing the benefits of intelligent automation.

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Accessibility for Publishers: Practical Tips That Demonstrate it's Well Within Your Reach

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Accessibility for Publishers: Practical Tips That Demonstrate it's Well Within Your Reach

Accessibility is an approach to publishing and design that makes content available to all, including those with disabilities who use assistive technologies on the computer. Publishers also benefit from embracing this essential initiative. When accessibility is well executed, it can expand readership and provide a higher-quality user experience for everyone. In our latest industry report, KGL provides business cases for accessibility that can be brought to leadership and stakeholders in a publishing organization.

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Smart Suite 2.0 Released - A New Approach to Pre-editing, Copyediting, Production, and Content Delivery

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Smart Suite 2.0 Released - A New Approach to Pre-editing, Copyediting, Production, and Content Delivery

Smart Suite Version 2.0 is a cloud-based ecosystem of publishing tools that streamlines the production of high-quality content. The system has a complete interface (UI) redesign and tighter integration with high-speed production engines to solve the challenges related to multi-channel publishing.

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Taylor & Francis Group Awards Full-Service Production for Global Journal Content to Cenveo

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Taylor & Francis Group Awards Full-Service Production for Global Journal Content to Cenveo

Cenveo announces a major increase in full-service content production for Taylor & Francis’ global journal production program. Taylor & Francis selected Cenveo as a core content service provider to support Taylor & Francis’s continued growth.

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The Future of EPUB: Facts Regarding the IDPF and W3C Merger

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The Future of EPUB: Facts Regarding the IDPF and W3C Merger

The IDPF and W3C are working to combine the two organizations. Working together, they will strive to foster the global adoption of an open, accessible, interoperable digital publishing ecosystem that enables innovation. The primary motivation to combine IDPF with W3C is to ensure that EPUB’s future will be well-integrated with, and in the mainstream of, the overall Open Web Platform.

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Good vs Valid XML: Cheap is Dear

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Good vs Valid XML: Cheap is Dear

For many years I preached the merits of XML-first and XML-early workflows before it was the norm. Now my platform is "good vs valid XML."

Any service provider can provide XML.

Indeed automated XML is pretty much a standard output from most systems that have anything to do with publishing. It's been 13 years since Microsoft Office introduced the XML formats for Excel and Word files.

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MathML: A Sure Sine That X Have Δ'd

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MathML: A Sure Sine That X Have Δ'd

Like other human languages, math uses agreed-upon symbols and syntax to represent abstractions, allowing one person to convey meaning to someone else. In the past, publishers have used carefully designed type reproductions of formulas to communicate mathematical concepts. While these were more difficult (and costly) than simple typesetting, they required no special technology to render math as ink on paper.

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NIMAS: Opportunities With XML-Based Accessibility Specifications for Publishers

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NIMAS: Opportunities With XML-Based Accessibility Specifications for Publishers

Since the early nineteenth century invention of braille, the concept of making written content available to the blind or visually impaired has been a noble aspiration of civilized society. Making that concept a practical reality is another matter. Even as new, more automated, technologies arise, the challenges of accessibility remain formidable. For educational publishers, accessibility is particularly important. In the United States, schools receiving federal funding support are required to provide accessible content to any student or parent who requests it.

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