In 2016, a crowd sourced e-book accessibility audit was organised by a group of universities with support from Jisc. At the time, this was one of the largest attempts to provide objective accessibility information across a range of publishers and platforms. It provided an important benchmarking opportunity and stimulated a wide range of positive and constructive conversations between library/disability staff and the e-book supply chain. There were a number of requests for a follow-up survey in 2018.
The original team is now planning a follow-up survey but, for reasons of sustainability, plan to change the focus from auditing the entire platform to auditing the quality of accessibility information provided – in other words, how easily can a user find information on the accessibility benefits they could exploit or the barriers they might need support in working around?
The original e-book audit team placed high value on the inputs of ‘critical friends’ in helping to fashion a process and reporting mechanism that is transparent, fair and above all, informative to all stakeholders. We are hoping to get representatives from up to 10 publishers and 10 aggregators together with library/disability staff to a workshop at the Publishers Association where we collaborate on designing the audit questions, the process and any advance guidance we want to give to the sector so that suppliers have maximum opportunity to create high-scoring guidance in time for the audit in summer 2018.
If you are interested in being involved at this steering stage then please register your initial interest (https://goo.gl/forms/DXwITbUgfojzlPvF2) – we will send more details in early January. For planning purposes, the date is Thursday 18th January 2018 from 11:00 - 13:00 at the Publishers Association in Southwark, London.
Many thanks
Alistair McNaught
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