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Publishing for all makes terrific business sense!

Tijdens de Nationale Kennisdag voor Innovatief Publiceren

23 April 2015

Alicia WiseDirector of Access & Policy

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• Began with a group of individuals who were engaged and interested

• User Centered Design – supports 130 web products

• Digital Book Archive fulfills c. 4,000 requests each year from people with disabilities

• Universal Access – special team in strategy

• Operations w/ experts in EPUB2, EPUB3, MathML, ONIX3 and tagged PDFs

Our Accessibility Journey… began with people

• Internal news and webinars

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Opportunistic within a strategic framework

• Next we created a more formal Accessibility Policy Task Force- Product Management- Book Publishing- Journal Publishing- Legal- Operations- User Centered Design- Finance

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• Main Idea: All products should be accessible to people with disabilities

• Scope: Print Products, internal and external websites and tools, eBooks, in-house and out-sourced

• Benchmark: WCAG 2.0 (A)• Outreach: Partner with

external experts and people with disabilities

• UCD: Apply user centered design best practices

• Timeline: Policy to be implemented from 2013

Our policy was approved by the senior management team in 2012 – what was in it?

4View Elsevier’s Accessibility Policy: http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-policies/accessibility-policy

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Challenge 1: Demonstrating Business Case

“Why should I care about accessibility, there aren’t any blind doctors.”

For our flagship products there can be more than a dozen requirements competing for a release at any given time. We had to establish accessibility as part of our definition of a minimum viable product accessibility

Approaches:• Show that our customers are asking for and pulling for

accessible products• Put a revenue number on numbers of customers with

accessibility requirements• Team up with an executive level champion and passionate

enthusiasts• Create an educational program to interest product teams and

other staff members• Create a (highly visible!) product scorecard• Demonstrate the appeal of accessibility as a feature with

glossy marketing• Use positive reinforcement, not the policing mentality

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Challenge 2: Where does the budget come from?

“Wait a minute you are going to charge me to comply with the company accessibility policy? How much is this going to cost?”

Product managers need to account for accessibility in their bottom line and in budget planning. Create a culture where accessibility is expected, and give enough lead time that this can be factored into the normal budget setting process.

Approaches:• Accessibility and usability are twins. Invest to

enhance the user experience and you can get twin brother accessibility too!

• Tackle accessibility going forward, feature by feature and don’t try to boil the ocean

• Galvanize by showing what the competition is doing

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Challenge 3: Large company with diverse development practices “We use the agile methodology, so you better not hand me 10 pages of accessibility documentation to follow”

There is not a one size fits all solution for tackling accessibility across diverse product and development teams. Elsevier produces over 130 web products.

Solutions:• Be adaptable - some will want a UI spec, some will

want a live tutorial, some will want a best practices wiki, some will want training, some an expert to talk to

• Create a central accessibility center of expertise, or ask a trade body to do this for you (e.g. UK Accessibility Action Group)

• Re-Use: (best practice documents, WCAG 2.0 review template, recommended code snippets)

• Leverage external suppliers (e.g. typesetting companies)

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Where are we at?

• Epub3 now standard for all our frontlist ebooks w/ ONIX 3 metadata• Products have had WCAG reviews; specific funding and budget

allocated to tackle accessibility and usability• WCAG 2.0, Section 508 requirements in our RFPs

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Plan Requirements Review Implement Sustain

Determine opportunity for accessibility release

Product managers author requirement to follow W3C WCAG 2.0 A standard

UCD Conducts Review Against W3C Standards

Development team implements suggestions. UCD helps conduct QA

Accessibility is baked into:

• requirements

• process

• development tools

• code/web components

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• Partnered with University of Illinois, Indiana Univ, and Michigan State to help test features before releases

• Developed best practices guideline to be used across Elsevier

• Development team expects accessibility in each release

- ARIA landmarks- ARIA labels- Good structure (headings, lists)- Keyboard Operability- Management of keyboard focus- Logical tab order

• Incorporated MathJax & MathML

ScienceDirect Case Study – our journals platform

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Ebook Case Study – ePub3 now standard

ePub3 Basic

ePub2

Works on both ePub2 and ePub3 readers The following is only available on epub3 readers:

Improved Table of Contents Improved accessibility Improved viewing of footnotes, citations, references Support for MathML Richer semantic tagging

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Accessibility Features

1.Separate Content and Presentation 2.Provide complete navigation 3.Create meaningful structure wherever possible 4.Define the content of each tag 5.Use images only for pictures, not for tables or text

6.Use image descriptions and alt text 7.Include page numbers 8.Define the language(s) 9.Use MathML

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ONIX 3.0 feeds convey accessibility features

• No accessibility features are disabled (most notably Text to Speech.)• Our TOCs link directly to the text. We also have some other improved

navigation features such as lists of figures, etc.• Our Indexes also are linked directly to the text.• The reading order follows a logical pattern.• We support MathML in our XML files. We’re ahead of the curve on this

one. There aren’t any readers that support MathML at this point.• We support print-equivalent page numbering in our ePUB3 files so no

matter how the text reflows due to a change in type size, the user can still navigate by page.

• We list a “trusted intermediary” contact in our ONIX files.• We list a “publisher contact” for accessibility questions.

Tripp Narup: our wonderful and talented contact person!

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Conclusion – strategic within an opportunistic framework!@wisealic a.wise@elsevier.com