Publishers are becoming increasingly familiar with accessibility standards and automated checks. However, as your session will discuss, passing a technical check does not necessarily mean a book is genuinely usable. In your experience, where do publishers most often confuse compliance with true accessibility?

Laura: There is a substantive difference between meeting standards and crafting a good, accessible reading experience. Compliance does not mean access.

Conforming to a checklist of standards is great and important — it’s measurable, easy to report on and easy to delegate responsibility for. But creating a thoughtful, well-rounded accessible reading experience is more complex and nuanced.

An organizational culture focused on accessible outcomes means thinking about reading systems, workflow tools and cultivating an ongoing understanding of the issues that can affect accessibility.

Accessibility is still often treated as something to be fixed at the end of production. If publishers were to rethink the workflow from the beginning, at what stage should accessibility decisions actually start—and which early editorial choices have the biggest impact later on?

Laura: I've long advocated for something I call 360° Accessibility—that is, a corporate culture that centers accessibility as part of everyone's job.

It's all well and good to designate an accessibility lead, but that work becomes siloed if it's not baked into everyone's remit in a publishing house.

Writers understand the need for structure and image descriptions; editors pay attention to emphasis and language shifts while working; sales and marketing teams tout the accessible features of their lists and seek opportunities to highlight them in the supply chain through things like accessibility metadata. And customer service is trained to respond capably to accessibility inquiries, for example.

You have spent years training publishers to build more accessible workflows. What tends to be harder to change: the technology itself, or the assumptions people bring to the publishing process? And what have you seen actually work when trying to make accessibility part of everyday publishing culture rather than the responsibility of one specialist?

Laura: Both! I have worked with an expert group to drive change in how Adobe InDesign creates EPUBs, for example, and while that work is bearing fruit, it has involved four and a half years of endless meetings.

In a way, the work to influence how InDesign exports EPUB is my sneakiest work to date, because publishers are generally creating more accessible ebooks without realizing it.

But one of the more difficult reasons publishers trip up is simply time and bandwidth. For many smaller publishers, every employee is wearing several different hats, so developing a deep — or even moderate — knowledge of accessibility best practices can be difficult when people are already rushing around doing the work of two or three people.

If there's one idea you hope people take away from your session, what would it be?

Laura: That accessibility is a culture that needs to be worked on continuously.

It's not a checklist or a one-and-done situation. Accessibility is ongoing work that a publisher needs to foster in order to be sustainable.