Episode 34: Laura Brady on Accessibility

Laura Brady is an inclusive publishing expert whose priority is always to put users first. She has more than 25 years of publishing experience creating and converting eBooks, training publishers on accessible workflows, and consulting for service organizations about how to publish inclusively while worrying about everyone’s reading experience.

Currently, she serves on the board of the Accessible Books Consortium, is a lecturer at Toronto Metropolitan University, and is the Accessibility Training Manager at eBOUND Canada. Laura joins the BookSmarts Podcast to discuss what accessibility in book publishing means and how to effectively practice inclusivity so readers of all kinds of abilities and disabilities can easily access and enjoy your content.

Follow Laura Brady on Twitter @LauraB7 or visit her website at www.laurabrady.ca.

Transcript

Joshua Tallent 

This week on the BookSmarts podcast, I am excited because I get to talk to a friend of mine, Laura Brady, who is an expert in publishing accessibility and eBooks. She’s been around, golly Laura, how long ago? I don’t want to talk about that. That would make me feel really old to talk about how long ago we met each other. But thank you very much for joining me on the podcast this week.

Laura Brady 

Oh, thank you for having me. I’m really happy to be here. This is a fun opportunity.

Joshua Tallent 

It’s exciting, yeah. So okay, so we could talk about eBooks probably forever. But I want to focus in on accessibility, because it’s obviously a really big deal right now and it’s a growing concern for a lot of publishers. But let’s start off just talking about trade publishing, you know, accessibility on the more academic side of publishing makes a lot of sense to people. But let’s talk about trade publishing. And actually, maybe we should even talk a little bit about what accessibility is from a publishing perspective. So let’s start there. What is except what would you say accessibility is in the publishing perspective? And then from there, let’s talk about what does it mean in the context of trade publishing specifically?

Laura Brady 

Yeah, for sure. So my take on this is that accessibility in Trade Publishing means publishing thoughtfully, and publishing for all readers so that readers of all abilities and types have choice in how they read. And so what that means, really, is that you’re just being thoughtful about how you produce things, both print and digital, and also audio. And bringing some thoughtfulness and some awareness of the issues surrounding inclusive publishing to the table when you create those kinds of formats is, I think, critical. And that’s what accessibility and publishing really means. We can talk about this a little bit more, but I really think that one of the key things is that accessibility should be something that rolls into everyone’s job in a publishing house. And I really mean everyone, from the receptionist to the CEO. It should be part of what everyone does, and they should bring accessibility and inclusive publishing thinking to almost everything they do. And sort of rejigging how we think about producing books and folding accessibility into it can lead to some seismic changes from the current status quo.

Joshua Tallent 

That’s interesting. So you’re taking a step back from just like, oh, it’s ebook accessibility, right? It’s really about the entire process, the entire kind of outlook of how a publisher looks at their processes from start to finish. So how, just out of curiosity, how would that person who is, you know, the receptionist of the front desk? How would that person, in a role that isn’t a direct, you know, responsible for publishing role, how would they be impacted by accessibility in their thinking? How do you think that inclusivity comes into play in that?

Laura Brady 

Yeah, so that person probably doesn’t have a ton of power when it comes to affecting change. But they can be answering the phone in an inclusive way, you know, it can be even things like thinking about pronoun usage. One of the best examples I’ve heard of recently is that customer service needs to be trained on accessibility so they don’t do something like ask a deaf blind user to send a screenshot of what is troubling them and why they can’t read a content, you know. It can be really, you know, small things like that, but also reading meaningful things. The other example I have is that, I really think that the key to moving the needle on accessibility issues is to get editorial staff involved. And editorial staff, I think it’s fair to say, are very overworked and really bear the burden of the publishing process. And so this feels a little bit like a pile on. It’s not how I intended it. But if editors are doing things like marking language shifts, and marking the difference between, say, italics and emphasis in content that can be preserved all the way through the production process, and can be meaningfully coded in an eBook, and meaningfully coded for an audiobook reading experience. So that kind of thing is really, it feels kind of minor and sort of low on the totem pole of priorities. But if editors are thinking about those things, we are a couple miles ahead when it comes to creating content seamlessly and accessibly.

Joshua Tallent 

And not having to go later in the process and redo work that was already done or even make the process more extensive or have to outsource it or pay more money for it or any of that other stuff. You’re starting with the people you know. It’s the same thing we talked about with metadata, right? That metadata needs to start earlier in the process. And the people who know the book need to be describing it and that kind of thing. But it’s the same thing there. So speaking of trade publishing, specifically, as opposed to say, academic publishing, or, or things like that, how would you say, in a trade publisher, the approach is a little different than where we’ve seen accessibility? Especially, let’s say on the eBooks side? How would you say accessibility comes into play in a Trade Publisher? That’s a little different, maybe?

Laura Brady 

Yeah, there’s a number of things. I mean, thinking about readers and thinking about inclusivity can be right from the acquisition stage, like you can be, you know, building characters with difference into a fiction or that sort of thing. You could be asking authors to write image descriptions, particularly of nonfiction content. And if there’s an awareness of accessibility like that, at that level, then that can be built into contracts even. If you’re planning far enough ahead, you can start a collaboration with maybe a third party who will fund and produce a Braille edition of content. If, you know, if you start from, you know, two years out, that’s a total possibility. There are people in the marketplace who can collaborate like that. But it also means things like, you know, making your eBooks accessible. That’s I haven’t said that out loud yet but I think that’s really important. A lot of eBooks are made at the end of the publishing production pipeline with some ambivalence, and maybe not a lot of thought. And I would love to change that fundamentally. Ebook publishing should be a revolution for people with print disabilities, and we are 15 years in or so and it’s just not. And that’s because there are a lot of slapdash eBooks in the marketplace that just don’t meet even accessibility minimums. It’s a problem. And in the context of trade publishing, higher ed publishing, for sure, but trade publishing, publishers can do things like get their workflow certified, say, through a program like Benetech Global Certified Accessible. I love that process, because it’s an education. Because it’s iterative. What Benetech does is it takes one of your eBooks, looks at it, gives you feedback, and tells you to go fix it. And then through the process of fixing it, you figure out all the kinks in your workflow, and correct them, and then send it back. And then they’ll tell you what you have to do again, because it’s a process. One of the main messages I would love listeners to take away from this podcast is this. Accessibility is a culture and accessibility is a process. And if, you know, if you don’t know a ton about it, it can feel really overwhelming, especially once you start to sort of scratch the surface of what’s available on the internet. But just start, you know, accessibility is a culture. Accessibility is a process and just start. It may be baby steps, but, you know, dig in and go on, just try. It could be something starting with something as simple as coding language shifts in your content, and then working up to writing image descriptions. And then taking a keen look at the built in environment in your office to make sure that it meets accessibility standards, you know, and then planning an accessible event where everyone is welcome. People of all kinds of abilities and disabilities can enjoy it in a full way.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, and that idea, again, we’re talking about if this is a culture shift, if this is a process and a culture shift together, then it means that it can’t just be driven by the one person on the production team who’s responsible for eBook creation, you know. It needs to be a top down from the executive level. How do we handle the content, the accessibility of our content in a way that is going to be meaningful down the line. And that also means that you have to look at it from a sales perspective and look at it from a revenue generation perspective. And when you build accessible content, you’ve actually like, the juice is worth the squeeze? There’s this value of, you know, actually putting the work into it does actually mean higher potential revenue because you’re opening up the ability for more people to access your content.

Laura Brady 

That’s exactly right. Yeah. Make it easy for people to buy your books. And one of the ways of doing that is making really accessible content. You know, one other thing I would love to mention is that publishers should really audit their own websites, particularly if they have an ecommerce website. And by audit it, I don’t mean audit it yourself. Spend some time and money to buy a third party auditor who can evaluate particularly things like the checkout process, to make sure that people who can’t see, or, have disabilities of some sort that prevent them from interacting in a so called normal way with your website, you know, the expected interaction, audit that process and make sure that they can buy your books. We want people to buy your books. And if they can’t read it, that’s one thing. They can’t buy it, that’s also another thing, you know, make that easy. That’s a simple first step that you can take. I mean, I say simple. It’s not simple. Making website isn’t simple. But that is a step you can take.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, definitely. And there’s been a lot of talk recently about the legal ramifications of accessibility over in Europe, the urgent changes happening. Can you speak to that, and what you see potentially coming down the pike for non-European publishers?

Laura Brady 

Yeah, for sure. There’s a major piece of legislation in the EU called the European Accessibility Act. It went into effect in 2019. And there’s a kind of a gradation with this legislation. It goes into full effect in June 2025. So there’s still a few years out. But essentially, eBooks are seen as a service just like learning platforms and websites are seen as a service. That’s how they’re interpreted in that legal mechanism. And if your digital content doesn’t meet strict accessibility, minimum standards, you will not be able to sell it into the EU. So how, why should North American publishers think about that? That’s the EU; that’s not us. Doesn’t matter, right? Well, in Canada, where I’m from, French language publishers are a little bit ahead of English language publishers. And that’s because they are already selling into the EU. And they’re already thinking about those things and trying to get their house in order. And then also, if you’ve visited a website today, and had to accept all cookies, you can thank the EU for that. That’s GDPR legislation that’s rippled out around the world. I wouldn’t sleep on the EAA. It may feel like you’re a tiny publisher in America who doesn’t need to pay attention to European legislation, but this will ripple out and it will impact your marketplace, I promise. It remains to be seen what kind of effect that’s going to have but I you know, my advice is just get your house in order and publish accessibly because, you know, you’ll sell more books.

Joshua Tallent 

So this is going to impact new products. Do you know or do you have an indication it’s going to affect older, like I built an ebook 10 years ago and you know, in EPUB 2 or something.

Laura Brady 

The backlist is 100% affected. So if your backlist isn’t accessible, you will not be able to sell it. It’s a major undertaking for European publishers at the moment. It is almost all anyone’s talking about in some circles. There are mechanisms to opt out of it. Like if you’re only producing manga or comics or graphic novels, those are exempt. And if your annual revenue is less than 2 million euro, I believe, then you’re exempt. There are some opt outs. They’re small. I’m gonna say that, for sure, most content is subject to the EAA, backlist included. So a lot of publishers in Europe right now are sort of going through their sales records and deciding which are their favorite children on their back list to remediate. It’s a ton of work. It’s good work. Accessible content is better content for everyone. So putting in the time and making that content better, is a win-win-win, in my opinion.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, that cleanup process can be a pain in the rear, but it really comes down to do you think that you can sell more products if you have that book available. The back list is continuing to grow but that doesn’t mean that the backlist isn’t beneficial for a publisher. Because it’s still, what, 80% or so of all books that are sold are backless titles. And if, you know, if you’re worried about, I’ve got a 20 year old title that I haven’t sold any copies of. Okay, maybe that one gets, you know, just put it out of print. We’re done with it, or we just won’t sell in the EU or whatever. But there’s still in the last five years, like look at the last five years of your books and you’ll see that the vast majority of your sales are coming from that. I think it was BookNet Canada that did a study on that a couple of years ago, and found that it was at two to five year range was a really high percentage of sales. So yeah, it’s really important to be willing to go back and look at that back list as well.

Laura Brady 

Yeah, it’s an undertaking, but there’s resources and sometimes you can find ways and means.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah. So what would you say to someone who works at a publisher and is responsible for the technology side or maybe the eBook creation side and they need to convince their bosses about this, where can they go to get information to be able to say: here’s the reasons, Mr. CEO, or Ms. CEO, here’s what I think we should be doing. Here’s how we can implement that. There’s obviously resources available. So what would you say is the first step?

Laura Brady 

This is a great question. Five years ago, there was, you know, very little out there in terms of helping you with this specific kind of question. But we live in a bit of a golden age of resources when it comes to accessible publishing. There’s a couple of resources I’d like to point to. One is a website called APLN.ca. It stands for Accessible Publishing Learning Network. This is something that an organization in Canada wrote and built, they’re called Ebound Canada and it’s full of really good content, some of it I’m responsible for so I should just make that clear at the start. But most of the content was written by the folks at NNELS, the National Network for Equitable Library Services. And they’re a really amazing organization who employs a load of people with print disabilities to do the work of inclusive publishing. And a lot of those articles were written by those staff. It’s a tremendous resource that answers almost all the questions including things like how do I convince my boss to take this seriously? But also there’s downloadables, like a checklist for checking an eBook for a thorough accessibility, some plain language explainers of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which are anything but plain language. So it’s nice to have those interpreted in a quotidian accessible way. There’s also the other really important piece of APLN is the community hub, where anyone can create an account and post a question and crowdsource answers from experts around the world. It’s a really useful piece of the APLN and I encourage you all to go have a look and check it out. The DAISY Consortium has a website, I think it’s daisy.org. I should double check that, but I’m pretty sure it’s daisy.org. And it is a rich website full of webinars from the past, full of tools that you can use like ACE by Daisy and EPUB Checker, and full of explainers of how to do specific pieces of the accessible publishing puzzle, really tremendous resource. And they have a sister site called inclusivepublishing.org that has a newsletter, which you all should sign up for. It’s always full of interesting things. And then finally, there’s another site out of Europe called inclusive publishing in practice, I will find that URL and send it to you, Joshua. It is a really useful resource, really useful, and it’s in Dutch, German, Spanish and English. So if English isn’t your first language, you have options.

Joshua Tallent 

That’s great. Yeah, it’s an important thing. And I’m glad that there’s so many resources available and like you said, tools as well. So if you’re trying to, you know, just figure out what do I need to do,  how big of an effort is this going to be? You know, running your files through ace and maybe talking to Benetech. And, you know, starting some sort of assessment process is going to be a really good first step for someone on the practical side of things. What would you say we’re backing into, you mentioned earlier, things like having the author write image descriptions and things like that, any other recommendations or suggestions on the kind of in the process, the publishing process, that you’ve seen publishers doing to really, from a practical perspective, take this accessibility and put it a little further back in the process?

Laura Brady 

Yeah, I think that, you know, instead of having one person in a publishing house, who’s responsible for accessibility, I mean, it’s good to have specialists. But I think one of the problems with particularly indie publishing is that it’s a very small house, with, you know, four or five employees wearing five or six different hats, that sort of thing. So if you have all of that knowledge condensed in one person, and that person leaves, then you have a problem. So making sure that the responsibility and the knowledge about accessible publishing is spread throughout an organization, I think, is really critical, particularly for small publishers. But I would also say that there’s operational things you could do, you know. The question of image descriptions, for example. I work with one publisher who insists on image descriptions from the author. And if they’re not provided, they’re billed for the service of writing the image descriptions for them. And, you know, I think that’s a kind of really revolutionary thing. I don’t, it’s not all on the author, it’s not all on the editors. But if we’re all sharing some piece of that work, then the work is easier. You know, sharing the load.

Joshua Tallent 

That’s great. It’s very practical. I like practicality. I think that we need to be thinking about these things, but also just jumping in and doing them and figuring out the process, day by day. So thank you very much, Laura, I really appreciate you coming on the show to share your expertise. Can you give people information about yourself where they can follow you and the kind of work that you do? You’re working in this space. What can you do to help publishers as well?

Yeah, so I teach classes at Toronto Metropolitan University, and soon Simon Fraser University, on accessible publishing and unmaking ebooks. You can find me at laurabrady.ca. And on Twitter, LauraB7, I think. And then I’m doing loads of work these days, like I’m doing a research project on accessibility metadata, which is a critical piece of the accessibility puzzle and which not a ton of people are doing really well at present. That’s a space that needs help. I also make eBooks and I consult for publishers about how to do things a little bit better. I call myself an accessibility busybody. And it really bears out in fact. I do things like I’m on the board of the Accessible Books Consortium, which is a part of WIPO in Geneva. So they administer the Marrakesh Treaty. That’s fun work. Yeah, yeah, I’m a busy body. I promise. I’m everywhere.

Joshua Tallent 

That’s awesome. I’ll have links to all of the locations and places that Laura’s talked about in the show notes. Thanks again. I really appreciate you joining the show.

Laura Brady 

Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Joshua Tallent 

That’s it for this episode of the book smarts podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please leave a review or rating and Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcast. And also share this podcast with your colleagues, especially those who need to learn more about accessibility. If you have a topic suggestion or feedback about the show, you can email me at mailto:joshua@firebrandtech.com. Thanks for joining me getting smarter about your books.