Episode 47: Benetech’s Michael Johnson on Accessible Ebooks

Michael Johnson is the Vice President of Content at Benetech. In this role, he works directly with publishers, conversion houses, technology platforms, retailers, and educational institutions to help them understand and implement processes that allow for fully accessible content to get from authors all the way through to the end reader. He also has a long-time relationship to publishing standards having sat on several ISO, NISO, BISG, and MARC standards committees throughout his career and currently sits on the Board of Directors for DAISY.

With almost 40 years of experience in the technology, publishing, and distribution markets, Michael joins us on the BookSmarts Podcast to discuss the services that Benetech offers to create accessible ebooks, such as Bookshare, and provides advice on how to make books GCA (Global Certified Accessible) certified.

Visit the following links to learn more:

• Benetech: benetech.org
• Bookshare: bookshare.org
• Born Accessible: bornaccessible.org

Joshua Tallent
So on this BookSmartsPodcast episode, we’re talking to Michael Johnson, who is the Vice President of Content at Benetech. Benetech is a organization that I’m sure he’ll tell you more about that helps with accessibility needs. And so we’re going to kind of dive into accessibility, ebook accessibility, in this podcast. Michael, thanks for joining me.

Michael Johnson
Thanks for the opportunity. Glad to be here.

Joshua Tallent
So let’s start off at the very beginning. Let’s talk about Benetech and what you guys do. What is Benetech about, and what are the services and options and opportunities you provide to publishers?

Michael Johnson
Sure, Benetech is a charity. We are a digital content service. We provide accessible content to people with certified print disabilities. So by certified print disabilities, I mean people who are blind, low vision, dyslexia, anywhere in the DIS universe, basically, and a whole host of other types of challenges. The simple answer is, if I were to hand somebody my Android phone and said, Can you read the digital content on here? If the answer was no, the odds are pretty good that the person has some sort of print disability. So we offer a variety of things. The first, which has two pieces, is Bookshare. So Bookshare is both a technology platform where members can sign up with proof of disability and become active members using our titles, and Bookshare is also a massive, and growing even more massive, collection of content. We have 1.3 million titles. We add about 10,000 titles a month to the collection. So it’s those two pieces interrelated which also include a web-based reader, piece of software, and a downloadable reader which will run on iPhones, Androids, Windows machines, Apple machines, etc. So that’s the biggest part of our program. We also offer a series of services to what I like to call the digital content ecosystem. So these are publishers, these are ebook conversion vendors. These are people who make technology that publishers use, like Vellum and Bookalope and people like that, as well as people who make digital products for the education environment. So we’re trying to cover as much as the spectrum as possible. We are digital only, so we don’t deal with a lot of things that typical print disability organizations deal with. We don’t have dogs, we don’t do canes, we don’t do any physical braille. We do digital braille, but not physical braille. So it’s that focus on digital and the real driver, Joshua, is education equity. So we want people, regardless of their reading abilities, to have access to the content so they can read, learn, grow, enjoy, research, whatever it is they’d be using the content for.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that makes sense. And part of that process, then, is trying to help the publishing industry as a whole understand more about how to make content accessible from the beginning, and how to build out processes that will make accessibility kind of more ingrained in the overall big picture, right? So let’s talk a little bit about Born Accessible. What is Born Accessible? What does it mean for a product to be Born Accessible?

Michael Johnson
Right, tat’s a great question. So Born Accessible is a phrase that was coined by a previous CEO at Benetech, Betsy Beauman. The notion here is in the regular production workflow, however it is somebody creates their content, at that point when they go into sales and distribution, whether it be Amazon or Ingram or one of the library sources, or wherever the sales and distribution happens at that point, we help the publishers and the rest of the ecosystem make sure that in the same Create Workflow, all the books that come out are accessible to all readers. So when we say Born Accessible, that’s what we mean. As it’s out for sales and distribution, one file, any pub file, of course, one file fully accessible for all readers. So we have a program called GCA which teaches the publishers and the ebook conversion vendors on how to make that happen.

Joshua Tallent
Okay so how then, let’s say, as a publisher, I have my own internal workflow, and we develop, you know, we use InDesign to create our print books, and we’ve got some sort of digital workflow for the ebooks. How do I get involved in GCA? What is GCA? What does it look like for a publisher, and how do I participate?

Michael Johnson
Right, so I’m sure the folks in marketing would be upset if I didn’t explain what GCA is. So, GCA, because we love our acronyms in publishing. GCA is Global Certified Accessible, and it is following the old axiom, “If you give a person a fish, you feed them for a day. If you teach a person to fish, you feed them for a lifetime”. So we work with the publisher or the ebook conversion vendor. So in your scenario, Joshua, you’ve got InDesign, you have some other internal process to turn that InDesign file into an ePub file, you would send us one of your books. We would pick it apart. We would explain to you what you did wrong, chapter and verse, why it is wrong, what you should have done, and perhaps even given you some coding snippets or suggestions about ARIA labels or whatever happens to be so you can do it properly. And then you would go back and rework that book, however it was you created in the first place. Begin at the beginning, rework it informed by the guidance we gave you, recreate the book, send it to us again, and we would just stay in this sort of ‘do’ loop until that book passes. We repeat the process for a second book, which hopefully goes much more smoothly and much more quickly, because it should be informed by the work on the first book. What we’re not doing is fixing the first book. We’re teaching you how to change the workflow so when you recreate the first book, it’s accessible. So when you create the second book, it should be through this enhanced workflow. When you create the third book, it should be even easier. And then after three books, we are working on the Honor-based system that you’re going to continue to behave yourself and create books as you were taught, and for a year, that production process would be certified accessible.

Joshua Tallent
Okay, so there’s obviously a lot of hurdles a publisher has to endure and figure out as they try to make their content accessible. So again, with our understanding here, we’re just kind of going from “I’m a publisher, and I have my own internal workflow, not using a vendor”. What are some of the major hurdles or changes for publisher content that you’ve found are necessary in that becoming fully accessible?

Michael Johnson
Yeah, another great question. So that answer is variant based specifically on what publisher, the type of books they publish in the book they hand in, but the three broadest categories are image descriptions. So not doing image descriptions properly is the most commonly occurring and most negatively impactful problem in accessibility. So we really need to have the images in the book properly described. So that’s number one, image descriptions. Number two is in book navigation. So we want to make sure that there’s 100% print page fidelity. We also want to make sure that endnotes, footnotes, glossaries, table of contents, all those kind of things are marked properly so that a person with a print disability can easily navigate in book. And the third most commonly occurring one is language shifts. Let’s say a book is published in French, but there’s a paragraph in Spanish, so you want to make sure you indicate that you’re shifting, because the declared language for the book would be in Spanish. So whatever assistive technology is being used, it will try and present the book to the reader in French, because the declared language is French. And then when you switch to Spanish, if you don’t tell it, the assistive technology will try and read the Spanish paragraph in French, which is a horrible experience, I promise you. And if you say it right, going into the Spanish, but you don’t flip it back, then it will try and read the rest of the book, which is in French, in Spanish. So these are terrible things. So those are the three biggies. And then depending on the publisher, depending on the subject matter or the genre the publisher is producing, we start to get out in the weeds on what the particular problem is the particular book, but those are the ones which cross most publishers, the ones which cause the largest problems with somebody with a print disability trying to successfully read and enjoy both.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah. Okay, so I’m a publisher again, gone through the whole process. We got certified, GCA certified and now we want to make sure that our books are available in Bookshare. And there’s reasons for this. Obviously, part of it is that it’s being a good citizen, making sure that your content is available for those people who would otherwise not be able to access it. And in certain cases, that’s, you know, absolutely necessary. I’m taking a class in college or something, and I need access to that book. And other cases, maybe it’s not as absolutely necessary, but still a good practice. So what if I’m a publisher and I want to participate in Bookshare and make sure that my titles are available in the Bookshare database.

Michael Johnson
Right, so GCA and Bookshare are heavily related, but not inextricably so, so you can participate in one, the other, or both. So in the Bookshare collection, publishers donate the content to Benetech. We have 900 publishers, which represent almost 2,000 imprints who regularly donate their content, most of them just when their spring line comes out, or whatever it is they’re doing when they distribute to their normal distribution channels, we’re just part of that process. Either they distribute to us directly or they use Core Source when you’re distributing out every place else and distribute to Benetech as well. So it’s a very basic agreement, which was actually we had help when the agreement was drawn up from one of the lawyers at the AAP designing the way the donation agreement works. The publisher agrees to donate the files. They give us whatever geography they’re allowing for our distribution. We promise to behave ourselves. We only give these books to people with the certified print disability, and we honor the distribution requirements from the publisher. So it could be US only, it could be US plus Marrakech, which is a rights protection international protocol that’s available in several countries, or it could be North America only. Probably everybody on the call is familiar with all the various publishing rights and matrices. So we follow those very explicitly. So you sign a donation agreement, we set up a secure drop site for you. You either drop the files directly to us or work through whoever does your ebook distribution. They show up in Benetech for access, in Bookshare for access for our certified print disabled users.

Joshua Tallent
Okay, pretty straightforward, and that process then allows you to make those accessible to people who need the content. Is there typically a timeframe around this as well? Do some publishers kind of hold off on putting content in Bookshare until certain times or is it just basically generally, everybody puts everything in at the time when it’s published.

Michael Johnson
Well, there’s probably 1800 or 2700 different answers to that question. So it like any other distribution channel, as far as you know, we’re going to delay this until then, or don’t do this book until that book’s released, or whatever. So we do, like anybody in the eBook distribution business does, we do the best we can to honor those arrangements, to make sure that we’re not doing anything which would upset the publisher, because we rely on the publishers. We don’t create any of our own content. We don’t remediate the content. The publishers donate it to us. We perform certain digital miracles to make the files more accessible than they were when the publisher gave it to us in general. But a lot of the publishers that are in GCA are also donating their beautiful GCA files back into Bookshare as well. You know, you talked about people should do it because it’s the right thing to do. When wetalk about GCA, the goal here is to raise the awareness, but also raise the production and distribution level of content. I shouldn’t need a second reason, because my first reason is it’s just the right social justice thing to do. So if any publishing house cares at all about DEI or underrepresented voices or any of those phrases or programs, you can’t ignore accessibility and say you’re a DEI house or you care about people, basically, because accessibility strikes across all boundaries, all races, creeds, faith, traditions, countries of national origin, social economic strata, whatever it happens to be, accessibility just happens to people. Sometimes it’s an accident which causes some sort of situation, sometimes it’s genetic, sometimes it’s a combination of the two. So that’s the first reason why people should make their book successful, at the very least donate to Bookshare, but certainly also go through the GCA process so they’re building better books anyway. Like I said, I don’t need more reasons, but I do have two other reasons. The second one is a commercial reason. Joshua, we’ve known each other for a long time, but this is year 39 for me in this insane combination of technology, publishing and distribution, and so I get the commercial aspects of it very well. So there’s two pieces on the commercial side. The first piece is, depending on who you talk to, whether it’s Yale or whatever various studies are done, it’s somewhere between 22 and 25% of the population has some sort of print disability. So I’m not promising any of your listeners, or anybody for that matter, that they’re going to have a 25% increase in sales, but I do promise them, if people can’t read their books, they’re not going to buy them. So you’re opening up a whole huge addressable market by making your book successful. That’s the first piece. The second commercial piece is we at Benetech regularly speak to the people who are in charge of your search results when you search for things on the internet, and they are starting to explore and interrogate the EPUB files and they’re taking things like image descriptions and surfacing those when you do book searches. So if you and I write a book, Joshua, about our years together, two guys with beards, whatever it happens to be, that’s not going to be in the Onix feed, unless that’s our clever title, but whatever’s going to be in the Onix feed is in the Onix feed. But what’s happening now with the search engines is they are lifting up the well built image descriptions and including those in search terms, so it’s a much greater chance for discovery. Yeah. The third reason, which I really don’t like to get to, is the legal reason. So if anybody listening is has anything at all to do with any basic education system in the United States, title two requires that all digital content available in educational institutions or any government funded institutions be fully accessible. If anybody listing wants to sell ebooks at Europe. The European Accessibility Act requires, or will require, in June of 2025 that ebooks be fully accessible. There’s also several provinces in Canada doing this. So again, I don’t need the second or third reasons, but I have them.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, and that European Accessibility Act is something that people are obviously really starting to get concerned about, or think about more or put more effort around. So let’s talk a little bit about that. I think the EU is definitely putting an emphasis on this for the right reasons. But at the same time, there are, like you said, commercial reasons for a publisher to think about accessibility and to engage in accessible content creation. So what specifically for anybody who’s listening who doesn’t really know what’s going on, what are the specific requirements of the European Accessibility Act, and how do you think that’s going to impact, let’s say, US publishers, for the sake of argument.

Michael Johnson
So in the compressed time we have for our check today, the simple thing is, if anybody has a digital good or service for sale beyond June 28, 2025 it has to be accessible, or else you are subject to fine by any one of the 27 countries in the European Union. The European Union, the European Parliament, has decided that the EPUB 1.1 accessibility standard and the WCAG 2.2, double A are the rules. So we were delighted, those of us in the accessibility industry, especially technical guys like me, were delighted that the EU didn’t come with own set of standards. They’re just going to use the already accepted, already in force, already under development, already in place standards available that I just described. So those are publicly available standards. Anybody can go to the internet, and if you have a competent person working on your ebooks, they should be able to read the standards and comply with them. It’s not that big a deal. Most of the retailers and wholesalers are beginning to, if they’re not already, inspecting incoming files and looking to see, are you passing those two hurdles. So the process is already underway. You know, there is a large company somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, and if they decide to start do something about it, that will change the game for everybody, as it always does when that unnamed company makes those decisions. But, in the meantime, each of the European Union countries, as is always the case with their legislation, will have their own local laws. It’s a little bit different than the ADA here, because the ADA requires a person, the American with Disabilities Act requires a person, to say, hey, such and such is violating my rights. In the EU, you’re just breaking the law, and any one of the governments can just say, well, you’re breaking the law. It doesn’t require a reader to say, hey, I can’t get this book from XYZ publisher. The national government can review and say you’re out of compliance.

Joshua Tallent
Okay. It’s pretty straightforward, really. I mean, it’s just a matter of meeting the requirements. It’s good that they’re sticking with requirements that are already published, and it’s not a bunch of new stuff that they’re coming up with. I guess, then, the logical question again for a publisher who’s trying to do some of the stuff on their own, they want to make sure their titles or ebook files are accessible, what kinds of tools and services should they be thinking about and using to become an accessible publisher? Obviously, GCA certification would be great. But if I’m building these internally and I’m just using InDesign, I don’t know much about this. What are some tools that I could use to get the process started internally and start thinking through what to do to be better at this?

Michael Johnson
Right. So if you’re using InDesign, there are a series of challenges. We don’t have time to go through them all, but there is an interesting company called Circular Software, which has built a bunch of little things that sort of lay on top of InDesign that will help you do your EPUB files at a higher level of accessibility compliance than the regular out of the box InDesign will allow you to do. So that’s something to consider. We have no relationship with them at all, but the gentleman who founded that company got frustrated that he couldn’t do this work in InDesign so he built a software company basically that addresses that. So that’s just something to consider. The easiest things to do would be, there are two free checkers out there. One’s called EPUBCheck, and that will check to make sure the technical details of your ePub file are correct. So it’s not going to do any content evaluation. It’s just going to, it’s purely a formatting check. And then there’s a tool called ACE, like the playing card Ace, ACE from an organization called Daisy, like the flower, and Ace by Daisy will also do a series of checks around accessibility compliance. Now, both of these circumstances, there’s only so much that the machine can do, because there are a lot of nuances in doing accessibility correctly. But if you’re creating your own files using those two tools, the EPUB checker, which is free, EPUBCheck, and ACE by Daisy, which I believe is also still free. That’s a big step forward. You could just take any pub you created yesterday through InDesign, or however you got to your ePub file and run those checkers. That’s a good start. Benetech is also certified, I don’t know, it’s probably a dozen or so now, of the conversion houses, so you can go to bornaccessible.org and look at our list of certified publishers. If you’re not using them, maybe have a conversation with them to see how they could help you. If you are using them, alert them that, hey, accessibility is important to me, and I want to start getting accessibility processing as part of my regular production flow.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that makes sense. All right, well, Michael, thank you. I appreciate this. It’s a good overview. There’s obvious, you know, always more to talk about when it comes to accessibility. I’m sure we’ll bring on more people, and we’ve had on people like Laura Brady in the past to talk about this, but we’ll continue the conversation. I think it’s important for us as publishers to engage with this topic and try to figure out what the next steps are and how do we get this going? And, you know, dealing with the questions. So I really appreciate you coming on and telling us more about accessibility and also about the work that you’re doing at Benetech as well. Anything else you think is important before we hang up the phone?

Michael Johnson
Well, I want to say thank you, obviously, for bringing me on. But I want to let everybody listening know that Benetech has been at this for 25 years. We’ve done 31 million downloads of accessible content to readers around the world. We exist as a charity to help people solve this problem. So I just ask all of your listeners to please let us help you solve this problem.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that’s great. And where can they follow you online? What kind of things can people see about Benetech and about yourself and the work that you’re doing?

Michael Johnson
Sure, benetech.org, bookshare.org, bornaccessible.org, and then my email is michaelj@benetech.org

Joshua Tallent
We’ll put links to all that in the show notes for those who are listening. Thanks, Michael. Appreciate your time. It’s great to have you on the show.

Michael Johnson
I appreciate it. Thanks for the opportunity.

Joshua Tallent
That’s it for this episode of the BookSmarts podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, you can leave a review or rating on apple podcast or Spotify, or wherever you’re listening to the podcast. And also, we really appreciate when you share the podcast with your colleagues and let them know what we’re doing here. If you have topic suggestions or feedback about the show, you can email me at Joshua@firebrand tech.com thanks for joining us and getting smarter about your books.