The Future of Publishing

Prior to the beginning of every term at U.S. colleges and universities, staff in Disability Resources (DR) offices begin the process of trying to obtain or create accessible instructional materials for students with print disabilities. As other students head to the bookstore to purchase their textbooks or course packs, either in person or online, students with print disabilities are required to take the extra step of making requests for their materials to be converted into formats they can access. If those students, the DR office at their school, and faculty are proactive, the student may have their course materials at the start of the semester just like all of their nondisabled peers. However, any breakdown in that process, late changes and choices, or an inability to get appropriate versions of instructional materials for conversion can leave a student waiting into the term to get materials, causing them to fall behind. In a sixteen-week semester, a ten-week trimester, or an eight-week quarter, every day that the student does not have access to their course materials puts them in a bind. For students with print disabilities a delay can mean the difference between success and failure.

Unfortunately, most publisher-provided content is not born accessible and ready for use by students with print disabilities. This requires DR offices to request electronic versions of materials from publishers that they then must remediate themselves. Some publishers cannot provide appropriate versions or do not respond to requests. In those cases schools do even more work themselves. Some publications, especially STEM titles, require custom work and faculty consultations to translate or interpret images, graphs, or other supplementary materials embedded in the text, or to convert the publisher supplied PDF into the needed file format. Multimedia materials present special challenges, such as transcribing subtitles for video or creating new versions with voiced descriptions for visual components. Despite all these challenges, the work of reformatting and delivering these materials to print-disabled students rests in the institution’s DR office.

The scale of these services can range from a single student to thousands of students. Each student makes a request based on their individual course of study. A single class may be one large textbook, dozens of scholarly articles, a stack of early American novels, or an infinite number of other variations. The vast range of course subjects and pedagogical approaches is a cornerstone of American higher education. The innumerable curricular differences between institutions is also valued. In the context of accessibility, this academic freedom creates a cost in terms of meeting the accommodation requests of students.

The challenges for schools and students with respect to supplying accessible instructional materials have been well documented. In 2011 the Report of the Advisory Commission on Accessible Instructional Materials in Post secondary Education for Students with Disabilities (AIM Commission Report, 2011) studied the state of accessible materials and made eighteen recommendations to the U.S. Congress. Unfortunately, little has changed since the time of the Commission’s report even though efforts to move to born accessible workflows and formats, especially accessible EPUB3, have been gaining momentum. At this point so few titles are commercially available in an accessible format that this challenge remains for students and higher education as a whole.