Hi all, Tom, Agata and I are pleased to announce that the OABN has become an OPERAS Special Interest Group (SIG), and as such it is now formally supported by OPERAS, the European Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the European Research Area.

The OABN will continue to…[Read more]

I’ve been doing some more digging into accessibility resources and have found the following:

– Improving the Accessibility of your Mainstream Digital Content, which seems to be a wealth of resources from the Inclusive Publishing group, coordinated by the DAISY consortium: https://inclusivepublishing.org/about-the-inclusive-publishing-hub/
– The…[Read more]

At OBP we have adapted our InDesign-based workflow to produce accessible EPUBs. So far it has been a mixture of adopting some new typesetting practices and doing some post-production work. It’s still a work in process, if anyone has comments on this I am all ears!

We have recently discovered that pdfs produced with LaTeX have a certain treatment that does not interface well with common screenreaders for visually impaired people. Fixing this is actually a major project and will get pretty gory. We will not have the funds available at LangSci to do this on our own, but we might apply for some funding. If you…[Read more]

This channel was set up after the Open Cafe discussion on the accessibility of OA books, at which a number of links were shared, so I will drop them here for future reference:

– EU directive on accessibility, coming into force in 2025: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32019L0882
– OAPEN VPAT:…[Read more]

NEW COLLECTION: Myself and François van Schalkwyk of African Minds have put together a collection of OA book publisher business models, with contributions from a number of presses. The collection is here: https://oabooksbusinessmodels.pubpub.org/

We’re keen to add to it, so if your press might be interested in contributing, take a look at the…[Read more]