How to improve tools for accessible ebooks remediation? ABELab guidelines released!

In recent years, the topic of digital accessibility has become increasingly important, also in light of the imminent entry into force of the Directive 2019/882 on accessibility requirements for products and services, usually referred to as the European Accessibility Act (EAA). Ebooks are among the services to which the Directive applies. Some publishers have already started to produce and distribute born-accessible ebooks. But how to manage ebooks that have been produced and published in previous years, the so-called backlist?

This is where all tools, software, platforms, cloud solutions, APIs and other applications that can be used to transform an inaccessible ebook into an accessible version come into play, correcting accessibility issues to obtain a digital book that meets the requirements defined by European legislation and international accessibility guidelines.

EDRLab, Fondazione LIA and KB, the National Library of the Netherlands, are partners of the Creative Europe funded project ABE Lab (Accessible Backlist Ebooks Laboratory). The project aims to provide guidelines to boost the remediation of ebooks from publishers’ backlists. As a core part of the activities to reach this objective, the ABE Lab team has searched for, discovered and tested multiple remediation tools - that is, tools that can convert an inaccessible ebook into an accessible one - available on the market to assess their performance and their functionalities. The white paper Guidelines for remediation tools producers provides high-level guidelines based on the results of these tests and the insight gained. The document can be used by producers and developers to design, develop or improve their tools, highlighting the requirements these tools should include to be effective and to support the human operators by making the process as simple, intuitive and fluid as possible - also depending on the competence of the target users.

The white paper Guidelines for remediation tools producers can be read online and downloaded from the Deliverable section of the ABE Lab website.

We hope the document will provide valuable information to stakeholders and developers to improve the functionalities of their remediation software and applications, making them more comprehensive and powerful, thus providing better support for the remediation of inaccessible backlist ebooks.
For any questions or comments, Please contact the ABE Lab Project Core Team using the email contact@abelab.eu.