The Important Role of the Editor in Making Science Accessible

Abstract

Making publications accessible for people with print disabilities[1] is finally becoming more common. This is long overdue. In the past, it involved the creation of special accessible file formats in addition to the standard formats in which books and journals are published, and the editorial and production workflows that produced those accessible formats were based on technologies and standards that few publishers and few of their suppliers understood, or even knew of. This was particularly a problem for science, because of the complexity of typical scientific publications full of equations, tables, notes, citations, and figures. It was all too easy to acknowledge the importance of accessibility but to throw up one’s hands and say, “But there’s no way we can do that, sorry!” Editors can play a crucial role in getting this to happen—and getting accessibility right. This is no longer the case. Most publishers, even science publishers, are much closer to having fully accessible publications than they realize because the file formats and standards they commonly use are now, or can easily be converted to, the ones recommended for accessible publications. (This is described in detail in the following section.) Editors can play a crucial role in getting this to happen—and getting accessibility right. In my work over the past four decades, I’ve focused on standards, markup, and publishing technologies, mainly for scholarly and scientific, technical, and medical (STM) publishers. The first two of those decades were dominated by proprietary tools, technologies, and formats. At that time, when I […]