Jisc led a project on ebook accessibility: Ebook audit 2016
The e-book accessibility audit, which launched in August 2016 and was completed in November 2016 was a joint project between several UK Higher Education Institution (HEI) disability and library services, Jisc and representatives from the book supply industry. The audit supports an inclusive approach by seeking to introduce a benchmark for accessibility in e-book platforms. The focus is on key areas of practical user experience to measure basic accessibility functionality and guide targeted platform improvement.
The audit itself was a "non-technical" accessibility survey restricted to features that can be quickly and easily checked by a non-specialist with responses crowd-sourced by the UK university library and disability community.The testing was done by 33 universities and 5 suppliers with 44 platforms tested, covering 65 publishers with nearly 280 ebooks tested.
The audit focused on e-books supplied to the education sector in the United Kingdom (rather than books for mainstream commercial consumption e.g. popular fiction).
This project came about as a result of ongoing collaborative work between Jisc and a range of universities with a particular interest in accessible e-books and e-book platforms. If you have specific queries about the project feel free to contact us via ebookaudithelp@gmail.com. We will endeavour to get back to you as soon as possible but please note this is a voluntary project outside our day jobs - responses are on a best efforts basis. This website site has been assembled by Alistair McNaught (a subject specialist at Jisc) but the quality of the resources available reflects the wide contributions to the project from the team.
