The terrace at Fiesole’s Villa La Torrossa before the June 26 start of the Fondazione LIA ‘Apace’ conference on the European Accessibility Act. Image: Publishing Perspectives, Porter Anderson
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
See also:
Italy’s LIA and APACE: Accessibility Programming at Fiesole
Europe’s APACE: Only One in Four Publishers Produces Accessible Ebooks
Accessibility: Italy-Based Fondazione LIA Hits Its 10th Anniversary
‘The European Accessibility Act Is Here: Now What?’
Snuggled into a brake-pumping bend in the Via Benedetto da Maiano high above Firenze, the Villa La Torrossa in Fiesole this week surely is one of the oldest structures in which one of Europe’s newest law’s implications are being discussed.
On Saturday (June 28), the European Accessibility Act is to come into force. And as one of the speakers in the Fondazione LIA‘s “APACE” conference on Thursday said, “In the last three months, we’ve had a lot of calls,” as publishers and others in book publishing get alerts from their calendars about this weekend’s looming date.
The Accessibility Act carries potential fines for non-compliance. As one consultant in the assembly at Fiesole has noted, it’s going to be interesting to see reactions the first time a player in publishing or another industry is fined—or even simply reprimanded—for not taking the appropriate steps to make a book as accessible as possible to citizens who are visually impaired.
The APACE project, managed by Elisa Molinari, is funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe. Its partners include publishers’ associations which are members of the International Publishers Association (IPA) and the Federation of European Publishers (FEP).
This two-day exclusive conference in Fiesole—during a heat wave—has drawn more than 100 participants and speakers, from international book publishing, retail, and related companies as large as Amazon, Kobo, Bookwire, and Italy’s biggest book publisher, the Mondadori Group, to smaller but elite organizations such as library and university press leaders in Finland, Denmark’s Politikens, Germany’s Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, Germany’s publishers and booksellers association, and the publishing elements of the Lithuanian Audiosensory Library.
The parent LIA Foundation (for “Libri Italiani Accessibili”) in 10 years has catalogued more tens of thousands of ebooks for people who are blind and otherwise visually impaired in Italy—its original mission. Created by the Association of Italian Publishers (Associazione Italiana Editori, AIE) and the Italian Union of the Blind and Visually Impaired (UICI), Fondazione LIA and its APACE project have a slogan: The most readable book is the one everyone can read.
And yet, of course, conference participants readily concede that many of the companies and organizations they represent are not ready, despite a generous half-decade for preparation.
Musinelli: ‘A Very Complex Discussion’
In an agenda-setting round table, ‘The European Accessibility Act Is Here: Now What?’, Fondazione LIA secretary general Cristina Musinelli, center, speaks about the long march to the new law’s development and to the formidable range of issues ahead in bringing its value into reality. At left is Kristina Kramer, Germany’s Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels’ deputy director for international affairs. To the right is Elisa Molinari of Fondazione LIA, the project director of the ‘APACE’ project. Image: Publishing Perspectives, Porter Anderson
Not unlike the Villa La Torrossa’s eponymous tower—which arrived as a late-19th-century addition to the 15th-century original Parenti family villa—the European Accessibility Act, Directive 2019/882, in April 2019 provided the book business and other industries a five-year runway.
“We started, in reality, with the first European project in 2006.”Cristina Musinelli, Fondazione LIA
Under the expert event-production skills of Milan-based Molinari and the calmly insistent leadership of LIA secretary general Cristina Musinelli, what’s quickly developing in this European Accessibility Summer School, as it’s called, is a picture of just how broad are the challenges when you try to create that world in which more than 100 million print-impaired blind, visually impaired, and dyslexic people in the EU can “choose among all the publications available on the market.”
For a broader perspective, the World Health Organization reports that there are more than 285 million people who are blind or otherwise visually impaired. What may be fewer than 100 countries today have national copyright laws that include special provisions for such citizens. The EU’s new Accessibility Act is something of thunderclap in a long-neglected field of would-be readers.
At the Fiesole conference, after opening comments sent by the European Commission’s directorate-general of employment, social affairs Immaculada Placencia Porrero, Musinelli astutely talked on Thursday through decades of development around the need for accessibility.
“We started, in reality, with the first European project in 2006,” she said. “There were the publishers on one side, the specialist organizations, the Library for the Blind, and the disability organizations on the other side.
“I remember a meeting during discussions of the WIPO-led Marrakesh Treaty“—which created a universal copyright exception that will allow authorized parties to “travel” accessible formats to appropriate consumers—”where we discussed the possibility of changing some of the standards … and some of the disabilities organizations left the table.”
In short, the road to the European Accessibility Act has not been an easy one, at times putting into contention various factions and stakeholders.
“It was a very difficult time,” Musinelli told the conference. “A very complex discussion.”
Pellegrino: ‘An Important Success Criterion’
Fondazione LIA chief officer of accessibility, Gregorio Pellegrino, speaks about technical hurdles and ‘InDesign Warriors’ in an interview with APACE project director Elisa Molinari. Image: Publishing Perspectives, Porter Anderson
It is still a complex discussion.
“The most readable book is the one everyone can read.”Fondazione LIA, APACE
Fondazione LIA has become one of the most visible hubs of partnership-driven progress, working, for example, on the development of standards for accessible reading in working groups of W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium; EDRLab, the European Digital Reading Laboratory; the Daisy Consortium; and ISO, the International Organization for Standardization.
In an interview Molinari conducted onstage with Gregorio Pellegrino, the chief accessibility officer of Fondazione LIA, Pellegrino talked about a “small group of experts,” the “InDesign Warriors,” working with Adobe relative to its InDesign software, in “consistent weekly consultations to help improve their tools’ output.”
In training Pellegrino is leading studies and response development to make pixel layouts accessible—in part by working with a publisher of sonnets in Italy “who wanted to publish a book for children. We managed to make it as accessible as possible.”
He used the success of that exercise to point out that, “What is really nice is to be able to claim that a fixed layout is accessible right now” for a given case, “an important success criterion” in the “rules for making ebooks accessible.”
Challenges—and Awareness
Participants in the Fondazione LIA ‘APACE’ conference on the European Accessibility Act are encouraged to interact with speakers as the outline of the job of implementation comes into focus. In the foreground, consutant Simon Mellins of the United Kingdom. Image: Publishing Perspectives, Porter Anderson
One of the most accomplished figures in the field leaned over on Thursday, the first day of the conference, to say quietly to a reporter, “It’s really a lot.” What was meant by that whisper was that the overwhelm clear in the eyes of some conference participants—most of them well-placed in their own publishing and related careers—has to do with the many components of the work still far from done in helping the industry approach the European Act’s vision of universal accessibility.
All is not technical, as it is in Pellegrino’s domain.
During the day, some of the most frequently registered issues encountered were not registered with undue frustration, but with clear-eyed understanding of some of hurdles, many of them quite different from one setting to the next, one staff to the next, one engaged executive leadership to the next shrugging top floor, and so on. Briefly such issues can include, to name only a few:
- Corporate commitment: How serious is a company’s brass interested in accessibility and willing to support its needs. The realities can run from one key employ delegated to “handle that, will you?” to rich resources provided by a keen management.
- Core value vs. commercial expediency: Is a given company’s governance interested in the cultural importance of genuine accessibility, or in checking the required boxes?
- Social interest: Although the United Kingdom is not part of the EU’s regulatory framework, a consultant from the UK pointed out that he can see “budgets being pulled away” as interests beyond the first phases of deep accessibility understanding and implementation wane.
- Genuine collegiality: More than once, it was said that the formation of a working group—at whatever level is needed, whether inside a single company or across many companies and/or across specialist needs—can bring together the most committed, most giving and cooperative experiments because those who raise their hands to work in such efforts are self-selecting out of genuine interest.
- Broadening the reach of the directive: It may be easy or a struggle to encourage economic players whose own services or products may not be in the scope of the European directive to apply accessibility requirements.
- The crucial point of metadata, which is a focus of the programming today (June 27): Musinelli stressed that while everyone in various parts of the industry may be working to achieve accessible publishing available, without metadata’s correct support to distribution, the information of what’s available may not reach the very end-user whose needs are being targeted.
- Many more needs include not only training, but—as one participant pointed out—preparation to provide customer service in certain settings.
- The need now for implementation of the European Accessibility Act as national law among the countries of the EU, engaging with governments and stakeholders.
The conference reconvenes for its second and final day with eyes wide open, the first day having demonstrated that the imposing achievement of the European Accessibility Act now presents the demand for many adjustments, development, and buy-in from a vast range of constituencies. Suddenly, the frequently mentioned resistance in some cases to changes in workflow at a publishing house had begun to feel minor.
Tobias Giverson, Politikens’ project manager on accessibility in Copenhagen, made a familiar but suddenly more meaningful observation as the depth of the accessibility endeavor came into focus while those vehicles sped past the Villa La Torrossa outside its huge windows. “This is all like trying to fix a car while it’s moving.”
More from Publishing Perspectives on trends and issues involving accessibility in world book publishing is here, more on the Italian market is here, more on the work of Fondazione LIA is here, and more on issues and publishing in Europe is here.