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by Jill Ross
One of the hot topics in publishing right now is “accessibility”. Accessibility refers to the extent to which a product, service, or environment is designed to be usable by people with disabilities. It is not the same thing as “access”, which refers to the ability or opportunity to use or access something.
Accessibility is not a new issue. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law in 1990. Title III of the ADA requires that businesses, state and local governments, and nonprofit services providers make accommodations for the disabled public to access the same services as patrons who are not disabled.
1990 was a long time ago. In fact, there are probably some people reading this column who weren’t even born yet! So why is accessibility in publishing such a hot topic right now? While nobody disputes that people with disabilities should have the same access to content as everybody else, in general publishers have pretty much just kept going about their business as usual.
One reason that accessibility is gaining traction is that recent standards and technology are making it easier for publishers to make their products accessible. For example, in 1990 most people had never heard of an ebook. (Fun fact: the first commercial ebook was produced in 1993. It was a thriller novel titled Host and was distributed on floppy disks.) In the mid-2000s, ebooks began to gain wider acceptance and popularity with the introduction of dedicated electronic reading devices, such as the Kindle. Today, ebooks account for about one in every four books sold.
In addition to the ADA, there are other standards and guidelines that guide accessibility:
- The European Accessibility Act (EAA) identifies the product features and service features that must be accessible for persons with disabilities. As of 28 June 2025, companies must ensure that the newly marketed products and services covered by the Act are accessible.
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 defines how to make Web content more accessible to people with disabilities. Accessibility involves a wide range of disabilities, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, language, learning, and neurological disabilities.
- The PDF/UA standard (Universal Accessibility) contains specifications for accessible PDF documents, as well as conforming PDF readers and assistive technologies.
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At ASNT, we are actively working to make our products accessible. It’s not only the right thing to do, but it’s a good business decision. (For example, conforming to the EAA will allow us to continue to sell our ebooks in Europe in 2025.)
Beginning in 2023, all new ebooks published by ASNT are designed and produced in an accessible manner. Accessible ebooks are built upon accessible PDFs. Accessible PDFs require a number of elements, including:
- tagging the elements of a page in a logical reading order
- building a clear heading structure
- ensuring functional hyperlinks and form fields
- writing “alt text” (descriptions) for images
- ensuring proper table and list formatting
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The audience description provided in the introductory paragraph of this article—“people with disabilities”—goes far beyond physical disabilities such as blindness or low vision. It also applies to people who process and learn information differently, such as a person with dyslexia or attention deficit disorder (ADD) who may prefer to have books read aloud or need to adjust font size. Generation Z has grown up with individual education plans and know their needs and rights. In fact, many of the requests that we currently get are for classroom books used at the community college level.
Many other interesting tools are on the horizon. One that fascinates me is called “bionic reading,” in which letters are randomly bolded. Bionic reading was created by a Swiss developer named Renato Casuut, whose aim was to make reading easier by “guiding the eyes through artificial fixation points.”1
As an experiment, I converted a recent Technical Paper published in ME to bionic text. Unfortunately, PDFs are not compatible, so I had to first convert the PDF to RTF (Rich Text Format) before uploading to app.bionic.reading.com. You can see the difference compared to regular text in the figure below.
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What do you think?
My daughter has ADD, and I can see how something like this may help improve focus. Maybe someday this will be a plug-in or a simple on/off feature on ereaders.
Another thing you may have never thought about is colors. Did you know that images can be made more accessible by choosing certain hues, shapes, and textures? Some of the tips in a recent Nature article2 include:
- Do not use rainbows. Use a perceptually uniform color map, such as viridis or cividis.
- Avoid red, especially in combination with green.
- Go gray. Check your figure in grayscale, or by completely desaturating it.
- Pick a palette that works for everyone, such as Color Universal Design or Color Blind 10 Palette.
- Think bigger. Use features such as shapes and line textures to disambiguate color.
- Test drive. Use a simulator such as Color Oracle or Coblis to ensure images can be interpreted accurately by everyone.
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What are your thoughts? How do you prefer to learn, read, or consume content? Feel free to email me at jross@asnt.org.
References
1 Fedewa, J. 2022. “What is bionic reading and how do you use it?” https://www.howtogeek.com/807981/what-is-bionic-reading-and-how-do-you-use-it/.
2 Katsnelson, A. 2021. “Colour me better: fixing figures for colour blindness.” Nature, Vol. 598.
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Jill Ross is the Director of Publications at ASNT, jross@asnt.org.
“Accessibility and ASNT” originally appeared as a two-part series in the May 2023 and June 2023 issues of ASNT Materials Evaluation.
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