Elsevier’s Company Accessibility Policy
Alicia Wise, Director of Universal Access
Elsevier’s Accessibility Journey
• About Us
• Accessibility Working Group
• About our Accessibility Policy
• Challenges and Solutions
• Working in Partnership
Accessibility Working Group
• Began by bringing together
•
•
•
•
those engaged and interested
User Centered Design –
supports 130 web products
Digital Book Archive fulfills c.
4,000 requests to worldwide
services that support people with
disabilities each year
Universal Access – special
team in strategy
Operations w/ experts in
EPUB2, EPUB3, MathML, and
tagged PDFs
• Internal news and webinars
• Accessibility Matters
Opportunistic within a strategic framework
• The terrific tale of Tripp Narup
• Creation of Accessibility Policy Task Force
• Email invite to nominate a task force representatives
• Delegates from across business and operations helped design policy
◦ Product Management
◦ Book Publishing
◦ Journal Publishing
◦ Legal
◦ Operations
◦ User Centered Design
◦ Finance
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Policy Development
• Divided into sub working groups
◦ Industry accessibility best practices
◦ Physical accessibility* laws and best practices
◦ Print disability law, non-US laws, and HR practices
◦ Partners and third party supplier standards
◦ Web accessibility
◦ Inventory of our sites
• Several rounds of review and iteration using web conferencing
• Final approval by Upper Management Committee in Jan 2012
• Final polish by Corporate Communications then published to web
*Physical accessibility was excluded from the policy since each international location each had hardened laws and felt that would dilute
focus of policy and expand complexity
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What’s in the Policy?
• Main Idea: All products should be accessible to people with disabilities
and comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0).
• Scope: Print Products, internal and external websites and tools,
eBooks, partners and suppliers
• Benchmark: WCAG 2.0 (A)
• Outreach: We partner with the industry experts
• UCD: Apply user centered design best practices
• Timeline: Policy will be implemented from 2013 onwards
View Elsevier’s Accessibility Policy:
http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-policies/accessibility-policy
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Challenge 1: Demonstrating Business Case
“Why should I care about accessibility, there aren’t any blind doctors”
For our flagship products there can be more than a dozen requirements competing for a
release at any given time. We have to prove that there is a business case for addressing
accessibility
Solutions:
• Show that our customers are asking for accessible products
• Put a revenue number on numbers of customers with accessibility requirements
• Team up with an executive level champion
• Create an educational program to interest product teams
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Challenge 2: Where does the budget come from?
“Wait a minute you are going to charge me to comply with the company accessibility
policy? How much is this going to cost?”
Product managers need to account for accessibility in their bottom line and in budget
planning.
Solutions:
• Accessibility and Usability are twins. Invest to enhance the User Experience and you can get
twin brother accessibility too!
• Tackle accessibility going forward, feature by feature
• Fly under the radar
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Challenge 3: Large company with diverse dev practices
“We use the agile methodology, so you better not hand me 10 pages of accessibility
documentation to follow”
There is not a one size fits all solution for tackling accessibility across diverse product and
development teams. Elsevier produces over 130 web products.
Solutions:
• Be adaptable: (some teams will want a UI spec, some will want a live tutorial, some will
want a best practices wiki, some will want training)
• Create a central accessibility center of expertise
• Re-Use: (best practice documents, WCAG 2.0 review template, recommended code
snippets)
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Challenge 4: Need policy to be enforceable
“If I’m not going to be sued and not going to be fired, then should I care about following
the accessibility policy”
Having a well written policy is a good start, but how can we provide some incentives for
enforcing?
Solutions:
• High-level champions
• Use positive reinforcement, not the policing mentality
• Create a (highly visible!) product scorecard
• Demonstrate the appeal of accessibility as a feature with glossy marketing
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Challenge 5: quality feedback loops
Challenge
5: WCAG
2.0business
not easiest
Business: “Show
me the
case” guidelines to understand
Product Mangers: “Show me the customer need”
Developers: “Show me the code”
UX: “I’ve shown you all of that. Wait a minute, how do I map the recommended solutions
to the WCAG2.0 checkpoints?”
Solutions:
• Create a WCAG 2.0 template for reviewing products
• Provide a separate report on compliance with guidelines
• Focus on practical advice, techniques, and solutions
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Where are we at?
• Policy went live last month
• Key products have already had WCAG reviews
• Typically we are in the plan and requirements stage for most other web
products
• We aspire to sustain accessibility in all of our products
Plan
Determine
opportunity for
accessibility
release
Requirements
Product managers
author
requirement to
follow W3C
WCAG 2.0 A
standard
Review
UCD Conducts
Review Against W3C
Standards
Implement
Development team
implements
suggestions.
UCD helps conduct
QA
Sustain
Accessibility is baked
into:
• requirements
• process
• development tools
• code/web
components
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What are examples of policy wins?
• At least 10 WCAG 2.0 reviews completed including:
• SD, Scopus, SciVal Experts, EV2, NursingSkills, MCS LMS, Health
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•
•
•
Advance, Lancet, Cell, HR Portal
includes 2 largest revenue generating S&T Sites
Reed Elsevier Supplier Management has included WCAG 2.0, Section
508 requirements in our RFPs
At least 3 Elsevier vendors have accessibility requirements including
Health Advance platform
Specific funding and budget allocated to tackle accessibility and usability
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ScienceDirect - going above and beyond
• Partnered with University of Illinois,
Indiana Univ, and Michigan State to
help test features before releases
• Developed best practices guideline to
be used across Elsevier
• Development team expects
accessibility in each release
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◦
◦
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ARIA landmarks
ARIA labels
Good structure (headings, lists)
Keyboard Operability
Management of keyboard focus
Logical tab order
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What is planned for 2013?
• Training of staff in WCAG 2.0, Web Accessibility
• Release of accessible Math (MathJAX/MathML)
• EPUB2 fulfillment with Book Archive/AccessText Network
• Accessible EPUB3 template creation
• PDF Tagging Upgrades
• Several web site WCAG 2.0 reviews scheduled:
◦ internal book editorial site
◦ College of Direct Support LMS system
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Working in Partnership
• EDItEUR et al. in the UK
• WIPO Stakeholders Platform
• AccessText Network
• National Federation for the Blind
• Variety of universities and disability support offices
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Thank you for listening! Any questions?
Elsevier is committed to access, quality, and sustainability!
Thank you!
@wisealic
a.wise@elsevier.com
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