A step into inclusivity: Making content digitally accessible for all

Abstract

Digital accessibility represents a crucial journey towards inclusivity. In a world where approximately one in five people live with some form of disability, it is crucial for companies to ensure that their digital content is accessible to all. This commitment is reinforced by various legislative measures around the globe which require businesses to respond to the needs of those with disabilities. Prioritizing digital accessibility not only enhances a company’s reputation for corporate social responsibility, but also helps to prevent legal challenges that may arise from non-compliance. It ensures that all users can have an equal experience when interacting with digital content. It involves careful consideration of various factors, such as creating the right workflow, managing alternative text for images, and optimizing metadata and colour contrasts. As businesses embark on this path, they encounter various challenges that require thoughtful solutions and strategies. We will address how organizations might develop these strategies and implement the necessary tools to create a robust framework for digital accessibility and highlight NISO initiatives related to these areas. By doing so, companies not only comply with legal standards, but also contribute positively to an inclusive digital landscape.

Why digital accessibility matters

In a world that is transforming to online platforms for everything from education to shopping, social interaction, employment, and digital accessibility, digital accessibility is not just a technical requirement. It is imperative in today’s society.

Digital accessibility is about ensuring that everyone, regardless of their ability or disability, can access and use digital content and services. That includes websites, mobile apps, e-learning platforms, online services and more. When digital products and products are designed with accessibility in mind, they become usable by people with various disabilities, such as visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive impairment. But why does this matter?

The importance of digital accessibility extends beyond compliance with the law or guidelines. It is about creating inclusivity, ensuring that everyone is equal, and has equal opportunity to participate fully in the digital world and society.

One of the main reasons digital accessibility matters is inclusivity. According to the World Health organization, 15% of the global population – 1.3 billion people – have some form of disability. In the U.S. more than 25% of adults have a disability (about 70 million people). This means a significant portion of the population face a challenge in hearing, vision, mobility, self-care or independent living.

When we make digital space accessible, we are not just catering to a small niche group of people. We are addressing the needs of millions who deserve equal access to information services and opportunities. Inclusive digital design will ensure that people with disabilities can engage in the same activities that everyone else does, whether it is applying for a job, attending online classes, or simply just doing online shopping for food and, medicine.

By making accessibility a priority, we uphold the principle that the digital world should be open to everyone, not just to those who fit certain physical or cognitive profile.

Impact on individuals

On the individual level the impact of digital accessibility is most felt by people with disability. Accessible digital platforms are not just a convenience; they are essential tools to achieve independence and autonomy.

Accessible websites and apps allow individuals with disabilities to perform everyday tasks such as online banking, shopping, job searching, etc. without the need for assistance. They provide equal access to information, which is crucial for education, employment, and civic participance. Accessible education platforms enable students with disabilities to fully participate in online learning, expanding their opportunity for academic success and personal growth.

Access social media and communication can help reduce social isolation by enabling people with disability to stay connected with their communities. In health care, accessible health platforms can allow individuals to manage their health more effectively, ensuring that they receive the care they need without unnecessary barriers.

Impact on businesses

For business, the benefits of digital accessibility are huge, not only helping to avoid legal challenges, but also to enhance corporate reputation and expand market reach. Since 15% of the world’s population has some form of disability, by making digital content accessible, businesses align themselves with the global movement toward inclusivity and sustainability, while also tapping into a broader customer base. Moreover, accessible digital platforms contribute to greater employee satisfaction and retention as they reflect a company’s commitment to inclusivity and equal opportunity.

A strong reputation for corporate social responsibility can attract top talent who value working in organizations that focus on ethical practices such as ensuring that accessibility is met and compliant. When digital content is accessible, businesses can reach much larger audiences. This represents a substantial market that is often overlooked. By making digital platforms accessible, businesses can tap into this huge market, expand the customer base, and open up new revenue streams.

Accessibility features such as clear navigation, readable fonts, and alternative text to images do not just help those with disability; they improve the user experience for everyone. More user-friendly websites and apps mean higher customer satisfaction, which in return can lead to increased loyalty and repeated business for the organization.

Furthermore, in today’s social environment, a company’s reputation is tied to its commitment to corporate and social responsibility. Making digital accessibility a priority is clearly signal to consumers, employees, and investors that the organization values inclusivity and ethical practice. Companies that lead accessibility are often seen as more responsible and forward thinking, which can enhance brand loyalty and attract top talent.

By making a commitment to accessibility, businesses can align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially those related to reducing inequality, promoting decent work, and ensuring inclusive education. By supporting these SDGs businesses position themselves as leaders in sustainable and ethical business practices.

As the global population ages, the number of individuals who benefit from accessibility design will increase as that population comes to depend more upon visual and hearing aids.

Therefore, implementing accessibility now prepares business for a demographic shift that will demand more inclusive digital experience. Moreover, accessibility often drives innovation; diverse needs can lead to creative solution that will benefit all users, leading to more flexible and resilient design products by staying ahead of the curve.

Organizations can maintain a competitive edge in an increasingly inclusive digital marketplace.

Legal framework for accessibility

Moving beyond ethical obligations, there is strong legal case for digital accessibility. Many countries have enacted laws requiring that digital content and services to be accessible to all. In the United States, the American Disability Act mandates that businesses and public services ensure that their digital offerings are accessible.

Similarly, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) ¹ and the UK Equality Act 2010 also set similar requirements. The European Accessibility Act, which comes into force on June 28, 2025, states that if you are providing a product and services to the EU, the product and services should be accessible to everyone, even if you are not an entity.

This applies within the EU no matter where you are based around the world. Even if you are based in the U.S., you must ensure that your products and services that are delivered to the EU are fully accessible and compliant. Failing to comply with this regulation can result in severe consequences, including legal action and hefty fines. One of the EU regulations in Ireland ² states that if you do not provide fully accessible content, you will be fined or put in jail for 6 months.

Compliance is more than just avoiding penalty. It is about aligning your organization with the shift towards inclusivity and fairness. Understanding the legal framework for accessibility is crucial.

For any organization in the US, the Americans with Disability Act provides the foundation requiring that digital content be accessible to people with disabilities. In Europe, the European Accessibility Act ensures that products and services meet accessibility standards.

In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 mandates reasonable adjustment for people with disabilities. Recently, the Department of Justice stated that websites and education platforms must be compliant, and the Web Content Accessibility 2.1 level AA is the standard to follow. This ruling will come into force in April 2026.

Enforcement of these regulations varies. Not everybody is the same, but it is clear that governments around the world are increasingly making digital accessibility a priority and businesses must do the same.^3–5

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

All this legislation adopts the WCAG 2.1, ⁶ level AA as the main guidelines. This is an international standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These guidelines focus on making web content as perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust (POUR).

Core components of accessibility

Key components for the Web Content Accessibility are providing alternative text to images, ensuring keyboard navigation, offering captions for multimedia and maintaining proper colour contrast. By adhering to these guidelines, businesses can create digital experiences that are inclusive and accessible to all users, regardless of their ability.

Accessibility and SEO

There is a strong connection between accessibility and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Many accessibility practices, such as use of proper heading hierarchies, alternative text, and clear navigation also will improve SEO for websites. Accessible websites tend to offer a better user experience, which can lead to increased engagement, longer site visits, lower bounce rate, all of which are favourable factors for the SEO allowing businesses to increase their visibility in search engines and drive more traffic to their digital platform.

Assistive technology compatibility

Ensuring that digital content is compatible with assistive technology is another key aspect of accessibility. Common assistive technology, such as screen readers, screen magnifiers, speech recognition software, and alternative input devices help to make digital content accessible.

Organizations should follow the WCAG using semantic tagging, providing alternative text to image, ensuring keyboard accessibility testing with assistive technology. It is important to ensure that digital platforms are fully functional for users with disabilities.

Digital accessibility is far more than just a legal requirement; it is a pathway to creating a more inclusive, innovative, and ethical digital world. Whether you are a business leader, developer, designer, or simply a concerned citizen, making digital accessibility a priority is a key step towards ensuring that everyone has equal access to the opportunities and benefits of the digital age.

Common challenges

When organizations are looking to start talking about accessibility, by far the biggest issue is that it is often just a single person from a single department of the organization that is looking to make those changes. It may be that an organization publishes books and journals, but it is somebody from the journals department that is looking to make accessibility changes without necessarily having consulted colleagues beforehand. It soon becomes clear that they need to involve colleagues from these other areas in the organization before they can even start to think seriously about implementing any changes.

We have already established that it is an organization’s digital assets that are covered by the legislation that is discussed, and those assets can include books, journals, the website itself, as well as marketing materials. In looking to implement accessibility changes, there will be challenges throughout the organization in technical process changes, editorial policy, potentially stretching into branding and marketing as well.

As such, it is very important to have a cross-departmental approach to looking into accessibility changes. Knowledge should be shared between the various stakeholders to get an organization-wide view of what the aims are and what changes are going to be required in order to achieve those aims. With that kind of cross-departmental working group, it will make the project more visible, more transparent within the organization, and it will help to make clear where the responsibilities are sitting and give the ability to be able to prioritize those accordingly.

All of that is only possible if that working group has the autonomy to be able to make decisions around the required changes as well. This approach should also then lead to a consistency in application of the changes across the organization, which will unify a user experience, which may otherwise have been fragmented if it had been handled in a piecemeal fashion.

As with any changes to process or policy, there is likely to be resistance to that change which will need to be managed effectively. A good start to this is the transparency that you will get through a cross-departmental team. That change management can also be helped through raising awareness throughout the organization, through education programs, to explain why changes are necessary, what the approach to those changes will be and what the overall progress of the project is as well.

Strategies for implementation

In many cases, you will need to come up with at least two different approaches. One for your current content, which can be worked into existing production workflows, and then another approach to be able to address legacy content. ⁶

Technology does not stand still, particularly when it comes to things such as web applications. Making accessibility changes is not a one-time deal, you will need to keep on top of developments to ensure that any changes that are planned will be up-to-date and flexible enough to adapt as those technologies themselves change.

Alternative text (Alt Text)

Possibly one of the most high-profile accessibility requirement is alternative text for images or Alt Text.

Alt Text can be defined as a textual description which conveys the meaning and context of visual content. This Alt Text helps screen readers to describe images for visually impaired users and, as already mentioned, can help improve SEO by allowing search engines to use that textual information and any semantic information that might be in there.

In defining what Alt Text is it can help us to first understand what Alt Text is not. Alt text is not a figure caption. Alt text is not the file name of the image. This brings us back to the blend of the technical and editorial challenges that we touched on earlier. Technically speaking, accessibility checks that are being run over content will pass Alt Text which is either the same content as the figure caption or is just the file name of the image. These checks just see that the Alt Text is present and that it has been populated, they don’t interrogate what that content of the Alt Text is or how relevant it is. This is where editorial help is needed to ensure that the Alt Text is correct, useful, and relevant. Alt Text should be concise and succinct, usually only a sentence or two long, but it has to be specific enough and descriptive enough to allow understanding for the context of the image. Once you get beyond using a couple of sentences to describe that another accessibility feature called long description is more appropriate for this kind of longer form explanation, though Alt Text is also required as well as the Long Description.

If there is important text contained within the image, then that should be included within the Alt Text. Do not start off the Alt Text by stating ‘this is an image of…’ or ‘this is a picture of…’, the context of the Alt Text takes care of all of that. It is also important not to repeat yourself within the Alt Text.

Coming back to the cross-departmental aspect, it is all very well deciding that you need to have Alt Text and put workflow processes in place so that can be achieved from a technical point of view, but editorially you need to make some decisions as well. Where is that Alt Text going to come from? Ideally, it should be coming from the author because they are the ones who best understand why they’re including the image in the first place and what message they are trying to convey by including it.

But realistically, not all authors are going to provide Alt Text even if they are asked to. Importantly, we should also remember that a lot of the time the content, the Alt Text, has actually been written by researchers, not by authors. These people are not professional authors and as such any Alt Text which is supplied within a manuscript for images requires editing in exactly the same way as does the rest of the manuscript. As such, editorial staff will need training to be able to provide effective editing of the Alt Text.

A process is also needed if the author does not or is unable to provide any Alt Text. For legacy content, for example, it is not practical to ask authors to go back and provide Alt Text for past content that may have been written five or 10 years ago. Contingency processes need to be put in place for these instances.

Training editorial staff to write Alt Text seems to be the best solution, but that is often a burden that organizations do not want to place on an already overworked, scarce resource. Vendors may specialize in creating Alt Text, but this would be a paid service. ⁷

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate Alt Text is still somewhat unproven, ⁸ but will no doubt rapidly improve. AI can do a job in interrogating an image and providing Alt Text for that image, but at the moment, the technology that is available is still somewhat lacking. If you are going to use AI to generate Alt Text, then it is really important to have an editorial check in place so that you can vet the Alt Text that’s being created.

Tables

Moving away from images to tables or maybe not moving on from images at all, because the first thing that we are going to tackle here is tables rendered as images. This is an issue that is particularly problematic with legacy content. At one stage it was fairly common for tables to be provided as images due to technology restrictions in the past, making it very difficult to be able to render tables online and in various readers.

Regarding accessibility, it is fine to have an image of a table, but that should only be as an alternative rendition of that table, and you should have Alt Text on that image, too. Overall, you should always be aiming to have your content marked up either as HTML or as XML.

We mentioned screen readers earlier on. And in reading normal body text, paragraph text, the screen readers can handle that absolutely fine, but when it comes to tables, they do need a little bit of help. Every table should have table headings correctly identified. This allows screen readers to identify the table headers and the body text to which those headers relate. This can be either column headers or row headers. What is important is that the table header is present, which again brings us to a few editorial considerations.

If you have a table which does not have any table headings, you need to ask yourself if it should actually have some table headings. If not, should it be a table at all or is that content better placed as being a text box or something similar. If your publications do not have things such as text boxes, this illustrates why a cross-departmental approach is needed. Perhaps you need to go to your design team or your branding team and have a text box added to your publication style to be able to take care of this type of content.

We have established that table headings are required, but those table headings should only be at the top of the column or at the start of a row. There are many instances where what looks like it is another table header is coming halfway down the table. Just because it looks like a table header on the page, it does not mean that it is a table header within the markup. For accessibility purposes, you cannot have a table header within the main table body. If you have styles which allow for this, then you either need to change those styles or split the tables out into different tables or just figure out another way to be able to represent that information.

Large tables can also be problematic. If a table continues or extends over multiple pages in the print version or PDF, then that must be represented correctly as a single table within your XML or HTML. There should not be separate tables for each page of a PDF rendition of a long table. Where you have instances of large tables, it is advisable to have a summary of the table in the same kind of spirit as you would do for the Alt Text for images.

Visual design

Implementing accessibility features can be looked upon as a sliding scale, and that is particularly true when it comes to design. At one extreme, you may have a very, very heavily designed page containing lots of colour, different floating elements, and things that are going to be very, very challenging for a screen reader. Then, at the other extreme, you may have just a simple black and white page single column, with everything inline, and very, straightforward for a screen reader. The reality is that the majority of designs are going to fall somewhere in the middle.

Often a lot of time and money is spent on creating a visually appealing design along with branding so that everyone knows who created the product at which they are looking. As such, it may well be that you need to compromise on some of those design features to create a more accessible product. For example, using colours to denote context within the content may look very visually appealing, but it does not work for accessibility. Within those designs, it is also important to consider colour contrast so that content within the design can be perceived as widely as possible. WCAG have recommendations on colour contrast that should be considered when you’re looking into that. You should also consider the fonts that you’re using. Sans serif fonts are very good for people with dyslexia, ⁹ Comic Sans is particularly good in this case having very good ascenders and descenders, letter spacing, and very clearly distinguished forms for the capital I, lowercase L and the number 1 which can often be mistaken for one another. While it is unlikely that academic and scholarly publishing is going to have widespread adoption of Comic Sans anytime in the future these are still good points to consider when you are looking at choosing what fonts you will be using.

Other considerations

Equations

Equations should be handled using MathML. This allows equations to be structured in a way that screen readers can handle them. In common with tables, in the past it has been very common for equations to be handled as images. This is not the best practice when it comes to accessibility and replacements for these images using MathML should be made.

PDFs

Where PDFs are being produced as part of the publication workflow there are a few technical details of which you need to be aware. The underlying code of a PDF dictates the reading order for screen readers to use. This is particularly important where you have multiple columns and floating items so that screen readers understand the flow of the content. Thumbnails and bookmarks should also be enabled to ensure easy navigation of the PDF. Metadata options within the PDF should also be populated.

Heading hierarchy

Heading hierarchy is extremely important as this gives the document its structure, enabling readers to easily scan a document, find content accordingly, and use those headings to determine their location within a document. A well-organized heading structure gives everyone, especially screen reader users, the ability to be able to understand and navigate a document, whatever its format.

Accessibility as an obligation

We have discussed why accessibility is important to various stakeholders, and it really needs to be viewed as an obligation and as an ongoing commitment. Technologies will change, so a continual testing, feedback, and evolution program is vital to ensure that any changes to technologies do not necessarily affect the changes that you are going to be putting in place for your workflows. They must remain valid as that technology changes.

Revisiting the cross-departmental aspect again, this must extend into management as well. The idea of corporate responsibility to make content inclusive needs to be driven from the top so that the time and resources needed to undertake all of these changes can be allocated to continue that commitment into the future. And of course, if you are not compliant, then there are legal issues that could come into play as well.

NISO and accessibility

NISO has several initiatives around accessibility, which are well worth investigating further:

• NISO has its own DEI committee – https://niso.org/what-we-do/DEIAcommittee

• JATS for Reuse (JATS4R) has recently published their accessibility recommendations on tagging accessible content in JATS XML – https://www.niso.org/publications/rp-47-2024-jats4r-accessibility-v1.0

• The Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM) working group are looking at extending and refining existing models to meet the needs of a broader accessibility community – https://niso.org/standards-committees/arm

• Further information on Daisy standards is also available through NISO – https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/daisy-standards