AUP participates in Accessibility panel at Redux 2024

Last week, AUP’s Director of Sales and Marketing, Vanessa de Bueger, took part in a panel on the 'European Accessibility Act' at the University Press Redux 2024 in Edinburgh.

The panel featured a diverse range of publishing professionals, including Stacy Scott, Head of Accessibility at Taylor Francis Group; Martin Klopstock, Digital & Operations Director at Kogan Page Ltd; and Suresh Parandhaman, Publishing Solutions at Integra Software Services, to provide a technical perspective.

The critical discussion delved into the implications of the forthcoming European Accessibility Act for publishers ahead of the deadline in June 2025. Spanning the practical steps required to produce more accessible digital material to the impact this will have on reader engagement, both for individuals and collectively, the panel hoped to debunk anxieties around the changes and encourage publishers to start preparing early.

Reflecting on her experience of the panel and the Accessibility Act in general, Vanessa de Bueger said:

"Everybody in the supply chain needs to collaborate to make academic publishing more accessible. This will allow us to widen our readership as much as possible. We started this during the panel by bringing together different types and sizes of publishers and a pre-press vendor with technical knowledge. Moving forward, this conversation about accessibility also needs to include the distributors, aggregators, and librarians.

Preparing for the panel and my work on the accessibility changes at AUP has made me more aware of how different disabilities can impact reading. It is our mission to collaborate on changes within the market to push our industry forward – including and beyond accessibility – as all innovation within academic publishing should be a team effort."

University Press Redux 2024 was organised by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) and Edinburgh University Press.