ASK UP – Hosted by SUNY Press
Accessibility at the Forefront
By Jenn Bennett-Genther, Development & Services, SUNY Press
We at SUNY Press were honored to be invited earlier this year by the Association of University Presses to act as the host press for Ask UP for the winter season. Ask UP is an excellent resource, which fields all sorts of important questions coming from scholars, authors, and prospective authors in the university press community and around the world. We knew going into this opportunity that there was a need for greater clarity about accessibility, so my colleagues looped me in, as the person here at SUNY Press who is leading the charge in my role as manager of training, development, and services on accessibility. My first reaction to was to rub my hands together in excitement and get into the nitty-gritty of all things accessibility that I’d learned in the past year — to the point of excess and, ironically, at the potential risk of excluding our audience. I was thrilled to realize the knowledge I’d gained so far made me the closest to an expert. What proved to be more challenging was scaling back all that I’d learned into more basic, applicable broad-strokes guidance. There is so much more I want to share and still so much more to learn.
The focus on making our eBooks meet accessibility benchmarks for the blind and low-vision community is expansive and encompasses a range of people from all walks of life. For myself, understanding and meeting these benchmarks includes being an informed advocate. I believe I’m just scratching the surface as a professional working in publishing, and my motives are not just to inform but to inspire. I am a humble servant to this community, and I seek to convert others.
I also know that many people are just trying to understand what it is that university presses mean when we talk about this subject. They want to know the basics of what we’re doing to achieve the new and upcoming accessibility standards. I hope that with these FAQs, https://ask.up.hcommons.org/faqs/, where the broad range of related questions were culled, we begin to meaningfully provide answers and greater clarity.
We’ve gotten to the heart of some of the major questions our authors might have. While I don’t claim to be an expert in this field, I hope my curiosity and subsequent research engage a dialogue with the wider world of academia in the interest of doing and being better.
