Brush Education’s Accessible Publishing Journey: The Complex Work of Making Textbooks Accessible

Introduction

Welcome to the second installment in our blog series exploring Canadian publishers’ accessible publishing journeys! Where our first post explored the journey of a trade publisher, this post dives into the successes and challenges of an educational publisher, Brush Education Inc. Brush’s Managing Editor, Kay Rollans, shared the complex process of making textbooks accessible, supporting authors with alt-text creation, pursuing Benetech certification, and keeping up with the latest accessibility standards.

Brush Education is an Alberta-based publisher creating learning resources for college, university, professional, and general audiences. They aim to produce 5-10 born-accessible titles per year and currently have 39 accessible titles in their catalogue, with several more in the works!

Brush Education’s Accessible Publishing Beginnings

In 2020, Brush Education began working on the accessibility of their titles with the Book Publishers Association of Alberta’s Accessible Digital Publishing Initiative, a government-funded project that provided the opportunity for small presses to convert their backlist titles into accessible formats.

“As an educational publisher, this process was challenging in large part because of the complexity of the majority of our titles. Unlike most novels and monographs, textbooks tend to be heavy on all of the things that make accessible markup challenging: images, diagrams, flow charts, tables, ordered and unordered bullet lists, language shifts, indexes, asides of different kinds—a couple of our titles even have videos. Many of our titles have hundreds of illustrations, and some have upwards of 1000, which makes alt text production a huge endeavour, whether we’re producing it in-house or proofing text created out of house.”

A major challenge for independent publishers, and especially educational publishers, is the limited number of resources available to devote towards remediating their backlist. “The complexity of our backlist titles and the amount of time and resources required has meant that our backlist conversion is ongoing,” says Rollans, “but we’re really proud of the many titles we have been able to convert, and we absolutely could not have done that without the support of the BPAA and the Government of Canada. That support is what got us started and what is allowing us to keep going, and to start producing born-accessible frontlist books.”

Pursuing Certification

Regarding some of the reasons that prompted Brush Education to pursue Benetech GCA (Global Certified Accessible) certification, Rollans notes, “We’re committed to making resources from which anyone can learn, to the extent that the capacity of our small team allows. A secondary, but also important, reason is that accessible books offer more functionality and convenience to all readers than inaccessible books do.”

In 2022, Brush completed their GCA certification through eBOUND Canada’s partnership with Benetech, allowing them to enhance their workflow and produce born-accessible frontlist titles.

“Every book comes with its own quirks and challenges, and the main thing is to do what you can, ask questions, keep learning about how to improve, and show that learning in the new books you produce,” mentions Rollans. “Benetech’s certification program facilitated through eBOUND has been really useful in this regard, as it gives publishers so much opportunity to make and learn from mistakes during the certification stage. They also continue following up with certified publishers in the years after certification, with eBOUND sending industry standard updates and Benetech completing annual spot-checks that help publishers keep on top of the changes in accessibility requirements and best practices.”

“This corner of publishing is changing rapidly, so it’s really important to have that kind of support. We just passed our one-year mark of certification. I was really pleased to see how our workflow stood up to Benetech’s check, but unsurprised that we still have some things to iron out.”

One of Brush’s accessible frontlist titles is Truth and Reconciliation Through Education, edited by Yvonne Poitras Pratt and Sulyn Bodnaresko.

“This is a really unique book that combines practical teaching models based on Indigenous-led reconciliatory frameworks with first-hand educator stories of transformational learning—both their own and their students’—through the integration of reconciliatory practices into their teaching,” Rollans highlights.

“The book includes words in several Indigenous languages—Cree, Inuktitut, Tsimshian, Michif—as well as a few words in syllabics, all of which screen readers don’t yet handle very well, so this was something we had to navigate. In the end, we opted to mark up these language shifts in the hopes that they will, one day, be supported by the reading platforms. In the meantime, though, we’ve included a note about this gap in the accessibility summary.”

A more complex forthcoming title from Brush is Christine Sutherland’s Wheeling in Good Hands, a textbook about wheelchair massage that includes over 400 illustrations, all accompanied by alternative text.

“It’s been a huge undertaking, and we’re excited to see it come out later this year,” says Rollans.