RE: Welcome to the W3C Publishing Community Group

Dear Wolfgang, dear all,

Thanks so much for your very kind email welcoming me to the group! It’s very nice to meet you all. This is the first W3C community group I have joined, so it’s good to know that I’m on the right track.

A bit about myself – I work as a Production Editor at Boydell & Brewer. We are an academic publisher publishing broadly within the humanities with offices based in both the UK and the US. I have been in my current role for just over two years and in my day to day I am responsible for guiding both print and digital publications through our workflow. Part of my job includes ePUB creation from InDesign with the help of our dedicated CMS Librios.

Over the past year we have worked hard to improve the accessibility of our ePUBs (both those created in house as well as assessing the standards of external vendors we occasionally use for more complex publications), which has included the introduction of author-written alt text, improvements to schema.org and ONIX accessibility metadata, some tweaks to our CSS and so on. We are now finally producing ePUBs in house that are WCAG AA standard which has been a huge achievement for our small team (our company has 35 staff in total and only 6 Production Editors). My main motivation for joining the group is glean whatever advice on best practice from the community that I can with regards to ePUB in general. I was recently watching a session from the Digital Publishing Summit focusing on metadata and the speaker Gregorio Pellegrino mentioned the project (taking place within this group, I think) between LIA and EDRLab currently in place about how to display accessibility metadata, which was what led me to hearing about the group.

A ‘pain point’ that we have been grappling with as a company recently is how to ensure we are adequately preparing ourselves for the upcoming European Accessibility Act to make sure that we are futureproofing our list now so that publications will comply with it when the time comes – it seems that there is a wealth of information out there about the Act in general but I would like to be more clear on how the act specifically relates to eBooks. Related to this, I am also keen to learn more about fixed layout accessibility initiatives, and how fixed layout eBooks might be viewed by the Act (we produce a PDF eBook as well as an ePUB for most of our titles).

I am unclear about how discussions take place within the group – are these via email, via a dedicated site? I’m looking forward to getting involved with discussions in the group and look forward to learning from colleagues working within digital publishing. 😊

All very best,
Christy


From: Schindler Wolfgang Dr. <w.schindler@pons.de>
Sent: Wednesday, July 19, 2023 10:35 AM
To: Christy Beale <cbeale@boydell.co.uk>
Cc: Zheng Xu <zxu@wysebee.com>; public-publishingcg@w3.org
Subject: Welcome to the W3C Publishing Community Group

Dear Christy,

a warm welcome to our W3C Publishing Community Group! I have seen that you company is producing lovely books on history.

It would be nice if you could just introduce yourself to the group. We would also be interested to learn about the issues that pop up in your daily work – the success stories as well as the pain points where you would like to get some assistance or be informed about best practices. All questions of digital publishing are relevant for this group and we love to hear from and discuss with our colleagues. So please feel free to comment and ask any question.

Zheng and me are always willing to assist as far as possible.

Have a lovely day!

Best regards,
Wolfgang