Keeping up with accessibility standards: strategies for small & mid-sized journal publishers, with photos of the webinar speakers and their titles below (Damita Snow, Director of Accessibility and DEI Strategy, Publications & Standards, ASCE; Michelle Piehl, GWU MPS in Publishing Adjunct Professor & 508 Institute Instructor; and Will Horne, Product Designer, Scholastica).
Keeping up with accessibility standards: strategies for small & mid-sized journal publishers, with photos of the webinar speakers and their titles below (Damita Snow, Director of Accessibility and DEI Strategy, Publications & Standards, ASCE; Michelle Piehl, GWU MPS in Publishing Adjunct Professor & 508 Institute Instructor; and Will Horne, Product Designer, Scholastica).

During “Keeping up with accessibility standards: strategies for small & mid-sized journal publishers,” publishing experts discussed current and upcoming content accessibility guidelines and their advice for embedding accessibility into journal workflows. Get the webinar recording here.

In recent years, many scholarly publishers have been working to make their content more accessible to people with disabilities. Now, with the European Accessibility Act (EAA) in effect and forthcoming updates to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title II Regulations, accessibility is moving to the forefront of publication planning and accelerating timelines for implementing support for digital content.

It’s important work with wide-ranging benefits. Advancing accessibility not only helps remove barriers to content for disabled people. It can also improve broader publication engagement by offering readers different ways to consume information, such as listening to journal articles while commuting or reading video captions in a noisy environment. All of this helps enhance the value of scholarship and the missions of the publishers disseminating it.

For publishers, the current objective is determining the best ways to make their content accessible by design, so they can proactively meet requirements and prepare for future updates.

As part of the 2026 GW Ethics in Publishing Conference, Scholastica and the GW MPS in Publishing Program hosted a webinar that brought together experts to share advice on developing an accessibility roadmap: “Keeping up with accessibility standards: strategies for small & mid-sized journal publishers.” The session featured the following speakers:

  • Damita Snow, Director of Accessibility & Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Publications & Strategy at the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)
  • Will Horne, Product Designer & Accessibility Lead, Scholastica
  • Michelle Piehl, Adjunct Professor at the GW University MPS in Publishing program & Instructor at 508 Institute

In this blog post, we cover highlights from the webinar, including a breakdown of current accessibility standards and key takeaways from the webinar speakers on weaving accessibility into publishing workflows.

What are current accessibility standards for scholarly journals, and what’s forthcoming?

For journal publishers, accessibility requirements are becoming increasingly important as governments introduce or strengthen guidelines for digital products and services. A few recent developments are particularly relevant, as discussed during the webinar:

The European Accessibility Act (EAA): Effective June 28, 2025, the EAA is an EU directive establishing common accessibility requirements for certain products and services sold or provided in the European market, including e-books, e-readers, e-commerce services, and electronic communications. For scholarly publishers, the EAA may therefore apply to some or all of their digital publishing offerings if they fall within the Act’s scope.

For covered services and content, the EAA requires digital information and features to be accessible to people with disabilities and usable with assistive technologies. EN 301 549 provides technical guidance for meeting these requirements, including many of the accessibility principles found in WCAG 2.1.

Microenterprises (defined as businesses with fewer than 10 employees and annual turnover or balance-sheet totals below €2 million) are technically exempt from the EAA service requirements. However, publishers that fall under this exception may still need to assess their accessibility practices, particularly if they publish on behalf of or in partnership with public entities subject to forthcoming ADA Title II requirements.

ADA Title II: First enacted in 1992, with the last regulatory updates released in 2024, ADA Title II exists to prevent state and local governments from discriminating against people with disabilities. If a journal publishing program is part of a covered entity, including public universities, libraries, and other government-affiliated institutions, it is bound by Title II.

Now, some significant ADA Title II updates are on the way. The guidelines will soon require web content and mobile apps to conform to WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA standards, including content provided through third-party vendors. Those updates will go into effect April 26, 2027, for public entities serving populations of 50,000 or more and April 26, 2028, for public entities serving populations under 50,000 and special district governments.

The language “serving populations” is important for small publishers in this update: ADA Title II deadlines are not based on the number of employees at the publishing program or publisher. They are based on the population served by the covered public entity. Therefore, a small journal team at a public university should not assume it will get additional time for compliance.

Broader movement toward WCAG: While different nations have different accessibility requirements for government agencies and private entities, various international accessibility laws are based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In many ways, WCAG has become the standard for digital accessibility, and many countries require conformance with a recent version of those guidelines.

What accessibility areas must publishers focus on to comply with WCAG standards?

A key takeaway for journal publishing and editorial managers from the “Keeping up with accessibility standards” webinar, echoed by all the speakers, is that accessibility is not solely a website or technology issue. Publishers must consider accessibility across journal platforms, articles and multimedia, submission and publishing workflows, and the tools and vendors involved in producing and delivering digital content. Examples include:

  • Journal websites and publishing platforms: Publishers should assess whether journal websites and platforms are accessible with assistive technologies. Key factors include keyboard navigation, logical page structure, headings, link text, color contrast, focus indicators, form fields, error messages, and screen reader compatibility.

  • Articles and digital documents: Article content should be structured in ways that make it usable by people with disabilities. For HTML, this can include appropriate semantic headings, lists, tables, links, image descriptions, and accessible equations. For PDFs and other downloadable files, publishers should consider whether documents have appropriate tagging, document structure, alternative text, and other features needed for assistive technology.

  • Images, figures, tables, and multimedia: Scholarly content presents accessibility challenges that are more complex than ordinary web publishing. Figures, charts, diagrams, photographs, tables, mathematical notation, and multimedia may all require specific approaches. For example, simply adding alt text to a complex scientific figure may not adequately communicate the information it contains. Publishers should develop guidelines for determining when images require concise alternative text, longer descriptions, or other accessible ways of conveying the underlying information. Videos and other multimedia may also require captions, transcripts, audio descriptions, or other accessibility features depending on applicable requirements.

How can journal publishers effectively embed accessibility standards into their workflows?

Given the technical nature of accessibility standards, publishers and vendors must work together to fulfill current requirements. Accessibility is easier to maintain when incorporated into journal workflows rather than treated as a final production check. So, it’s essential to understand which accessibility responsibilities sit with the publisher and which sit with its vendors so both parties can embed accessibility into their respective areas.

During the “Keeping up with accessibility standards” webinar, the speakers shared practical ways publishers and vendors can work together towards making content accessible by design. Key takeaways include:

  • Treat accessibility as part of quality content, not a post-publication fix. Damita shared how a mindset shift, from “how do we make this accessible?” to “how do we build accessibility in from the start?”, led ASCE to write accessibility into its strategic plan and editorial policies and build it into every stage of the content lifecycle. Michelle Piehl added that building reviews into the schedule from the start saves time and cost.

  • See accessibility from the user’s perspective. Will demoed how color-only status cues, low-contrast links and missing alt text for figures and equations appear to readers. He then demonstrated what strong alt text and MathSpeak sound like, and recommended free tools like WAVE to help with accessibility audits and remediation. Michelle also covered the WCAG POUR principles and contrast ratios.

  • Break the work into manageable steps. Damita advised starting with a roadmap, an accessibility maturity model, and the highest-impact fixes. Will suggested sorting out which errors you control and which come from third parties, and Michelle recommended thematic checklists plus second-person quality checks to help you stay on track.

  • Lean on vendor partnerships and peers. Will recommended working with vendors on shared goals, using the software’s feedback loop, and starting VPAT conversations and remediation plans early. Damita encouraged publishers to share VPATs, borrow roadmaps from other presses, and invest in expert consultations or audits.

These are just a few highlights of advice the speakers shared for assessing your accessibility posture and establishing accessibility implementation processes and milestones. They also discussed strategies to incorporate accessibility into journal workflows, including process and training considerations for publishing managers, authors, editors, and software and service providers, all of whom play a role in fulfilling accessibility needs.

Get the webinar recording, plus further resources

The “Keeping up with accessibility standards: strategies for small & mid-sized journal publishers” webinar is now available to watch on demand. As you dig deeper into implementation, below are some helpful guides and tools for applying accessibility standards to digital content and scholarly publishing workflows shared by the webinar speakers.

Content accessibility guides:

Accessibility auditing tools:

As all noted during the webinar, accessibility is an ongoing journey. Now is the time to assess where your content stands and develop an iterative roadmap for improvement.

Many thanks to all of the webinar speakers! If you have any questions about the session, feel free to add them to the comments section. You can also find Scholastica on LinkedIn and Bluesky.*

Update Note: This blog post was originally published as a webinar announcement on September 3, 2026, and updated to recap the event on November 4, 2026. The “Keeping up with accessibility standards” webinar aired live on September 23, 2026.

Danielle Padula
This post was written by Danielle Padula Tillmann, Head of Marketing and Community Development