The University of British Columbia Press (UBC Press) is committed to making its publications and electronic media accessible to the broadest possible audience. UBC Press is an accessible publishing organization, and we set high standards for accessibility in all that we do. We strive to continue producing publications that meet rigorous standards of accessibility, implementing accessible systems, and advocating for change across the publishing industry.

Accessible Ebooks

In Spring 2022, UBC Press achieved Benetech certification of our EPUB production process. EPUBs published from that point forward (with a few exceptions) are born accessible and meet AA requirements of WCAG 2.0. Visit Accessible Ebooks for more information.

We recognize that some of our publications are in formats that are not accessible to all our readers, and we are working to remediate as many of those publications as possible. If you have purchased an ebook that does not meet your accessibility needs, or if you have any questions about accessibility, please contact us at accessibility[at]ubcpress.ca and we will work with you to prepare a usable file whenever possible.

Website

We recognize that our website does not yet fully meet accessibility standards. We plan to address this in the future to ensure that the website meets WCAG 2.1 standards per the University of British Columbia guidelines. In the short term, our goal is to display the specific accessibility features of each ebook on its book page.

Accessibility Committee

The accessibility committee meets regularly to set the accessibility direction for UBC Press, advise on practices to create born-accessible publications, and implement accessible technologies and systems. Currently, it is working on:

• clearly defining, for customers, which accessibility features are included in each ebook available on our website, and ensuring that accessibility metadata is available to our vendors
• investigating the viability of producing audiobooks as part of our regular workflow
• constantly improving the accessibility of the ebooks we produce and ensuring that as standards change, our processes do as well.

Past work has included:

• training for acquisition and production staff on the creation of accessible books
• working with vendors to implement and support accessibility features in EPUBs and PDFs
• fully incorporating image alt-text into our production workflows, including developing clear guidelines for our authors, who are now required to include this with any images in their manuscript submissions
• achieving Benetech certification for accessible EPUBs.

Updated January 2024