The important role of the editor in making science accessible
by Bill Kasdorf
This article has been republished with permission from the author and Science Editor. The original article can be found on Science Editor.
Making publications accessible for people with print disabilities is finally becoming more common. This is long overdue. In the past, it involved creating accessible file formats in addition to the standard formats in which books and journals were published. The editorial and production workflows that produced those accessible formats were based on technologies and standards that few publishers and few of their suppliers understood, or even knew of. This was particularly a problem for science because of the complexity of typical scientific publications full of equations, tables, notes, citations and figures. It was all too easy to acknowledge the importance of accessibility but to throw up one’s hands and say, ‘But there’s no way we can do that, sorry’.
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