Season 3, Episode 11
Michael Johnson, VP of Content, Benetech
Michael Johnson recently joined Tyler Carey on the Westchester Words podcast. The discussion focused on six statements that have been made regarding the European Accessibility Act, to determine whether they were fact or fiction. Michael provided information to help set the record straight on what publishers need to know about the legislation, which will be enforced starting in June 2025 and what steps they should be taking to ensure their business is in compliance.
Additional resources:
Benetech Born Accessible program
BISG (Book Industry Study Group)
W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium)
DAISY ePub Standards
Visit our European Accessibility Act Information page for more resources related to this legislation.
Podcast transcript:
Nicole Tomassi: Welcome to Westchester Words, Education, edtech and Publishing. I'm Nicole Tomassi and on this episode, I am pleased to welcome Michael Johnson of Benetech. Michael is the Vice President of Content, and he speaks regularly about the need for content that is born accessible, which means that it's designed from the outset to be in digital formats which are compatible with all key book reading platforms and accessibility features.
Side note here that Westchester Publishing Services is a Benetech Certified Accessible Vendor, and we work together with publishers to create fully accessible ebooks. Also, I'm welcoming Tyler Carey to the discussion. He's the Chief Revenue Officer for Westchester Publishing Services. Michael and Tyler will be discussing some facts and some misnomers about the European Accessibility Act, which is set to come into force in June of 2025. With that, I will turn it over to Tyler to begin the discussion.
Tyler M. Carey: Thanks Nicole, and thanks for being here today. Michael. As Nicole shared, Westchester is a vendor that helps publishers with a number of editorial and production needs. And by extension of that, as the European Accessibility Act approaches, we're getting asked a lot of questions by our clients and prospects across all different markets of the publishing and education sector about how their content can be best prepared for this milestone for accessibility within our industry.
And we're hearing a lot of things from our clients and prospects that they hear in the market, some of which is spot on and right in line with the requirements that the EAA has set in place and with best practices set up by Daisy Benetech and others.
We are seeing some misinformation floating around. So, it seemed like a good opportunity to get our friend and colleague Michael Johnson here, help us wade through some of the fact and fiction floating around the market. So, thanks for being here, Michael.
Michael Johnson: Oh, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. And hopefully we can help some folks better understand things.
Tyler M. Carey: Excellent. So, the first of six statements that perhaps you can help us set the record straight with is one that we heard from somebody recently, which is I heard that the EAA doesn't apply to many publishers.
Is that a fact or fiction?
Michael Johnson: Michael I would have to say that is an outrageous fiction.
The EAA applies to anyone who creates and distributes content within the European Union. There are some minor loopholes I suppose under certain conditions, but everyone is impacted who is distributing ebook digital content anywhere in the eu.
Amongst that group there are a few people for some very small reasons who might not be required to fully comply, but they're still impacted.
Tyler M. Carey: Excellent. Thanks Michael. Like a lot of these, I mean, these are the kinds of things that Publishers and content providers can explore with their legal counsel. Right. If they think there's an exception, that's probably something where they should get some good advice from somebody who's an attorney.
Michael Johnson: Yeah, so I should have said that in the beginning. Nothing I'm going to offer here today counts as legal advice. And Benetech is not in a position to offer legal advice on any issues really, but certainly not around these issues.
My replies are all going to be, this is what the actual standards community and this is what the actual institutions who will be enforcing the legislation have told us.
Tyler M. Carey: Excellent. And yeah, my realm of legal expertise is two pre law classes and having worked at a legal publisher. So, yeah, don't want me representing you either. So the next topic that we have in the list is everybody is so hyped up over nothing.
I understand we have until 2030 to get our backlist converted again, something we heard in the market and concerned us a little bit. But is it a factor of fiction, Michael?
Michael Johnson: I'd say that's mostly a fiction.
As with any EU legislation, the legislation gets passed by the EU Parliament and then the member nations pass their own national laws as to how they're going to enforce it.
So, it may be possible in certain countries under certain conditions, certain publishers or certain book types might have a slightly different timeline than 28 June, which we are now inside the 200 days or less. So, it is possible within one of the 27 member nations, a particular legislature may say, we choose not to enforce this aspect of the EU regulation in our country. That is possible.
The big danger there, and I think a lot of people are overlooking, is let's just say I'm in EU member country X and I'm my company, my publishing house is domiciled in EU country X.
And my parliament says, oh yeah, you have three years, two years, five years, whatever to implement. But once I leave that country and go to another country, I'm bound by those laws where the transaction is taking place. So even if a publisher is in a country which may pass legislation that might soften some of the backlist issues, if those books are sold in another country, which is following the spirit of that legislation, which is basically all books on offer, then they will be held bound by that law, not the law in the first country.
Tyler M. Carey: And so I guess a variation on that theme which we've heard from American publishers, as if you are an American publisher, for instance, sell your books in the EU and that EU member nation where your book is being sold, that that's where the applicable law is being considered correct.
Michael Johnson: Right. And at some point, we might talk about the recent Department of justice rule, Title 2, which is actually much more strict and much more direct and comes to effect in May of 2026 in the U.S. but American public, of course America is not in the EU. But American publishers sell in the EU, as do Canadian publishers, as do South African publishers and other publishers from around the world. So, it's the point of sale in the country of sale, not the point of origin of the publisher or point of domicile of the publisher.
Tyler M. Carey: Excellent. I have a feeling Title 2 may be a whole other show which as we get more information we can share and discuss. So, topic number three, Is this one a truth or a fiction?
Michael, generating a truly accessible EPUB is not as simple as clicking export in InDesign, even with the improvements to Creative Cloud. Is that true or false?
Michael Johnson: I would struggle to find a statement which is more true than that statement that is true. It is not that simple, especially from InDesign. So, there isn't a just push a button and then you're accessible. I don't care what your create environment is, but certainly not for InDesign. You can't just push a button or download a widget or a plugin or something and go through it.
Accessible books, just like any well-designed element of a book take care. And it takes resources and it takes expertise to create them. So that statement is true. It is not as simple as pushing a button or two in your InDesign setup.
Tyler M. Carey: And would you say to kind of help improve and professionally develop the staff that are using InDesign to create ePubs or work with vendors and then audit those files. Would you say like putting a good professional development program in place where folks have access to resources like Daisy Bisg your resources. Is that kind of a good industry practice as this becomes more complicated for everybody?
Michael Johnson: Yeah, we're finding that Benetech's worked with about 90 organizations around the world on our program which teaches the publishing and conversion communities how to do things fully accessible.
You know this Tyler, because of course Westchester is a GCA certified Conversion Vendor. So, when we work with the publishers, we teach them everything they need to know to do this properly. And doing it in InDesign is just currently not possible. Adobe's making great strides. They're working very hard. They're not unaware that this legislation is coming. But today there aren't enough buttons to push and there isn't a magic button to push that. Just go from InDesign into a fully accessible repo.
But yes, professional development, absolutely. And there are a bunch of places and as we have time we can list some other places. But certainly Daisy.org has a whole series of applications absolutely free webinars that help people understand these things better.
Tyler M. Carey: Excellent. So, question number four or kind of topic number four. I was told by my distributor that we don't need to do anything with epubs. As long as we have a good looking PDF, we are in great shape.
Michael Johnson: Yeah, so that one is about as false as false things get. PDFs by definition are basically, for all intents and purposes, inaccessible. So whoever that distributor was and whoever that person was, you got a lot of misunderstanding. I would like to say they're not telling falsehoods. I just hope that they have been misinformed.
Look, Adobe did a beautiful thing when they invented PDF. It does a phenomenal job with what it was intended to do, which is take pictures, it takes a great picture of the page. Blind people can't see pictures. So a tool which takes a picture of a page does not lead to accessibility and the effort necessary to take an existing PDF and fully remediate it up to the current standards that are in the legislation.
You're better off just creating an EPUB file because epub by its definition and its point of origin is fully accessible. So no, you can't just have a nice looking PDF and be accessible. That's not even possible. And too, the better path is take whatever it is you have and get it turned into an EPUB file.
Tyler M. Carey: Just on the production side, that's what we see where it's almost the path of least resistance, especially backhaul, to kind of create a good accessible EPUB file rather than try to make an older PDF file. Especially if you don't have the archives and InDesign assets or even quark, you know, how are you going to make a really quality accessible PDF? So agreed on that?
Michael Johnson: Fully.
Tyler M. Carey: Let's see, here's another one. There is no practical way for any publisher to know if their files are accessible or not. What kind of tools or resources. I'm just going to call that one false right there. But that's something where we've heard grumblings from some people. How would you address that one, Michael? Just as far as people auditing what they have, what's a good best practice there?
Michael Johnson: So I will echo your false and I will add that's just a downright silly statement there. There are a lot of tools out there which are free. There's the EPUB Check, which will check the digital formatting of the EPUB file itself. There's Ace by Daisy, also free, and it's an automated tool to check. And that will cover probably 30, 35%, depending on the type of content that's in your book. And then there's Smart, which is a more advanced tool from Daisy, which has some manual review capabilities in it.
So that's three just off the top of my head that are out there, very easily available, very easy to run. If you're any good at all at scripts, you can run a dozen books at a time or a larger number of books at a time through there and get the results.So, like I said, that one's not just false, it's silly. Going back to Daisy, Daisy has a whole webinar series on this topic. Daisy also runs, and I shouldn't say full disclosure, I'm on the board at Daisy, where Daisy's also a nonprofit.So, there's no, no nickels changing hands here or Euros or anything else.
There are also some industry experts who can help with these things.I'd say, you know, Bill Kasdorf, certainly Laura Brady. Those are just a couple of names that come to mind. These people have great expertise. Westchester, not just because you're the host, but Westchester, as an authorized GCA accredited conversion house, can provide all sorts of guidance on that. And Benetech can advise them. We have a whole service, actually. The GCA service is designed to teach the publishers how to do these things. So, your services, Tyler, and my services are not free.
Those other things I mentioned are free, but it's a very doable thing and there's plenty of ways to go about this. There's also a lot of other working groups. There's PAAG in the uk, There's a lot of roundtables.There's a ton of information out there at low cost or no cost.
Tyler M. Carey: So, it sounds like number six is going to be true then, because that one was. There are easy to follow resources available that can help guide me and my team through this process.
So, wow, you got a two for one with the previous.
Michael Johnson: Oh, yeah, I think that. Yeah. Doing a little all due respect and rest in peace, Karnak. So, yeah, I guess I leapt ahead there to the next question. So, yes, all the things I just said I would say in there. But there are a lot of groups. BISG, you mentioned another group, the W3C, has lots of working groups. PAAG in the UK as well as the Daisy materials. Benetech does a lot of different Webinars as well.
So basically, what I would encourage anybody to do, look at the resources we just listed off, but also find somebody who's a publisher like you. I'm not comparing houses who's already doing this, because the people who've been through this pain and suffering, while perhaps some of them in the state of Schadenfreude would like to see some people go through the same amount of suffering, most of them are willing to help.
Tyler M. Carey: Sorry to interrupt, but I mean, you just touched on a really key piece there, which is finding other people like yourself. Certainly, the needs that a legal publisher that sells legal content in the European market are going to have are going to be different than those with trades.
We're seeing that with a lot of industry groups. IPG is another one in uk, for instance, where there's a lot of really quality working groups there that are kind of sitting down and talking through how things work, whether they're in the academic side of IPG trade.
We're working at Westchester on a white paper right now with a couple of partners that tries to organize some of these resources. So we'll hope to have that available before London Book Fair, because I'm sure we'll provide some links along with this podcast. But, you know, there's everything that you mentioned there, PAAG our friends like Laura Brady and Bill Kasdorf for really, you know, talented consultants. Daisy. And the, you know, BISG, IPG, kind of all the different industry organizations are taking this seriously because it's coming up soon, right, Michael? I mean, the Official date is June 2025 for when a lot of these pieces start to take effect. Right?
Michael Johnson: Yeah. Just to give some folks some scope as I said earlier, each of the 27 member nations will have their own national legislation.
The Irish Parliament has been most aggressive. They’re talking about €5,000 fines for the first failure to meet the specifications. And then I believe when you accumulate five or six of those fines, the managing director of your publishing house goes to prison. So, the Irish clearly are not fooling around on this sort of thing.
Benetech has a number of lawyers on our board, and I just want to echo something that they said in our last board meeting, which is, yes, we have this legislation. It's a forcing function. It's something we all have to pay attention to.
But there are much higher realities than probably more important realities as to why you should create born accessible books. The first one is it is just the right thing to do. It's the social justice thing to Do. Why do you want to deny 20%, 20 plus percent of the Earth's population access to your content?
Now, I'm not promising that your sales are going to go up by 20% if you do accessible books, but I do promise you, if your books are inaccessible, that 20% of the population is not going to buy your book.
Because why would they? They can't read it. So that's one thing. The other is discoverability, right? So, a well formatted epub file, especially with good alt text, it's going to get indexed by the people who are in charge of what we see when we search for things on the Internet.
And I'm not going to name them, but I talk to those people quite regularly on this very topic. And they are now interrogating EPUB files that are up for sale and they're pulling out the alt text, they're pulling out the long descriptions, they're including that. So, when you search for a certain topic, whatever that topic may be, it might not be in your Onix feed, but it might be in the alt text of some of the images in your book. And so now that book might surface if somebody's using a search engine to find things on the Internet.
And then as long as I'm on your favorite topic, Tyler, legal things, just a quick mention of the rule here. So the Department of Justice, not the Department of Education, the Department of Justice passed an interpretation rule in April of this year which basically says if any public institution in the United States of America receives Title 2 funding, which is the super majority of all public institutions, then everything digital, not just ebooks, everything digital, ebooks, magazines, class schedules, city bus schedules, everything digital has to be fully accessible by either May of 2026 or May of 2027.
May of 2026 if your public service area is 50,000 people or more, May of 2027 if it's less than 50,000. So, this one's much clearer and it's all encompassing.
So there is a question we didn't talk about is, well, what about me, I'm a journal guy. I don't pay attention to these e book rules. The Title 2 rule here in the States, everything digital, whether it's a letter home to a parent or these are the hours at the tax collector's office, whatever it is, Title 2 funding's involved. So, you're right, a separate podcast. I just wanted to toss that out there.
Tyler M. Carey: No, well, it touches on something good. Just kind of wrap, because I think for a lot of people, you know, they see this as kind of a a need that people with visual challenges may have that we're trying to address, but it goes a lot deeper than that. And title two, as I understand it, speaks to a lot of that, which is it's not just about visual access to information. There are people with neurodivergence, people with dyslexia, where they can still see, but words can get jumbled on a page, which several members of my family have. There's a lot more people that benefit from accessible content, and legislation is trying to drive the way for that. It's a very broad topic and a very broad pool that's being supported here.
We appreciate everything Benetech's doing to help advance this Daisy, which you also mentioned, and we'll put some more information together. Any other parting thoughts regarding these truths or fictions? Michael? I mean, we appreciate you helping set the record straight. Now some of these are a little bit more almost cartoony, but they are things that we'd heard people mutter in meetings and just figured it might make sense in case any of that misinformation is floating around out there to kind of help address some of these on.
Michael Johnson: There are three super quick things. 1. I hope everybody learned what's true and what's not true in these chats. 2. You should visit those resources. I imagine there'll be a listing there, but it's daisy.org as an example, because there's a ton of free and useful information. And the third thing is the most important next thing for you to do in your publishing house is take a step, take a step forward. Nobody's going to be magically accessible in the morning. Just start to do something. It's already too late to be honest about it, if you're worried about the EAA, but you can still make progress and feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions. Michaelj@benetech.org
Tyler M. Carey: Excellent. Well, thanks for your time, Michael, and thanks for having us. Nicole.
Nicole Tomassi: Thank you both Michael and Tyler for that very informative conversation. And as mentioned, we have some resources up on our website, so visit westchesterpublishingservices.com we have a page dedicated to the European Accessibility act with lots of resources including webinars, blog posts, articles and links out to organizations such as Benetech, Daisy and W3C so that you can access more resources about steps you can take to start moving forward.
If you haven't started.
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