Westchester Publishing Services

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Accessibility, AI, and more…

Epub3

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

headshot of a bearded man wearing glassesIt’s been a busy few weeks for me, meeting with some of our clients about expanding our support for their lists, this year. During these meetings, two topics have been coming up again and again. Accessibility — and AI.

For the former – accessibility – Westchester has a lot of resources that we can bring to bear to help. If you’re at all looking for further support in making your content — whether upcoming titles or backlist — accessible, please do reach out. Westchester became a GCA-certified vendor in 2021 to help publishers with their accessibility needs for ePubs. We also joined DAISY to further our knowledge and support for accessible content. In an ongoing basis, we’re keeping track of emerging trends in ePubs, Accessible PDF’s and more, including these recent changes for ePub files from the W3C. Personally, I’m on the Workflow Committee of the Book Industry Study Group, where my talented colleagues on the committee recently released this update regarding fixed layout ePubs. We’re helping with tasks from WCAG compliance to creating alt-text entries to large-scale backlist scanning and conversion projects. This recent IBPA webinar I participated in with Michael Johnson from Benetech covers some highlights to consider.

For the latter topic – AI – well, I’m not sure any of us have a clear vantage into how GPTs and emerging tools will impact our business in the long term. The team at Westchester have been using scripts and natural language processing for years to help automate repetitive tasks and run some of our comparisons and checks. Much as indexing software became a tool for trained indexers to use to organize keywords and condense the time it takes to index a book, AI will likely be used to help improve accuracy and create even more efficiencies in various parts of the publishing workflow. The talented publishing professionals at Westchester Publishing Services establish the gold standard in our industry, and using a variety of technologies to provide high quality solutions for our clients is simply part of our DNA. I know we’re already harnessing AI in specifics areas of our toolsets. I’m looking forward to seeing how our team will continue to evolve and develop more solutions that benefit our clients and the industry as a whole.

In case you missed it, this article by Thad McIlroy in the June 6 issue of Publishers Weekly, provides a bit more of a stimulating viewpoint on the subject. And this article exposes perhaps the extreme case of trying to automate as much as possible with AI – and the negative impact it can have on content and the people who collaborate with you on your content.

While these strategic discussions are happening in all of our shops, I still remain grateful that the majority of my time is being spent exploring the editorial and production services the industry has come to expect Westchester to handle with care since the launch of our company in the 1960s. Much like the rest of the publishing industry, we continue to pivot and evolve, but remain steadfast to striking the right balance between technology and human expertise to allow our clients to trust their publications with Westchester.

How can Westchester help you for the balance of the year on your projects? Whether it’s helping with manuscript prep, typesetting, copyediting, or other tasks for your titles and assets, just reach out, we’ll be here for you.

compiled by Nicole Tomassi, Marketing & Conference Manager

2021 has been extremely productive for all of us here at Westchester, as the number of publishers we work with and the variety of project requirements we support for them continues to grow. Below are several of the highlights from the past few months:

Another successful publishing industry webinar with Publishers Weekly

Westchester and PW Publishing Now 21 panelistsApril began strongly, with our most highly attended webinar to date, hosted in partnership with Publishers Weekly. Jim Milliot, PW’s Editorial Director was the moderator for a wide-ranging discussion with four publishing industry thought leaders. The more than 500 attendees heard firsthand about how the panelists’ companies and their employees adapted to the multiple challenges 2020 created, including the supply chain issues we are all contending with in the industry, as well as what we might expect as we navigate through this year. We’ll be announcing details about our next event with PW soon, so stay tuned!

Westchester Education Services Webinars

Westchester Education Services State of K-12 Education 2021 webinarIn May and June, Westchester Education Services hosted two informative webinars that were each moderated by Kevin J. Gray, President and Chief Content Officer. “The State of K-12 Education in 2021”, focused on the impacts of the last year-plus on education at the school district level and what would be required to support successful outcomes for students as they prepare for the upcoming school year.

Westchester Education Services Emerging Trends in K-12 Education webinarThe “Emerging Trends in K-12 Education” webinar showcased three areas of learning that have experienced significant interest over the last year as there is increased understanding about how social-emotional learning, culturally responsive education, and career and technical education are all important facets of meeting students where they are in their education journey and supporting their learning goals.

Westchester Education Services CTE worksheet sampleWestchester Education Services expands into CTE

Speaking of Career and Technical Education, this past spring Westchester Education Services appointed Debbie Allen as Content Director for Career and Technical Education. Debbie leads a team of subject matter experts who draw upon their extensive experience in teaching CTE to create effective supplemental materials to serve students and teachers in several career pathways. To the right is one of the career exploration worksheets we developed to introduce students to the different types of jobs that are available in various career clusters.

Stationers Shortlist 2021It truly is an honor to be nominated

This May, we received the thrilling news that Westchester Education Services was shortlisted by The Stationers’ Company in the service development category for our Culturally Responsive Education Rubric Review process. We felt like winners to receive recognition from our industry peers in the UK’s livery company that has represented the needs and interests of publishing and media professionals for more than six centuries. Learn more about all the shortlisted entries and watch the awards ceremony.

Westchester Words podcast logoWestchester Words’ first season springs forth

The Westchester Words podcast debuted in March and really hit its stride this spring, when yours truly had the pleasure of speaking with more than a dozen professionals in education, ed tech, and publishing about a variety of subjects that are impacting these industries. You can find all of the episodes on your favorite streaming platform or at our websites, where we have posted additional content that some of our guests have been kind enough to share.

The final episodes of the first season are being released in the coming weeks. We’re planning our second season of episodes, so if there’s a topic you want to hear more about, get in touch.

print to digital imageEnsuring Content Compliance on Digital Platforms

If your preferred reading mode is digital, you probably know that Amazon sunset the ability to load or update mobi files for new or previously published content on their platform last month. In early May, Scott Keeney, Westchester’s Senior Composition and Digital Production Manager, wrote this informative blog post explaining how this also impacted reflowable ePubs and outlined how Westchester is well-prepared to support publishers with ePub3 files that meet the updated platform requirements.

Summer Reading 2021

Summer reading imageWhile some kids get chills up their spine when told they will have to read several books during the summer break and turn in book reports on the first day of school, I wasn’t one of them and I suspect many of you weren’t, either. Now that we’re all adults and can skip doing book reports, each May I ask my colleagues to tell me what books they plan to read during the quieter days of summer and they always impress me with their title selections. See what they picked for this summer’s reading pile, and let us know what’s on your list.

Looking Ahead imageLooking Ahead

We are thinking about the time when we’ll be able to safely gather in an in-person setting. Until then, stay connected with us by following our LinkedIn pages, subscribing to our YouTube channel, and looking for our email messages in your inbox, filled with information about the services and knowledge-packed webinars we offer to help you understand and respond to the developments that are shaping the publishing industry.

Westchester proudly supports more than 300 publishers in all sectors of the publishing industry with their editorial, production, design, and content development requirements. Read and download our case studies about the efficient and cost-effective solutions we have provided your peer publishers, and talk with us about our customizable workflows that output printer and POD-ready content files in the formats you need for your customers.

Wishing you an enjoyable, relaxing second half of the summer.

digital reader contentThe past year and a half has presented its fair share of challenges for publishers, including how to repurpose existing content into the formats that your readers want to access it in.

With the increased interest in backlist titles, Amazon-compatible ePub3 files, and print-on-demand opportunities, publishers are looking at their archives on content and exploring ways to generate more revenue from their backlist. How can you make sure you’re getting the most revenue you can from your backlist titles?

Westchester can help you cost-effectively produce your existing content in the digital formats that are currently supported in the marketplace. Over the past year and a half, US employee-owned Westchester Publishing Services has helped many of the 300 publishers we support to address the many ways they can produce and repurpose their content, including the following tasks:

  • OCR and Keyboarding of physical books that do not exist in a digital format in your archive, so that you can have a clean Word manuscript for typesetting
  • Working with older PDF’s, Quark files, older InDesign files, and more, to generate newer printer files – including printer files for POD needs
  • Generating accessible, Amazon-compatible ePub3 files and fixed-format ePub3 files from backlist assets
  • Creating XML, HTML5, and other digital assets for use in platforms you may be using for content distribution

Talk to us about how we can serve as a release valve, taking tasks like these off the plates of your busy staff, and helping you maximize revenue opportunities with your valuable content.

Nicole Tomassi, Marketing and Conference Manager

by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer

In November 2019, Amazon released updated epub3 accessibility guidelines and now officially recommends using the ACE Accessibility Checker from the DAISY Consortium for epub3 files that are available through their website.

Westchester has been utilizing the ACE Accessibility Checker for several years and is well prepared for this upgrade. ACE, which includes checking conformance of various HTML and epub accessibility rules, performs the following functions:

  1. Runs automated accessibility tests on epub content documents
  2. Extracts the publication metadata, and checks accessibility-related metadata
  3. Extracts various document outlines (the ToC, headings, and HTML structure) for side-by-side comparison
  4. Extracts all the epub images and graphics and their associated accessibility descriptions in a consolidated table, for easier review
  5. Extracts other various content features to facilitate human-driven accessibility audits

In addition to ACE, Westchester also includes these additional accessibility checks as part of our standard workflow:

  1. Setting the Language attribute (Daisy). Most non-Latin languages will be automatically marked (Daisy)
  2. Setting Page Title – Meaningful titles allow users to find and navigate documents without having to first read them (Daisy)
  3. Mark context breaks, aka space breaks or scene breaks (Daisy)
  4. Mark ornaments/purely decorative images with an empty alt attribute and ARIA “presentation” role (Daisy)

Along with the accessibility checks that Westchester provides as part of our standard workflow, we are able to incorporate the following features to give your epubs additional functionality:

  1. Alt text for image descriptions
  2. Semantically tagged italic and bold text
  3. Language changes when the Latin alphabet is used
  4. Color contrast errors can be corrected with supplied instructions/parameters (i.e., convert failing gray text to default, replace failing gray background with a border, etc.)
  5. Use SVG to render vector images (as long as reading systems display the image properly)
  6. Use MathML with image fallbacks whenever not cost-prohibitive

In addition to our full array of customizable editorial and composition services, Westchester is able to deliver epub files that include the accessibility features your publications require in order to meet the needs of your customers. Contact us today to learn how we can help your publications program be fully accessible.