Accessibility in Digital Publishing: An Interview with Allison Belan from Duke University Press

Starting from June 2025, the European Accessibility Act makes accessibility mandatory for all digital academic publications. What this means is that all eBooks, journal articles and online resources, along with the platforms they are hosted on, should be made accessible to differently abled readers in compliance with recognized web content standards. For publishers like Duke University Press, the Act represents “an opportunity to fulfill our ethical obligation to make the critical scholarship we publish as available and accessible as possible to as many people as possible,” says Belan.

Compliance with the European Accessibility Act is easier said than done, however. Not only is there a significant technical and logistical challenge to ensure that things like font sizes, display options and alt texts are made compliant throughout the digital publishing ecosystem – publishers, libraries and repositories also have to content with legal ambiguities in the Act itself.

To help untangle some of these knots, we were delighted to learn from the insights of Allison Belan, Director of Strategic Innovation and Services at Duke University Press, in the interview that follows. The conversation was led by Florian Hofbauer, Archivist and Process Manager at Paradigm Publishing Services, a division of De Gruyter Brill.

Florian Hofbauer: Hi Allison! I came across your work on accessibility via a recent Book Industry Study Group webinar. Please tell me, how long has Duke University Press been involved with accessibility?

Allison Belan: Since the mid-2000s, we’ve provided all of our eBooks to Benetech’s Bookshare program, and generally we relied on participation in that service to provide accessible versions of our eBooks to students and educators. Though the European Accessibility Act was approved in 2019, we didn’t fully realize its scope and potential impacts until autumn 2024 after which we began transforming our authoring, editing, and production practices to make our eBooks accessible to the WCAG 2.1 AA standards. Thankfully, we were able to mobilize quickly despite initial doubts about how to tackle the challenges inherent in the kind of work we publish; many of our books are image-heavy and contain a variety of languages throughout the English text.

Further reading: How De Gruyter Is Making Its eBooks More Accessible

FH: That’s interesting to hear. To set the stage further, what role do you play in accessibility at Duke University Press?

AB: As the Director for Strategic Innovation and Services, I am responsible for Duke University Press’s digital publishing practices and specifications. I also have oversight of our web product platforms, www.dukeupress.edu, read.dukeupress.edu, scholarlypublishingcollective.org, and projecteuclid.org. Finally, large efforts that span multiple functional areas of the Press often land in my office, since I work across our book and journal publishing programs. It is my job to raise awareness of things like accessibility and data security and to bring our resources to bear on meeting new and emerging standards related to digital content and platforms.

FH: I think you are on an exemplary path from what I have seen so far! The most important topic now is certainly the European Accessibility Act, which will become mandatory in July. What are the biggest opportunities and challenges of this new situation in Europe from your perspective?

“The European Accessibility Act pushed us past nervousness about putting new requirements on our authors and cost and labor concerns related to the complexity of our list.”

AB: The EAA has provided us with an opportunity to fulfill our ethical obligation and our mission to make the critical scholarship we publish as available and accessible as possible to as many people as possible. The EAA pushed us past nervousness about putting new requirements on our authors and cost and labor concerns related to the complexity of our list. It has also given us a clear, defined standard that we can reference when library customers ask about the accessibility of our digital products during the licensing process.

The challenges have come in two primary forms. The first has been time—a challenge we largely brought on ourselves by not following closely enough the regulatory activity around accessibility in the EU and not understanding earlier the requirements of the EAA. The second challenge is the Act’s ambiguities. Publishers’ legal counsel, external legal experts, and accessibility experts and consultants have differing and at time conflicting interpretations of the EAA’s provisions. We’ve been left to navigate unknowns such as whether backlist books are immediately subject to the terms of the Act, whether electronic journal content served from a web site is in scope, and what will be deemed valid applications of the disproportionate burden exception.

FH: The ambiguities in the law are keeping the whole market busy. You only need to do a little research online to come across contradictory information. One part of the EAA that is often discussed is the alternative texts for images that an eBook must have according to the EAA guidelines. When we talk about alt-texts, we cannot ignore the role of AI-generated alternative texts. What are your thoughts on this topic?

AB: I think the best source of alt-text is the author, so for books that will be “born accessible,” we focus on supporting the author in creating good alt-text and refining it through the editing process. For the backlist, it really isn’t possible to re-engage the authors, so we must consider how to create alt-text on their behalf. Especially for a sizable backlist in visually intensive subjects, it just may not be financially feasible to pay for human-authored alt-text. I believe that carefully tuned, AI-generated outputs are appropriate alternatives to the eBook having no alt-text at all.

“I believe that carefully tuned, AI-generated outputs are appropriate alternatives to the eBook having no alt-text at all.”

In general, I view alt-text more like metadata rather than original or creative writing. Like metadata, it is information about a thing, not the thing itself. It takes skill and practice to create good alt-text, just as it takes skill and practice to create and structure good metadata. As an industry, we’ve had few qualms about using automation, machine learning, and natural language processing to extract or create other types of metadata that make our works more discoverable, linkable, and accessible. I see alt-text in much the same way.

Further reading: Using Alt Text to Make Your Scientific Publication More Accessible

An important disclaimer: my thinking is shaped largely by the disciplines Duke University Press works in—humanities and social sciences. People’s lives generally do not depend on the description of a film still or a landscape painting being absolutely accurate in the way that they may when the subject matter is medical research.

FH: The metadata comparison is very interesting. This is exactly how you should prompt AI if you are already using it to write alt-texts. I have another hypothetical question on another controversial topic: EPUB vs. PDF. Do you think the EPUB will replace the PDF as an accessible alternative, or will both continue to exist in parallel?

AB: The PDF has been impervious to all other formats in research and scholarship applications. It’s hard to imagine the EPUB replacing it anytime soon. There are disciplines, such as physics, statistics, and mathematics, that have oriented around the PDF as the only target output. But EPUB has many of the advantages that a PDF has for research plus more. Like a PDF, an EPUB can be downloaded and stored on personal devices for easy, ongoing access and reference. With the right reading device or application, it can be annotated and marked up by a reader. And of course, the EPUB surpasses the PDF because the text can be resized and reflow to meet any reader’s needs and any size viewing window. While HTML5 viewed in a browser offers the accessibility benefits of EPUB, it does not satisfy the researchers desire to “have” the book or article. I would venture that EPUB has a better chance of replacing the PDF than the HTML format prevalent for decades in journal publishing.

Duke University Press is a partner of De Gruyter Brill through its Paradigm Publishing Services division, which manages the partner program. Paradigm is designed to respond to the evolving needs of publishers in the modern digital era. With a legacy of over 340 years of scholarly excellence, De Gruyter Brill has launched Paradigm Publishing Services to further its mission of facilitating the dissemination of academic work while addressing the financial and accessibility challenges faced by publishers today. 

Headquartered in Boston, Paradigm Publishing Services harnesses the collective strengths and reputations of established De Gruyter brands, such as Ubiquity, Sciendo, and the Partner Program. The goal is to forge partnerships that transcend traditional publishing boundaries, offering bespoke solutions that integrate seamlessly with the goals and capabilities of Paradigm’s partners.  

[Title Image by Chansom Pantip/iStock/Getty Images]