Accessibility Essentials: A 2025 NISO Training Series

Scope

Accessibility Essentials is a new 8-week training series that will empower attendees with actionable insights and practical guidance toward accessibility compliance for professionals in scholarly communications and publishing. Attendees will come away with an operational understanding of what it means to engage in accessible publishing and methods to ensure their organizations are prepared to achieve accessibility compliance. This seminar will cover upcoming regulatory changes and what is needed to avoid fines and expensive lawsuits; accessibilitystandardsandbestpractices; and human-centered webdesign. From production to public relations, this seminar is critical for all information practitioners, content or product development experts, and scholarly communications professionals. Each week will focus on answering these questions:

1. What is inclusive publishing and why do we care about accessibility? (defining terms, establishing rationale)

2. What are the repercussions for non-accessible content, services, other programs? (regulatory overview, history of court cases, fines and fees)

3. How do we establish an inclusive publishing program? (intro to accessible publishing)

4. How do we establish an inclusive design program? (intro to human-centered design)

5. How do we implement accessible web designs? (WCAGcompliance)

6. How do we implement inclusive content production? (producing accessible PDF ,EBUB, etc.)

7. How do we retrofit backlist titles and remediate existing products?(accessibility audits and best practices)

8. What is our inclusive publishing strategy going forward? (integrating accessibility into organizational strategies, budgets, etc.

Training Facilitator

With more than 20 years’ experience in scholarly publishing and product design, Lettie brings human-centered methods to her work with technology and service providers. She is a dedicated information professional, passionately delivering inclusive innovations in research and publishing. 

Lettie is driven by an interest in how scholarly communicate and manage their research information. In her 8 years as an independent researcher and consultant, Lettie contributes both commercial solutions and original research to the study of scholarly information experiences.

In her 10 years with SAGE Publishing, Lettie played a key role in establishing product management expertise and user-centered product lifecycles and market research routines. She was instrumental in launching user-centered web and mobile products, driving research and analysis that enabled evidence-based product management to maintain outstanding quality of SAGE platforms. 

Currently, Lettie serves as Product Experience Architect for LibLynx, a part-time instructor in San José State’s School of Information, among other independent projects. In her spare time, Lettie is a Publications Committee member for the Association for Information Science & Technology and a ‘chef’ with the SSP’s Scholarly Kitchen blog. You can read more about Lettie on her LinkedIn and ORCID profiles.

Course Duration and Dates

The series consists of eight (8) weekly segments, each lasting 90 minutes. Specific dates are:

• April 3, 10, 17, 24
• May 1, 8, 15, 22

Each session will be recorded and links to that archived recording will be disseminated to course registrants within 2 business days of the close of the specific session.