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Advancing Accessibility in Open Access Publishing
Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei&Livy Snyder
A photograph of two hands flatten a pink book titled Queer Communal Kinship Now! on top of a copy machine as if to make copies. Photograph by Luz Magdaleno Flores.
When it [accessibility] is embedded in the culture, it reinforces the mission of serving all readers. It’s not a checkbox; it’s a strategic, forward-looking commitment and means knowledge can be equally shared. It’s a feature of high quality digital publishing. ~ Sharla Lair

At punctum books, accessibility is inseparable from our mission. Open access confronts the inequity of publicly funded research being inaccessible to the public; accessibility ensures that openly available knowledge is usable by all readers. 

Digital content is never neutral with respect to different bodies and modes of reading, and attending to its form is essential to making scholarship genuinely open. These values guide our approach to digital publishing and shape how we develop formats that support a more bibliodiverse and just scholarly record.

This year, we have been developing a more thorough roadmap for compliance with the accessibility requirements stipulated in Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which mandates WCAG 2.1 AA standards for web content as of April 24, 2026. While Title II applies directly to public entities, it also affects publishers who supply materials to them—such as punctum books, whose Supporting Library Membership Program includes many publicly funded university libraries. For us, these requirements align with our broader commitment to ensuring that open publications are accessible to all readers.

Our work on improving accessibility is part of a wider collective effort across the open access community. A central focus of the Copim Open Book Futures (OBF) project funded by the Research England Development Fund, which punctum co-initiated in 2023, is an accessibility work package that produced the toolkit COPIM COMPASS - Open Book Accessibility. It includes comprehensive guidelines and strategies for OA publishers navigating accessibility requirements across multiple jurisdictions. 

Based on these guidelines, several workshops hosted by the Open Book Collective, and internal discussions, we drafted an Accessibility Statement and Roadmap that is publicly available on our website. We based our accessibility strategy on the following three main considerations:

  1. Open access addresses the unacceptable inequity of research funded by the public being inaccessible to it. This is usually framed as a question of economics: open access publishers therefore make their publications freely available. There is no accessibility without open access.
  2. However, focusing on the economics of accessibility is clearly not sufficient. Digital content is not neutral with regard to different people's level of physical ability to access it. This must therefore be addressed in the form of the digital content itself.
  3. punctum books was founded as print-forward press. We believe in the importance of the physical, printed book and its cultural heritage and have always considered our OA PDF publications to be a digital analog. As a result, our PDFs are not fully WCAG 2.1 AA–compliant.

These considerations helped us determine a practical and sustainable path toward meeting WCAG 2.1 AA standards. Rather than developing complex workflows to make our PDFs compliant, we have introduced an additional digital format that supports accessibility more robustly: EPUB.

As of November 1, 2025, all punctum titles are published in three formats: paperbound print, PDF, and WCAG 2.1 AA–compliant EPUB. The EPUB, like the PDF, is made freely available as open access. We are also assessing the work and financial feasibility of making our backlist available in EPUB, and in the meantime, will accommodate individual requests to convert particular titles. Contact us with such requests at info@punctumbooks.com.

Improving accessibility in scholarly publishing is an ongoing, collective undertaking—one grounded in broader commitments to equity, disability justice, and open knowledge. The policy landscape remains complex, with multiple legislative frameworks across different jurisdictions, many of which do not address every need, and their relevance to open access publishers is not always immediately apparent. Nevertheless, through the support of collective initiatives such as the OBF project, the Open Book Collective, and the ScholarLed Foundation, we have been able to deepen our understanding, refine our practices, and establish a clear way forward.

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