Ellen Forget, University of Alberta (eforget@ualberta.ca)

John W Maxwell, Simon Fraser University (jmax@sfu.ca)

Abstract submission deadline: October 1, 2026 

Accessibility is more than ticking boxes on a minimum-requirements checklist. Achieving accessibility requires intention, thoughtfulness, and inclusion, as well as conducting design, editing, and production with diverse and disabled audiences clearly in mind. Disability and critical-access scholar Elizabeth Ellcessor argues that “merely making material available is insufficient to promote genuine access” (2018, 108). The affordances of electronic publishing make improved accessibility possible in several ways, but publishers still need to know how to use the tools available to them to produce materials that are genuinely accessible to disabled readers. In this context of accessibility, there are arguments to be made for (Williams 2012) and against (Hamraie 2017) principles of universal design, and publishing is a prime case. 

Accessibility in digital publishing—be that the open web, scholarly communications, journalism, or trade publishing—is a core issue for the missions of almost every publication. It is easy to agree with concepts of accessibility in theory, and yet it remains an operational challenge for many publishers despite the growth of accessibility legislation, promotion, and advocacy efforts in many countries and industries. Indeed, the European Accessibility Act (EAA), which came into effect last year, has global implications for any publisher who wants to sell their ebooks in Europe. Laura Brady, an accessible ebooks expert, describes how the EAA affects non-European publishers in a recent blog post (2025), arguing that the legislation is “poised to have a seismic effect on digital publishing by influencing both emerging and developed markets.”

And yet digital accessibility is not a new idea! One of the early use cases back in the 1980s for SGML, and later XML and the web itself, was accessibility (see Kaysen 1988; Rubinsky 1994). The separation of document structure from visual formatting that is the foundation of most markup technologies was in significant part in order to make possible alternative renderings of the same content. This idea has been present since the early stages of most of our digital publishing platforms. And yet, even in structured-information environments like the web and ebook production, traditional print-based workflows (which stubbornly persist even in digital-only publications) make thinking about accessibility harder than it needs to be.

How are publishers thinking about serving diverse and disabled audiences? How are scholars doing it? How does accessibility affect access to research, to news, to influential information? What technologies and trends are shaping the way publishers think about accessible publishing today? What can the history of accessibility technologies and trends teach us about present and future challenges? We welcome submissions from a variety of perspectives: professional, scholarly, technical, and personal. 

We encourage written submissions about a variety of electronic publishing media, including text, audio, video, and combinations thereof. We also welcome submissions from any geographical, linguistic, or temporal context, although submissions should be written in English. Some potential topics include (but are not limited to):

• Advocacy efforts
• Analysis of technology and standards
• Reports on trends and practices
• Reflections and considerations

This special issue invites abstracts for papers of ~4,000-8,000 words reflecting on these issues. 

When submitting an abstract, please note that your proposal is for consideration in the Accessibility in Digital Publishing special issue. Abstract submissions between 250-450 words (as well as a brief author bio of no more than 150 words) are due on Oct 1, 2026 and should be addressed to the special issue editors Ellen Forget and John Maxwell via jmax@sfu.ca and eforget@ualberta.ca with “Accessibility in Digital Publishing JEP” in the subject line. Submission policies and additional details are available on the JEP Policies page.

Full papers of accepted abstracts are due March 2027.

This special issue of JEP will also be transcribed into Unified English Braille for a digital braille edition. Special issue editor Ellen Forget will do the braille transcription after final copy edits have been approved on selected articles.

Please direct any questions to special issue editors Ellen Forget (eforget@ualberta.ca) and John Maxwell (jmax@sfu.ca). 

We are currently waiting for an official AI policy from the University of Michigan Publishing. If you would like to engage with AI tools for part of your article creation process, please consult with us and the editors of the journal (Janneke Adema and Alyssa Arbuckle) before doing so and we will discuss. Any use of AI must be disclosed to the editors and will be disclosed in the published article as well. Note that, in the absence of an official policy from the University of Michigan Publishing, the Journal of Electronic Publishing is currently not publishing articles researched through or written with generative AI tools. In return, we confirm that generative AI tools have not and will not be used in our editorial management or review of your article. Should the University of Michigan introduce such usage for the later stages of production in future we will notify all authors as soon as possible.

AI tools used for accessibility purposes (voice-to-text, transcription, etc.) do not need advance consultation, but they should be disclosed on submission.

Works Cited

Brady, Laura. April 12, 2025. “The European Accessibility Act and Book Publishing.” https://laurabrady.ca/blog/the-european-accessibility-act-and-book-publishing

Crook, Mark. “Yuri Rubinsky Explores Use of SGML to Generate Text for Sight-Impaired.” OCLC Newsletter 212 (December 1994): 16–18.

Ellcessor, Elizabeth. 2018. “A Glitch in the Tower: Academia, Disability, and Digital Humanities.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities. Routledge.

Hamraie, Aimi. 2017. Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. University of Minnesota Press.

Kaysen, Jesse. “Let’s Play Tag: The Promise of SGML.” The Raised Dot Computing Newsletter, November 1988. https://www.duxburysystems.org/downloads/library/news/new70-71.htm.

Williams, George H. 2012. “Disability, Universal Design, and Digital Humanities.” In Debates in Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press.