Accessibility-first workflow, particularly for Ok–12 initiatives, is gaining momentum at Lapiz Digital. “We’re assembly this demand head-on and automating a lot of our processes to be able to deliver down challenge prices for our shoppers,” says head of operations Meena Prakash, whose firm is Benetech-certified for accessibility companies. “As consciousness about accessibility will increase and expertise turns into extra built-in, there’s a rising emphasis on making digital content material accessible for everybody.”
Producing accessible video content material was one complicated challenge that the Lapiz workforce not too long ago accomplished. “We wanted to assemble a workforce of material consultants to evaluate the audio descriptions from a content material high quality viewpoint, specializing in the descriptions over the relevance or brevity of the visible components,” Prakash says.
E-book manufacturing companies that assure the accessibility of digital publications for individuals with disabilities is a fast-growing section at Lapiz. “This contains including options corresponding to text-to-speech, scalable font sizes, and navigational help for customers with visible impairments or studying disabilities,” Prakash says. “Our workforce is particularly educated to supply meticulous planning and seamless coordination with an consideration to element that ensures our accessible digital companies and content material are usable by individuals with disabilities.”
Automation in any respect ranges and throughout numerous processes is a vital enterprise technique. “Our digital conversion workforce, for example, has made monumental enhancements by way of high quality and productiveness via absolutely automated options for XML, SGML, and EPUB deliverables,” Prakash says. “Our turnaround instances have shortened considerably for e-book initiatives and XML conversions. For our shoppers, this interprets into shorter time to market and better price effectivity.”
The corporate’s sturdy challenge administration instrument Lazuli has utterly reworked the workflow for impartial and commerce e-book publishers. “Cloud-based Lazuli can deal with each e-book and journal workflows and could be very simple to make use of,” says Prakash, including that the instrument addresses widespread challenge administration challenges corresponding to communication gaps, deadline monitoring, and activity group. “We now have additionally developed an AI-aided automation answer for fashion modifying of complicated mathematical journals, and it’s able to dealing with primary language modifying duties as nicely.”
E-book conversion stays a specialty for Lapiz, Prakash says. “There has a been a gentle influx of accessible EPUB3, enhanced audio e-books, and EPUB2-to-EPUB3 conversions. Final 12 months, we processed nicely over 1,000,000 pages in each English and non-English titles. Our automated end-to-end EPUB3 workflow, which additionally covers accessible e-book manufacturing, has been instrumental in rushing up the method whereas enhancing the standard output—and that makes us and our shoppers completely satisfied.”
A model of this text appeared within the 06/24/2024 challenge of Publishers Weekly underneath the headline: Accessibility and Automation at Lapiz Digital
