HEB and Accessibility

ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) was recently a participant in a study of e-book accessibility, conducted by JISC and the Publishers Accessibility Action Group. HEB was designated one of seven "honest dealers" who responded to this inquiry (among a total of thirteen e-book platforms and aggregators contacted by the project), consequently designated "players to continue to invest with".

As per the JISC TechDis blog entry: "We commend the following for their active honest engagement. Thankyou to our 7 honest dealers; ACLS Humanities E-Book; Gale/Cengage; EBL (ebrary); EBSCO; Elsevier; Emerald Insight and Ingram. Cambridge University Press were in the middle of a redesign with enhanced accessibility so felt that results from existing platform would be unrepresentative. (...) If there’s a platform you expected to see here but they are not represented then feel free to ask them for a personal response regarding their accessibility credentials." Read the entire blog entry here.

At this time, we believe that most features of the HEB collection provide accessibility for users with disabilities who draw on assistive technologies, and allow for navigation by standard automatic screen readers. Specifically, the HEB collection currently conforms to W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, Conformance Level A; which means that titles meet all Level A Success Criteria and contain no absolute barriers to access; all page-image titles contain an OCR scanned, text-only version of the content that can be processed by assistive technologies; links are operable by keyboard, and images include descriptive "ALT" attributes.

We continue to strive to improve our accessibility and welcome input from readers to this effect.

HEB Pricing for 2015

ACLS Humanities E-Book has now finalized its subscription rates for the upcoming year. These rates go into effect January 2015, and can be found on our website. Depending on a subscriber's size and classification, prices will go up by a margin of roughly 2.8% to 3.4%. This modest increase will serve to offset administrative overhead; subscribers are asked to bear in mind that it is accompanied by an increase in the size of our collection of about 9%, as we've just added another 353 titles, bringing the total to over 4,300.

For more information, please contact us at subscriptions@hebook.org.