2024 AUPresses Week-in-Residence Report: Jenn Bennett-Genthner

Professional Development,

Jenn Bennett-Genthner, Manager of Training, Development, and Services at SUNY Press, reports on visiting Gallaudet University Press and Johns Hopkins University Press

Rationale for visit

I’m currently the sole person at SUNY Press responsible for initiating procedures for accessibility and making our works compliant with EU guidelines. The Week in Residency gave me an opportunity to meet and discuss perspectives and processes with other presses as we all work toward the same goal: frontlist accessibility by June 2025. Since Gallaudet University Press is focused on the deaf community, I thought their perspective could be very valuable while Johns Hopkins University Press has addressed accessibility in ways SUNY hasn’t yet.

Summary of experience

Gallaudet University Press (3 days): I met with all four staff members: Katie Lee (acquisitions), Angela Leppig (director), Dierdre Mullervy (managing editor), and Valencia Grace (marketing) individually and as a group. Our conversations began in major questions I had sent prior to my visit and ranged widely, touching on how accessibility impacts marketing outreach, using platforms like Manifold for supplementary content, and strategizing for open access.

It was interesting to learn more about Gallaudet’s publishing focus on the deaf community, their current university mandates, strategies, and possible future procedures. Gallaudet’s perspective on accessibility centers on improving access for everyone, being thoughtful about sharing resources, considering every book and its strategy in a detailed way to ensure titles meet the press’s mission and the overall mission of the university.

Johns Hopkins University Press (2 days):  My primary point of contact was Claire Tamberino, product manager in the marketing/sales department for books who heads the press’s accessibility taskforce.  I also got to meet with:

  • associate director Erik Smist and briefly attended their launch meeting.
  • director of people, culture, and equity Julia Lynton-Brown to chat about university and community connections I could be making (identifying consensus answers and policies across SUNY’s 64 campuses is daunting).
  • art director Molly Seamans to discuss designing for accessibility, including issues with fonts and print on demand. I was glad to share my thinking about alt text for cover files, which wasn’t on their mind yet.
  • production manager Jenn Paulson, associate production editor Kyle Kretzer, and production controller Jay Soglo to compare notes about alt text experiments and procedures as well as their practices with ebook vendors.
  • rights and permissions manager Kelly Rogers who confirmed my thinking about EU-mandated backlist remediation timeline.
  • Jennifer D’Urso at Project Muse to discuss procedures for trying to make both frontlist and legacy files accessible despite variability in files received from clients. We had an in-depth conversation about remediating PDFs, which is still a sore spot with lots of folks. We also brainstormed ways to encourage authors to write alt text.

Lessons learned

Dierdre Mullervy at Gallaudet recommended the Books without Barriers guide, as did the book production team at Hopkins, and I’m really looking forward to digging into it.

The overall empathy and thoughtfulness demonstrated by Gallaudet staff was invaluable. Their thoughts about access for everyone really influenced my growing need to be a better advocate for all of our readers and not just those with low vision. Their immersion in the deaf community means they think about access every day. As a closely working foursome, their cooperation with each other was also impressive. I really appreciated their work ethic and atmosphere, and I left believing I’ve made friends and not just met with colleagues in the publishing community.

Hopkins staff gave me some interesting ideas about procedures, especially with regard to updating contracts to attempt to hold authors accountable for contributing to the accessibility of their work. Getting some confirmation that I understood the legal verbiage in the EU mandate was a huge win too.

Even though Hopkins is much larger than my press, I discovered that our thought processes and procedures align more than I thought they would. I was glad to know that we’re on a similar path despite smaller staff and fewer resources, and grateful to receive validation of what I’m doing at my press from a committee of 10 working on the same issues there.

I also very much enjoyed the comparing notes with other professionals working on accessibility as well as considering open access, open educational resources, artificial intelligence, and sustainability. I felt like I was helping and being helped. I left both presses feeling invigorated to tackle my job again and continue to share knowledge.