The letters A and Y, in the word Accessibility, are divided by 11 characters. This gave birth to the term A11Y and the name A11Y Generation, a combination of letters and numbers which refers to the word ally.

The project has been presented within the call “Reprojecting the future 2022” issued by Fondazione Cariplo. Its objective is to develop the competences of Fondazione LIA’s team. This would be crucial to adequately prepare the Team’s members for facing the challenges linked to the promotion and the creation of a born accessible publishing ecosystem, in which print impaired people have the possibility to access a wider and wider offer of born accessible books, contents, and digital environments.

THE CONTEXT

Within the new legislative and technological accessibility framework, Fondazione LIA works toward the update of the paradigm for all the stakeholders involved in the publishing ecosystem: from the production to final users, particularly the ones with print impairments. New skills are crucial for developing projects and innovative solutions that nurture the shifting needed. More and more digital products are available in the publishing industry. This is causing a big change in how visual disabled people can access to the contents other than the wideness of the titles they can access. At the state of the art, the overall level of awareness is still low, and the skills needed for an effective implementation of the European Accessibility Act are not sufficiently widespread. It is therefore necessary to spread the culture of accessibility and provide the stakeholders with tools and skills to make their productive and distributive processes compliant with the accessibility requirements.

THE ACTIVITEIS

A11y Generation will involve the entire LIA’s structure, enhancing managerial and management skills as well as the ones in social marketing, to enable it to:

• Successfully manage a wider number of social projects of growing complexity with international partners
• Efficiently promote the culture of accessibility between the different stakeholders
• Manage the growing request of consulting, services and products from the stakeholders and the new subjects of the publishing ecosystem

The project foresees some online and in presence formative activities, held with the support of experts, and some project work on the job to enhance the acquisition of new competencies and the innovation of the management process.