Accessibility and inclusivity rules
The European Accessibility Act (EAA), a landmark legislation aimed at enhancing the accessibility of products and services, such as websites, apps, ATMs, and e-commerce platforms, for people of all abilities, came into effect on June 28. “This legislation represents a significant step toward harmonizing accessibility standards across the European Union,” says head of operations Meena Prakash at Lapiz Digital. “We are proud to share that we have acquired the Benetech certification, a globally recognized benchmark for accessible content production, which reinforces our capability to deliver high-quality compliant digital solutions.”
Internally, the Lapiz team has implemented comprehensive training to align its processes with EAA requirements. This in-depth training covers key areas such as WCAG 2.1 compliance, PDF remediation, accessible document authoring, assistive technology compatibility, and inclusive design principles. “These efforts ensure that accessibility is embedded into every stage of our product lifecycle,” Prakash says. “Several ongoing major projects are focused on making digital platforms, documents, and content fully accessible in accordance with the EAA. We are also actively collaborating with clients to audit and enhance their digital assets not only in the European region but across the U.S. market.
”Retrofitting existing digital offerings with accessible features and inclusive designs is not easy. The task requires significant investment and effort, which translates into higher costs, work disruptions, and lots of top-down buy-in. Now that the EAA is in effect, any delays in compliance will only cause both financial and reputational risks for those plying their trade in the EU region.
“Many publishers did take quite a bit of time getting their workflows and lists ready for EAA,” says chief revenue officer Tyler Carey of Westchester Publishing Services. “Thus far, 2025 has been a busy year for us on this front as publishers finalize policies and plans and get their lists into compliance. We have been active in speaking on webinars hosted by the IPG and Ingram and in more than a hundred client meetings on the subject over the past year. We also had the opportunity to partner with accessibility consultant Laura Brady and Typeflow’s Keith Snyder on a white paper, Guidance on EPUB Accessibility, about best practices for workflow and getting titles into compliance. It had hundreds of downloads and continues to help address questions publishers have as they get ready for the final phases of building their own accessibility plans.”
Accessibility has become a strategic priority, says Sameer Kanodia, managing director and CEO of Lumina Datamatics. “With global mandates like web content accessibility guidelines and regional compliance requirements becoming stricter,” Kanodia says, “publishers are looking for partners who can provide both speed and subject matter expertise in delivering born-accessible content. Lumina Datamatics is ready to partner with them.”
The urgent case for AI
Change is never easy, and changing our mindset and letting go of preconceived ideas are even more difficult. Despite the many benefits of AI—increased efficiency, higher productivity, personalized experiences, automation of repetitive tasks, for instance—concerns about its impact on jobs, its ethical implications, and its consequences for data privacy and security continue to slow its adoption. The case for AI continues to be riddled with equal parts buzz, skepticism, and trepidation.
But after the last Digital Book World conference in early 2023, the Westchester team witnessed a tremendous amount of excitement and the rapid adoption of AI by some publishing houses and vendors. “But when some publishers filed lawsuits against OpenAI and other tech platforms, adoption slowed due to pending litigation and also a lack of trust,” Carey says. “Other industries have been moving more aggressively on AI than publishing has, but we are starting to see a thaw of that skepticism, with thought leaders in our industry such as George Walkley sharing a lot more use cases that are becoming more adopted.”
Some publishers, such as The Stable Book Group, are using AI to perform routine tasks and are implementing closed AI models to increase their efficiency and speed to market, Carey says. “But we also see companies that are still trying to figure out the best policy forward on AI, as well as those who are directly opposed to AI being used in any portion of a book’s lifecycle. We also have clients that are eager to learn more about our development efforts and capabilities in this area and are looking to us to provide assurance that our opt-in secure AI solutions will not risk their intellectual property. We are seeing some partners handling tasks such as evaluating the slush pile, drafting agreements, and analyzing data with AI on a daily basis. BISG is currently conducting a survey on AI in publishing, and I would encourage publishers to spend time with the output from that survey to track trends and consider use cases for AI.”
Over at Lumina Datamatics, Kanodia is seeing “a significant rise in the demand for AI-integrated workflows, especially in areas such as copyediting, content tagging, manuscript evaluation, and accessibility remediation,” he says. “Clients are considering how automation can accelerate processes without sacrificing quality.”
Kanodia perceives AI as an enhancement, not as a replacement. “We utilize AI and machine learning tools to manage repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as quality checks, style validations, or initial content structuring, which allows our editors and proofreaders to concentrate on higher-level thinking, subject matter accuracy, and editorial judgment,” he says.
“We assure our publishing partners that our exclusive AI-powered solutions, such as Arty.AI and XEditPro, are designed to enhance human capabilities and not to replace them,” Kanodia says. “AI is used as a tool to increase efficiency under the guidance of skilled professionals. We often engage in co-creation workshops with our clients and establish how AI and editorial expertise can effectively work together to improve quality and efficiency. Transparency, education, and control remains essential to building that trust.”
As for AI-powered solutions that boost content creation and personalization, the Lapiz team now offers smart writing support for faster article and report generation, AI-based assessments tailored to learner needs, personalized content delivery based on user preferences, and video scripting and multimedia creation. “We leverage our proprietary AI-enhanced tool to power several core services, including alt-text generation, auto-structuring, bibliography/reference checking, and copyediting support,” Prakash says. “Each of these AI-driven capabilities helps us deliver faster and more accurate results—thus allowing us to focus our human expertise where it matters most.”
Speeding to the market
Speed to market is a growing focus among publishers. “Increasingly, our clients are looking at the rise of self-publishing, where the barrier to getting a book from manuscript into a reader’s hands has dropped dramatically due to the tools that empower authors such as IngramSpark,” says Carey, of Westchester.
“They are realizing that the traditional method of taking a book from acquisition to delivery—which can take up to 18 months in some publishing houses—is negatively impacting their ability to compete, especially on hot topics where getting books to market more quickly is going to be key to their success,” he adds. “I’m not talking about what the market used to refer to as ‘instant books’—those sensational tell-alls and the like. I’m talking about participating in the trends more rapidly and more actively.
”For example, right now, romantasy is the hot trend, Carey says. “If the next big thing is sci-fi, do you really want to gamble that it will still be a bestselling topic 18 months after the titles you rush to acquire become available on bookshelves? No, you want to be able to find paths—for the right books—to copyedit them quickly, work with your production partner to rapidly typeset and apply the author’s amendments, and then work with a printer to get the books to market as quickly as possible. Westchester is a piece of the puzzle, and our rapid-turn offerings, which are customized to each client’s workflow, are being adopted by publishers big and small.”
Forget talking about speed to market in terms of competitive advantage, market dominance, or product leadership. To CFOs any-where, speed to market essentially means speed to money, which is the holy grail for companies worldwide.
Meeting customer demands
Projects come in all shapes and forms. Some ask for bells and whistles and everything in between. Others are more mainstream but come with their own challenges.
Take some of the recent projects that landed at Lapiz Digital. The projects might not seem complex at first glance, but often the real challenge lies beneath the surface: meeting tight deadlines, scaling operations on short notice, and maintaining high-quality output across different service lines. “What sets our team apart is our ability to navigate these challenges with agility, backed by a solid foundation in automation, strong project management practices, and close collaboration across functions,” Prakash says.
One such project involved converting thousands of pages of legacy content into structured digital formats for a global publishing client. “We built custom automation scripts to handle repetitive formatting work and introduced a modular workflow that enabled multiple teams to work in parallel, speeding up the entire process,” she says. “To further ensure high quality standards, we developed a proprietary validation and comparison tool that checks for formatting consistency and metadata accuracy prior to final delivery.”
This is where Lazuli, Lapiz Digital’s custom-built project management tool designed to make the publishing experience smoother, more transparent, and highly efficient, comes in. Solutions include live project tracking, smart collaboration, a centralized file hub, deadline oversight, custom workflows, anywhere access, and query logs. “Lazuli is not just a tool,” says Prakash, whose company has expanded its portfolio to include higher-ed and corporate training materials, thus moving beyond its proven expertise in K–12 products. “It is a smarter way to manage publishing projects to support publishers, authors, and project managers alike. With Lazuli and the Lapiz expertise, we are committed to providing a more professional, secure, and hassle-free collaboration experience.” Prakash finds that publishers are increasingly requesting the development of interactive digital content to captivate audiences and multilingual support, especially translation and localization services, to reach global markets.
Over at Westchester, one client acquired the English language rights to a series of titles originally published in French and German. “We translated the titles using AI and human-based translation services, combining tech and people skills to create an affordable, optimized translation, including updating captions on images, and then typeset the new editions in English,” Carey says. “A series of projects for another publisher focused on helping them save money on the production of full-color titles. They have talented designers but were growing their list and needed help with capacity. Instead of trying to replicate their design style, we developed a model where their designers would set up the design for each title, and we would handle corrections cycles. This freed up their designers to focus on their strengths and growing the list with the publisher, and allowed us to handle other production tasks affordably.”
The Westchester team is also working on projects for decodable readers for the U.S. and global markets. “Due to our scale, we can set up separate authoring and design teams to avoid any overlap of resources between client projects, removing any risk of one clients’ readers being similar to another’s,” Carey says. “For the clients we have been supporting, we have used existing titles as models, established requirements for authoring and agreed upon topics for readers, secured educational writers with expertise in literacy and readerships to write the content, found illustrators to create images and characters to support the text, and worked with our offshore production team to assemble all the pieces into readers for print as well as accessible digital editions.”
Checking on emerging trends and opportunities
“We are seeing several key trends among our publishing clients,” says Kanodia, of Lumina Datamatics. “There is a significant rise in the demand for AI-integrated workflows, especially in areas such as copyediting, content tagging, manuscript evaluation, and accessibility remediation. Clients are considering how automation can accelerate processes without sacrificing quality.”
Then there is the increasing interest in rights and permissions management, freelance resource scalability, and metadata optimiza-tion. Publishers, Kanodia says, “want to do more with less and need agile, tech-enabled partners who understand editorial expertise and the demands of modern content delivery ecosystems.”
Economic instability has undoubtedly made some publishers more cautious, Kanodia says. “We have seen a slowdown in discretionary spending and long-term projects related to research and development. However, this also means publishers are more inclined to outsource to partners such as Lumina Datamatics to increase efficiency. We have gradually established ourselves as a strategic partner who can bring scalability, speed, and cost-effectiveness to the table without compromising quality. This trust has helped us survive instability and, in some areas, even grow our footprint. Additionally, clients are exploring alternative revenue models—digital-first formats, audio content, micro-certification, for instance—and we are actively supporting them through our digital content development, conversion, and publishing solutions.”
One of the major challenges that Kanodia and his team at Lumina Datamatics face is keeping pace with continual technological evolution, from generative AI to immersive learning formats. “Several publishers are unsure of how to adopt these tools without disrupting their legacy workflows,” he says. “And there is the challenge of data privacy, content authenticity, and platform compatibility besides.”
But with these challenges come enormous opportunities, Kanodia says. “The shift to AI-powered, data-enriched workflows opens doors to personalized learning, adaptive content delivery, and predictive editorial strategies.”
Another opportunity lies in inclusive publishing. “Alt-text for images and keyboard navigation for digital books are critical aspects of accessibility, which play a significant role in business operations,” Kanodia says. “At Lumina Datamatics, we are investing in technol-ogy, platforms, and talent that can help our clients deliver content that is accessible, discoverable, and future-ready.”
The digital publishing market remains humongous. According to the Business Research Company, the digital publishing market will hit $58.73 billion this year at a 11.6% compound annual growth rate. By 2029, the market will grow to $88.16 billion. Another report from Mordor Intelligence stated that Asia Pacific is the fastest-growing dig-ital publishing market, while the North American market remains the largest. Technavio expects the digital publishing market to grow by $155.7 billion between 2024 and 2029, partly owing to the increased digitization of paperback books and easy access to digital content on-the-go through the proliferation of mobile apps.
The market and the opportunities are waiting to be had. For vendors in India, and elsewhere, helping publishers achieve content agility and longevity while securing a healthy bottom line is the way forward.
