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I’m working on the Hugo Voter Packet again this year. (In fact, this year I’m in charge of it.)

(In this post, I mention a couple of people by first initial, just because I don’t know whether they want to be named publicly.)

I thought I was well-prepared for coordinating the Packet this year. Last year, we worked out a bunch of systems and procedures and checklists and documentation. And a couple months ago, I wrote and tested some code to handle some technical stuff that caused difficulties and delays in the Packet last year. And we’re reusing the hosting setup that C built for us last year. And this year’s Hugo committee and WSFS people are some of the same people who ran things last year, and they’re great to work with.

And all of that is great; it has made things a lot easier this year in most ways. But it turns out that there were (at least) two things that I wasn’t taking into account in my planning:

• Confidentiality. The previous times when I’ve been involved with the Packet, I didn’t get involved until after the finalists had been publicly announced. But this year, I got off to a nice early start—well before the finalists had been announced. And despite all of my planning for this year, it didn’t occur to me that confidentiality would be an issue—that various things we asked finalists for would require them to tell other people about being finalists, before the public announcement was made.

  That mostly turned out not to be a big deal, but it did cause some finalists some stress. If I had understood that this was an issue, I would have arranged the Packet schedule at least a little differently, and communicated more clearly about things.

• Accessibility. Last year, someone contacted us late in the process and asked if we could include audiobooks in the Packet. Our reaction was that (a) that was a great idea, (b) we wished we had thought of it, but (c) it was too late in the process to implement that year.

  So for this year’s Packet, in categories where we would normally just have text ebooks, we decided to ask for audio versions of the works along with the text versions. And coincidentally, someone on this year’s Worldcon staff, M, asked us to also make the text materials in the Packet (especially the PDFs) more accessible, and they educated us about some ways to do that.

  So we’ve enhanced our usual process this year, by asking finalists in most categories to provide (a) accessible text versions and (b) audio versions of their works. (If possible.)

  Which is great! But it turns out sometimes audiobooks are handled by different publishers from print books, which adds some complications. And it turns out that many publishers don’t know how to create accessible PDFs and ePubs, so after a publisher submits a finalist’s work, I often need to contact them and ask them if they can make their documents more accessible. (We provided some instructions ahead of time, but in those instructions we didn’t really cover the two things that are turning out to be the two most common issues (accessibility tags in PDFs, and metadata in ePubs), because I didn’t know about those issues until later.)

  So it’s a learning experience for a lot of us. I’m hoping that this process will help some publishers learn how to make their ebooks more accessible, and I’m continuing to document our processes so that whoever runs the Packet next year can build on our experience this year.

  Anyway, this year’s Packet will definitely not be 100% accessible. But it’ll be the most accessible that the Packet has ever been, and I’m hoping future years will improve on that further.