I\u2019m working on the Hugo Voter Packet again this year. (In fact, this year I\u2019m in charge of it.)<\/p>\r\n
(In this post, I mention a couple of people by first initial, just because I don\u2019t know whether they want to be named publicly.)<\/p>\r\n
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\u2019re reusing the hosting setup that C built for us last year. And this year\u2019s Hugo committee and WSFS people are some of the same people who ran things last year, and they\u2019re great to work with.<\/p>\r\n
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\u2019t taking into account in my planning:<\/p>\r\n
Confidentiality. The previous times when I\u2019ve been involved with the Packet, I didn\u2019t get involved until after the finalists had been publicly announced. But this year, I got off to a nice early start\u2014well before the finalists had been announced. And despite all of my planning for this year, it didn\u2019t occur to me that confidentiality would be an issue\u2014that various things we asked finalists for would require them to tell other people about being finalists, before the public announcement was made.<\/p>\r\n
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.<\/p>\r\n <\/li>\r\n
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.<\/p>\r\n
So for this year\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\r\n
So we\u2019ve 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.)<\/p>\r\n
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\u2019t know how to create accessible PDFs and ePubs, so after a publisher submits a finalist\u2019s 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\u2019t really cover the two things that are turning out to be the two most common issues<\/a> (accessibility tags in PDFs, and metadata in ePubs), because I didn\u2019t know about those issues until later.)<\/p>\r\n So it\u2019s a learning experience for a lot of us. I\u2019m hoping that this process will help some publishers learn how to make their ebooks more accessible, and I\u2019m continuing to document our processes so that whoever runs the Packet next year can build on our experience this year.<\/p>\r\n Anyway, this year\u2019s Packet will definitely not be 100% accessible. But it\u2019ll be the most accessible that the Packet has ever been, and I\u2019m hoping future years will improve on that further.<\/p>\r\n <\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[82,110,125],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-awards","category-disability","category-ebooks"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21329"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21331,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21329\/revisions\/21331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}