Braille and Accessible Format Producers Editing and Proofreading Services

Producing an accessible edition means making every decision the original designer made without thinking. A sighted reader takes in a pull quote, a sidebar, a chart and a caption in one glance and knows instantly how they relate. In braille or in audio, that page becomes a sequence, and somebody has to decide the order, decide what a chart actually conveys, and decide whether a decorative rule is information or noise. Those decisions are writing, and they determine whether the reader gets the same book or a lesser one.

We edit what transcription agencies, accessible format producers and publishers produce — transcriber's notes and format explanations, image and figure descriptions, alt text and extended descriptions for complex graphics, guidance on describing tables, charts and diagrams, transcription and formatting policies, braille production specifications and volume planning, large print and easy read conversions, audio description scripts, guidance for describing images in educational and examination material, accessibility statements for publications, procurement and tender responses for accessible format contracts, and training material for transcribers and describers. Our editors work on the descriptive text itself, which is the part no software produces.

Image description is where the craft concentrates, and the common failure is describing appearance rather than function. A chart described as "a bar chart with five coloured bars" has told the reader nothing they can use, while a full transcription of every data point buries the finding the sighted reader gets in a second. We write these so the description leads with what the image is doing in this document — the finding, the relationship, the thing the caption assumes you can see — then gives the supporting detail in a structure the reader can navigate, then supplies the underlying data separately where a reader might need it. For an examination paper the rules invert: the description must give exactly the information a sighted candidate has, no more, because a description that interprets a diagram has answered part of the question. Getting that boundary right requires knowing what the image is for, which is why descriptions written from the picture alone are usually wrong.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including examination material under embargo and publisher files supplied under licence. We are editors rather than transcribers, braille specialists or accessibility auditors, and we offer no view on conformance with any standard or on the production decisions themselves. What we can do is make descriptive text accurate, economical and genuinely equivalent for the reader who depends on it.