Well-spaced text and sensory elements key to making books more accessible, EIBF hears

Clear and well-spaced text, attractive covers and sensory elements are key to making books more accessible, audiences at the Edinburgh International Book Festival heard. 

In a panel, The Accessibility of Books, which was part of the festival’s Business of Books strand, Nikesh Shukla, author and co-founder of the Good Literary Agency, asked panellists about the steps they are taking to help those who face barriers in accessing books, or whose stories are underrepresented in mainstream publishing. 

Ailie Finlay, founder of My Kind of Book, discussed the pioneering ways she incorporated sensory elements into texts to help engage children with complex additional needs. The publisher’s first book, Stone Soup, included stage directions alongside the text to help get readers involved in the story.  

Meanwhile, Ailsa Bathgate, publisher at Barrington Stoke, explained the publisher’s aim is to enable readers to access work from the authors that their peers are already reading. “We don’t want them to look like some reading scheme that you feel different, we work really hard on our covers so they look fantastic,” she said. 

“We never compromise on quality, it’s just that way of inviting everybody in, we encourage teachers to see these books as class reads, they’re not for the struggling reader, they’re for everybody.” 

During the editorial process, books undergo a language and accessibility edit, where specialists go through the text word by word to look for potential plotholes that might trip up a struggling reader.  

The publisher also uses clever design features, such as a font where each letter has a serif to help words hang together. Letters also have individual shapes to help children decode text. Paragraphs are well spaced and special "yellowish" paper is used to avoid the distracting glare from black text on white pages. The paper is also thicker to ensure text and illustrations from the next page don’t show through. Although Bathgate admitted that this paper is much more expensive than standard paper.