About us
Making published information usable for everyone
Accessibility Matters Ireland helps public bodies turn complex, design-led publications into documents that everyone can read, navigate and understand – where the hard part is editorial judgement, not just technical compliance.
Who we are
Accessibility, from a publishing background
Accessibility Matters Ireland is led by Stephen Keane, whose background is in publishing. Accessibility has been part of that work for a number of years – not as an afterthought, but as a design goal.
In 2022 Stephen developed The Fact Factory, the world’s first audio-print STEM magazine series for visually impaired children, combining printed educational content with touch-activated audio. Over the last two years, while working on seven county heritage guides commissioned by local authorities – including a fully remediated, accessible edition of the Wicklow Heritage Guide – that focus turned to making complex public documents digitally accessible.
That combination – editorial craft and hands-on accessibility work – is deliberate. Making a document genuinely usable is rarely just a technical task. It is a series of editorial decisions: what an image really needs to convey, what order information should be read in, and whether a document is even in the right format at all.
Why this matters
Accessibility is not a minority concern
Accessible publishing is often treated as a box to tick for a small group of users. The evidence tells a different story.
1 in 5
More than one in five people in Ireland – 21.5% – reported having a disability in the 2022 Census.
Most
Most disability is acquired during a person’s lifetime, and the proportion of people with a disability rises with age. It is something that touches most families over time.
440,090
Reported difficulty with pain, breathing or another chronic condition to any extent – the most common category. Blindness or vision impairment and deafness or hearing impairment affect hundreds of thousands more.
Behind those figures are people trying to read a council report, a heritage guide, a health notice or a public consultation. When a document is published only as an untagged PDF, or as text locked inside an image, that information is simply unavailable to a screen-reader user – not because of their disability, but because of how the document was built. Accessible publishing removes that barrier.
Statistics: National Disability Authority, Disability Statistics factsheet (May 2024), drawn from Census 2022 (Central Statistics Office). Figures are reproduced here for context; please refer to the NDA and CSO for the source data. [Verify each figure against the source before publishing.]
How we work
A considered route from source file to publication
Every document is different, so every engagement starts by understanding what already exists and what it needs to do. From there, the right route is chosen – and part of the value is knowing which route that is.
Assess and prioritise
We review what is being published, identify the documents that create the greatest barriers, and prioritise where intervention will have the most impact.
Choose the right route
Remediation of the existing PDF, accessible recreation from source, or conversion to responsive HTML – whichever genuinely serves the reader, rather than a default.
Remediate with judgement
Structure, reading order, headings, links and meaningful alternatives for visual content – done by hand and by decision, never by automated overlay.
Verify and hand over
Automated checks backed by manual and assistive-technology testing, with a clear record of what was done and what to watch for in future updates.
Have a publication that needs to reach everyone?
Start with a scoped review of a representative sample – it reveals the likely complexity of a larger project before you commit to it.
Start a conversation