Online lectures
Due to the ongoing corona pandemic, the planned networking event by Every Story Matters at the Bologna Book Fair 2021 couldn't take place in live form.
Instead, we brought you two fascinating online lectures with experts who will tell you more about different aspects of diversity and inclusion, how to understand these concepts and how modern technology can help us put them into practice.
Ebooks, audiobooks, and accessibility
A lecture by Marko Hercog (Slovenia)
Ebooks and Audiobooks are capable of presenting content when readers become print-impaired so books in digital format have the capability to cover quite a lot of accessibility issues. Not everybody, who struggles to read, will be able to use a tablet or smartphone. There are still contents that cannot be read by everyone using current techniques, but accessibility features of smartphones, tablets, and e-readers, together with the explosion in the availability of digital books and articles, is bringing about a new era for reading for people with print disabilities.
In this lecture, you’ll find out more about the accessibility opportunities and novelties for book publishers and readers.
Marko Hercog is CTO of the Beletrina, involved in the areas of digital publishing, printing, design, mobile devices etc with more than 20 years of experience. He is a digital architect of the Beletrina e-book platform for lending and selling, He is expert on a field of reading apps and ePub creation. He regularly attends IT conferences around the world (Digital Book World, Adobe Max, PepCon, Contec, Digital Publishing Summit, …) and is member of e-book working group at NAPLE FORUM. He is involved in the dissemination of knowledge on e-book reading, producing and publishing in the local cultural environment.
Diversity and inclusion: questions to ask ourselves
A keynote by Maria Vlachou (Acesso Cultura, Portugal)
At the ISPA conference in January 2020, Madani Younis said that “Generosity is not justice. And inclusion is not equity.” With this, we realised that, despite the words diversity and inclusion appearing quite frequently in the discourse of cultural organisations and their professionals, we are not fully aware of what they mean, what they represent and the impact they have (or should have) on our work and on our relationship with society.
In this lecture, we will try to explore and better understand the concepts of diversity and inclusion. We will consider the results of inclusion policies implemented in cultural organisations in different countries. We will learn more about the work and internal processes of organisations that could serve as an example, as well as the criticism made by members of the teams of organisations that considered themselves to be inclusive.
Maria Vlachou is a Cultural Management and Communications consultant. She is a founding member and Executive Director of Acesso Cultura, working for the improvement of access – physical, social, intellectual – to cultural participation. Author of the bilingual (pt/en) blog Musing on Culture, where she writes about culture, the arts, museums, cultural management and communication, access. She is the manager of the Facebook group Museum texts / Textos em museus and co-manager of the blog Museums and Migration.