The scope of quality assurance (QA) in publishing services basically deals with the width and depth of a specific subject knowledge, and the analysis and application of said subject. The main objective of an accuracy audit (AR) and QA is to ensure pedagogy alignment to predetermined formats/styles or exactness, the correct placement of functional elements, provide appropriate alt text, if necessary, and any other tasks required by the client. Basically, the client wants to ensure the ease of content access for the target audience before the content is ready for publication.
At Lapiz Digital, we do the QA of online materials (such as e-books) against the source materials using different authoring tools, including Cypress, Revel, Evergreen, and Testcafe. There are different procedures ranging from complete audits to random checks.
The complete audit scope includes checking for complete content display, source match, and content consistency. A detailed proofing of the content is performed, such as checking for spacing issues, junk characters, missing images/tables/figures, alt text, and image quality along with formatting styles, design layout (if required by the client), and audio/video links. Functional elements such as interactivities, key terms, glossary, footnotes, and table of contents are also checked. Discovered bugs are recorded and reported in Jira, or in any other specific format, as required by the client.
The same content is also checked against the relevant proofs to ensure that the reported bugs are fixed correctly and appropriately and that no other surrounding content has been altered by any means.
Archive records audit is similar in scope to audits performed for print and online deliverables. The goal is to compare, and ascertain, the quality of different format outputs such as interactive PDFs, scrub PDFs, InDesign files, table images, box images, documents, glossary, and flashcard spreadsheets, XML files, index spreadsheets, and EPUB files against the source material (i.e., print PDFs). The scope covers checking of content accuracy, formatting issues, junk characters, style of images, and boxes.
Another scope of audit is for the subject matter experts (SMEs) to analyze the solved problems (i.e., end-of-chapter exercises or additional problems in the coursebook) provided for testing along with the source material for relevance, match, and appropriateness. The questions may be single-step, multiple steps, or with guided steps approach to the problems. The complexity varies and these need to be cross-checked for simple formatting errors such as commas and periods, correctness of template layout, instructions for arriving at the
appropriate answers, tolerance acceptance (set up for numerical answers) as well as ensuring the correctness of the answers and the number of attempts for each step and the appropriate feedback for correct and incorrect answer choices. This type of audit also involves ensuring adherence of the problem set up to the course materials provided, correctness of the question, answer-solving method matching exactly to the concepts explained in the lessons, and also aligning with the standard guidelines set by the client.
For the publishing client, the ultimate goal is to deliver impeccable content to its target audience. For Lapiz Digital, our goal is to help the publishing client to attain that goal. Quality of deliverables and customer satisfaction are of utmost importance to us. We provide complete and comprehensive content audit, fact checking, alt-text writing, content transformation, and accuracy review services for educational publishers. SMEs in different disciplines, including mathematics, economics, chemistry, and computer science at Lapiz Digital help publishers to deliver high quality and engaging educational products to the market.
Meena Prakash, head of operations at Lapiz Digital
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