Accessible Digital Publishing in Dublin

EDRLab hosted their annual conference at Trinity College on June 16 and 17 this year and digital publishing and accessibility expert, Laura Brady, has kindly written an overview of the exciting event.

DPUB was held in Dublin this year and what a good craic it was! In a lecture hall in the arts building on campus a robust crowd of Europeans, with a notable Canadian contingent, heard about the development of Readium and Thorium, about uses of AI in publishing, and some very interesting talks that centered on accessibility. The agenda was packed, but I will highlight a few of the talks that impact accessibility work. 

AI and Image Descriptions for Thorium

Daniel Weck spoke about current work-in-progress to bring dynamic image descriptions to Thorium, which may be useful for publications that have no image descriptions at all. It depends on a “bring your own key” security structure running on Gemini, Open AI or Mistral AI Pixtral credits. Using one of these connected services, users can prompt generative AI to create a short or extended description with pre-defined prompts. 

Daniel showed us a few examples, the most successful of which could identify the illustrator, historical context, and nuance of an image even managing to take into account the context provided in the text around the image. And he added an important note that free versions of AI will add your text and prompts to their LLM while paid versions are closed. As with most things, the onus is on the user to read the terms and conditions. 

Backlist Remediation at FeniXX

Émile Delaporte is working on a massive backlist remediation project for FeniXX under the French Ministry of Culture. Her group has digitized 100k books in a national French initiative. Since 2019, this work has shifted focus to produce fully accessible ebooks which presents significant challenges when working from scanned pages and with a diverse catalogue.

The FeniXX team feels strongly that while they could use the disproportionate burden exemption in the European Accessibility Act, they have a moral obligation to digitize these titles as accessibly as possible. They have automated many of the tasks and analysis in the project using the SOLIMAN (Solution d’Optimisation des Livres Indisponibles et de leurs Métadonnées pour l’Accessibilité Numérique) project and Readium CLI tools. The analysis shows that many of the books had the same stylesheets, decorative images were correctly tagged but also that 49% were missing accessibility metadata, 29% had erroneous language information, and 10% had problems with the tables. 

Émile had a notable quote:

Ebook accessibility is like a retaining wall

holding up so much of the digital publishing industry. The accessibility of the backlist will continue to dog publishers for some years. In France, publishers have until 2030 to get organized but the situation remains very different and more uncertain for publishers in other territories. 

User Requirements at CELA

Lindsay Tyler from the Centre for Equitable Library Access (CELA) spoke about the needs of readers with print disabilities needs and preferences from commercial audiobooks. It was a great relief to hear a talk where user needs were centred, something notably missing from much of the event. 

CELA surveyed a group of users—some with disabilities, some not, and a diverse group that included French-speaking readers—to ask about the accessibility gaps and their needs in the commercial audiobook space. The major findings were that there were navigation problems, missing content like footnotes and image descriptions, hard to find accessible versions, and platform barriers for users with disabilities. All users wanted image descriptions and accessible supplementary materials in addition to expressing an interest in hybrid ebooks with media overlays so that a reader could switch easily between listening and reading. Read more about this research on CELA’s blog.

Support for Ongoing Work

Laurent LeMeur wrapped up the two-day conference with a plea for collaboration and commitment from EDRLab partners for the health of the work that folks who plug away at open-standards work do. Building on an XKCD comic about the heavy lifting that a “project that some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003” does in modern digital infrastructure, Laurent suggests that open-source work is a building block underneath the layer that our infrastructure depends on. It is worth bearing in mind that progress in accessible publishing is very much contingent on collaboration and cooperation in this space. 

Our thanks to Laura for sending us this report so quickly so that we could update our readers on all the DPUB news!