Tag Archive for: A11y

Ebooks for Designers – Webinar

August 15th, 2018
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Kevin Callahan of BNGO Books (www.BNGObooks.com) is an ebook developer, writer and speaker based in New York City. He will be delivering this one hour webinar for The Graphic Arts Guild. Members and non-members are welcome to register

Almost every print book is adapted as an ebook. Some publishers have robust workflows to convert their InDesign or Quark layouts to EPUB3 files, but many don’t. They rely on vendors and freelancers to create their ebooks. This session introduces ebook basics: what they are, how to create them, and how to adapt print designs to digital use. Get some tips on using your skills to create beautiful, user-friendly, and accessible ebooks that honor the print design and serve digital purposes.

Date

August 15, 2018

Venue

Online Webinar

Learn More

To register and learn more about this session visit the event page on the Graphic Arts Guild website

Inspiring Words from Industry Leaders: Interview with George Kerscher, The DAISY Consortium

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Photograph of George KerscherInclusive Publishing has embarked on a series of interviews with industry leaders and their approach to accessibility. George Kerscher began his IT innovations in 1987 and coined the term “print disabled”.  He is dedicated to developing technologies that make information not only accessible, but also fully functional in the hands of persons who are blind or who have a print disability. He believes properly designed digitally published materials and web pages can make information accessible to all people.  George is an advocate for semantically rich content which can be used effectively by everybody.

As Chief Innovations Officer of the DAISY Consortium, Senior Advisor, Global Literacy to Benetech, and member of Publishing Groups in the W3C, Kerscher is a recognized international leader in document access.  In addition, he chairs the DAISY/NISO Standards committee and the Steering Council of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), and also serves on the Advisory Board of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

I ask all of my staff to use a screen reader, put a towel over their screen and send me an email! This involves them getting to their desktop, launching an app or email program, writing that email and then sending it. Suddenly it all clicks!

Accessibility in publishing has improved significantly in the last 30 years, can you give us a practical example of what it was like before?

When I first got involved in accessible publishing there was no accessibility within mainstream published printed content.  Not until initiatives that utilize chop & scan, source file conversions and recordings for libraries for the blind did progress begin concerning the accessibility of a wider range of printed content. Before this time, it was only libraries serving the blind that selected key publications to be made available. People just wanted more and a wider range of materials to be available. However, it was still sitting in the hands of specialist organizations that were completely separate from those who published the information; that had to change; it had to integrate with the mainstream flow of published materials.

Significant change for digital publishing materials really began in 2000 although this was hampered by DRM preventing technology working with assistive materials. Jim Fruchterman and I wrote the article The Soundproof Book in 2002 which really helped raise awareness of these issues. The DRM problem was eventually solved as it became accepted that content on screen could be exposed to assistive technology and the accessibility of the content could be evaluated.

With the introduction of the iPad and Steve Jobs’ commitment to EPUB we witnessed a turning point for accessibility in digital content. Features such as VoiceOver meant that much more material could be accessed on iBooks.

With the arrival of EPUB 3 in 2011, DAISY endorsed it as their file format of choice. They halted development of the DAISY standard and began the transition to EPUB. Together with reading system evaluations, which still take place today, EPUB provides the best option for accessibility in the mainstream.

What has been the most impactful change in accessibility to help bring us here?

The turning point for me was when publishing and technology accepted that assistive technology cannot be blocked. This was the game changer. You cannot stop people from accessing content.

Are there any questions you regularly encounter which you wish people knew by now?

People often say that they don’t see where EPUB is used as they don’t realise that ibooks, Google, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple etc. are all using EPUB as their primary format. It’s behind the scenes. This can be frustrating and publishers still provide pdfs and readers accept pdfs without realising that the user experience from re-flowable EPUB is far superior. We need to make that transition – we need to make sure readers are requesting born accessible EPUBs and that publishers are offering them. I think we are in an in-between phase at the moment – after all, pdf has been around for 25 years. But EPUB is based on modern web technology and this is where all of the accessibility advances are being made.

What would be the single most important piece of advice you could give to a publishing colleague who is new to accessibility?

Use Ace by DAISY! That’s clearly the first thing they need to do! They should also try to understand how assistive technology is used. I ask all of my staff to use a screen reader, put a towel over their screen and send me an email! This involves them getting to their desktop, launching an app or email program, writing that email and then sending it. Suddenly it all clicks! Navigating through their computer and apps has to be fast and efficient and in their visual world it is easy to take in an entire panorama. In an audio space everything is sequential and your screen reader presents one piece of information at a time until you yourself have built a mental model.  The same thing applies to the reading experience and when everything is laid out correctly then content becomes a joy to read.

What do you think will be the biggest game changer for inclusive publishing in the next couple of years?

I think that the further adoption of EPUB by even the small publishers and the inclusion of accessibility metadata within purchasing systems will be the next game changer. A good accessibility rating and conformance to accessibility standards is going to become a pre-requisite in the education space and useful purchasing choices will be made on accessibility criteria.

What do you think is the biggest challenge for publishers, and how might they overcome it?

I think that publishers are finding the production of accessible mainstream content for text only content fairly straightforward. The challenge will come in adding more interactivity in education materials. Trying to present the essence of a visualisation is going to be difficult and experts will have to write meaningful summaries for everyone working with that visualisation but especially if the student is disabled. The supplemental information provided with visualisations is crucial to a contextual understanding of the interactive material.

Do you have any final thoughts on accessibility or inclusive publishing practices you would like to share?

I have a concern about university presses who are still very ingrained within the print paradigm. I’d like to see a move towards EPUB and online publishing but the “publish or perish” ethos is still adhered to within this space. Journal publishers may be able to lead the way on this as the data that is included in their articles appears online but convincing academics that a move towards digital publishing is essential is going to be difficult.

I really feel that we’ve passed the “tipping point” and that the publishing industry understands the necessity of accessibility. They understand that they have a commitment to making information available to the public. The route of both words, publishing and public is the same after all!

Our thanks to George for his time.

BISG Metadata Summit

July 25th, 2018
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Following up on the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) May 2018 metadata summit for data providers, this meeting will focus on the requirements and priorities for metadata recipients. Attendees include representative of distributors, retailers, data aggregators, and systems providers who are active in the transmission of book industry metadata which is essential for the discovery of accessibility features within ebooks. This is the second of three metadata summits scheduled in 2018.

Date

July 25, 2018

Venue

Nashville, TN, USA

Learn More

For full details on how you can take part in this summit which is open to members and non members of BISG visit their website

Equity and Excellence: Access in Higher Education Conference

July 16th to 20th, 2018
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The Association on Higher Education and Disability’s (AHEAD) 41st annual international conference is its hallmark event, drawing approximately 1,500 participants from around the world for a week of extraordinary professional development and networking. Presenters and participants come from diverse fields, including education, technology, law, scholarship, and government, but share a common interest in fostering equitable higher education experiences for disabled individuals.

Date

July 16-20, 2018

Venue

Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA

Learn More

Registration, program information and details of how you can join this conference virtually as well as in person are available from the AHEAD website.

 

SXSW EDU, 2019

March 4th to 7th, 2019
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The SXSW EDU Conference & Festival hosts a community of optimistic, forward-thinking, purpose-driven stakeholders with a shared goal of impacting the future of teaching and learning for four days of compelling sessions, in-depth workshops, engaging learning experiences, mentorship, film screenings, startup events, policy discussions, competitions, exhibition, networking, and so much more. This year’s conference includes a new track on Accessibility and Inclusion with a variety of session formats and crossover techniques between learning levels.

Of particular note is the session entitled: Moving the Needle on K-12 Accessibility which will focus on what  teachers, administrators, procurement staff, and direct service providers need to know to comply with the law and most importantly, meet student needs. This overview session provides up to date information and a toolkit to ensure content providers are more able to meet the needs of all students.

Date

March 4-7, 2019

Venue

Austin, Texas, USA

Learn More

For details on how to register and the conference in general visit the SXSW EDU website

Workshop Report: The Production of Natively Accessible Books

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logo for the french publishers associationThis post was kindly submitted by Luc Audrain, Head of Digitalization at Hachette Livre and co-chair of the W3C Publishing Business Group.

Inside the Syndicat National de l’Édition (SNE), the French publishers’ association, a technical group “Norms & Standards*” has been formed to work on standardization for the digital world, bringing together publishers, booksellers, the BnF and the Electre and Dilicom companies, to reflect on the implementation of standards which are shared by all.

The group organizes practical workshops aimed at informing SNE members about standardization and monitoring technical developments. In France, EPUB accessibility is taken very seriously by the publishing industry and for the second year running the annual workshop of the N&S group has focused on this subject.

Lead by Luc Audrain, the N&S group held it’s workshop on Thursday 5th of July to provide SNE members further in-depth knowledge of EPUB accessibility.

This year, the group showed that with existing production and validation tools, it is indeed possible to achieve a high level of mainstream accessibility in simple books like novels.

The audience had the opportunity to discover :

  • on which international standards EPUB accessibility is based and which major organizations are involved, like the DAISY Consortium
  • how to practically encode accessibility in EPUB content, following the EPUB Accessibility Techniques 1.0 document
  • How to use Ace by DAISY to avoid evident errors through a live demo
  • How Indesign EPUB3 export can be used and how much work afterwards is necessary to bring the file to pass Ace
  • what training and financial support might be available

Demo of Ace by DAISY showing a perfect score for a file exported from InDesign

This slide shows the perfect technical validity from Ace (Accessibility Checker for EPUB) for this EPUB3 file exported from InDesign. All the steps described in the presentation are also available on the SNE website (in French) at the Norms & Standards page together with group documentation from the day’s event.

 

As a reminder, the N&S workshop from last year was covered by DAISY in their newsletter:

http://www.daisy.org/planet-2017-06#a1

*Members come from publishing houses and also from the national library (BNF), the Ministry of Culture, booksellers, books in print database, and include a blind EDRLab employee Fernando Pinto da Silva.

Accessing Higher Ground

November 12th to 16th, 2018
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This 5 day conference, presented and hosted by AHEAD in collaboration with ATHEN, EASI and the University of Colorado-Boulder. focuses on the implementation and benefits of:

  • Accessible media, Universal Design and Assistive Technology in the university, business and public setting;
  • Legal and policy issues, including ADA and 508 compliance;
  • The creation of accessible media and information resources, including Web pages and library resources.
  • Universal Design and curriculum accessibility.
  • best practices for web design, reaching untapped audiences through accessible design, and compliance with existing and anticipated Section 508 and ADA stipulations.

Date

November 12-16, 2018

Venue

Westin Westminster, Colorado, U.S.A.

Learn More

For further information on this excellent program and how to register visit the Accessing Higher  Ground website

W3C Workshop on Digital Publication Layout and Presentation

September 18th to 19th, 2018
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The W3C have announced the latest in a series of workshops exploring the capabilities needed to ensure that the web delivers on its full potential as a universal platform for digital publishing.

This technical workshop will focus on evaluating the current status and exploring future directions of visually-rich long-form digital publications based on Web Technologies (particularly CSS, the formatting language of the Web), encompassing both fixed and dynamic layouts. Such “high-design” publications, with complex or sophisticated layout, may be sequential art (Comics, Manga, Bandes-Dessinées, etc.), magazines, picture books, cookbooks, educational materials, etc.

Date

September 18-19, 2018

Venue

Tokyo, Japan

Learn More

Further details and how you can participate in this event can be found at the event listing on the W3C website here

Thanks for the Feedback!

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Feedback written on a chalkboardHuge thanks to everyone that took part in our Inclusive Publishing Survey recently. We’ve been delighted with the response and we are very interested in everything you had to say.

A good cross-section of publishers, educators and developers took the time to answer our questions and it is rewarding to hear that you all find Inclusive Publishing such a relevant hub of information and that having one “convenient and authoritative source” for material on accessible publishing is proving to be of great use to our industry. We also received answers from all levels of experience with accessibility which was ideal and we are immensely grateful to everyone who took 10 minutes to submit their thoughts and ideas.

In particular, we are pleased that so many people who are new to accessible publishing made the effort to let us know what they would like to see on the site and how we can help them to further their knowledge. This is invaluable information for us and we are working to improve these areas of the site – our newly designed resource menus for each user group should make it a lot easier for nontechnical personnel to navigate accessibility requirements and our introductory pages for each relevant area should help to present topics to those new to accessibility. We want to make sure that you have all the information that you need at your fingertips!

Good to hear that our topical articles, news items and industry event calendars are proving to be such a success. As ever, we rely on our subscribers, members and interested readers to keep us informed of what’s going in their areas so keep sending us your updates and we will make sure that we promote them and inform the international community of your good work.

Workflow and best practice guidance was another area that was highlighted as being particularly important to our readers and we are embarking on a series of case studies to highlight industry best practice in this area. If you think you’d like to take part in this then we would be delighted to hear from you.

Most commented on the site’s success in promoting EPUB as an accessible mainstream format for the publishing industry and we will continue to do this via all of our content streams. To help we have included specific EPUB information relevant to each user group within the resource menus. Our close relationship with the W3C remains as important as ever and we encourage all of our readers to participate in their activities wherever possible.

We work continuously to improve the Inclusive Publishing site and newsletter to ensure they remain as relevant as possible to you. The survey is closed for now, but we always welcome your feedback – so do get in touch if you have suggestions for how we can improve anything at all.

Notes from Berlin: DPUB Summit Highlights

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Ken Jones, author of this article, displays his conference pass, program and conference information
 This is a guest post by Ken Jones – Ken specialises in writing workflow applications and offering training and consultancy for publishers on print and digital workflows. Ken’s company ‘Circular Software’ provides software tools and services for a range of illustrated book publishers. Contact Ken on twitter @CircularKen on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/kenjones  or through the website circularsoftware.com.

This article has been kindly edited by Laura Brady and has been cross-posted on epubsecrets.com

The Digital Publishing Summit was held in Berlin on Weds 16th and Thurs 17th May. It was a wide-ranging and stimulating event full of interesting news about the digital publishing landscape.

The area of central Berlin we were in had a pleasant bohemian vibe. After my vegan panini and smoothie, I strolled to the event hotel as hordes of cyclists whizzed by along the sunny streets. Oh, wait, this is not a holiday review, allow me to continue… #not-eprdctn

This previous name for this yearly gathering used to be the ‘EPUB summit’ but this year it has been renamed the Digital Publishing Summit or ‘DPUB summit’ as it relates to digital publishing beyond EPUB. Before the main conference started around 40 of us started off the Wednesday morning with an extra Readium workshop led by Laurent Le Meur, CTO, EDRLab (@lmrlaurent). Laurent started but outlining some of the challenges with Readium 1 — notably performance, accessibility gaps and lack of Windows and Linux SDKs. They decided to  to start R2 with fresh codebase and to create new mobile & desktop SDK named Readium-2 (aka R2).

The overall aim of the project is to deploy a set of open and interoperable digital publishing technologies in Europe, around an open, flexible & accessible standard applicable to all kinds of digital publications

Laurent Le Meur presenting at DPUB Summit

R2 is being optimised for performance, ease of maintenance, and is well documented with consistency between target environments (so different OS, mobile, desktop). It is a live ongoing project with releases approx. every two weeks. Everything they are doing is on Github. Readium 2 apps are emerging already and an Alpha desktop version in publicly available.

They have an ambitious roadmap for 2018. Expect progress to be made in roughly in the following order: import, library, reflowable EPUB, LCP (Readium Licensed Content Protection), user settings, RTL, fixed-layout, CBZ (comic books and manga), OPDS (Open Publication Distribution System), bookmarks, vertical text, themes, footnotes, accessibility navigation, search, support for WP, audiobooks, TTS, media overlays, more dyslexia support.

Laurent Le Meur presenting the EDRLab Roadmap for 2018

 

EDRLab are seeking a wider community for development, feedback, and financial support.

Phew! Got all that? I’ll explain in more detail about some of this below. The roadmap is available on Github. EDRLab are seeking a wider community for development, feedback and financial support. They need constructive testing (so don’t just moan about how it may look wonky or has missing features, they already know this!…) and, again, everything is open and logged on Github.

Hadrien Gardeur of Feedbooks then spoke about the Readium Web Publication Manifest. Think of it as an unpackaged and deconstructed ebook that exists in RAM. By abstracting the contents it means R2 reading apps can be much more responsive. By loading the publication into memory and preparing for transmission over the web. And it doesn’t have to be EPUB, any structured publication could be deconstructed. They already support CBZ (a format for comic books as images) and are in a good place to handle any new W3C formats that come in the future.

R2 ingests packaged EPUBs in this way ready to them streamed, parsed, and fetched as HTML resources. They refer to the flow of rendered content to the reader app as the ‘streamer’. Think of the R2 reading system in 2 parts: frontend and backend. The frontend reader is fed by the backend, which could be either within an offline app or streamed from a server. By pre-fetching and pre-rendering content in backend memory everything is presented super fast.

Readium CSS is the open resource that Readium apps are using to present content and to handle user settings. Glue JS is a new project being built for R2 which makes sense of pagination, scrolling, touch and key events and CSS, locations, and custom properties.

Aferdita Muriqi of EDRLab (@AferditaMuriqi) talked about where they are with Readium mobile apps and their future plans.

Aferdita Muriqi of EDRLab (@AferditaMuriqi) talked about where they are with Readium mobile apps and their future plans. The R2 iOS app is out now and it is still being developed with later builds regularly and betas here. The R2 Android app is also available now (in beta) from Googleand Github. R2 iOS and Android are being developed in tandem and share the same functionality and core code. But the different OS mean they have to handle things differently.

It’s important to understand that the EDRLab stance on mobile apps is that they will only ever be ‘test apps.’ They have no plans to produce a fully featured mobile reader instead will provide an open source example to others of what is possible and exactly how to do it.

The ultimate goal is a robust attractive reading system and to become an open replacement.

Daniel Weck of EDRLab (@DanielWeck) talked about Readium desktop apps and their future plans. Unlike the mobile apps the plan for desktop IS NOT to be just a test app. The ultimate goal is a robust attractive reading system and to become an open replacement. R2 desktop apps are already very impressive but are still in early stages. Latest builds available here.

Video demo of Readium desktop app

R2 apps (desktop and mobile) already come with support for OPDS (Open Publication Distribution System) basically a way for a metadata feed from a vast library of books to stream and also can point to book content. Sideloading is also possible. R2 Desktop has a load button for local files and mobile apps can load from weblinks or Dropbox etc. via the OS. If you interested in the future of EPUB readers, or the current lack of them, consider join me and others in testing and giving feedback to shape these valuable and open source mobile and desktop apps.

If you interested in the future of EPUB readers, or the current lack of them, consider join me and others in testing and giving feedback to shape these valuable and open source mobile and desktop apps

We then moved on to an interesting chat about EPUB Canonical Fragment Identifiers. In short, EPUB CFI is an accurate way to point to any content within EPUBs. Lars Wallin of @ColibrioReader demonstrated how to use EPUB CFI to achieve interoperable, sharable, annotations, bookmarks etc. EPUB CFI also support identification of interactive elements, images and even parts of images within EPUB. Yuri Khramov of @EvidentPoint then spoke how they are contributing to ‘Readium NG’ to support existing R1 users in their migration to R2 with as little pain as possible

Later, in the main DPUB conference, we heard more on how Readium Licensed Content Protection aka Readium LCP can store a user’s passphrase inside an EPUB reader to effortlessly unlock content. Hermann Eckel of German ebook company Tolino explained how Readium LCP is already installed in their hardware and how it is now their preferred copy protected solution.

Later we saw a live demo of a reader entering accessing an ebook using the standard library log-in.
 Slide displaying details of the readium 2 LCP project

Eden Livres talked about how they invested last year to integrate LCP server side and now have over 80,000 titles now live with Readium LCP.

De Marque talked about how National Libraries Quebec achieve 6M+ ebook loans – quite a lot for a small city. Previous DRM systems had cost them over $800K CAD over the years and with countless hours of support and left them feeling powerless and not in control. LCP was a community project to take that control back. They are currently focus testing LCP with user in Quebec City, to be released this summer for all public libraries in Quebec province and other partners.

“DRM should be boring. It should be invisible and nothing to the user.”

A refreshingly neat quote that summed it up was “DRM should be boring. It should be invisible and nothing to the user.” #eprdctn

Garth Conboy of Google spoke about EPUB3.2 and future plans for EPUB at W3C and invited participation in the community group.

Slide displaying details of how the edge browser supports EPUB

Ben Walters of Microsoft (@_BenWalters_) gave a great presentation on how their Edge browser natively supports EPUB. Double click any DRM free reflowable or Fixed Layout EPUB on Windows 10 and it auto opens in this well featured reader. He said that reading books on a desktop or laptop may not be common but actually for reference or education the ability to have multiple pages of the same book, of different books, or other web content side by side can be very useful. One challenge for browser based reading is that people don’t expect a browser to work offline, even though they can for cached and local content. The challenge here is in education.

Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android edge on phone coming ‘very soon’. First releases were last year but last month’s update brings improvements including notes, better navigation, page sharing and media overlays! This is great stuff from Microsoft!… You hear that @Adobe…

Ben confirmed to me afterwards that, at launch, sideloading will not be possible for Edge on Android and iOS. It will only feature content from the Microsoft store.

Ben also won the prize for the most amusing slide when introducing his agenda.

Amusing agenda slide from Ben Dugas

Stephan Knecht from Bones AG demoed how their audio reader accepts EPUB by parsing a book into txt files. Able to handle cues like SSML, to indicate preferred speech speed, male, female voices for example. More here.

Stephan made an interesting point that his customers (often visually impaired, elderly, veterans) like the static simplicity of dedicated hardware. Rather than making a phone app, his credit card sized audio player has a run time 40 hrs with standby of months.

Word files are a ‘post paper digital artifact’

I really enjoyed the talk from Adam Hyde of Coko Foundation. He explained in a friendly rant how 90% of scholarly content is supplied as Word files and not truly digital. His phrase was Word files are a ‘post paper digital artifact.’ But not just there to complain, Adam had three solutions that all looked worth finding out more about:

  1. Getting content from word into HTML – XSweet.coko.foundation was released two weeks ago.
  2. How to edit content in HTML including citations, notes, tracked changes etc. (that is, the pro tools that are missing from Google Docs) — An open source HTML word processor.
  3. How to get digital content it out into legacy formats like PDF —Automation and using the browser as a typesetting engine: pagedmedia.org

Other highlights included @gleephapp a phone app that features a real-time barcode scanner of ISBNs and even book spines to make the link from physical to digital and then allows recommendations. This app has just launched in France with 33,500 users and 20,0000 titles.

Volker Oppmann of mojoreads (@onkelvolker) showed their neat book sharing platform which actually pays its users 10% commission for any sale that comes from their recommendation. #eprdctn

We also heard that Readium has further goals including an update to the Readium CloudReader with support for audiobooks.

I’m very glad I made the trip and I hope to attend again next year but I must conclude by saying this: it amazes me that Adobe is not attending, supporting, contributing development effort and funding to EDRLab. Privately they would have so much to gain themselves from this modern open source reading system And publicly, surely Adobe putting a couple of full time developers in EDRLab Paris for a year or two would both demonstrate and garner respect and support of their paying customers and the wider publishing community.

I’ll be talking more about Readium and demoing R2 during my PePcon session in a couple of weeks time if you’re attending CreativeProWeek and into EPUB and ebook development.

Also feel free to contact me directly if you’d like more info and I’ll help where I can.

Postscript. Typescript (@typescriptlang) seems to be a the current programming language of choice. Microsoft, EDRLab, and many of the smaller developers presenting at DPUB were all using it and speaking highly of it. http://www.typescriptlang.org