Tag Archive for: accessibility

4 Strong Finalists Revealed for DAISY Award at DBW

Published at August 19, 2019/in News /by Sarah Hilderley

The shortlisted finalists for the DAISY Award for Accessibility at Digital Book World 2019 have been announced. The winner from this impressive list of contenders will be announced at the DBW Awards Dinner on Tuesday September 10th. The 4 finalists in this category are:

Macmillan US
VitalSource
Hachette Livre
Kogan Page

Congratulations to all finalists and our thanks to everyone who submitted nominations for this award. We are excited to hear who our winner is!!

Inclusive Publishing readers can still register for DBW with a 20% discount using the code DAISY. Make sure you don’t miss out on the stellar program which includes Dave Gunn’s (DAISY) presentation “Challenges and Success Stories in Accessible Publishing”.

Inspiring Words from Industry Leaders: Interview with Julie Ganner, Institute of Professional Editors, Australia

Published at August 12, 2019/in Articles /by Sarah Hilderley

Inclusive Publishing is continuing with its popular series of interviews with industry leaders and their approach to accessibility. Julie Ganner AE represents the Institute of Professional Editors (IPEd) at the Australian Inclusive Publishing Initiative (AIPI), a cross-sector forum launched in 2016 to foster a collaborative, consultative and consensus-based approach to tackling accessibility problems in Australia. Its members include representatives of the publishing industry, authors, agents, editors, designers, indexers, libraries, copyright organisations, disability associations, government and accessible-format providers. The aim of the AIPI is to increase access to published material for people living with print disabilities in Australia.

Designing a book to be inclusive from inception is much more efficient and cost effective than trying to retrofit accessibility features into it later, once you have already published it in other formats.

Julie is the co-author of Inclusive Publishing in Australia: An Introductory Guide, which is available for free download from the AIPI website in EPUB, PDF, Word, braille and DAISY formats.

Why is inclusive publishing important to you and/or your organization?

The AIPI recognises that for publishing to become inclusive, we need to start with a consultation process that is fully inclusive too. Everyone involved in creating, publishing, supplying and using accessible books needs to be consulted about what they need, and how they can contribute, if we are to tackle this issue efficiently as an industry. It’s a big jigsaw puzzle and each AIPI participant holds a piece that completes the full picture.

IPEd’s participation in the AIPI is a good illustration of the benefits of this collaborative approach. The fundamental task of an editor is to ensure the author’s message is communicated to the reader clearly and in full. Editors therefore already have the tools to remove some of the barriers to information access that readers with a print disability can experience, such as missing or inappropriate text alternatives for graphic material. But we can do this only if we’re aware of what those barriers are in the first place. Taking part in the AIPI has offered IPEd a great opportunity to hear about and observe the specific problems readers with a disability can encounter when accessing published materials, so we can see how editing practice needs to evolve. And the consultative process works the other way too: it enables IPEd to explain what editors and proofreaders need from publishers and authors if we are to contribute effectively, such as the inclusion of accessibility requirements in editorial briefs and house style sheets.

This inclusive approach was also invaluable when we were creating the content for Inclusive Publishing in Australia. While my professional experience is in traditional book publishing, my co-author Greg Alchin is an inclusive design consultant and disability advocate, so we each came to the project with very different perspectives on what we needed to convey. Into the mix we then added contributions and expert advice from representatives of disability agencies, publishers, editors, designers, indexers and government. This was vital to ensure not only that the information we provided was accurate and workable, but also that it addressed the needs and experiences of everyone involved.

Do you have a top tip for others new to accessibility?

When starting a new publication, plan ahead and consider the needs of everyone who will participate in the publishing workflow. When writing our guide, we focused on workflow planning because we recognised how crucial it is for all contributors to know what is expected of them. This includes not only authors and in-house staff but also the contractors employed on a project-by-project basis, such as copy editors, proofreaders, designers, indexers and typesetters.

What do you wish you knew about accessibility 5 or 10 years ago?

As an editor, I wish I had been more aware of the issues that people with a print disability face when their needs are not addressed during the writing and editing process. It was only brought home to me after I visited the Royal Institute of Deaf and Blind Children’s Alternative Format Publications unit and saw firsthand how much work the staff and volunteers do each year to transcribe textbooks into accessible formats, such as braille. Watching a teacher using a screen reader for a digital maths textbook was also instructive, as it demonstrated the need for care not just with the obvious tasks like providing useful alt text but also smaller style decisions, such as how numbers in thousands are set. (In Australia, the convention is to use a thin space to separate tens of thousands rather than a comma. However, a screen reader delivers this as ‘ten zero zero zero’, so it is clearly time we reviewed this practice!)

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

More and more publishers recognising that there is a solid business case for investing in inclusive design.

For those still on the fence, why should they consider accessibility?

Creating books that are accessible to every reader benefits us all: not just the consumer and the community but also the publishing industry itself. We want our content to be read by as many people as possible, and for it to be useful to everyone who does so. Inclusive publishing therefore makes good business sense, as increasing the number of readers who can access your books also means the potential to increase sales. Offering your content only in traditional formats, on the other hand, means you could be missing out on a great opportunity for sales in a market segment that is not well serviced at present.

Why should companies consider publishing a policy on Inclusive Publishing?

Having a policy on inclusive publishing encourages thinking that embeds accessibility into the workflow right from the start. Designing a book to be inclusive from inception is much more efficient and cost effective than trying to retrofit accessibility features into it later, once you have already published it in other formats.

Can you sum up your attitude towards inclusive publishing in one sentence?

Inclusive publishing is simply good publishing.

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

The Chinese have a wonderful aphorism for just about everything. One of my favourites is: ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, you must take everyone with you.’

Cressida Cowell, Children’s Laureate, Creates Charter for Reading

Published at July 17, 2019/in News /by Sarah Hilderley

Cressida Cowell, author of the How to Train your Dragon series, has been elected as Children’s Laureate in the U.K. Speaking to an audience at the Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London, Cressida said that she had “two super-simple key messages” as laureate:

Books and reading are magic.

This magic must be made urgently available to absolutely everyone.

Our congratulations to this outstanding author on her appointment and for immediately focusing on the reading needs of everyone. To accompany this exciting news she has published a reading charter, again emphasizing inclusivity and accessibility.

Cressida Cowells Laureate Charter

Inclusive Publishing Hearts and Minds at the Digital Publishing Summit

Published at July 15, 2019/in Articles /by Sarah Hilderley

The 2019 edition of the Digital Publishing Summit took place in Paris (France) on June 25-26. This increasingly popular two-day conference—now in its fourth iteration—is organised by the not-for-profit organization EDRLab (European Digital Reading Lab). The conference began in 2016 in the town of Bordeaux (France), then moved to Brussels (Belgium), followed by Berlin (Germany).

This year’s opus was hosted by the National Library of France, in the capital city where EDRLab’s headquarters are located and has, yet again, been a showcase of some of the most exciting developments in the industry. The two conference days were packed with in-depth presentations as well as entertaining insights on the many facets of the publishing ecosystem. Business managers and technical experts shared their experiences, and reflected on the challenges and opportunities that have marked the year.

The extensive program covered a broad spectrum of topics, including:

The essential role of technical open standards—the EPUB specifications, the W3C web platform, and the global collaboration to normalize digital sequential art / visual narratives (comic books, manga)
The strategic significance of open source software—EPUBCheck and the Ace by DAISY Accessibility Checker
Innovative research and development projects coming to fruition and the growing adoption of Readium architecture in commercial-grade solutions
User-friendly Digital Rights Management gaining traction in the library context—Readium LCP (Licensed Content Protection)
The emergence of bleeding-edge software solutions and services, automated production processes powered by machine learning principles
Changing consumer habits and evolving business models including the remarkable expansion of the audio-books market
Legal directives and legislative frameworks, ensuring inclusive access to all published content—the European Accessibility Act and the ongoing ratification and implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty

This short article only touches the surface of some of these topics, so make sure you explore the YouTube video recordings of the conference talks.

Image supplied by Luc Audrain, Hachette Livre

I personally made a presentation about Thorium, an open-source desktop application based on the Readium architecture. Thorium is a reading system developed by EDRLab, which aims to support EPUB (reflowable and fixed layout), the LCP DRM, OPDS catalogs, TTS read aloud, accessible annotations, and many other essential features. I talked about usability, as well as the technical challenges faced when implementing accessibility techniques (e.g. keyboard navigation, screen reader support, customizable text formatting, adaptable user interface, etc.). Aferdita Muriqi (EDRLab) showcased the Readium mobile apps, with the notable addition of support for audio books. Naturally, accessibility is also high on the priority list of the Android and iOS projects.

Over the past few years, the digital publishing industry has demonstrated a passionate drive to create systems with inclusive design in mind, impacting not only the reading experience end of the supply chain, but throughout the entire ecosystem—authoring tools, production practices, validation utilities, delivery and discovery systems, and of course technical standards and publication formats.

In the first slide of his presentation, Ken Jones (Circular Software) showed how the word accessibility contracts to the term a11y. Ironically, Ken immediately went on to make live demonstrations of interactive, animated, all singing-and-dancing fixed layout EPUB publications, which usually rate low on the a11y-o-meter! However, Ken made the case that documents authored with Adobe’s InDesign—a tool typically geared towards visual typesetting and graphic-oriented creations—can indeed feature a clean navigation structure and linear reading order. Ken showed keyboard usage and gave an example of accessible text in typographically-rich layouts. He also explained how to label interactive controls so they are announced by screen readers as well as demonstrating EPUB Media Overlays read aloud— the playback of audio narration synchronized with highlighted text.

There is indeed a strong case to be made for optimized publications – as defined in the EPUB Accessibility specification, for example those that meet the particular needs of readers with dyslexia, using adapted typography, text formatting, colours, and synchronized voice narration, etc.

However, fixed layout EPUBs have an intrinsic characteristic that makes them inherently less accessible than their reflowable counterparts: they are not authored with responsive design in mind. By definition, a fixed layout document is not meant to reflow depending on screen size and device orientation. At best, it can be scaled in or out, and panned across. Crucially, in the real world, many fixed layout publications are just mere exports from typesetting tools like InDesign, or straight conversions from PDF with little or no care for accessibility.

A case in point: Vincent Wartelle (ISICrunch) gave an entire presentation about using machine learning—more commonly referred-to as artificial intelligence—to reverse-engineer the navigation structure, linear reading order, and text flow from PDF files typically published in the education sector. In my opinion, although there are valid justifications for fixed layout EPUBs, I believe the first port of call for any modern digital creation should be a reflowable responsive design.

Thankfully, nowadays there are readily-available tools to help validate publications not only in terms of their correctness with respect to the EPUB specification (i.e. EPUBCheck), but also by asserting a number of well-defined accessibility criteria. As Romain Deltour (DAISY Consortium) demonstrated, the Ace by DAISY Accessibility checker verifies W3C WCAG rules as well as EPUB-specific ones. The report produced by Ace contains a list of categorized and prioritized issues, which content creators can use to identify problems and address them effectively (references to the DAISY Knowledge Base are provided).

I anticipate that in some not-too-distant future, there will be similar validation/checking tools to help with the production of audio books. In her presentation, Wendy Reid (Kobo) walked us through the W3C audio books standardization effort, which includes a strong recognition of the need for a structured table of contents (not just a playlist of MP3 files!), accessible descriptions, as well as the potential of more advanced features like escapability and skippability (which are well-known concepts in DAISY Digital Talking Books)

Many of the presentations at the Digital Publishing Summit did not have a direct accessibility angle, which made them no less interesting. Julie Blanc (Labo Paragraph) talked about “page.js”, an HTML toolkit for print layout based on CSS stylesheets. Florian Dupas (Kwalia) presented the latest research and development in the field of digital comic books – sequential art / visual narrative – a collaborative effort that involves participants from several countries (notably Japan, where manga is a popular art form, and a vibrant market).

Conversely, a whole portion of the conference was dedicated to discussing inclusive access, head-on. Notably, Cristina Mussinelli (LIA Foundation) provided an overview of the Marrakesh Treaty and the European Accessibility Act. Avneesh Singh (DAISY Consortium) talked about the global accessibility specifications that are used to implement the legislative requirements.

To conclude, here is a quote from one of Avneesh Singh’s slides:

We are in the beginning of a revolution, we have a lifetime opportunity to achieve the era of born-accessible publications.
Let’s come along for a common worldwide standard for accessible publications

We certainly are. We certainly should.

This article was kindly submitted by software engineer, Daniel Weck, who works with the DAISY Consortium and EDRLab to implement accessible open source production tools and reading systems. Daniel also contributes to the standardization of web technologies and open publication formats, with a particular focus on inclusive publishing.

The History and Future of Audiobooks

Published at July 5, 2019/in Articles /by Sarah Hilderley

This article was kindly submitted by Wendy Reid, Senior QA at Rakuten Kobo Inc and one of the co-chairs of the Publishing Working Group of the W3C. She is the editor of the audiobooks profile of Web Publications, the focus of this blog piece. Wendy recently presented on the new audiobook standard at the DPUB Summit in Paris.

When Thomas Edison recorded the first audiobook in 1877, he probably didn’t think of them as anything other than a way to sell more phonographs. In the 1930’s, when the Library of Congress and the AFB developed a program for talking books, audiobooks got their real start and reputation as a medium for reading accessibility. The talking books program was created to provide reading materials for wounded war veterans and people with visual disabilities, and the model would be recreated in other countries in the years that followed.

My first exposure to the world of audiobooks came in grade 10. My English teacher, a man well known for his coke-bottle glasses and sweater vests, popped a cassette tape into a player on his desk and played us a recording of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It was pretty good, certainly more interesting than reading the worn copy in my backpack or listening to my classmates stumble over Shakespeare’s peculiar use of English. However, it was a cassette in a time when I carried an iPod around in my school bag and feverishly downloaded MP3s from torrent sites. Audiobooks, though better than reading my school books, seemed antiquated. When I picked up an audiobook again at a summer data entry job, it was on a CD. I later discovered I could torrent them off music sites too, but my tiny 8gb iPhone 4s couldn’t handle more than one at a time, and I always seemed to lose track of my place.

Little did I know then that in a few years I would be working on audiobooks on the other side of the table. Instead of torrenting them I’d be working on an app to purchase, download, and listen to them all on my iPhone 6s. I would spend 6 months of my life listening almost exclusively to audiobooks, some I enjoyed, some I hated, many in languages I didn’t understand, all for the purpose of releasing a product. A product I inevitably use almost every week..

Last year the Publishing Working Group at W3C started work on audiobooks. It had become apparent to us that there was a strong business need for standardization in the industry, especially as it was seeing a newfound popularity.

It would shock many people to know that audiobooks are produced without any sort of unifying specification at all.

Today, if a publisher wants to produce a new audiobook, they are responsible for a few things: they have to produce the audio files, cover, a track list, and any supplemental content that they want to include with the book (this can be things like graphs or photos). Once they have done that, they often send their files to either distributors or direct to retail. Each of those entities may or may not have a preferred “standard” they expect, and this can be very different depending on the requirements.

This fragmentation means that end users, depending on the platform they use (and they are almost always siloed to one), can get many different experiences.

Those reading platforms also have to factor in for a lot of data challenges, things like incorrect chapter lengths, missing track data, a missing or incorrect table of contents.

The Publishing Working Group looked at all of these problems, as well as use cases that we thought were underserved by the current implementation of audiobooks—specifically accessibility. Our specification, now a public working draft, addresses our four main classes of use case:

Listening—a user should be able to listen to their content without input or interruption
Portability—a user should be able to download, steam, or offline their content
Navigation—a user should be able to know when and where they are in their audiobook
Accessibility—regardless of ability, a user should able to enjoy their content

Listening

Our specification makes the possibility of seamless listening possible via the reading order section of the manifest. This provides instruction to reading systems or the web that as long as no other input is present, this is the order the content should be presented it. It does not preclude fast forwarding or rewinding, but if a user chooses to not interact with the listening medium, they get their content in order.

Portability

The audiobooks specification is designed for the web first, meaning that streaming was a major use case, but we also recognized the need for an offline distribution model where content could be downloaded and transported in a single piece. For that we have developed a packaging specification that addresses this problem. It means that content creators can bundle their content together into a single file, and users can download that file and enjoy their content wherever they choose to open it.

Navigation

The audiobooks specification has a specific provision for the Table of Contents. We allow content creators to create an HTML document for the table of contents which means they can create a rich document with the necessary structure of the book, and audio platforms can use it for display and information. That data can be used to help the user understand where they are in their audiobook at any time.

Accessibility

Audiobooks are often considered accessible by default—talking books were designed for the blind after all. However, print disabilities is a bigger classification than this and we needed to address all of the possible users for the specification. For that reason, the Audiobooks specification will be using the Synchronized Media specification to provide a method for content creators to sync audio and textual content for optimal experience. The specification also allows content creators to reference accessibility metadata within the manifest (on top of any ONIX they may use) to allow users to understand exactly what content they are receiving and if it meets their needs.

The audiobooks specification is moving towards recommendation status with the W3C, at this point in our process we are looking for feedback and implementation, so please reach out to us on our GitHub at https://github.com/w3c/wpub or to the editor at wendy.reid@rakuten.com (you can also reach me on twitter @wendy_a_reid if you are really keen).

Accessible Ebook Publishing in Canada: The Business Case

Published at June 18, 2019/in Articles /by Sarah Hilderley

This article was kindly submitted by Laura Brady and Daniella Levy-Pinto who are presenting this Business Case for Accessibility at The Toronto Book Summit 2019 on June 18. Laura is Director of Cross-Media at House of Anansi Press and runs the highly respected and popular ebookcraft conference in Canada. Daniella is the Coordinator for Accessibility Testing with the National Network for Equitable Library Service (NNELS). As a totally blind reader, Daniella has considerable experience with accessible formats and accessible reading.

Publishing people don’t want to hear much about ebooks at the moment. Print is surging, ebooks are static—all the stats say so. Do we really have to talk about ebooks anymore? People love the smell of print, it’s been proven. There are even candles that smell like print books. Consumer nostalgia for print is real, so why do we need to keep discussing ebooks?

Despite my ride-or-die ebook reputation, I am a traditionally-trained typesetter and a hard-core print fetishist, believe it or not. There is nothing sexier than good typography, nice paper, or a well-designed cover that you can touch. My house is overrun with books, to be honest. (I am biding time until the kids move out and I can convert their rooms to libraries.) But I labour in cross-media and think a heck of a lot about inclusion, diversity, and the reading experience.

What’s not always obvious in the conversations about the smell of print is that there is a healthy slice of the reading population for whom paper books are duds. The smell has nothing on the fact that they can’t see the words or navigate the pages.

A doctrinaire approach to print books is, by its nature, exclusive and self-involved.

I know what you’re thinking. “You want me to put more time and energy into ebooks? How on earth can I justify that?” We want to arm you with the facts and figures that you need to go back to your publishing houses to make an argument for doing better when it comes to digital publishing. A little known fact is this: ebooks are not automatically accessible

Learning how to design and publish inclusive content as a standard part of your workflow makes great business sense. Being aware of how content and design may create barriers to reading also helps us generate new ideas and designs. It highlights opportunities to create solutions with utility and elegance that will create better books for everyone.

Making Better Ebooks

Electronic publications have great potential for users with print disabilities to gain access to information that might otherwise be inaccessible to them. Print disabilities, according to Canada’s Copyright Act, includes visual, mobility, or comprehension impairments. The word accessibility means the “ability” to “access.” In this instance, we are talking about access to information but, as with all situations, accessibility refers to how something is designed to be used, reviewed, read, or otherwise accessed by someone with a disability or impairment of some kind.

The advent of ebooks meant that for the first time in history, blind and other print-disabled users were able to gain access to the same books and publications at the same time as the rest of the population, at the same price. Readers with print disabilities access ebooks on computers or mobile devices using various assistive technologies, including screen readers, refreshable Braille displays, or screen magnification software. A screen reader refers to the software that runs in computers or mobile devices that reads the contents of a smartphone’s or tablet’s screen out loud, allowing users with visual disabilities to access information. They utilize a variety of gestures in mobile devices, or keyboard shortcuts on computers in order to execute functions.

Digital content is inherently more flexible than hard copy. It should be possible to use assistive technologies to read the text out loud with or without being able to see the screen. The user should be able to navigate easily and orientate themselves within the context of the content. It should be possible for users to change colours or magnify text and have it reflow to fit the page.

Of course, readers who cannot access print materials in a conventional way have different accessibility requirements: blind readers need to be able to navigate books like their fully sighted counterparts can, including moving between pages and chapter or section headings, and navigating to a particular section of interest from the table of contents; people with low vision or reading disabilities need to be able to adjust the presentation of content on a screen by, for example, enlarging the font size or changing font and background colours; and people with mobility impairments may need to be able to read and navigate digital books using voice commands or other assistive technology.

This, however, does not always happen. Depending on the aggregator, the publisher, and the format, readers with print disabilities can have very different experiences when trying to access a book. Many publishers and their suppliers are still clinging to EPUB 2, an inherently inferior product from an accessibility point of view. Accessibility also depends on the devices and software which the person with a print disability uses, and on the person’s knowledge and skill in using the devices and software. Needs also are changing with the development of new technologies and the familiarity of younger people (in particular) in working with them.

Opening up Markets

Let’s talk about consumer markets. There are two post-consumer organizations serving readers with print disabilities in Canada: the National Network for Equitable Library Service, and the Centre for Equitable Library Access, also known as NNELS and CELA. And they are busy. In 2018, NNELS acquired 23,911 books — and spent 7-20 hours remediating 300 of those with their limited in-house staff. In the fiscal year ending March 31, CELA’s users borrowed 1.18 million titles, 265k of which were digital versions (DAISY talking books, e-braille, etc.) These are staggering numbers for a market the size of Canada.

NNELS is both a digital public library of downloadable books and an advocate for an accessible and equitable reading ecosystem for Canadians with print disabilities. NNELS supports principles of openness, inclusion, and choice. NNELS develops and maintains a digital repository of accessible titles for Canadians with print disabilities, available through Canadian public libraries, works to advance the agenda of accessible publishing, and builds capacity by providing employment opportunities for people with print disabilities.

Anyone with a print disability can request any title through one of those organizations, thanks to the copyright exemptions that come from Bill C-11, also known as the Copyright Act. They will buy the ebook or print book and then do the incredibly laborious work of re-formatting it for its next reader —stripping junk HTML, OCR scanning, adding alt text, etc. That’s their mandate but they are actively trying to get out of that business so they can focus on being librarians. They aren’t going to just be librarians anytime soon, I’m afraid. There are a lot of slap dash ebooks in the marketplace that are going to keep the remediation work going for some time.

So what is this mythical print-disabled marketplace? Not so mythical at all. There are 37 million people in Canada; approximately 1.5 million of those meet strict criteria for being labelled as having a print disability. That number does not account for an ageing population. According to the National Coalition for Vision Health: Vision Loss in Canada, one in nine Canadians will have irreversible vision loss by 65. That figure ramps up to one in four by the age of 75. As twenty-five percent of the population will be aged 65 or over by 2030, that is a substantial chunk of readers.

So that covers vision issues, but the term print disability is broad. According to the International Dyslexia Association, between 15-20% of the population has some form of language-based learning disability. A chunk of the population has a physical issue that prevents them from holding and manipulating a book. And, I would add, this doesn’t account for situational disabilities. Listening to an audiobook while driving, or having voice aids read text aloud so the reader can be hands-free are good examples of that. A breastfeeding mother needs her hands for other things, for example. Someone who has a broken arm may have trouble navigating an ereader or website.

There is a healthy market in readers with print disabilities. And there are some preliminary statistics that point to that group of readers being more voracious than the average. The Italian accessibility organization, Fondazione LIA, points out that where texts are accessible to them, readers with print disabilities consume more than three times the number of books than the non-print-disabled population.

According to Booknet Canada’s 2018 How Do Readers Use Ebooks survey, approximately half of all digital readers use accessibility features of some kind. Font sizing, night mode, text orientation, reading mode, colour modifications, and screen magnification.

SenseAbility.ca states that the buying power of the Canadian disability community is $55.4 billion annually. The value of the global population of people with disabilities and their friends and family is 3.6 billion. This is a very large, untapped market. In the UK, this enormous spending power has a nickname: the purple pound.

And beyond the disability market, 87% of Canadian consumers say that they value inclusion, and 92% of consumers are more likely to support a business that is both physically and digitally accessible.

Go out there and court those readers! The consumer market is there and eager to be served.

Opening Up Government Funding Opportunities

You may have heard about the latest round of funding in the federal budget. In March of this year, the Liberal government announced 22.8 million over five years to support independent Canadian publishers to publish more accessibly. This funding is likely going to be geared towards setting publishers up to do better when it comes to ebooks. The Department of Canadian Heritage is going to administer the monies and will start “rewarding” publishers who meet standards fairly quickly, starting next year at the latest and possibly as soon as this Fall. It’s coming, people! They have two streams of funding through the Canada Book Fund: support for organizations, and support for publishers.

There are other ways to tap into government support of accessible publishing as well. Did you know that if you write “Literature for the Blind” in the upper right hand corner of a package, Canada Post will deliver it free of charge? (Please don’t abuse this knowledge.) Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) has a number of instruments by which they support accessible publishing in this country. This agency supports NNELS and CELA/CNIB in significant ways—project support, and ongoing funding. In January of this year, they supported the organization and staging of an Accessible Publishing Summit, which brought together various stakeholders in our industries—libraries, publishers, alternate format producers, and accessibility advocates. The work of that summit is still reverberating.

At least three provinces offer funding support in the form of tax credits to publishers. At present none of them explicitly reward born accessible content, but it’s not hard to imagine that something of this sort would be part of future programs. For example, Manitoba offers a bonus equal to 15% of printing costs back to the publisher if a book is printed on paper with a minimum of 30% recycled content. One could easily see tax credits extending to publishers who put more attention and detail into their digital publishing program. Get your house ready!

Legal Requirements

Investing in accessibility will help mitigate legal risks and ensure that you will avoid litigation—avoiding costs and the brand damage associated with legal proceedings.

The Government of Canada and several provinces are currently working towards making Canada a more inclusive, barrier-free country. This is a very brief summary of the most relevant laws:

AODA and Other Provincial Legislation

In 2005, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) was passed for the purpose of “developing implementing and enforcing accessibility standards in order to achieve accessibility for Ontarians with disabilities with respect to goods, services, facilities, accommodation, employment, buildings, structures and premises on or before January 1, 2025″ (AODA, 2005). The act creates the legal framework for developing and enforcing regulations regarding accessibility.

When it comes to ebooks, the AODA’s Information and Communication Standard is what lays out accessibility requirements. It mandates public sector organizations and large organizations to make their internet websites and web content conform with the World Wide Web Consortium Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) initially at Level A and increasing to Level AA. (O. Reg. 191/11, s. 14 (2).) As EPUB files are HTML-based, WCAG standards are therefore applicable.

Other provinces also have disability legislation as well and we recommend this website for an overview https://siteimprove.com/en-ca/blog/a-complete-overview-of-canada-s-accessibility-laws/

In brief:

Accessibility for Manitobans Act (AMA)—became law in 2013
Nova Scotia Accessibility Act—became law in 2017
British Columbia has proposed an Accessibility Act (Bill M 219), it had its first reading in the Legislature in May 2018

Bill C-81

An Act to ensure a barrier-free Canada. The Accessible Canada Act was introduced in the House of Commons in June 2018, and on May 29, 2019, it was passed unanimously in the House of Commons. The Bill now awaits Royal Assent. One of the purposes of the bill is to prevent accessibility barriers in information and communication technologies, including digital content and the technologies used to access it. Requirements of this bill, including web accessibility, will likely follow WCAG. Organizations under federal jurisdiction will be required to comply, or face a fine of up to $250,000.

It aims to set the base for the full and equal participation of all persons, especially persons with disabilities, in society. This is to be achieved by the identification, removal and prevention of barriers.

The Marrakesh Treaty

The Marrakesh Treaty is an international treaty administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) that was adopted in Marrakesh, Morocco, in June 2013; Canada joined in 2016. It aims to facilitate access to published works for persons with print disabilities by providing the material in formats that they can easily use. The Treaty establishes international norms that require countries to provide exceptions in their national laws to facilitate the availability of works in accessible formats for persons who are print-disabled.

In Canada, government policy on copyright exceptions for people with perceptual disabilities already aligns with the objective of the Treaty. Before Canada could accede to the Marrakesh Treaty, the government had to amend the Copyright Act to bring the exceptions in the Act for people with print disabilities in line with the obligations of the Treaty. Amendments made to the Act include the following:

Permit the making of large-print books
Reduce the restrictions on exporting accessible materials—authors will be allowed to send accessible-format copies of their work, regardless of their nationality, facilitating the cross-border exchange of works in accessible formats with supporting organizations in other countries.
Safeguards to protect the commercial market for materials in accessible formats. This ensures that publishers who choose to make their books available in accessible formats can sell them in the marketplace.

In the US, the number of legal actions continues to rise and courts increasingly decide in favour of equal access often citing the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Benefits Will Ripple Through the Supply Chain

A well-made ebook won’t be sent back from any vendor. An EPUB that meets certification standards will sail into the marketplace without a hiccup. It will function better across all reading systems and platforms because of clean HTML and semantic markup. It will just work. That ebook will bounce its way into OverDrive and Hoopla. The people at NNELS will do a happy dance whose tremors you will feel.

But over and above that, you will find that ebooks that meet standards and are maybe even certified, will get privileged positioning in the marketplace. In the higher education market in the US, ebooks that are certified will receive privileged positioning in the Vital Source catalogue. (VitalSource Bookshelf a part of the Ingram Group, and is an ebook platform that allows you to access course materials whenever and wherever you choose–laptop, desktop or mobile device. You can download texts directly or access them via your browser.) Consumers who need content for specific needs will be able to search for content that is resizable, or has image descriptions, for example. And instructors can search through the Vital Source catalogue for course material identified with the accessibility icon.

It feels like it’s just a matter of time before this becomes more common. We would love to see this ripple out in the library context, to make it easier for readers who need certain features to find the books they want to read. Given OverDrive’s dismal record on accessibility and their dominance in the library world, this feels unlikely in the short term. But the fine folks at NNELS and CELA would love to see trade publishing using accessibility metadata.

Further, the use of good accessibility metadata will mean that in some contexts, your content will be more discoverable. You can use a11y metadata to indicate if that your ebook is structured, is resizable, has alternative text on images, has ARIA semantics descriptors built as well as many other features that you may wish to highlight.

It’s worth referring back to Fondazione LIA again, the Italian accessible publishing organization. Starting in 2011 as a project carried out by the trade association of Italian publishers, their goal has been to increase access to content for people with visual impairments. It has been supported by the Italian government since the beginning. They have built a catalogue of 20 thousand accessible ebooks, with more than 400 titles added per month. They are an excellent example of publishers and accessibility advocates working together with government support to leverage technology to plug a hole in the marketplace and to have a dramatic effect on the supply chain in that country.

Accessibility is Good for Your Image

People will like you if you publish with accessibility in mind. They will, they really, really will like you! A clear commitment to accessibility can demonstrate that a business has a genuine sense of Corporate Social Responsibility. Making the commitment to sustainable, inclusive marketing and employment practices, can bring about a range of benefits, including enhanced brand image and reputation, increased sales and customer loyalty, improved workforce diversity, and a more inclusive society. Conversely, neglecting to incorporate accessibility can mean that your products will be left behind, for example by not being able to adapt old or outdated content to new standards as they emerge; that would be the result of the cost of inaction.

To further underscore the relevance of accessibility for the world’s economy and businesses, it is worth noting that a key message at the Davos World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in January 2019, was the need to build a more inclusive society, and include the estimated 1 billion people in the world living with a disability.

Branding

Businesses that integrate accessibility are more likely to be innovative, inclusive enterprises that reach more people with positive brand messaging that meets emerging global legal requirements.

Making sure that the ebooks you produce are easy to use by disabled people will mean that it is also easier for every customer to use those ebooks. Think of this as a Usability Bonus.

In physical environments, everyone takes advantage of lower curbs, automatic door openers, ramps, and other features provided for disability access. Accessible ebooks are by nature flexible, allowing content to faithfully render across a broad spectrum of devices, platforms, assistive technologies, and operating systems, and this provides more options for everyone.

Showing that a company cares about accessibility engenders customer loyalty and generates repeat business. Producing ebooks which everyone can use, regardless of their abilities, unites us by design. Empathy is important here; you will be helping create the feeling of belonging rather than feeling excluded. The benefits for your reputation are particularly relevant. A survey undertaken by the National Business and Disability Council in 2017 found that 66% of consumers will purchase goods and services from a business that features persons with disabilities in their advertising, while 78% will purchase goods and services from a business that takes steps to ensure easy access for individuals with disabilities at their physical locations.

Increased sales and cost considerations

When ebooks are “born accessible,” it means that all readers can access the content at the time of publication. This enhances the experience for all readers, and is especially beneficial for readers with print disabilities, who don’t have to wait for an alternate format of the title they want to read—they can simply purchase ebooks from publishers and bookstores, or borrow them from the public library, like everyone else. Furthermore, accessibility is becoming increasingly relevant in government procurement decisions, such as books for higher education.

An initial investment means that publishers are in a position to produce ebooks that are accessible. Once established, best practices help publishers become much more cost effective, by building accessibility into all their content, right from the start. The rest is business as usual.

Creating a Diverse Workforce: People with Disabilities are Part of the Solution

Part of the solution to the current lack of accessibility, is a cultural change. Instead of an optional feature, we need to start thinking of accessibility as the baseline. A 2016 Microsoft-funded investigation about the economic value of accessible technologies to companies suggests several advantages for employees from increased talent diversity, including a boost in productivity, and increased retention.

The best way to overcome accessibility barriers is by engaging people who have dealt with those challenges.

This represents the opportunity to tap into a reservoir of potential that could enrich our society with new ideas and new interactions. Those who have had to adapt and overcome such challenges often prove to be the most positive, determined, and hardworking employees. People with disabilities are innovative and resourceful, and have experience finding ways to prevent and eliminate accessibility barriers, for example finding workarounds to be able to consume specific content.

Good inclusive design can begin with hiring people with disabilities to help find solutions. The design team must comprise individuals who can empathize with users who consume print content in non-traditional ways. It’s all about thinking beyond the “typical” user and embracing new ideas to produce a seamless experience for all users.

People with disabilities can create awareness of what works well and what doesn’t for the publishing workflow. In-house accessibility experts can also do a thorough quality assurance test to ensure that all accessibility features have been included according to specification. Moreover, employing people with disabilities can give you access to a larger pool of potential customers. There are many benefits that come with accessibility, such as the good will that doing so creates, and the relationships you can build. You can become leaders in this.

On an individual level, we need to normalize the idea that everyone has different senses and capabilities, and make sure we’re communicating in a way that everyone can understand. On a corporate level, we need to make accessibility integral to the ebook, rather than something to be added later.

Accessible content also brings about a societal benefit. When persons with print disabilities have the means of full participation in the information economy, Canada’s national productivity would benefit from the contribution of this newly realized asset. Moreover, we live in an era of unprecedented challenges, from climate change to the weakening of liberal democracies. In this context, it is of the most importance to ensure that everyone can have access to information, to enable full participation in society. We need all hands on deck, and accessible content is essential, because it enables everyone to access information.

Let’s Talk!

So in conclusion: let’s start doing a better job by leveraging the tools we already use. Let’s talk about getting ebooks certified accessible. Let’s talk about ebook distribution and how to use metadata to boost the discoverability of your digital publishing products. Let’s talk about folding the work of print-disabled experts into your workflow. It’s good for your profile, good for your bottom line, and good for business.

Our thanks to Laura and Daniella for enabling a wider, international audience to benefit from their wisdom.

Accessibility in Publishing: A Case Study from Kogan Page

Published at June 12, 2019/in Articles /by Sarah Hilderley

Accessibility: The quality or characteristic of something that makes it possible to approach, enter or use it

Context

Broadly speaking, there are three key reasons why publishers ought to engage with accessibility:

The first is legal: the Marrakesh Treaty (signed into EU law on 1 January 2019) now facilitates access to published works for persons who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print disabled. This makes governmental, further and higher education institutions more accountable for digital accessibility for their stakeholders.
Secondly, there are well-defined standards—EPUB Accessibility 1.0 together with WCAG 2.1 and WAI-ARIA 1.1, which enable publishers to semantically describe and format their content accessibly so that assistive technology can exploit the embedded accessibility features.
Thirdly, there are documentation and resources available in the public domain that greatly facilitate a structured approach to accessibility for publishers.

In addition, there are well-rehearsed and compelling social and political arguments for creating content that is accessible to all readers. Publishers also have a moral as well as a commercial obligation to make their authors’ content accessible to the widest possible readership.

The fact that less than 10 per cent of all publications are currently accessible is a timely reminder that much remains to be done.

This case study will describe the approach to accessibility taken by Kogan Page over the last 18 months. The focus will be primarily on the path we took to create accessible content, but it will become clear that this is not where the journey ends.

Like many other publishers, Kogan Page approach content development with the overall goal of creating high-quality content by driving standards and workflow automation into our pre-press processes. The emerging accessibility requirements (both accessibility metadata and features such as Alt Text, Long Descriptions and ARIA roles) forced us to rethink our standards-based workflow from the ground up. This might initially seem like a daunting task, but as an independent publisher with a focused list of publications and predictable (if complex) content types, we were reasonably confident that our goal of making all our content accessible to a high standard was not overly optimistic.

A key decision was to reconfigure our pre-press workflow by developing and implementing an XHTML Schema and accompanying CSS. We had seen this as a highly desirable goal for our digital content for a long time but realising that it would enable us to incorporate all key accessibility features into our default production workflow was a real incentive to pursue EPUB Accessibility 1.0 as a realistic outcome.

The following case study will show that Kogan Page has adopted an integrated approach to accessibility. This contains at least three dimensions: content, interface, communication—plus ongoing research. While the initial approach clearly has to be content focused, it is just as important that the accessible content developed is tested at the interface at which it is ultimately accessed. It’s also key that you communicate your message about accessibility and its importance, both internally to colleagues, and externally to authors, customers and other stakeholders in the accessibility community.

Content

Making content accessible is achievable if you know the key areas on which to focus, the skills required in-house to implement change and where to ask for help. We didn’t have this information when we began our journey and offer the following thoughts in order to encourage others on theirs.

There were three factors that led us to think about accessibility in a serious way.

In early 2018, we made the decision to invest in implementing an XHTML schema and workflow. Our main aim was to drive structure and semantic information into our ebook files in a consistent manner and automate some of the laborious pre-press processes (for us and our vendors). We very quickly realised, though, that the structure and semantic information we would be incorporating into our files would allow us to very easily map and append accessibility features.
At this time, a new role was created for the purpose of implementing the new XHTML schema. It proved essential that this person took ownership of the schema process; and this lead naturally to the role doubling up as proponent and owner for accessibility.
We also knew that the ideal format for accessible publications is EPUB 3, the format of our entire ebook back catalogue. This gave us a good start. However, as many publishers know, not all EPUB 3 files are born equal. The EPUB 3 specification simply makes it possible to produce highly accessible files. Publishers need to supplement HTML5 with the detailed structural semantics in the WAI-ARIA specification, for example.

With the convergence of the above factors, we realised that we were in a privileged position.

We had an opportunity to design a robust workflow that would allow us to produce highly accessible ebooks consistently and efficiently.

Further research established that, for books such as ours, accessibility can be broken down into four areas.

Structure

We made sure our books included HTML5 semantic mark-up features and epub:type attributes, which aid navigation and help reading engines work out how to correctly render different types of content. We also added ARIA roles, which allow users, through assistive technologies such as screen readers, to easily identify different parts of a book and navigate its landmarks. Including these elements did not prove onerous because we were already implementing a well-defined schema that rigidly defined how our content should be marked-up and structured inside our ebooks. Without the schema, we would have struggled to make sure all of our products featured the same level of accessibility. We also used our schema to create an online validator, which checks that all of our EPUBs comply with our schema and meet our accessibility requirements. A second validation process was then built into our workflow: this validates our files against the Ace by DAISY tool and EPUBCheck. Final file validation, and the requirement for the vendor to submit zero error log files, is essential for QA and removes the costly and time-consuming requirement for remediation.

Accessibility Metadata

Accessibility data is simple to add and it helps users determine whether the file is suitable for their needs. Is the content textual, visual, auditory? Does it include flashing, alternative text, for example. The required accessibility metadata is documented in the EPUB Accessibility 1.0 specification.

Image Descriptions

Providing alt text for images is vital for accessibility, so it is worth taking the time to find specialists that can write high-quality content—it’s a skill. What you write depends not only on what the image is trying to convey, but on the potential reader, the context surrounding of the image, the complexity of the image, whether the image is already adequately described elsewhere, in the caption, for example, and whether the image is merely decorative. We recommend the Poet Image Description Tool created by Benetech and the methods outlined by TextBOX if you want to get to grips with best practice for image descriptions. Bear in mind that it may take a while to find the writers you need and provide training for in-house editorial and production staff and external vendors who will need to edit the text and make sure it is incorporated into your EPUB files. The latter needs workflow automation, but most vendors are able to offer that.

Tables

These are tricky. We focused first, again, on structure, because when tables are not structured accessibly, the data they contain can quickly become a meaningless sea of numbers and text. You need to make sure you use the correct table tags and identify column and row headers. Often, large and complex tables are rendered poorly by ereaders and table cells can spill across multiple page views. To prevent this, some publishers include the tables as images, so they can control their visual layout allowing users to zoom in and move around the table. This is usually not advised as best practice, because assistive technologies have no way of reading the image. To give all users the best reading experience, we wanted to work how to include both the image of the table and the raw table data. As a result, in our ebooks, sighted users see our larger tables (those with more than four columns) as images that fit nicely to all screen sizes. And the assistive technologies can find the readable table data and summaries in the <details> element below the image. This solution was run by experts, but we still need to do further testing with assistive technologies to make sure it’s suitable. The takeaway here is that tables are hard (for everyone)—give them special attention.

Communication

Once our pre-press workflow had been amended, with our content generating zero errors on DAISY Ace and fully EPUB Accessibility 1.0 compliant, we realised that we needed to communicate this to our readers, customers, authors and partner organisations. The first step was to publish a new Accessibility Statement on our website. This clearly spells out what accessibility features our content supports and on what online platforms it is available. It also demonstrates our commitment as a business to accessibility and invites print impaired readers to get in touch for further information via a dedicated mailbox address.

The final part of our journey to accessibility revolves around outreach and networking. We have accepted invitations to share our experience at the London Book Fair 2019, and will participate in other events (webinars, discussion panels etc). We are also raising awareness among colleagues at Kogan Page regarding our accessibility related efforts and are now specifically engaging with industry stakeholder groups like RNIB, Benetech, DAISY, Inclusive Publishing, TextBox and others. We want to be an active participant in the discussion about accessibility and ensure that we stay abreast of new developments and share our experiences with anyone who might benefit. This article is a case in point.

There are two aspects of the accessibility ecosystem which we are particularly keen to develop:

Engagement with print impaired end users. This is uncharted territory for most publishers, who—maybe understandably —remain content-focused. But what really matters is the actual usability of real files in an specific institutional context on a particular platform for a specific user. We are currently looking into organising user testing of our EPUB files on a range of platforms and with a range of screen readers. This will establish how our content fares in a specific setting and we regard this as a vital final test of successful born accessible content development. With changing standards and ever-improving platforms and reading engines, managing accessibility has become an ongoing and changing task—we will probably never finish our research and development work. And that’s a good thing.
While we can automate the capture of accessibility metadata inside an EPUB file, there is also the ONIX metadata that accompanies the EPUB when it is distributed to third party platforms. Here it is our aim to include ProductFormFeature metadata from ONIX Code List 196 in our ONIX messages. We are testing this currently, but this is an area where the industry as a whole (including the bibliographic system providers) needs to pull together to ensure this becomes a default option.

The approach we have taken to accessibility has resulted in a new pre-press workflow, semantically enriched content, more control over the rendering of our content (CSS) and a sense that we are now genuinely reaching all possible users.

Lessons

There are a few takeaways we want to highlight, as we would have benefitted from these at the start of our journey.

It is important to shift perspective on accessibility away from it being primarily a burden on your resources and time. It can in fact help you optimise your workflows and improve the quality of all your digital products at the same time.
By implementing accessibility, we found it helpful to have an accessibility coordinator in-house. This person needs the backing and support to communicate with staff in the entire organisation to ensure that accessibility goals, commercial considerations and the impact on existing workflows are fully understood. This person needs the time and space to get their head around your accessibility goals and potential pain points. They do not need to be a programming or EPUB expert, but they do need to understand their employer’s content at a granular structural level. The DAISY Knowledge Base will guide them through the technicalities!
If you haven’t embarked on the path to accessibility yet, we recommend reading the specifications and BISG Guide to Accessible Publishing and plug your current EPUBs into Ace by DAISY to see how close your files are to the EPUB Accessibility 1.0 standard. From there you can plan your next steps.
A large percentage of accessibility requirements for EPUBs can be baked into your workflow (ARIA roles, epub:type attributes, accessibility metadata) if you have a schema. But some aspects will be specific to your business and your content (e.g. handling tables, maths, who writes/proofreads the alternative text, how much you can afford to spend on these non-automated tasks, etc) and will therefore require more serious thought.
Think about scalability and sustainability. Knowing what you need to add or change in your ebooks is one thing. But you need to work out how you are going to improve all of your ebooks without draining resources. Our automation of simple tasks and the validation scripts helped with this. So did training for our production editors to parse alt text and long descriptions, and check that they have been inserted in our XHTML files. Workflow automation is key to accuracy and scalability.
Talk to the experts! The community is very friendly and eager to help those who are willing.

This case study was written by Martin Klopstock, Operations Director at Kogan Page, and Arthur Thompson, Content Developer at Kogan Page. Martin and Arthur both presented at The London Bookfair Accessibility Action Group seminar. Read the write-up of this event where their slides are also available.

Avneesh Singh Elected to W3C Advisory Board

Published at June 4, 2019/in News /by Sarah Hilderley

Many congratulations to Avneesh Singh, Chief Operating Officer at the DAISY Consortium, who has been elected to the W3C Advisory Board alongside other esteemed candidates as reported in W3C’s announcement today.

The W3C Advisory Board “provides ongoing guidance on issues of strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution” within the W3C. DAISY is delighted that the board now have the benefit of Avneesh’s experience and expertise. His submission blog piece describes in full why he will be such an asset to this outstanding group of industry leaders.

Society of Scholarly Publishers Annual Meeting

May 29th to 31st, 2019

Published at May 14, 2019/in Upcoming events /by Sarah Hilderley

The SSP’s annual meeting is presented this year with the theme Shaping the New Status Quo: Global Perspectives in Scholarly Publishing. The conference is keen to focus on the inclusion of new voices within ongoing conversations—not just geographically but with any new perspectives that help publishers move together toward a new age of scholarly communication. What new technologies will be at work in the new status quo? How will publishers continue to meet the needs of authors and readers, especially in previously underrepresented markets?

Two sessions are of particular interest to inclusive publishing readers:

Why Inclusion Matters to Technology and Technology Matters to Inclusion—The Keynote this year is being delivered by Betsy Beaumon, Benetech
Digital Equality: The Importance of Accessibility in Your Publishing Strategy

Date

May 29-31, 2019

Venue

San Diego, California

Learn More

Find out more about how you can register for this conference and full programming information at the SSP Event website.

Accessible Publishing: A Snapshot of Success—Are You in the Picture?

Published at May 14, 2019/in Articles /by Sarah Hilderley

This has been a vibrant couple of years for accessibility in publishing, and we look forward to even greater things as Born Accessible publishing becomes part of our mainstream requirement.

Publishers should work on this now, build the necessary elements into their workflows, and reach a more diverse audience. Join the DAISY party!

George Kerscher , Chief Innovations Officer at the DAISY Consortium and Sarah Hilderley from Inclusive Publishing were pleased to publish this article with BISG. In this brief report they look at how far we’ve come as an industry in our challenge of creating born accessible mainstream content and they highlight the various tools that are available to developers and publishers to help with this challenge. The full BISG article is available here.

Tag Archive for: accessibility

Inspiring Words from Industry Leaders: Interview with Julie Ganner, Institute of Professional Editors, Australia

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