Tag Archive for: accessibility

Typefi User Conference, Brighton

March 22nd to 23rd, 2018
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The Typefi User Conference offers Typefi users, partners and staff an opportunity to network, share best practices, and learn from each other. If you’re considering adopting Typefi as your automated publishing solution, this is an excellent chance to see the platform in action and talk to other users.

Of particular interest is the morning workshop on the 22nd of March on Accessible Publishing which will include an introduction to accessibility, as well as in-depth presentations and conversations with experts in accessible publishing. If you want to understand why accessibility is important, and how to build standards-compliant accessibility features right into your publishing workflows without increasing composition costs then this session is for you!

Date

22nd-23rd March, 2018

Venue

Brighton, U.K.

Learn More

Publishing Accessibility Jargon Deciphered

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Ahead of their ebookcraft presentation Is Your EPUB Accessible: Put it to the Test where they will showcase Ace by DAISY, the new EPUB accessibility checking tool launched at the end of January, Romain Deltour and Matt Garrish have written a incredibly useful Guide to Accessibility Jargon for BookNet Canada. Make sure you gen up on all of your terminology in preparation for this sell-out event!

Visit our event pages for full details of the ebookcraft event

Funka Accessibility Days, Stockholm

April 17th to 18th, 2018
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Funka Accessibility Days is northern Europe’s largest conference on accessible ICT. As usual, an exciting program awaits delegates with specific focus this year on the new international WCAG 2.1 standard  and the latest W3C developments regarding standards and tools for accessible technology, design and content.

”Meet the expert” is a successful part of the program where you have the opportunity to book a master class with Funkas’ experts in smaller rooms, during the event. You can choose to pose your questions to a developer, a designer, a language expert, a requirements specialist, an assistive technology expert or an over all accessibility professional – and get answers and recommendations on the spot.

Date

April 17th – 18th, 2018

Venue

Stockholm, Sweden

Learn More

https://www.funka.com/en/we-offer/funka-accessibility-days/

W3C News – Synchronized Multimedia for Publications Community Group Proposal

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Marisa DeMeglio, software developer for The DAISY Consortium, has proposed creation of a new group  working on a way to “synchronize audio or video with Web Publications and other document formats being developed by the Publishing Working Group, in order to make the publications accessible to people with different types of reading requirements.”  For more information on this and details of how to support this proposal visit:

Proposed Group: Synchronized Multimedia for Publications Community Group

 

Inspiring Words from Industry Leaders: Interview with Luc Audrain, Hachette Livre

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Inclusive Publishing has embarked on a series of interviews with industry leaders and their approach to accessibility. Luc Audrain, Head of Digitilization at Hachette Livre, has been a driving force within the publishing industry, both in France and internationally, on the subject of accessibility. Headshot of Luc Audrain, Head of Digitalization at Hachette Livre and subject of this interview

Nothing has been more valuable for me during these last two years than being in touch with visually impaired people and understanding their skills in managing mails, sms, ebooks, etc.

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

Market Expansion: visually impaired people are suffering from a “book famine”. They are eager to be included in the mainstream reading experience and when a natively accessible ebook catalogue becomes available, I’m sure they are more than ready to lend or buy these titles

Regulations: at a national and European level, rules are being set to enforce the accessibility of products and services. We are taking these rules seriously and are preparing ourselves in advance.

Good Practices: structuring information is a must to implement accessibility within ebooks. We know, by experience, that the foundation of good practice in an editorial workflow is necessary for any kind of reuse of high quality content.

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

Structure your content!

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

I wish I had had the opportunity to understand how blind people read and write digital text in their day-to-day life!

Nothing has been more valuable for me during these last two years than being in touch with visually impaired people and understanding their skills in managing mails, sms, ebooks, etc.

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

Technology and standards are mature: Web accessibility is well described and EPUB3 production is increasing. From the French publishers side, the subject has been grasped and a significant move has already been made to publish simple monochrome titles as natively accessible ebooks.

Be prepared to see accessible categories in ebook stores in 2018.

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

Using the EPUB3 format and accessibility guidelines available from the IDPF and the DAISY Consortium, it is quite possible for simple books to achieve a good level of accessibility. Establishing good content structuring practices within editorial workflows helps to implement accessibility in EPUB3 files, and, in that case only, it is inexpensive.

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

Inclusive publishing sums up all the digital support I have brought to publishing teams throughout the years of my career.

 

Ensuring the Accessibility of all Learning Content

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Photograph of Rick Johnson, author of this articleRick Johnson, Vice President of Product Strategy at Vital Source has written an incisive article for the latest issue of Research information, focusing on what is required during this time of “dramatic change” for accessibility in learning content. Read the full article on their website

https://www.researchinformation.info/news/analysis-opinion/ensuring-accessibility-all-learning-content.

Rick Johnson will be presenting a number of sessions at the CSUN Assitive Technology Conference in March 2018 with George Kerscher, Chief Innovations Officer within the DAISY Consortium.

W3C ARIA Working Group finalize digital publishing specifications

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The Accessible Rich Internet Applications Working Group has finalized several documents:

Further information about this is available in the blog post:
https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/12/wai-aria-authoring-practices-note

Following the completion of WAI-ARIA 1.1, the Working Group will begin work on WAI-ARIA 1.2, which will focus on defining features that correspond to existing HTML 5 features. This reflects convergence of an accessibility taxonomy for the web across various technologies and will support future scripting and automation of accessibility features. More information about the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Working Group is available from its home page:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/

Ace by DAISY: Open Source EPUB Accessibility Checker – New Beta Release 

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Ace, by DAISY, the newly developed accessibility checking tool for EPUB, has entered its last phase of testing with a new beta release this week. The full release of Ace 1.0 is scheduled for the end of January 2018, so now is the ideal time to explore how you can incorporate accessibility checking within your workflows. For full details on Ace and what it can achieve for you, visit https://inclusivepublishing.org/toolbox/accessibility-checker/ 

Reports from the W3C Publishing Summit

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W3C logoThe annual W3C TPAC meeting this year was held in San Francisco last week and included, for the first time, the W3C Publishing Summit held over 2 days with a lively and informative program aimed at learning how web technologies are shaping publishing today, tomorrow, and beyond. This was particularly significant as it is the first major event that the newly formed Publishing@W3C has held since the merger of IDPF and W3C earlier this year.

The DAISY Consortium were delighted to take part in their session entitled: Accessibility in Publishing and the W3C, which gave us the opportunity to demonstrate Ace, by DAISY, the accessibility software tool currently in phase 2 of its beta release and due for general release towards the end of this year. Romain Deltour, lead developer on the Ace project, ran the real time demonstration with George Kerscher, Avneesh Singh (DAISY) and Judy Brewer (W3C) also taking part.

The panel emphasized that EPUB 3 is a “rock solid” standard for accessibility and that conformance to EPUB Accessibility 1.0 will become increasingly important for publishers. Ace has been developed based upon this specification together with the WCAG standard and can be incorporated into other certification processes as is being done by Benetech already.

Whilst this session was devoted exclusively to accessibility it is significant that most other sessions over the two day program singled out the needs and challenges of accessibility as a major and central part of their work in digital publishing today. Abhay Parashus, CTO at Adobe, set the stage early on:

“If our mission is to tell amazing stories for the world we cannot add an asterisk for only certain people to express stories……. For us accessibility is not a checklist item. If we truly believe in the mission of the company then it’s a differentiator.”

With so much support for our work, these are exciting times for Inclusive Publishing

“Access to information is a fundamental human right. We are working to make sure that standards and technologies support that access.” – George Kerscher

Event Report Round-Up

A number of detailed event reports have been published since the event and we recommend these to everyone interested in Inclusive Publishing:

Digital Publishers Find Shared Purpose at W3C Publishing Summit – an overview in Publishers Weekly by Jason Boog

W3C Publishing Summit 2017: An Ebook Dev’s View – a guest post for epubsecrets.com written by Teresa Elsey from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Publishing Working Group TPAC Summary 2017 – by Tzviya Siegman, Wiley Info Standards Lead and W3C Publishing WG chair

EDRLab and the W3C Publishing Summit – by Laurent LeMeur. This piece includes slides froms Laurent’s presentation at the summit

As slides become available from the conference we will post them here:

Jen Simmons on How New CSS is Changing Everything About Graphic Design on the Web

 

ABC International Excellence Award – Seeking Nominations

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The Accessible Books Consortium (ABC) International Excellence Award, to be given at London Book Fair 2018, is now open for nominations. ABC aims to increase the number of books worldwide in accessible formats, and make them available to people who are print disabled; the ABC International Excellence Award, given at LBF, recognizes outstanding leadership and achievement in advancing the accessibility of commercial e-books or other digital publications.

Two awards will be presented, one to a publisher and one for an initiative.  You can nominate your own organisation or a third party anywhere in the world, and nominations are encouraged from those based in developing or least developed countries.  The submissions deadline is Friday 26th January 2018, and the awards will be given on Tuesday 10th April 2018.  Click through for full detail and a submission form.