Tag Archive for: accessibility

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.

Introducing ACE: Accessibility Checker for EPUB

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Photograph of 4 ace playing cardsThis was a guest post for EPUBSecrets by Romain Deltour, lead developer of the Ace software tool, and re-posted here with the kind permission of Laura Brady, editor of EPUBSecrets.

The mission of ebook developers and publishers is a pretty darn cool and noble one, if you ask me: crafting pure information, pure knowledge, so that it can be readable by everyone. Yes, Everyone. As Billy Gregory playfully put it on Twitter in 2015, “when UX doesn’t consider ALL users, shouldn’t it be known as Some Users’ Experience, or… #SUX?”. If some people are left out, SUX. Well, we don’t want that in our EPUBs! The alternative is of course truly inclusive publishing, where content is accessible to all.

“When UX doesn’t consider ALL users, shouldn’t it be known as Some Users’ Experience, or… #SUX?”

Producing accessible ebooks, however, comes with its own challenges. Sometimes, accessibility is just underestimated and dashed off. Other times, goodwill may be damped down by perceived technical complexity. In any case, it is — sadly — far too easy to let some inaccessible content slip through a production workflow.

Wouldn’t it be useful to have some tools to help spot the most obvious accessibility errors, so that you can more easily work your way towards inclusive publishing? That’s the idea behind Ace, an accessibility checker for EPUB developed by the DAISY Consortium and currently in public beta testing.

Ace, in a nutshell

Ace is an open source tool that can help with evaluating conformance to the EPUB Accessibility 1.0 specification. Ace actually does two things: it runs some automated checks (and will report obvious accessibility violations), and it also extracts some data that can be used in a later manual inspection process.

Ace is usable as a command line tool, or can be integrated in larger software via a Javascript or HTTP API. Ace can create reports both in a machine-readable format (JSON-LD), or as a human-friendly HTML document.

“Ace is an open source tool that can help with evaluating conformance to the EPUB Accessibility 1.0 specification.”

Automated checks

When it comes to automated checking, it is very important to understand that a tool can only detect a limited set of accessibility requirements. Steve Faulkner, W3C HTML editor and well-known accessibility expert, for instance recently mentioned the figure of 30% of WCAG 2.0 criteria being able to be automatically verified. Trying to report more can result in a report riddled with false-positives and bloated information, which can be counter-productive.

In Ace, we’re trying to adopt a conservative approach and only report true and confirmed violations. Under the hood, to check an EPUB’s HTML content documents, Ace notably relies on aXe, a high-quality Web accessibility checker by Deque Systems. On top of these WCAG-related checks, Ace also runs a few EPUB-specific checks, for instance to check the presence of accessibility metadata. When a violation is found, Ace will point to DAISY’s accessible publishing knowledge base (curated by Matt Garrish).

Data extraction

In addition to the automated checks, Ace extracts some data that is intended to be useful for manual accessibility inspection. For instance, Ace can report the outline computed from the HTML headings (HTML elements h1 to h6) alongside the ToC from the Navigation Document, so that a person can check that they are consistent. Ace also extracts the list of the EPUB’s images and graphics along with their associated accessibility descriptions, and renders them in a consolidated table for easier review.

Again, automated checks cannot give the full picture, and by extracting relevant data Ace intends to prepare for the later stages in the process.

When to use Ace?

Fixing inaccessible content can be a costly operation. Imagine that you’re building a house: would you consider piercing the windows after having raised the walls and decorated with wallpaper, or would you rather consider it at build time? The example may sound trite, but it’s really what is at stake for accessibility. The well-known mantra “test early, test often” totally applies. The sooner you identify an issue, the easier and cheaper it is to fix. Accessibility testing doesn’t have to be put off to the QA stages down the line; it is a sane practice to also test during development.

What’s the plan, and how can I help?

Ace is currently in beta testing phase, and we’re eager to get feedback from technical experts in ebook production. Please be aware it may have some rough edges and …erm… bugs too (wouldn’t life be a bit bland without them?). We’re also looking forward to any usability suggestions or feature requests (on both Ace or the knowledge base). Feel more than welcome to use our issue tracker, or the beta testing feedback form.

We intend to release version 1.0 later this year. There’s already a bunch of improvements on our radar, including better configurability, more EPUB-specific rules, basic support for EPUB 2, localization, integration with EpubCheck,… Stay tuned! For news on Ace release updates (as well as all areas related to accessibility and publishing), don’t hesitate to sign up to the Inclusive Publishing newsletter, and follow @InclusivePub on Twitter.

Romain Deltour is a software developer and accessibility expert for the DAISY Consortium, and is a firm believer in the Web’s potential to enable a truly inclusive publishing ecosystem. When he’s not coding or attending W3C conference calls, he can usually be seen playing with one of his three lovely kids. Sometimes, they happen to enjoy the conference calls too…but shh!
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Accessibility: Ensuring that Edtech Systems Work Together to Serve All Students

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The attached article was written by Rick Johnson, Vice President of Product Strategy at VitalSource Technologies LLC, and published in the EDUCAUSEreview on September 25th. Key takeaways, as identified by EDUCAUSEreview, are:

  • As course materials are increasingly deconstructed and customized to specific learners, ensuring accessibility and interoperability of edtech tools and systems is crucial.
  • The next generation digital learning environment offers an ecosystem to provide this cohesion and ensure the accessibility of learning materials.
  • When vendors follow standards such as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines,their components support individual accessibility and contribute to enhancing the accessibility of the whole system.
  • Ultimately, the real-world test is not how each of the parts conform to a standard, but how all of the parts work together to provide a highly functional system for users.

For Rick’s full article please visit https://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/9/accessibility-ensuring-that-edtech-systems-work-together-to-serve-all-students