Tag Archive for: InDesign

An Insider’s Look at InDesign’s Accessibility Improvements (W)

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InDesign Accessibility Improvements webinar title slide

This week The DAISY Consortium was pleased to coordinate and host a special webinar focused on the accessibility improvements that have been made to Adobe InDesign.

This page contains:

Full Video of the Webinar

Speakers

  • Richard Orme, The DAISY Consortium—host and chair
  • Rob Haverty, Adobe
  • Gregorio Pellegrino, The LIA Foundation
  • Laura Brady, Accessible Books Consortium
  • Jonas Lillqvist, Celia

Session Overview

Richard Orme welcomed everyone and introduced attendees to the work of The Accessible EPUB from InDesign Expert Group which has been the driving force behind many updates, fixes and improvements that the publishing industry has been able to enjoy.

Rob Haverty

Adobe’s Rob Haverty spoke with Richard about accessibility and InDesign and shared with us some of the history behind the software’s original focus and how it now includes support for EPUB as well as PDF.

Gregorio Pellegrino

As the technical lead for this work Gregorio introduced the team of experts who have deep hands-on expertise with InDesign. Together this team presented some of the most significant enhancements and upgrades that InDesign now includes.  It is worth watching the video of this webinar to experience the demos from each presenter which perfectly explain each of the features being discussed.

Gregorio specifically explained the addition of the accessibility panel  within the metadata tab and alt text export for decorative and cover images, both of which had made a significant difference to EPUB export.

Laura Brady

Laura explained that InDesign can now produce a page list out of the box for reflowable EPUB as well as fixed layout. This is hugely important for accessibility and means that developers do not have to spend time creating a remediated page list. See Laura’s demo for how this is achieved and the 3 areas of page list creation that InDesign now fully supports.

In addition Laura spoke to us about the handling of drop caps which are traditionally very tricky to handle.

Jonas Lillqvist

Jonas concentrated on tables, footnotes and endnotes export and how the inclusion of previously missing features make a huge difference to accessibility requirements.  These were high priority items for the task force and there is still work to be done in this area.

Jonas also spoke to us about the handling of SVG images which has had limitations in the past.

Related Resources

Resources mentioned and other useful links:

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The Essentials in Your Toolbox, T-122 (W)

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In our series of free weekly webinars February 26th saw a session focused on The Essentials in Your Toolbox, showcasing a portfolio of tools and services which are available to content providers as they navigate their accessibility journey.

This page contains:

Full Video of the Webinar

Speakers

  • Richard Orme, The DAISY Consortium—host and chair
  • Romain Deltour, The DAISY Consortium
  • Daniel Weck, The DAISY Consortium
  • Laura Brady, Accessibility Expert

Session Overview

In his welcome Richard Orme informed us that there are a portfolio of tools available free of charge to the publishing industry to assist with the production of accessible EPUBs. Anyone using these tools on a regular basis should consider supporting the continued maintenance and development of these and similar DAISY solutions by sponsoring this work.

Romain Deltour and EPUBCheck

Romain concentrated on the EPUBCheck tool which is maintained by DAISY on behalf of W3C. Used almost universally by publishers for their EPUB files, EPUBCheck is the go-to utility tool for EPUB conformance. It is not an accessibility checker but is the first essential step in a conformance work flow. EPUBCheck tells the creator whether the EPUB conforms to the current standards. It’s important to note that an EPUB can conform correctly but still have serious accessibility issues!  However it is:

the foundational ground for a good reading experience and good interoperability across reading systems and assistive technologies.

Romain’s demo of the EPUBCheck tool used the command line version but it is also available to use with a GUI. Watch the demo to gain some inside tips and features that you may not be aware of.

Daniel Weck and Ace by DAISY

Daniel has been a core contributor to the development of Ace by DAISY, a software tool that checks EPUB files for accessibility. Ace is not a certification tool but it does evaluate for conformance and facilitate remediation. Available as a command line tool or as an app, Ace is free to use and available on Windows, Mac and Linux. Conformance is checked against the EPUB 1.1 Accessibility specification and WCAG and the rules it checks against include, discoverability metadata, navigation,  the reading order of synchronised text and audio, and many others.

The report generated by Ace is very user friendly and for those using the app there is a bonus feature – a metadata editor which Daniel describes in his presentation.  The Ace report integrates the DAISY Knowledge Base to help interpret issues that have been reported, providing guidance on how to solve issues. Daniel hopes that the future will see usability improvements with Ace and how it interprets technical standards.

Laura Brady and InDesign

Laura uses InDesign as an ebook creation tool and is part of The Accessible EPUB from InDesign Expert Group which works on improving the accessibility of the EPUB export files from this widely used solution. InDesign is page layout software and the starting point of 95% of ebooks and Laura’s demo shows how to use InDesign to create ebooks that prioritize accessibility.

Some important pieces of progress have been made recently and Lauras presentation looks at some of these more closely. This includes the ability to create a page list so that it remains faithful to the print version and how to ensure that navigation is maintained as you export to EPUB. The demo also focuses on accessibility metadata and how to ensure that it is included in the export file as well as giving an overview of the various options that can be included.

Laura uses a number of scripts and plugins every day and the presentation showed us examples such as Break Text Thread to assist with the application of semantics and the Access-Aide Sigil plugin to automate mapping epubtype semantics to aria roles.

Lots of useful tips and tricks to get the best of the InDesign software. In the future Laura hopes that EPUBs will only need minor remediation work upon export.

Related Resources

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Circular Software Launches New Accessibility Tools

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UK company, Circular Software, has announced the launch of new tools as part of their range of software to help with the creation of accessible InDesign files. Use of this software is free of charge and offers a “no code” approach for users.

Read the recently published article by Ken Jones, Director of Circular Software

Leveraging InDesign for Accessible EPUB Creation (W)

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Leveraging InDesign for Accessible EPUB Creation opening slideIn our series of free weekly webinars May 20th saw a session focused on Leveraging InDesign for Accessible EPUB Creation. If InDesign is part of your book production toolchain, then this webinar gave an invaluable overview of how to get cleaner, more accessible reflowable EPUB output. This page contains:

Full Video of the Webinar

Speakers

  • Richard Orme, The DAISY Consortium—host and chair
  • Laura Brady, House of Anansi Press
  • Michael Murphy, Adobe

Session Overview

This was a webinar in 4 parts with top tips and hints for the ebook designer to ensure that their exported EPUBs are as accessible as possible:

Establishing Structure With Styles

Michael Murphy opened the webinar with an overview of the importance of styles within InDesign, the first crucial step in file preparation and one which covers approximately 70% of accessibility related tasks, if properly and consistently used. Using paragraph and character styles enables you to achieve as clean and semantically rich accessible EPUB as possible—packing information into the formatting of your file via styles ensures that your EPUB is off to a flying start.

Edit All Export Tags

Export tagging of your styles avoids HTML cleanup later and Laura Brady showed  everyone how to successfully edit tags so that the HTML is as precise and semantic as possible:

Let the HTML do the accessibility heavy lifting

With a little nudging InDesign will perform and Laura demo’d various screens with us during the webinar

Image Output and Alt Text

In order to achieve an end result where the order, appearance and alt text of images are as intended in the final EPUB, Michael showed us various settings needed to ensure accessibility and good reflow of images.

Semantics and Post-Export CleanUp

Laura explained that InDesign has a full set of semantics built in and how we should think of epub:type as the scaffolding on which we can build ARIA roles. If you are passionate about accessibility then you should think of the InDesign Export EPUB as a starting point and be prepared to clean up the file with Laura’s list of specific cleanup tasks.

Related Resources

Discover the other webinars we’re running!