Technical presentation on eBook accessibility from Tools of Change Frankfurt 2012.

1. Accessibility
From the publisher’s
perspective
Chris Rogers
Penguin Books UK

2. • Fulfil our corporate social
responsibility
• Fulfil any legal obligations
• Take advantage of any untapped
markets (definitely a big bonus)

3. • Everyone's
• Starts with the people who understand the
technology
• Our responsibility to educate colleagues in
Editorial, Design (even Sales)

4. • Ensure that our eBooks are created in the
most accessible way possible
• This is both a design issue and a technical
issue
• I’ll be talking mostly about the technical issues

5. • What do we mean by that?
• Assistive technologies generally rely on
hierarchy of elements to determine document
structure
i.e.
• <h1-5> then <p> then inline elements such as
<em>, <strong> etc.

6. • Don’t use a <p> if you really mean <h5>
• Don’t use <i> if you really mean <em>, don’t
use <b> if you really mean <strong>
• <i> and <b> are presentational elements and
have no semantic meaning

7. • CSS styling means nothing to screen readers
• Meaning should be conveyed via mark-up, not
style
• An excellent example is feature boxes:

8. • Bad example:
• Feature box has no
indication that it is
separate from the
main reading flow

9. • A better way:
• Heading indicates that
it is in addition to
main content.
• Heading is an <h5>,
not a <p>

10. • Another example – charts and graphs
• Very difficult subject – no good way to make
charts totally accessible without also providing
the data in tabular form
• But we can make them a little better:

11. • Bad example:
• Data-sets
differentiated by
colour can be
difficult to read for
the colour-blind

12. • To a colour-blind
person it could
look like this:

13. • A better way to
do it:
• Combines colour
and pattern

14. • Links nicely with using the correct
structural/semantic elements
• Don't use lower level elements with style to
convey heading styles
• Don't use style on text to convey meaning

15. • For example:
• “I am really MAD that this sentence isn’t
accessible!”
<p>I am really <span class=‘angryRed’>MAD</span> that
this sentence isn’t accessible</p>

16. • A better way:
• “I am really MAD that this sentence isn’t
accessible!”
<p>I am really <strong class=‘angryRed’>MAD</strong>
that this sentence isn’t accessible</p>

17. Basic rule
If you removed the CSS, and just used
the basic styling of the ebook-reader,
would it still be readable and make
sense?

18. All images must have appropriate alt
attributes!

19. • When a screen-reader encounters an image, it
reads out the alt attribute
<img src=‘../image/car.jpg’ alt=‘A picture of a red car”/>
• Keep in mind the alt attribute is meant as a
replacement for the image
• Sometimes the meaning of the image is more
important than the image itself…

20. • For example:
<img... alt=‘A triangular sign with an
exclamation mark in the centre’/>

21. • For example:
<img... alt=‘WARNING!’/>

22. • The text in the letter
is part of the story.
• It is more important
to the reader than
the image itself
<img... alt=‘Are you a grumptious honker or a talent tooter?
Come and try out for this yearly’s pan-troll-mime!’/>

23. THE DREADED TABLES!
•There is no good way to display large, complex
tables on today’s generation of e-readers

24. Fixed-layout ebooks
•Too many different formats
•Hard enough to create in the first place
•Still, all the rules previously mentioned can be
applied

25. Poetry
•Will require text-to-speech facilities to improve
•Very difficult in ebooks, as proper visual
formatting often requires hacks

26. • EPUB3!
• epub:type
• enhanced metadata support
• Full HTML5 support will give access to new
semantic/structural elements
• Full SMIL (Read Aloud) support, you'll even be able to
indicate the correct inflections for words
• All these things will give screen readers the ability to
read books more and more realistically

27. • epub:describedat could give us a good
way of providing long-form backup content
for images

28. • There is a huge amount that can potentially
be done to make ebooks more and more
accessible
• Time, technical expertise and money are
always mitigating factors
• Often ebooks will be created out of house,
what do you do then?

29. • Always QA your ebooks with accessibility in
mind
• Brief your conversion suppliers carefully to
ensure they are doing the right things
• Making your ebooks accessible shouldn’t cost
a lot, as long as it is built into your workflow
• The advantages outweigh the disadvantages

30. • ‘Accessible EPUB3’, O'Reilly
• RNIB, IDPF websites
• Vendors specification documents (Amazon
have some great guidelines on creating tables)

31. • Chris.rogers@uk.penguingroup.com
• @fullcapstwit
• #eprdctn hour, Wednesdays 4pm GMT