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Accessibility of digital publishing formats such as ePub3

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Title: Accessibility of Digital Publishing Formats [edit]


Editor(s): Vivienne Conway [edit]


Categorization and Tags: accessibility, epublishing, ePub3, PDF [edit]


Description: At the recent W4A in Seoul, South Korea, the RDWG members present discussed the need to promote research into epublishing standards such as ePub3. [edit]


Background and State-of-the-art: Many digital books are still being published in PDF while others are embracing new formats such as ePub3. What is not yet clear is how accessible these formats are.[edit]


Challenges: Is ePub3 an accessible format for assistive technology such as screen-readers, refreshable Braille display, other AT and also keyboard-only users? What happens for the reader who wants to read such a book on their desktop/laptop computer rather than on a tablet such as an iPad or Kindle? Does the publisher need to publish in more than 1 format to allow for multiple devices? Has ePub3 been researched yet for its accessibility?

According to Scott Hollier (MAA - cited below), "The short answer is yes it can be accessible, but not always implemented as such. In terms of people that do it, I haven’t found many people that use ePub outside the big commercial procedures. Part of the issue is that its not well supported on the PC."

According to this link (with a quote from Judy Brewer, WAI W3C): http://idpf.org/news/ibm_adopts_epub-supporter-quotes, ePub3 is supposed to be accessible to screen readers, but we need to locate research to document this.[edit]


Research Goals:[edit]


Issues to be addressed[edit]



References: Scott Hollier / Media Access Australia: : http://www.accessiq.org/news/w3c-column/2013/04/the-great-ebook-format-war-the-headaches-and-the-solutions

Resources to assist converting MS Word & PDF to ePub3: http://www.convertpdf.org/pdf-to-epub http://download.cnet.com/PDF-to-ePub-Converter/3000-20412_4-75115614.html http://www.pdftoepub.com/

W3C info in Digital Publishing: http://www.w3.org/dpub/ http://www.w3.org/blog/dpub/2014/01/18/some-w3c-documents-in-epub3/


EPUB 3 Accessibility Guidelines: http://www.idpf.org/accessibility/guidelines/content/wcag-aria.php This link has a free online boo “Accessible EPUB3” as well as best practices etc. It should provide most of what you need.

Other useful links: http://it-ebooks.info/book/661/ http://mtdh.ruralinstitute.umt.edu/blog/wp-content/uploads/Accessible_EPUB_3_sized.pdf[edit]