Accessibility of Digital Publishing

Ensuring accessibility of digital publishing systems and content for people with disabilities requires:

• Technical standards with built-in accessibility support;
• Tools that faciliate the production and use of accessible content;
• Widespread awareness of the requirements and resources for accessibility;
• The willingness to put it all together.

Benefits

Persons with disabilities benefit because:

• The digital ebook provides far more opportunity for an accessible reading and interaction experience than any other medium;
• For many persons with print disabilities the accessible digital options is often the only good option.

Issues

Issues Requiring Explicit Accessibility Consideration:

• Accessibility support in standards;
• Digital rights management that doesn't break accessibility;
• Accessible content;
• Accessible content distribution;
• Accessible user interface control in client and authoring applications.

How Standards Contribute

The extent of accessibility support in digital publishing standards is dependent on the extent to which digital publishing systems are built on Web standards that already support accessibility.

• DAISY, and now IDPF, specs have been based on W3C guidelines.

Support Already Achieved

• Compelling hierarchical navigation models (using XML, XHTML, and HTML 5)
• Text and audio syncronization (using SMIL)

Support Needed

• Long image description mechanism
• Native SVG accessibility
• Compelling navigation models for nonhierarchical content
• More elaborate multi-media integration
• Dynamic heuristical hierarchy reorganization

Accessible DRM

The mechanisms involved in digital rights management (DRM) frequently lock out users of assistive technologies.

Accessibility Friendly DRM Means:

• A balance between owner and consumer rights;
• No impact on UI.

Successful DRM today

• NLS
• NLS BARD
• Learning Ally
• BookShare.org

IndieUI: Events

Communicates user actions to web applications.

• An abstraction layer for events
• Separating devices and multiple UI modalities from common events

Example:

Touch action Mouse click Keyboard press Voice command

→ Might all indicate "Scroll-Down."

The web application needs only the "scroll-down" event. How that event is triggered can/should be irrelevant to the application.

IndieUI: User Context

Communices user context to web applications.

• Assistive technology users need require alternative content renderings
• Anyone might benefit from a different rendering based on context

Example: A mobile device user watching a video and entering a noisy environment would benefit if the application would auto-enable captions.

Some Relevant W3C Resources

• W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Home Page
• WCAG 2.0 is also ISO/IEC 40500 Specifying accessible content and accessible web applications
• IndieUI One web page supporting multiple device interface technologies
• Media Accessibility User Requirements
• HTML 5 Accessibility The W3C's HTML-A11Y Task Force Home Page