Publishing@W3C: September 2021 Seminar

Hello, my name's Ken Jones.

I run Circular Software, a company that helps publishers by offering software products and custom development, along with training and advice on their print and digital workflows.

I'm an invited expert on the W3C EPUB 3 Working Group.

And as an active member of that Fixed Layout Accessibility task force, I have been asked to make this video update to share information on our recent and ongoing work.

Visual publications are an important style of communication, commonly used in education and consumer books and magazines.

They succeed in delivering engaging reading experiences through a combination of rich illustration, photography, typography, and page layout.

The value of graphic design is not to be dismissed as merely making things look pretty.

It creates a more inviting and rewarding reading experience, which can be vital for conveying complex ideas, increasing understanding, and reaching young or reluctant readers.

Many of the EPUB accessibility features found in Reflowable EPUB can still be used in Fixed Layout.

The following steps are forming the structure of our recommended best practice guidelines on how to achieve greater fixed layout accessibility.

We are preparing technical notes that will be suggested for inclusion in the EPUB 3.3 revision.

Let's briefly look at each of these steps in turn.

For navigation.

Because longer and more complex visual publications often have a table of contents spanning several EPUB pages, they must, therefore, have an additional table of contents for ebook navigation.

Adding a navigation document is a requirement of EPUB, and adding a good level of content and structure to this table of contents inside the EPUB is recommended.

The navigation of fixed layout EPUB can be further increased by adding section markers and landmarks to identify major sections of the publication, for example, the cover image, table of contents, and the start of the main body matter.

Because each page of a Fixed Layout EPUB is a separate HTML document, a page list can be generated relatively easily, something which is actually harder to do in a reflowable EPUB.

The use of heading tags ensures that users do not have to rely on visual styling to understand and navigate the document outline.

The structural hierarchy is already being considered at the design stage of visual page layout.

And by adding this information into the styles on the page and to the tags used on export, we can pull this structure into EPUB.

Reading order.

Whereas many reflowable publications have an obvious reading order or logical progression through the content, fixed layout publications are often more complex in their design and layout and may consist of multiple readable objects on the same page.

For complex designs, the position of objects on the fixed layout page is not a reliable indicator of their reading order.

Popular page layout programs export the page content in the order of the stacking of objects on the page rather than their page position.

The top most object sits above other objects and so are written last into the HTML.

Neither of these are suitable.

Altering the stacking order to dictate the reading order has the potential to alter and disrupt the design of the page.

The recommended best practice solution is to adjust the order of the elements inside the XHTML page and to preserve the design using CSS and z-index.

Image descriptions.

EPUB has long had well-established guidelines on adding shorter alt text and longer image descriptions to the images that they contain.

For fixed layout EPUB accessibility, we're adding more guidance.

The ability to use background images in XHTML carries through into Fixed Layout.

These images have no description or alt text and, therefore, should only be used for decorative images.

Full page images that require description should be placed into the body element and to the bottom of the stacking order.

As fixed layout EPUBs may be viewed as synthetic spreads, a left and a right-hand page, side by side, like an opened print book, it's possible for a single image to be used across both pages.

Careful description to avoid repetition is recommended here.

The visual nature of fixed layout design can mean a combination of images into larger montages.

If these are more than decorative, then they should also be described.

The position of the image description within the reading order also needs to be considered.

On to tables.

Using HTML to format tables is strongly recommended in reflowable EPUB and also in fixed layout EPUB.

As the structure of tables and their styling is often more rigid in fixed lay out, this needs extra consideration.

For fixed layout EPUB, large tables might span across multiple fixed layout pages or have extra interactivity to add filtering, sorting or scrolling.

And all these are being considered for our guidelines.

Legibility and readability.

Because the reader is unable to influence the text presentation of the fixed layout EPUB in the same way as reflowable EPUB, such as font size and style, general good practice for print graphic design and for web UX is applied in Fixed Layout EPUB design.

Typography and classic graphic design consideration, such as grids, white space, complementary font combinations, line length, leading and tracking, and so on, become more important.

Another of the considerations for fixed layout EPUB design is text contrast.

Poor contrast between text and background colors or images can affect everyone, but contrast is of greater importance for those with sight difficulties.

Accessibility metadata.

By declaring just how accessible or not an EPUB file is, we can inform the retailer and the reader about the features that the ebook has before purchase or download.

Although it may be possible to create fixed layout EPUB publications that conform to WCAG 2.0, conforming to the latest versions of the standard is much more difficult due to the reflow requirement that was added in 2.1.

As a group, we've discussed how we might be able to add or alter the schema.org metadata introduced with EPUB 3.2.

One way might be to add a metadata field to declare if a document has been sufficiently prepared for both visual and textual access modes.

Finally, I wanted to share an approach I've been championing and that we've been considering within the task force, which is the possibility for a single EPUB document to be presented as either a visual or textual publication.

If we're to achieve the ability to resize and reflow the text, it's clear that the nature of fixed layout visual publications is a fundamental flaw.

The approach under consideration is to provide the opportunity to add information, instruction, and rules within a single visual publication that can then be used to generate an alternative textual presentation of that same content when it is more suitable, useful, or accessible to read it in that way.

In this proof of concept example, I'm showing a visual page, which transforms to use a different presentation.

Here this is being demonstrated responsively with media queries, but it could also be something that could be triggered by the reading system or the reader.

Thank you very much for listening or watching, and I hope to see you in a forum or on a Zoom call soon.