Accessibility and EPUB3
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- This topic has 7 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 8 years, 8 months ago by
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I have been hearing how much better EPUB3 is in terms of Accessibility over PDFs.
Has anyone come across any tips that would assist a designer (me!) to ensure that an Accessible EPUB3 can be a export of the InDesign workflow in addition to, for example, a print output too. I’m thinking of upgrading my copy of Digital Publishing with Adobe InDesign 2014 (as my CS6 version doesn’t cover it) — but as 2015 has just been released I guess even that is out of date — in the hope that it has some half-decent information for me and my team.
I don’t think InDesign Magazine has covered this topic… or am I mistaken.Thank you
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I have not heard that EPUB is better at accessibility than PDF. That would be interesting. PDF has a large amount of tagging options. However, EPUB is basically HTML, so I suppose there are a lot of options there, too.
If you upgrade/subscribe to CC, you can get download any version of CC, including 2015.
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I attended a presentation by an advisor on accessibility for the NZ Government (and previously with the Canadian Government) which was very informative.
“If properly tagged and otherwise “accessible”, [PDF] semantic structures have never been available to screen reader users on Mac OS, iOS, or linux. I gather Adobe is currently taking steps to rectify the situation for OS/iOS, but that’s not complete yet, and it still leaves blind/screen reader users on linux out in the cold. They can still get to the text, but it’s just one big blob of linear, unstructured text.
The other issue with PDFs is that they don’t allow reflow, or changing fonts, font size, colour, etc. This makes them especially painful to use for everyone on mobile devices.
Epub3, on the other hand, is just HTML and CSS in a wrapper, so Epub3 readers can allow all those features, reflowing pages to the desired screen size, font/font size, etc. And since it’s all just HTML, the semantic structures in the markup are easily exposed to assistive technologies.”
Now my challenge is how to take this information and build it into a workflow for our design team.
By the way I really enjoy your InDesign podcast David. Thanks for sharing your wealth of information! (We are on CC2014… just haven’t updated our reading material, or gone to CC2015 as is incompatible with our server — long story but apparently there is a light at the end of the tunnel)
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PDFs can be accessible most definitely. I completely disagree with “If properly tagged and otherwise “accessible”, [PDF] semantic structures have never been available to screen reader users on Mac OS, iOS, or linux.” … well I’m not sure about linux. ;-D But OSX and iOS and Windows, for sure.
I speak from experience helping a number of companies created accessible PDFs for their customers, working with visually handicapped users to ensure the PDFs they downloaded from their websites were structured correctly to be read with a screen reader.
Or ask Chad Chelius, who’s quite well-versed in the subject.
Yes EPUB 3s come with built-in accessibility and can be enhanced to provide even more (better ALT tags, semantic markup etc.).
AM
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Thanks for your input Anne-Marie – like I said to David your podcast is very informative and enjoyable, so thank you!
Like most things I’m sure there is some give and take and sweeping statement dismissing one approach over another are usually not that helpful. I don’t have enough knowledge on the topic to dismiss things but have to assume that someone whose job is living and breathing accessibility standards know his stuff.
What I am try to uncover are processes to design and output content that can be accessible (in all senses of the word) to the widest audience, without hamstringing the design. As many of our clients are government-based this is very important. There a so many ways to skin this cat that I’ve begun to research how best to use InDesign both in the design and output. What I’d like to avoid as much as possible is re-creating (or re-artworking) documents that initially begin as print but will also exist online. An example would be getting the description of an image from the client, as part of the content supply stage for use as alt text, rather than relying on a designer tagging it something like ‘decorative image’ which is pretty useless really.
…And using inline images — although I’m not quite sure if I can implement this in all instances, or if/when it can be ignored but it’s something I’m going to explore.
…And ensuring colour contrasts meet WCAG 2.0 level AA while planning colour palettes rather than at the end of the project.Caspian
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Caspian that’s a tall order! ;-D
You might want to watch some of Chad’s lynda.com title on creating accessible PDFs:
Some of the best practices he outlines there would also help you create accessible EPUB 3s out of ID, such as adding ALT tags.
I have a few videos in my recently updated InDesign CC 2015: EPUB Fundamentals lynda.com course about enhancing accessibility:
(semantic markup, alt tags, etc.)
AM
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I’m so glad that you’ve enjoyed our podcasts!
I believe that what that accessibility advisor was trying to say is that Adobe Acrobat is not very accessible. So even if you have a very accessible PDF file, the software itself can’t do much with it. But there are many other PDF readers that are designed to “read” the accessibility inside PDF files.
That said, there is no doubt that reflowable EPUB is much better for allowing people to increase the text size!
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