Module 5. How to design an accessible art e-book

Introduction

Why you should care about accessibility?

There are two main reasons why you should care about accessibility in your e-books:

• it’s the right and inclusive thing to do, and
• it’s required by law in many countries.

Some benefits of accessible e-books include:

• increased reach and sales,
• improved search engine optimisation, and
• compliance with legal requirements.

Designing accessible e-books doesn’t have to be difficult. By following a few simple guidelines, you can create e-books that are beautiful and accessible to everyone. Through this module, we will give you everything you need to know about how to design and build accessible e-books.

What?

E-books

Since their widespread emergence in the early 2000s, e-books have attracted considerable attention — and even some controversy. While some readers have mourned the so-called ‘death of the book’ and a loss of the print book’s more tactile qualities, many others have welcomed the portability and improved accessibility that e-books can offer.

For readers with a disability — such as visual impairments, reading difficulties like dyslexia, and motor skill problems — e-books represent a more viable format by which to access stories, information and reading experiences that have otherwise hovered beyond reach. E-book formats allow us to make one book for all users. Instead of having the print edition and the Braille edition and the large print edition and the audiobook, we can include everyone in our audience with one format.

Not many e-books are fully accessible, however.

Hundreds of years of book design evolution have led to well-established rules about these visual cues — not only how they work best but also how they can be aesthetically pleasing. While many readers may not be conscious of these visual cues, they do important work. A visually impaired reader will typically need extra information to let them know where they are up to in a document and to make clear what type of text they’ve encountered or are interpreting.

As the market has grown and diversified, the wide variety of available e-book related technologies means that competing platforms and devices incorporate varying levels of accessibility and different methods of access. Over the last couple of years in particular, the publishing industry has recognized a growing need to improve accessibility for all readers, especially as self-publishing continues to gain momentum and increasingly more apps and e-reading platforms proliferate.

Accessibility in e-books

Accessibility in e-books isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s essential to ensure that your books can be enjoyed by all your readers, whether they’re on a mobile, desktop or other device or app. While e-books are quickly catching up with print books in terms of visual design, the future of reading is rapidly expanding into digital and accessible e-books as well.

If you’re planning to create an e-book or if you’ve already converted your print book into an e-book, you will want to make sure it is accessible to as many people as possible. You can do many things to make your e-book more accessible, including choosing the right file format, using an alternative text description for images, adding captions and transcripts for videos, and more.

So, accessible e-books, like accessible web content, usually include additional semantic markup to assist with navigation and to identify the purpose and meaning of content for impaired readers. This kind of semantic information is encoded into content using dedicated HTML markup tags, but also by attributes to markup tags. Accessibility information may also include textual image descriptions and audio transcripts to meet a range of readers with various needs.

Users with disabilities interested in having accessible e-books have different needs depending on their impairment:

• blind: files accessible by screen readers, transferable for Braille printing;
• visually impaired: files with possibility to enlarge the characters, recognizable by speech synthesis associated with magnification software;
• motor impairments of the upper limbs: possibility to “browse” the text in an alternative way using assistive technologies replacing keyboard and mouse;
• dyslexic: visual reading supported by speech synthesis to facilitate the understanding of the text;
• cognitive or linguistic-lexical difficulties: possibility of adaptation that requires manipulation of the document, both in content and formatting;
• hearing impaired: subtitling.

Unfortunately, manually improving the accessibility of an e-book or other digital content to ensure that it complies with these standards can be time-consuming and tedious manual labour, and thus expensive. Given the right tools, however, individuals or publishers interested in building accessible e-books no longer need extensive technical knowledge about how accessibility is implemented for e-books, nor do they require specialist skills or loads of free time. Intelligent software such as Bookalope can step in to streamline and simplify the process of building accessible e-books efficiently and reliably.

Building accessible e-books with Bookalope

Because semantic structure provides much of the foundation for building accessible documents, Bookalope has an AI-assisted workflow whose first step is to ‘understand’ the styles and structure of a given document and how they work to organize content and facilitate meaning.

Bookalope extracts all of the textual content from the file, as well as images, tables, and as much of the visual styling information as it needs for the AI to meaningfully classify the content’s semantic structure. It then cleans up the extracted information to get rid of the cruft that often sneaks into Word files, such as editing history, cut-and-paste residue formatting, and Word’s own internal document organization. After that, Bookalope runs its AI to classify the content’s structure based on the visual styling of the individual text elements and their context. It then presents the result of that classification for review.

It’s worth mentioning that Bookalope’s classification AI is not perfect, like any other machine classification or image-recognition software. However, an AI-assisted structure classification tool like Bookalope gets us a long way towards smooth (and largely automatic) book conversion. Having a semantically structured document ensures that correct and detailed accessibility information can be generated automatically for the e-book.

Once we’ve confirmed the structure of the document, the hard work is behind us. Next, Bookalope shows us various content and typographical issues that we may choose to fix or ignore, such as different regional spellings, punctuation inconsistencies, and other small typographical and stylistic details. At the end, Bookalope will assemble the e-book, and run the EPUBCheck and Ace tools to ensure that the accessibility information has been correctly applied and the e-book validates according to the strictest industry standard.

How?

Principles for building an accessible e-book: