The Essentials in Your Toolbox, T-122 (W)
In our series of free weekly webinars February 26th saw a session focused on The Essentials in Your Toolbox, showcasing a portfolio of tools and services which are available to content providers as they navigate their accessibility journey.
This page contains:
Full Video of the Webinar
Speakers
- Richard Orme, The DAISY Consortium—host and chair
- Romain Deltour, The DAISY Consortium
- Daniel Weck, The DAISY Consortium
- Laura Brady, Accessibility Expert
Session Overview
In his welcome Richard Orme informed us that there are a portfolio of tools available free of charge to the publishing industry to assist with the production of accessible EPUBs. Anyone using these tools on a regular basis should consider supporting the continued maintenance and development of these and similar DAISY solutions by sponsoring this work.
Romain Deltour and EPUBCheck
Romain concentrated on the EPUBCheck tool which is maintained by DAISY on behalf of W3C. Used almost universally by publishers for their EPUB files, EPUBCheck is the go-to utility tool for EPUB conformance. It is not an accessibility checker but is the first essential step in a conformance work flow. EPUBCheck tells the creator whether the EPUB conforms to the current standards. It’s important to note that an EPUB can conform correctly but still have serious accessibility issues! However it is:
the foundational ground for a good reading experience and good interoperability across reading systems and assistive technologies.
Romain’s demo of the EPUBCheck tool used the command line version but it is also available to use with a GUI. Watch the demo to gain some inside tips and features that you may not be aware of.
Daniel Weck and Ace by DAISY
Daniel has been a core contributor to the development of Ace by DAISY, a software tool that checks EPUB files for accessibility. Ace is not a certification tool but it does evaluate for conformance and facilitate remediation. Available as a command line tool or as an app, Ace is free to use and available on Windows, Mac and Linux. Conformance is checked against the EPUB 1.1 Accessibility specification and WCAG and the rules it checks against include, discoverability metadata, navigation, the reading order of synchronised text and audio, and many others.
The report generated by Ace is very user friendly and for those using the app there is a bonus feature – a metadata editor which Daniel describes in his presentation. The Ace report integrates the DAISY Knowledge Base to help interpret issues that have been reported, providing guidance on how to solve issues. Daniel hopes that the future will see usability improvements with Ace and how it interprets technical standards.
Laura Brady and InDesign
Laura uses InDesign as an ebook creation tool and is part of The Accessible EPUB from InDesign Expert Group which works on improving the accessibility of the EPUB export files from this widely used solution. InDesign is page layout software and the starting point of 95% of ebooks and Laura’s demo shows how to use InDesign to create ebooks that prioritize accessibility.
Some important pieces of progress have been made recently and Lauras presentation looks at some of these more closely. This includes the ability to create a page list so that it remains faithful to the print version and how to ensure that navigation is maintained as you export to EPUB. The demo also focuses on accessibility metadata and how to ensure that it is included in the export file as well as giving an overview of the various options that can be included.
Laura uses a number of scripts and plugins every day and the presentation showed us examples such as Break Text Thread to assist with the application of semantics and the Access-Aide Sigil plugin to automate mapping epubtype semantics to aria roles.
Lots of useful tips and tricks to get the best of the InDesign software. In the future Laura hopes that EPUBs will only need minor remediation work upon export.