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Accessibility and ebooks - strategies for ensuring it is done well
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Accessibility and ebooks - strategies for ensuring it is done well
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CLARISSA WEST-WHITE: Welcome to NISO 2021's session on accessibility and e-books, strategies for ensuring it is done well. I am your moderator Clarissa West-White from Bethune-Cookman University where I am the research librarian and reference instructor. Joining me today is Marisa DeMeglio who is a software developer for the DAISY Consortium and Laurent Le Meur who is CTO of the European Digital Reading Lab and President of the Readium Foundation.
CLARISSA WEST-WHITE: We have planned an excellent session for you today. And we thank you for coming and we also thank Marisa and Laurent for participating.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: Hi everyone. My name is Marisa DeMeglio and I'm going to talk more about what is accessibility. Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services for environments for people with disabilities. Now how does this apply to e-books? We're going to learn about accessibility and e-books, what it means, who it impacts, and how to do it right. So who's the audience for accessible e-books? Let's start by talking about print disabilities.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: A person with a disability cannot effectively read print because of a visual, physical, perceptual, developmental, cognitive, or learning disability. This includes blindness and visual impairment which affects 285 million people globally, dyslexia which is experienced by 10% of the global population, illiteracy which is on average present in 14% of the global population, motor impairments, and other disabilities.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: So why should you incorporate accessibility? Equal access to information and knowledge regardless of disability is a right confirmed by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. So then the case for accessibility is, first of all, what we just saw, that access to information is considered a fundamental human right. It's also often required by law.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: Accessibility techniques often overlap with other best practices. It's a great way to demonstrate corporate and social responsibility. And you can increase your audience reach. There's potentially 14% market share increase from incorporating accessibility. And consider that persons with disabilities in the US have over $220 billion in disposable spending power.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: And of course, with an aging population, we'll see these numbers increase. In fact, there are more people with disabilities globally than the combined total print sales for Harry Potter and The Twilight series combined. So what does an accessible e-book experience look like? The same accessible people can be read in many different ways. So let's look at examples of reading with eyes, ears, and fingers.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: Reading by sight can look like someone using the screen magnifier or even just enlarging the font to read. Other visual considerations, such as contrast, must also be taken into account. And finally, a user may wish to avoid hazards such as flashing or strobing. Reading with ears can look like listening to pre-recorded narration or speech synthesis.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: The device the reading on could be a laptop, a phone, or specialized reader. And in an audio first environment, we really notice the need for structured content. Reading with fingers can look like someone using a refreshable braille display, which offers around 80 cells at once and gives a line by line reading experience. So that's an overview of some of the needs of users when they interact with content.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: But what about getting the content to them in the first place? Content should be available at the same time and at no additional expense. Distribution channels must also support accessibility throughout, so from logging in, to shopping, to making the purchase, to opening the book, to creating bookmarks and adjusting settings, everything must be accessible.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: We'll focus on two areas. We'll first discuss the accessibility of the e-book files themselves. And also we'll see that there are accessibility repercussions throughout the supply chain. So talking about the e-books themselves. What do they look like? We're going to look at the EPUB format. It's an e-book file format and it's the industry standard.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: EPUB is an open standard, meaning that it's not proprietary. It's free to use. Accessibility is the guiding principle of EPUB work and it's present throughout. And then just a bit of history. EPUB 2 came out in 2007, version 3 in 2011, and most recently version 3.2 in 2019. So that's 14 years of evolution and real life use, not to mention formats that came before EPUB that inform it, such as OEBPS and DAISY digital talking books.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: So currently EPUB 3.2 is the latest revision. And EPUB 3.3 is under development at the World Wide Web Consortium or the W3C as it's known.
LAURENT LE MEUR: Hello. I'm Laurent and I'm very happy to participate in this panel today with Marisa and Clarissa. Soon the accessibility of digital publications will no longer be an option but a legal obligation in Europe. This will become the only conceivable way to produce marketable e-books. Players who have not anticipated this could disappear from the digital landscape after 2025.
LAURENT LE MEUR: These lines were written in a recent document of the French Association of Publishers, the SNE. Accessible books may be adapted from raw content or from existing books by non-profit organizations working in favor of print disabled people. There is a copyright exemption which allows this in Europe and the US.
LAURENT LE MEUR: Such books can then be shared between libraries for print disabled people via the accessible book consortium, the ABC. Older e-books-- this is new and this is where legislation come into play-- are created born accessible by the original publisher. Because making a PDF file accessible is very difficult, the publishing industry has chosen e-books Tree as its format of choice for such accessible e-books.
LAURENT LE MEUR: A common question is, how many e-books are accessible? Or what is the percentage of the book production which is accessible? In fact, nobody really knows. We hear that less than 10% of the whole production of the publishing industry is accessible. But the e-books usually taken into account in such evaluation are those produced by organizations for print disabled people.
LAURENT LE MEUR: So this covers books in large characters, books in braille, or digital books in DAISY format. How many novels produced in EPUB can be read on an accessible reading app at the moment? Nobody really knows. And why? Because publishers are only starting creating born accessible books and adding accessible metadata to them.
LAURENT LE MEUR: Metadata are key to follow the progression of accessible e-books in the global production.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: Our next topic is accessibility checking. So what is it? It's a methodology to ensure content is accessible. You should do it because remediation is expensive and more accessible is better. We'll take a closer look at accessibility checking, but first we should learn about accessibility standards. So how do you know what rules and guidelines exist for making content accessible? This is where accessibility standards come in.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: What are the actual standards? Well, there are two complementary sets of guidelines for us to consider. First, there's the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, abbreviated WCAG and pronounced "wuh-cag." These are developed at the W3C. They explain how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. WCAG conformance is described in terms of levels, A, AA, AAA.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: WCAG 2.1 is the current version, with 2.2 on the way later this year. And there's a bit of news. The first public draft version 3 was just released the other day. Next, let's learn what the EPUB accessibility specification is. The current version is 1.0. It incorporates guidelines from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0, which was the most current version when the EPUB accessibility specification was written.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: And it adds EPUB specific requirements to web content requirements. So now we know why we should check for accessibility and where the rules and guidelines come from. But what does the process of checking actually look like? You'll learn about two modes of checking, one is automated and the other is manual. Automated checking evaluates machine readable aspects of content against a set of rules, and around 30% of accessibility requirements can be checked automatically.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: Manual checking tests real world usability and employs different user scenarios. I really want to emphasize that this is important and specialized work so please do hire experts. There are tools that you should know about as well that can help you with accessibility checking. The first is called Ace by DAISY, and the second is called SMART which is also by DAISY.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: So let's see what each of them can do. First, let's look at Ace by DAISY. Ace by DAISY is an automated accessibility checker for EPUB. It's free and open source. It checks against the EPUB accessibility specification which includes Web Content Accessibility Guidelines checks. It offers a cross platform graphical drag and drop interface.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: And it's also available for programmatic usages as a code library. There's an integrated knowledge base. And it can be incorporated into a production workflow or used independently. So all that said, let's see a demo of Ace. You start out by dragging and dropping an EPUB file or folder into Ace.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: And then it runs. And it gives you a report. The report is broken up into different sections represented by tabs at the top of the screen. For example, we can look at the violations tab and we see a list of all the places where the checks were not fulfilled. It describes the severity of the issue, what it found that was wrong, a snippet of relevant code from the EPUB, and details about what could have triggered the violation.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: Now what's also available is filtering. So you can filter the list of violations by impact or severity, rule set, rule, and even location within the EPUB, so that's which specific file your problem was found in. You can also learn how to fix your issue because Ace has an integrated knowledge base, which is actually the DAISY accessible publishing knowledge base. So just click learn more to go to the relevant section in the knowledge base.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: And here you'll find techniques and examples to help you solve your issue. Ace also has a metadata summary showing all the metadata found in the publication and highlighting any missing accessibility metadata. By the way, we're going to talk more about metadata next. And finally, the images tab of Ace is very useful when reviewing your image alt text or descriptions or captions.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: It creates a table of all the images in the publication and also shows what it found as the textual equivalent. So it's easy to see where there's no text equivalent or to see if what you wrote actually makes sense when you look at it next to the image. I want to show you how to save the report from Ace because we'll need it in a second and I just want to make sure that you know what that step looks like.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: So you just choose export. And then it asks you for location to save your file. And that's it. That should give you an idea of what automated accessibility checking looks like. Now let's see a tool that can help us with manual checking called SMART. SMART guides you through the manual checking process.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: Its checkpoints are tailored based on the properties of your publication. It generates a clear and consistent report. And you can sign up for a demo. Or you could become a permanent user via the Inclusive Publishing Partner program. Now let's see a demo of SMART. And we're going to start by importing the report that we exported from Ace.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: So you just drag and drop it right into SMART. And SMART uses that to learn about what features your publication has so that it can customize the conformance checkpoints. So we're going to see that and we're going to look at the conformance section. The first checkpoint here is about non-text content. And it prompts me to verify that the images are meaningfully described by text.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: It offers techniques and documentation about this topic, and it lets me choose pass fail or not applicable. Next, we're going to see that there are many conformance topics that are grayed out that are related to audio and video because SMART knows that my EPUB doesn't have any of that so those checkpoints don't apply. The next conformance checkpoint is about using structural elements properly. There are many more checkpoints, and I've gone ahead and filled them out just to save time.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: We're going to have a closer look at metadata, but for now I'm skipping ahead to the report generation feature. So you go to report to see a summary of your conformance level. And now you can see the clear and consistent report generated by SMART. So now we've looked at some strategies for checking and improving accessibility of your content.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: But let's see, how do you communicate to everyone that you've made such an effort to create accessible publications? And how you do that is to use metadata. The purpose of accessible metadata is to enable the discovery of accessibility features in your EPUB. So what metadata standards should you know about? Well there's ONIX.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: And you can include accessibility metadata via ONIX records so that that data is available in distribution channels. ONIX has codes to describe granular accessibility features and also to describe performance to the EPUB accessibility specification. ONIX data lives in its own file, not necessarily inside the EPUB itself, but it can be referred to from it. The next metadata standard is Schema.org. Schema.org metadata enables discovery of accessibility features no matter how the publication is distributed or consumed.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: It is contained within the EPUB package document. It has properties used to identify the accessible qualities of the publication. And then we'll talk about evaluation metadata, which is not necessarily its own standard per se but it uses properties from Dublin Core and also the EPUB accessibility vocabulary to describe conformance and certification credentials. For example, which specification does it conform to?
MARISA DEMEGLIO: Which organizations certified it? And where the certification report can be found? And I'd also like to mention some of the current developments in accessibility metadata. The first version of the user experience guide will be released soon. And the objective of this is to guide retailers and distributors about how to interpret accessibility metadata, and how to display it in a user friendly way for readers.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: There's also work going on to harmonize different formats. The goal here is to provide appropriate accessibility metadata no matter which metadata format you're using. And good progress has been made in harmonizing Schema.org and ONIX accessibility metadata with MARC 21 and some other formats on the radar. So I said we'd go back to SMART's metadata features. So here's a tip. You can use smart to generate metadata records.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: What we're going to do is go into the discovery tab of SMART and we'll see different accessibility properties listed which we can check off. So we go to discovery and we see different things that we can select. SMART will even generate a human readable accessibility summary based on the information you provided. Then you press generate.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: And you get some markup that you can copy and paste into your EPUB package document. Also if we go to the distribution tab, we can create an ONIX record through a similar process. I go through and I select the applicable fields. And then at the bottom, again, I'm going to press generate. And see the ONIX record that gets created. And finally, when we go to the result tab of SMART, we can see that this generates some metadata to summarize the results of your checking and also to include your conformance level and evaluator information.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: So I hope that you now see how metadata enables discovery of accessibility features to give your content maximum audience reach.
LAURENT LE MEUR: Let's talk about reading applications now and accessible reading applications. We need applications that take advantage of accessible EPUBs, meaning that they can for example read the alternative text which is provided with an image. We need applications that have an accessible user interface that can be controlled via voice over on an iPad or via keystrokes and a screen reader on a PC or Mac.
LAURENT LE MEUR: A screen reader by the way is a software which reads aloud the information displayed on the screen. For that, the application must associate useful information with each label, with each button, which is affordance, which appears on the screen. We need also applications that support an accessible friendly DRM and means of production that does the break content accessibility.
LAURENT LE MEUR: And so at EDRLab, we have developed Thorium Reader as such an application. It is multilingual. It is multi-platform, on Windows Mac, Linux. It is free. And it is open source. Plus, it is compliant with the LCP DRM, which is accessible friendly. I mean, it doesn't break the accessibility of the content, and which is now an ISO technical specification.
LAURENT LE MEUR: Thorium Reader is also fully usable with the best known screen readers on the market, especially voiceover and NVIDIA. At the start of the speech, I talked about 2025, about what would happen in 2025. At this date the EU Accessibility Act will come into force, meaning that publishers, booksellers, public libraries, and reading applications must be ready by 2025.
LAURENT LE MEUR: There will be for publishers an application to generate born accessible books unless they are too complex, to generate born accessible, which is still to be clearly defined. There is still a difficulty for publishers to certify that what they have done is fully accessible. It is currently not possible to accept that fully automatically.
LAURENT LE MEUR: Human intervention is still necessary to check things like the proper use of HTML semantics, or that the alternative text provided with an image is of sufficient quality. This is a burden because it's costly if it's done for each book produced by a publisher. So in many countries, there is currently an open discussion about certifying production workflows rather than individual e-books.
LAURENT LE MEUR: Generating accessible content is key but it's not sufficient. The whole chain of distribution of e-books must be made accessible, especially websites of booksellers and public libraries. What does it mean? It means making website interfaces accessible. It means using the discovery of accessible books via specific filters into search specific icons, accessibility icons, and a good use of accessible metadata.
LAURENT LE MEUR: But it also means making it accessible the act of buying or borrowing the e-book which is also quite difficult. In France, the preparation for the EU Accessibility Act began two years ago. And it is led by the Ministry of Culture with all the publishing industry. And the French Association of Publishers has just published an interesting document called the Charter which details how publishers in France should implement accessibility standards.
LAURENT LE MEUR: Booksellers and public libraries are also asked to make their websites accessible urgently. LCP is recommended as a DRM. And accessible reading apps are currently developed especially well on mobile Readium based application, which are usually accessible, and the Thorium Reader, and forks of Thorium Reader.
LAURENT LE MEUR: And the same is happening in every EU country. EDRLab, which is an association of the publishing industry with many European members have a working group exchanging a national implementation on the EU directive. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Segment:0 .
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CLARISSA WEST-WHITE: Welcome to NISO 2021's session on accessibility and e-books, strategies for ensuring it is done well. I am your moderator Clarissa West-White from Bethune-Cookman University where I am the research librarian and reference instructor. Joining me today is Marisa DeMeglio who is a software developer for the DAISY Consortium and Laurent Le Meur who is CTO of the European Digital Reading Lab and President of the Readium Foundation.
CLARISSA WEST-WHITE: We have planned an excellent session for you today. And we thank you for coming and we also thank Marisa and Laurent for participating.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: Hi everyone. My name is Marisa DeMeglio and I'm going to talk more about what is accessibility. Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services for environments for people with disabilities. Now how does this apply to e-books? We're going to learn about accessibility and e-books, what it means, who it impacts, and how to do it right. So who's the audience for accessible e-books? Let's start by talking about print disabilities.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: A person with a disability cannot effectively read print because of a visual, physical, perceptual, developmental, cognitive, or learning disability. This includes blindness and visual impairment which affects 285 million people globally, dyslexia which is experienced by 10% of the global population, illiteracy which is on average present in 14% of the global population, motor impairments, and other disabilities.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: So why should you incorporate accessibility? Equal access to information and knowledge regardless of disability is a right confirmed by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. So then the case for accessibility is, first of all, what we just saw, that access to information is considered a fundamental human right. It's also often required by law.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: Accessibility techniques often overlap with other best practices. It's a great way to demonstrate corporate and social responsibility. And you can increase your audience reach. There's potentially 14% market share increase from incorporating accessibility. And consider that persons with disabilities in the US have over $220 billion in disposable spending power.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: And of course, with an aging population, we'll see these numbers increase. In fact, there are more people with disabilities globally than the combined total print sales for Harry Potter and The Twilight series combined. So what does an accessible e-book experience look like? The same accessible people can be read in many different ways. So let's look at examples of reading with eyes, ears, and fingers.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: Reading by sight can look like someone using the screen magnifier or even just enlarging the font to read. Other visual considerations, such as contrast, must also be taken into account. And finally, a user may wish to avoid hazards such as flashing or strobing. Reading with ears can look like listening to pre-recorded narration or speech synthesis.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: The device the reading on could be a laptop, a phone, or specialized reader. And in an audio first environment, we really notice the need for structured content. Reading with fingers can look like someone using a refreshable braille display, which offers around 80 cells at once and gives a line by line reading experience. So that's an overview of some of the needs of users when they interact with content.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: But what about getting the content to them in the first place? Content should be available at the same time and at no additional expense. Distribution channels must also support accessibility throughout, so from logging in, to shopping, to making the purchase, to opening the book, to creating bookmarks and adjusting settings, everything must be accessible.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: We'll focus on two areas. We'll first discuss the accessibility of the e-book files themselves. And also we'll see that there are accessibility repercussions throughout the supply chain. So talking about the e-books themselves. What do they look like? We're going to look at the EPUB format. It's an e-book file format and it's the industry standard.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: EPUB is an open standard, meaning that it's not proprietary. It's free to use. Accessibility is the guiding principle of EPUB work and it's present throughout. And then just a bit of history. EPUB 2 came out in 2007, version 3 in 2011, and most recently version 3.2 in 2019. So that's 14 years of evolution and real life use, not to mention formats that came before EPUB that inform it, such as OEBPS and DAISY digital talking books.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: So currently EPUB 3.2 is the latest revision. And EPUB 3.3 is under development at the World Wide Web Consortium or the W3C as it's known.
LAURENT LE MEUR: Hello. I'm Laurent and I'm very happy to participate in this panel today with Marisa and Clarissa. Soon the accessibility of digital publications will no longer be an option but a legal obligation in Europe. This will become the only conceivable way to produce marketable e-books. Players who have not anticipated this could disappear from the digital landscape after 2025.
LAURENT LE MEUR: These lines were written in a recent document of the French Association of Publishers, the SNE. Accessible books may be adapted from raw content or from existing books by non-profit organizations working in favor of print disabled people. There is a copyright exemption which allows this in Europe and the US.
LAURENT LE MEUR: Such books can then be shared between libraries for print disabled people via the accessible book consortium, the ABC. Older e-books-- this is new and this is where legislation come into play-- are created born accessible by the original publisher. Because making a PDF file accessible is very difficult, the publishing industry has chosen e-books Tree as its format of choice for such accessible e-books.
LAURENT LE MEUR: A common question is, how many e-books are accessible? Or what is the percentage of the book production which is accessible? In fact, nobody really knows. We hear that less than 10% of the whole production of the publishing industry is accessible. But the e-books usually taken into account in such evaluation are those produced by organizations for print disabled people.
LAURENT LE MEUR: So this covers books in large characters, books in braille, or digital books in DAISY format. How many novels produced in EPUB can be read on an accessible reading app at the moment? Nobody really knows. And why? Because publishers are only starting creating born accessible books and adding accessible metadata to them.
LAURENT LE MEUR: Metadata are key to follow the progression of accessible e-books in the global production.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: Our next topic is accessibility checking. So what is it? It's a methodology to ensure content is accessible. You should do it because remediation is expensive and more accessible is better. We'll take a closer look at accessibility checking, but first we should learn about accessibility standards. So how do you know what rules and guidelines exist for making content accessible? This is where accessibility standards come in.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: What are the actual standards? Well, there are two complementary sets of guidelines for us to consider. First, there's the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, abbreviated WCAG and pronounced "wuh-cag." These are developed at the W3C. They explain how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. WCAG conformance is described in terms of levels, A, AA, AAA.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: WCAG 2.1 is the current version, with 2.2 on the way later this year. And there's a bit of news. The first public draft version 3 was just released the other day. Next, let's learn what the EPUB accessibility specification is. The current version is 1.0. It incorporates guidelines from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0, which was the most current version when the EPUB accessibility specification was written.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: And it adds EPUB specific requirements to web content requirements. So now we know why we should check for accessibility and where the rules and guidelines come from. But what does the process of checking actually look like? You'll learn about two modes of checking, one is automated and the other is manual. Automated checking evaluates machine readable aspects of content against a set of rules, and around 30% of accessibility requirements can be checked automatically.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: Manual checking tests real world usability and employs different user scenarios. I really want to emphasize that this is important and specialized work so please do hire experts. There are tools that you should know about as well that can help you with accessibility checking. The first is called Ace by DAISY, and the second is called SMART which is also by DAISY.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: So let's see what each of them can do. First, let's look at Ace by DAISY. Ace by DAISY is an automated accessibility checker for EPUB. It's free and open source. It checks against the EPUB accessibility specification which includes Web Content Accessibility Guidelines checks. It offers a cross platform graphical drag and drop interface.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: And it's also available for programmatic usages as a code library. There's an integrated knowledge base. And it can be incorporated into a production workflow or used independently. So all that said, let's see a demo of Ace. You start out by dragging and dropping an EPUB file or folder into Ace.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: And then it runs. And it gives you a report. The report is broken up into different sections represented by tabs at the top of the screen. For example, we can look at the violations tab and we see a list of all the places where the checks were not fulfilled. It describes the severity of the issue, what it found that was wrong, a snippet of relevant code from the EPUB, and details about what could have triggered the violation.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: Now what's also available is filtering. So you can filter the list of violations by impact or severity, rule set, rule, and even location within the EPUB, so that's which specific file your problem was found in. You can also learn how to fix your issue because Ace has an integrated knowledge base, which is actually the DAISY accessible publishing knowledge base. So just click learn more to go to the relevant section in the knowledge base.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: And here you'll find techniques and examples to help you solve your issue. Ace also has a metadata summary showing all the metadata found in the publication and highlighting any missing accessibility metadata. By the way, we're going to talk more about metadata next. And finally, the images tab of Ace is very useful when reviewing your image alt text or descriptions or captions.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: It creates a table of all the images in the publication and also shows what it found as the textual equivalent. So it's easy to see where there's no text equivalent or to see if what you wrote actually makes sense when you look at it next to the image. I want to show you how to save the report from Ace because we'll need it in a second and I just want to make sure that you know what that step looks like.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: So you just choose export. And then it asks you for location to save your file. And that's it. That should give you an idea of what automated accessibility checking looks like. Now let's see a tool that can help us with manual checking called SMART. SMART guides you through the manual checking process.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: Its checkpoints are tailored based on the properties of your publication. It generates a clear and consistent report. And you can sign up for a demo. Or you could become a permanent user via the Inclusive Publishing Partner program. Now let's see a demo of SMART. And we're going to start by importing the report that we exported from Ace.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: So you just drag and drop it right into SMART. And SMART uses that to learn about what features your publication has so that it can customize the conformance checkpoints. So we're going to see that and we're going to look at the conformance section. The first checkpoint here is about non-text content. And it prompts me to verify that the images are meaningfully described by text.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: It offers techniques and documentation about this topic, and it lets me choose pass fail or not applicable. Next, we're going to see that there are many conformance topics that are grayed out that are related to audio and video because SMART knows that my EPUB doesn't have any of that so those checkpoints don't apply. The next conformance checkpoint is about using structural elements properly. There are many more checkpoints, and I've gone ahead and filled them out just to save time.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: We're going to have a closer look at metadata, but for now I'm skipping ahead to the report generation feature. So you go to report to see a summary of your conformance level. And now you can see the clear and consistent report generated by SMART. So now we've looked at some strategies for checking and improving accessibility of your content.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: But let's see, how do you communicate to everyone that you've made such an effort to create accessible publications? And how you do that is to use metadata. The purpose of accessible metadata is to enable the discovery of accessibility features in your EPUB. So what metadata standards should you know about? Well there's ONIX.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: And you can include accessibility metadata via ONIX records so that that data is available in distribution channels. ONIX has codes to describe granular accessibility features and also to describe performance to the EPUB accessibility specification. ONIX data lives in its own file, not necessarily inside the EPUB itself, but it can be referred to from it. The next metadata standard is Schema.org. Schema.org metadata enables discovery of accessibility features no matter how the publication is distributed or consumed.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: It is contained within the EPUB package document. It has properties used to identify the accessible qualities of the publication. And then we'll talk about evaluation metadata, which is not necessarily its own standard per se but it uses properties from Dublin Core and also the EPUB accessibility vocabulary to describe conformance and certification credentials. For example, which specification does it conform to?
MARISA DEMEGLIO: Which organizations certified it? And where the certification report can be found? And I'd also like to mention some of the current developments in accessibility metadata. The first version of the user experience guide will be released soon. And the objective of this is to guide retailers and distributors about how to interpret accessibility metadata, and how to display it in a user friendly way for readers.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: There's also work going on to harmonize different formats. The goal here is to provide appropriate accessibility metadata no matter which metadata format you're using. And good progress has been made in harmonizing Schema.org and ONIX accessibility metadata with MARC 21 and some other formats on the radar. So I said we'd go back to SMART's metadata features. So here's a tip. You can use smart to generate metadata records.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: What we're going to do is go into the discovery tab of SMART and we'll see different accessibility properties listed which we can check off. So we go to discovery and we see different things that we can select. SMART will even generate a human readable accessibility summary based on the information you provided. Then you press generate.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: And you get some markup that you can copy and paste into your EPUB package document. Also if we go to the distribution tab, we can create an ONIX record through a similar process. I go through and I select the applicable fields. And then at the bottom, again, I'm going to press generate. And see the ONIX record that gets created. And finally, when we go to the result tab of SMART, we can see that this generates some metadata to summarize the results of your checking and also to include your conformance level and evaluator information.
MARISA DEMEGLIO: So I hope that you now see how metadata enables discovery of accessibility features to give your content maximum audience reach.
LAURENT LE MEUR: Let's talk about reading applications now and accessible reading applications. We need applications that take advantage of accessible EPUBs, meaning that they can for example read the alternative text which is provided with an image. We need applications that have an accessible user interface that can be controlled via voice over on an iPad or via keystrokes and a screen reader on a PC or Mac.
LAURENT LE MEUR: A screen reader by the way is a software which reads aloud the information displayed on the screen. For that, the application must associate useful information with each label, with each button, which is affordance, which appears on the screen. We need also applications that support an accessible friendly DRM and means of production that does the break content accessibility.
LAURENT LE MEUR: And so at EDRLab, we have developed Thorium Reader as such an application. It is multilingual. It is multi-platform, on Windows Mac, Linux. It is free. And it is open source. Plus, it is compliant with the LCP DRM, which is accessible friendly. I mean, it doesn't break the accessibility of the content, and which is now an ISO technical specification.
LAURENT LE MEUR: Thorium Reader is also fully usable with the best known screen readers on the market, especially voiceover and NVIDIA. At the start of the speech, I talked about 2025, about what would happen in 2025. At this date the EU Accessibility Act will come into force, meaning that publishers, booksellers, public libraries, and reading applications must be ready by 2025.
LAURENT LE MEUR: There will be for publishers an application to generate born accessible books unless they are too complex, to generate born accessible, which is still to be clearly defined. There is still a difficulty for publishers to certify that what they have done is fully accessible. It is currently not possible to accept that fully automatically.
LAURENT LE MEUR: Human intervention is still necessary to check things like the proper use of HTML semantics, or that the alternative text provided with an image is of sufficient quality. This is a burden because it's costly if it's done for each book produced by a publisher. So in many countries, there is currently an open discussion about certifying production workflows rather than individual e-books.
LAURENT LE MEUR: Generating accessible content is key but it's not sufficient. The whole chain of distribution of e-books must be made accessible, especially websites of booksellers and public libraries. What does it mean? It means making website interfaces accessible. It means using the discovery of accessible books via specific filters into search specific icons, accessibility icons, and a good use of accessible metadata.
LAURENT LE MEUR: But it also means making it accessible the act of buying or borrowing the e-book which is also quite difficult. In France, the preparation for the EU Accessibility Act began two years ago. And it is led by the Ministry of Culture with all the publishing industry. And the French Association of Publishers has just published an interesting document called the Charter which details how publishers in France should implement accessibility standards.
LAURENT LE MEUR: Booksellers and public libraries are also asked to make their websites accessible urgently. LCP is recommended as a DRM. And accessible reading apps are currently developed especially well on mobile Readium based application, which are usually accessible, and the Thorium Reader, and forks of Thorium Reader.
LAURENT LE MEUR: And the same is happening in every EU country. EDRLab, which is an association of the publishing industry with many European members have a working group exchanging a national implementation on the EU directive. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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