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Re: EPUB-Experiences making them?

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From: Andrews, David B (DEED)
Date: Dec 5, 2014 8:35AM

There is currently a project going on to evaluate ePub 3 reading systems, software and devices. It is jointly sponsored by the DAISY Consortium and the "Book Industry Study Group." There are accessibility tests included -- and we are currently looking for volunteers to conduct additional accessibility testing.

The results so far are at: http://www.epubtest.org

Dave


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Alastair Campbell
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2014 4:47 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] EPUB-Experiences making them?

Duff Johnson wrote:

> Don't author tables, lists, paragraphs, etc that span pages. Unlike
> PDF, EPUB has (so far as I am aware, happy to be corrected) no means
> of associating semantic structures that span multiple pages.
>

I'm fairly sure that is not the case, although it depends on how you author it, and how you read it.

I've authored all of one epub so far [1], and I started by creating a basic HTML website, with headings, paragraphs, images, links, and tables. The core format is based on XHTML, with many peculiarities. Once I'd packaged an epub, I used Calibre to finish it and create a .mobi version.

I think some of the confusion comes from the tools, which vary in how they deal with things. For example, InDesign would (I assume) lead you to a more page-oriented approach, and iBooks author definitely does. InDesign allows for structure, iBooks author doesn't even do headings as far as I can tell.

On the client side, I found some annoying differences between iBooks and Kindle apps, where iBooks skips alt text, and Kindle doesn't announce headings. Something I did in the CSS that works fine for websites seemed to fix the textsize in iBooks (but not Kindle).

The core format (XHTML) obviously supports the basics, but the current user-agent support is all over the place, just from a bit of testing.

The accessible epub book someone mentioned was helpful, but it was the basic "how do you package an epub" that is really fiddly. Calibre is very helpful if you've taken the hand-coding approach.

Cheers,

-Alastair

1] http://www.nomensa.com/insights/improving-travel-website-accessibility