Re: More metadata questions

“Thank you for all this discussion. I personally don't have much confidence with respect to the accessibility summary. My impression is that content producers don't have the skills, time and desire to create an accessibility summary by hand.”

Agreed. I’m a coder. Most authors are not.  I belong to the Alliance for Independent Authors with the goal of moving out of academia and into self-publishing. It is a huge business. I would not be using a traditional publisher.  Authors are going to create in whatever authoring system they are using: Word, Scrivener, Vellum, Pages, InDesign,  Atticus, etc. At what point would accessibility be introduced into this process? Most authors are focused on content and expect that the reading system will handle everything. The writing software would output to an ePub file. Unless there is a tool  authors can run their  manuscript through, it would have to be a check at the Kobo, or Amazon KDP level.  Or we would need to get the authoring software venders to the table.

Note: Independent authors are encouraged to create a separate deliverable for different types of consumers: paper books, eBooks, audio books, and interactive books (Alexa). I know we are focused on eBooks here.

I’m still fuzzy if this accessibility statement designed for machines/readers, publishers and indexing systems, or will the reader/consumer be using it?

dr

From: Gregorio Pellegrino - Fondazione LIA <gregorio.pellegrino@fondazionelia.org>
Date: Thursday, May 26, 2022 at 4:18 AM
To: Matt Garrish <matt.garrish@gmail.com>, 'John Foliot' <john@foliot.ca>, kerscher@montana.com <kerscher@montana.com>, public-publishingcg@w3.org <public-publishingcg@w3.org>, 'W3C EPUB 3 Working Group' <public-epub-wg@w3.org>
Subject: Re: More metadata questions
Thank you for all this discussion. I personally don't have much confidence with respect to the accessibility summary. My impression is that content producers don't have the skills, time and desire to create an accessibility summary by hand.

On the other hand, generating the accessibility summary automatically from the metadata is redundant to the data already present in machine-readable format.

Furthermore, if the rules for creating an accessibility summary from metadata are clear and shared and the text can be created automatically, who has to create it? Who publishes the EPUB file or who shows the metadata to users?

I know we are returning to issues that have already been addressed, but the misunderstanding about these starting points seems to me to be the basis of all the misunderstandings that have been expressed.

Gregorio


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Gregorio Pellegrino
Chief Accessibility Officer

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________________________________
From: Matt Garrish <matt.garrish@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2022 01:11
To: 'John Foliot' <john@foliot.ca>; kerscher@montana.com <kerscher@montana.com>; public-publishingcg@w3.org <public-publishingcg@w3.org>; 'W3C EPUB 3 Working Group' <public-epub-wg@w3.org>
Subject: RE: More metadata questions


> We can’t put the horse ahead of the cart here, either



Lol, I shouldn’t write when I’m in a rush. Hit me about an hour later while driving that I thoroughly messed that metaphor up… :)



Matt



From: Matt Garrish <matt.garrish@gmail.com>
Sent: May 25, 2022 4:17 PM
To: 'John Foliot' <john@foliot.ca>; kerscher@montana.com; public-publishingcg@w3.org; 'W3C EPUB 3 Working Group' <public-epub-wg@w3.org>
Subject: RE: More metadata questions



Looks like I’ve missed out on the back-and-forth today, but going back to the original questions:



> 1) Should the accessibilitySummary reference the *version* of WCAG being used?



I would say yes, but this is subjective and a topic for the task force to delve into. The dcterms:conformsTo statement provides the machine-processable information about what version of the EPUB standard and WCAG have been met, so no matter what is written in the summary I wouldn’t rely on it for machine processing purposes. It boils down to whether users need this information in a more readable form or whether reading systems should be expected to translate the conformance strings into something more readable.



> 2) "Structured" summaries - in my initial email I posed the question, 'could the summary be formatted as structured content?'



Sure, if you weren’t writing them in the EPUB package document. The schema.org metadata wasn’t created for EPUB. It was created in conjunction with the LRMI metadata for describing resources on the web. We’ve had to adapt it to the limitations of EPUB, as I mentioned in an earlier thread about sufficient access modes.



If you were to write the summary in HTML using RDFa or microdata, you could use whatever markup HTML allows, but the only way to make that available in an EPUB would be to reference the HTML as a linked record. We talked about moving to an approach like that back around the time of the 3.1 revision as part of developing a “browser friendly format”, but that fizzled out with IDPF. At this point in EPUB 3’s life, expecting reading systems to parse linked records for information is more fantasy than fiction. So the more realistic answer is, no, you can’t do it.



(Note that while you can technically write RDFa and microdata in meta tags, it’s generally discouraged. The language of the text should be available from the language of the HTML page when you’re writing the summary in the body.)



In any case, the history of the schema.org property development is why you won’t find commonality between the schema.org examples and EPUB. Aside from the package document being a unique case, there wasn’t an EPUB accessibility standard when the properties were developed. And as memory serves, when we created the summary property we weren’t considering listing conformance statements because it wasn’t clear then whether that would be how they were expressed. The definition was meant to be flexible as it’s a free-form field. No matter how helpful this new document proves, nothing we write in it will stop people from writing bad summaries. That’s the curse of human language.



We can’t put the horse ahead of the cart here, either, so while I’d be happy to update the KB or the techniques document, short of consensus on what we’re updating the guidance to we’ll have to live with the discrepancies. The differences generally reflect where we’ve been on summaries at various points in time. That’s a big part of why this task force is looking at developing a recommended set of guidelines for authoring.



Hope this helps,



Matt



From: John Foliot <john@foliot.ca<mailto:john@foliot.ca>>
Sent: May 25, 2022 10:17 AM
To: kerscher@montana.com<mailto:kerscher@montana.com>; public-publishingcg@w3.org<mailto:public-publishingcg@w3.org>; W3C EPUB 3 Working Group <public-epub-wg@w3.org<mailto:public-epub-wg@w3.org>>
Subject: Re: More metadata questions



Greetings All,



After George's response to my question yesterday, I also received a meeting notice for this Thursday's call, where one of the topics is "Accessibility Summary Authoring Guidelines - Draft Community Group Report 24 May 2022". I hope to attend that call, but would also like to ensure my questions are documented.



I have done a perfunctory review of that document, and note that 2 of my questions from yesterday remain vaguely defined. Specifically:

1) Should the accessibilitySummary reference the *version* of WCAG being used? In the 2 examples provided in that note, the first example DOES reference WCAG 2.0:

 (" The publication meets WCAG 2.0 Level AA.")



...however, the second example does not:

("... and it also meets the Web AccessibilityContent Guidelines (WCAG) at the double "AA" level.")

[JF please note the typo - requires a space between Accessibility and Content.]



Could this question be clarified and better specified in the document (I would personally recommend that it DOES reference the version number, but normative guidance one way or the other would be appreciated).



2) "Structured" summaries - in my initial email I posed the question, 'could the summary be formatted as structured content?' - i.e. in my example I offered a summary that contained a number of bullet points. Would that be acceptable, or would that be discouraged (or worse, non-conformant)?

EXAMPLE:

accessibilitySummary
"This publication conforms to the EPUB Accessibility 1.1 specification at WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

•       This publication contains mark-up to enable structural navigation and compatibility with assistive technologies.

•       Images in the publication are fully described.

•       The publication supports text reflow and allows for reading systems to apply options for foreground and background colors along with other visual adjustments.

•       Print page numbers are present to enable go-to-page functionality in reading systems.

•       There are no accessibility hazards.

•       The publication is screen-reader friendly."



Might I request that these questions be answered in the emergent document?

Additionally, what is the intended publishing track for this document - will it end up being an ePub WG Note? Other status?



Thanks in advance!



JF





On Tue, May 24, 2022 at 11:01 AM <kerscher@montana.com<mailto:kerscher@montana.com>> wrote:

Hello,



In the Publishing Community Group, we are working on the guidelines for the Accessibility Summary. We meet Thursdays at 14 UTC. I think it would be best to review the work happening there and join that discussion.



John, let me know if you want me to forward you the agenda and meeting information.



Best

George





From: John Foliot <john@foliot.ca<mailto:john@foliot.ca>>
Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2022 8:41 AM
To: W3C EPUB 3 Working Group <public-epub-wg@w3.org<mailto:public-epub-wg@w3.org>>
Subject: More metadata questions



Hello,



After reading through the documentation, I still have a question or two related to accessibilitySummary. Specifically, there are examples out there that, if not contradicting themselves, show different authoring patterns/examples which leaves me a wee bit uncertain what is the best pattern to use.



Specifically, at Schema.org<https://schema.org/accessibilitySummary> (linked from EPUB Accessibility 1.1<https://www.w3.org/TR/epub-a11y-11/>) the example offered there is:

accessibilitySummary

"Captions provided in English; short scenes in French have English subtitles instead."



However, at the Daisy<http://kb.daisy.org/publishing/docs/metadata/schema.org/accessibilitySummary.html> Accessible Publishing Knowledge Base<http://kb.daisy.org/publishing/docs/metadata/schema.org/accessibilitySummary.html> the example offered there is:

accessibilitySummary

"This publication conforms to the EPUB Accessibility specification at WCAG Level AA."
(JF: and specifically calling out WCAG, but without the version number).



I want to presume that the W3C publication is "more up-to-date", and while the examples don't directly contradict themselves, there are significant differences in what is offered as an authoring example. I want to make the following presumptions, but am seeking a sanity check here (please).

  *   The accessibilitySummary SHOULD<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2119> reference the version of WCAG that the ePub conforms to.
  *   The accessibilitySummary SHOULD provide content authored primarily to be read by a human.

     *   The accessibilitySummary MUST NOT use structured content (i.e. avoid using lists or tables in the Summary), although correct punctuation is important (seperate key concepts with a semicolon or period). The assumption here is that while the metadata text is likely just string-text (i.e. does not support HMTL markup), the punctuation makes the content more 'readable'.

Based on the two examples, I am looking at essentially merging the prose content from those examples together, to end up with something like:



accessibilitySummary

"This publication conforms to the EPUB Accessibility 1.1 specification at WCAG 2.1 Level AA. This publication contains mark-up to enable structural navigation and compatibility with assistive technologies. Images in the publication are fully described. The publication supports text reflow and allows for reading systems to apply options for foreground and background colors along with other visual adjustments. Print page numbers are present to enable go-to-page functionality in reading systems. There are no accessibility hazards. The publication is screen-reader friendly."



...and so, my final question is, does that summary look acceptable? Or am I overthinking this? While I am presuming NOT(*) to use structured data, should the URLS for EPUB Accessibility 1.1 and WCAG 2.1 specifications be provided in the summary?

(* or am I wrong there? From a readability perspective, I believe the statement could be formatted to be *more* readable by using bullet-points:



accessibilitySummary
"This publication conforms to the EPUB Accessibility 1.1 specification at WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

  *   This publication contains mark-up to enable structural navigation and compatibility with assistive technologies.
  *   Images in the publication are fully described.
  *   The publication supports text reflow and allows for reading systems to apply options for foreground and background colors along with other visual adjustments.
  *   Print page numbers are present to enable go-to-page functionality in reading systems.
  *   There are no accessibility hazards.
  *   The publication is screen-reader friendly."

...but may make it more verbose than necessary, or the formatting would be completely 'lost' by consuming systems. Thoughts? This bulleted list example *IS* more human readable...)



TIA



JF

--

John Foliot |
Senior Industry Specialist, Digital Accessibility |
W3C Accessibility Standards Contributor |

"I made this so long because I did not have time to make it shorter." - Pascal "links go places, buttons do things"




--

John Foliot |
Senior Industry Specialist, Digital Accessibility |
W3C Accessibility Standards Contributor |

"I made this so long because I did not have time to make it shorter." - Pascal "links go places, buttons do things"

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