Re: New fundamental test book and covers

I feel like metadata is a red herring here, because while it's one of the use cases, the examples I gave (comics and picture books) are of cases where the art should be described, as meaningful images. This means there is a clear use case for cover alt being available to a book reader, regardless of options for encoding metadata. This means there are three plausible solutions:

1. Require reading systems to report any cover alt to AT, in some way, perhaps with visually hidden text marked as doc-cover.

2. Require reading systems to make the cover available to all readers, as well as AT, as an optional page that can be read in the reading order.

3. Tell content creators that if content from the cover is meaningful to the reading experience, they need to including it as a page in the reading order. (This is more or less what we do now.)

Three is the status quo and results in an inconsistent and confusing state of affairs.  Two is what I've always wished we do, but I have heard plenty of others in publishing who dislike having the cover in the reading order.  We ideally should do one or two.

Deborah

Received on Thursday, 6 December 2018 23:53:59 UTC