Re: [External] Re: New fundamental test book and covers

Good to see that accessibility of cover image has generated such a good 
discussion.
Clarifying the objective of this example sent by George.

In EPUB 3, cover was not accessible, we recognized it while development of 
WP, and worked on making it accessible.

But EPUB 3.x is still lagging behind in this, so the objective is to provide 
a "work around" for providing accessible cover in the existing environment 
and existing state of reading systems. This is why the focus is on content 
and not on updating reading systems.
It is difficult to come up with precise set of guidelines that will fit all 
kind of EPUB publications. So, I think that our approach should be to define 
some principles and allow content creators to develop best practices or 
their content based on the principles. The principles that we discussed 
were:
The main principle is that a cover should solve the same purpose for person 
with disability as it would do for any other person. for example, if a cover 
image is used for marketing or generating interest in the potential readers, 
the alt text should provide the same information to person with disability.
We encourage providing extended description, but it is not a hard 
requirement because many publishers are still at the level of providing 
meaningful alttext.

Title of the publication is exposed by reading systems, but metadata for 
author may or may not be exposed in accessible way.
So, title and author should be provided to ensure that both are available to 
readers. In the fundamental test book example, this info is the first piece 
in alt text, which is followed by description of the image.

So, the intent is to provide a simple example build on a set of principles, 
that can work in existing environment and existing reading systems.

With regards
Avneesh
-----Original Message----- 
From: Johnson, Rick
Sent: Friday, December 7, 2018 9:03
To: deborah.kaplan@suberic.net ; 'W3C EPUB 3 Community Group'
Subject: Re: [External] Re: New fundamental test book and covers

I don't see a way to move beyond #3 (the status quo).

#2 - The complexities of making something optional on a title by title 
basis, determining who is making it optional (publisher? Distributor? 
Author? Reader?  Can a teacher make it optional for a textbook, but only for 
specific classes? And on, and on...), and then inserting it into the reading 
order (is it maintained in the same place for every book on subsequent 
launches?  Can it be placed in arbitrary places?  Who determines this?), 
while requiring a reading system to solve this in order to be conformant, is 
too onerous.

#1 - The complexities of reverse engineering every AT and how to insert 
non-standard alt markup for it to be treated like standard alt markup, and 
requiring reading systems to do this (and maintain it as new AT emerge, and 
existing ones update) in order to be conformant, is too onerous.

We are left with #3.

-Rick


On 12/6/18, 4:54 PM, "deborah.kaplan@suberic.net" 
<deborah.kaplan@suberic.net> wrote:

    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 Friday, 7 December 2018 04:40:43 UTC