Re: Fixed Format EPUB all seem to fail WCAG 2.1 SC 1.4.10

Hello,

wouldn't it already be a solution to allow fixed layout only as an alternative
stylesheet and to require, that the complete information of an EPUB content
document is available even with scripting and styling switched off?

This means to remove the EPUB specific name value 'viewport' for the XHTML:meta
element and leave the layout to CSS without mixing layout conditions into the
XHTML, what is anyway already the basic idea of (X)HTML to separate content
from decoration.

To require access to alternative stylesheets (including user-stylesheets,
switching off style interpretation) is anyway already implicated with CSS
interpretation (even if several viewers still having a bug/gap providing an
interface to select alternative stylesheets, respectively to switch to the
default user-agent styling or a user-style).

Obviously for SVG content documents there is no primary reflowable variant, but
with elements title, desc, metadata there is a text alternative available (the
content of desc especially can be XHTML, if text has some advanced structure).
There could be a requirement to provide access to this text alternative in a
reflowable presentation.
Combined with the scalability of SVG this might already provide solutions for
authors and audience.

My observation with a test book with (long) poems is anyway, that especially
viewers with some interpretation of fixed layout have problems to present
fixed layout documents, for example if they have  a meta element indicating
something like
name="viewport" content="width=800, height=11200"
Often the poem is not readable anymore, because it is scaled down, until
the height fits into the available small presentation window, ignoring the
given height of 11200 px.
Taking into account this, the current fixed layout concept typically seems to
be already unusable due to problems concerning readability for any audience.
Effectively the audience has to unzip such fixed layout books and repairing
them first by removing the related meta element to get the content accessible.

Received on Saturday, 13 July 2019 10:12:02 UTC