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

Dear Vincent,

The Low Vision Task Force of the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group researched many barriers to reading content on the web with low vision. We found that the reflow problem was among the worst barriers. One reason is that lack of reflow impairs access for almost all types of low vision except color blindness.

One property of our Task Force was that no two of the participants had the same type of low vision.  That meant we had 11 people with 11 different presentations of low vision. When we encountered an issue, we usually had a member of our Task Force who experienced that issue. That brought to life many of the research issues we read about.

During one of our meeting on day, we discovered that we all had "tunnel vision" when it came to reading. We had our members with peripheral  visual field loss who had what is commonly referred to as "tunnel vision". However, we realized when our members with reduced visual acuity had to enlarge text on the screen, browser viewport acted just like a peripheral field loss. It cut off our view. Our electronic view of text on a page was a "tunnel vision" view. That was when we realized a reasonable format for reading short lines of text was required for almost everyone who had low vision. The reflow success criterion SC 1.4.10 came from that observation. Our group also discovered and proved that it took about 50 to 150 times the scrolling operations to read without reflow as it did with reflow. That is a major barrier. Our task for concluded that text that did not reflow at about 1/4 the line length of normal text, was not accessible. That is, no individual could read it effectively.

If you would like to understand this better see:
Understanding Success Criterion 1.4.10: Reflow<https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/reflow.html>.

Best, Wayne Dick





________________________________
From: vincent.wartelle@isicrunch.com <vincent.wartelle@isicrunch.com>
Sent: Friday, July 12, 2019 9:30 AM
To: 'George Kerscher'; Wayne Dick; public-epub3@w3.org
Subject: RE: Fixed Format EPUB all seem to fail WCAG 2.1 SC 1.4.10


Hello,

As an EPUB3 Fixed Layout producer since 2010, I do agree that this format is not tailored for accessibility.

That’s why we have launched a R&D program to produce Digital Ressources from PDF that are reflowable,

that means that the ressources could be delivered with Text, DYS and TTS tools incorporated into them.

The first outcomes very promising of our research involving AI, has been presented during the Digital Publishing Summit

in Paris in June (thanks to EDRLab) and I would be interested to discuss further on that matter.

Best regards

Vincent Wartelle

CEO

M : +33 6 70 07 75 49     T : +33 1 69 29 89 03
ISI
1 avenue de l'Atlantique – Bâtiment Mac Kinley
91940 LES ULI.

S – France

www.isicrunch.com<http://www.isicrunch.com/>
LinkedIn: https://fr.linkedin.com/in/vincentwartelle



From: George Kerscher <kerscher@montana.com>
Sent: vendredi 12 juillet 2019 00:07
To: 'Wayne Dick' <Wayne.Dick@csulb.edu>; public-epub3@w3.org
Subject: RE: Fixed Format EPUB all seem to fail WCAG 2.1 SC 1.4.10



Hello Wayne,



We highly recommend that publishers use reflowable EPUB 3 to make content as broadly accessible as possible. But EPUB uses HTML to represent its content, so we also have to work with publishers to get them to follow WCAG guidelines. We don’t restrict content at the core specification level. The EPUB Accessibility specification is where we inform publishers on how to apply WCAG and what we use to evaluate publications for conformance.



Any publisher who distributes EPUB 3 as a fixed format should put in the accessibilitySummary that this is in fixed layout and is not accessible. We agree with you that fixed layouts are not generally accessible. Screen enlargement is not the only problem with them.



Where are you getting these fixed layout EPUBs from, out of curiosity?



Best

George







From: Wayne Dick <Wayne.Dick@csulb.edu<mailto:Wayne.Dick@csulb.edu>>
Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2019 2:26 PM
To: public-epub3@w3.org<mailto:public-epub3@w3.org>
Cc: George Kerscher <kerscher@montana.com<mailto:kerscher@montana.com>>
Subject: Fixed Format EPUB all seem to fail WCAG 2.1 SC 1.4.10



Dear Community Group,

While I was looking at the EPUB Content Document 3.2 from the W3C Community Group I could not help but notice that there is no case to cover 320 CSS Pixels in width. Support for this case is now required (normative) by WCAG 2.1 in recognition of the fact that horizontal scrolling does not support effective reading.



For an easy visualization of this issue you may look at, https://nosetothepage.org/Fitz/2dScroll.html. This presentation is good for sighted readers because our best examples are visual. If a blind user would like to experience the issue imagine a braille document where each line of text was laid out across two pages, a left and right page. To read a line of text, you would start on the left page and then move to the right page; find the remainder of the line to read on the right page; finish reading the line on the right page and then find the next line on the left page. This is how people with low vision have been expected to read forever. To read a 100 page book requires 10,000 such transitions from page to page, at a minimum. Note: When I say minimum I mean the minimum number of scrolls needed for the user to have an opportunity to see each letter once.  In recognition of this difficulty the W3C developed the Reflow success criterion (SC 1.4.10). This severe problem for people with partial sight was trivialize by the Blind and Visual Impairment support community for many years, and it probably cost many young people the opportunity to attend and / or complete college.



I personally worked my way through a graduate program in mathematics using technologies that required horizontal scrolling. The only thing that got me through was my deep love of the subject. At that time we could not even get recorded books for the blind, since the Chafee amendment had not passed.



In my 30 years as a Professor of computer science I taught around 2400 CS majors. In that time 2 students with partial sight graduated from our program. Give 3,000,000 people with partial sight in the US that is a profoundly low level of under representation. Fixed Format explains a lot of that.



Sincerely, Wayne