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

Dear Wayne,

Seems very interesting. Thank you.

I will read your document thoroughly, and I’ll get back to you if I have any
comments or questions.

For sure, that will help taking decision for making specific CSS for reflow
text in that case.

Best regards

Vincent

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 ULIS – France

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

 

From: Wayne Dick <Wayne.Dick@csulb.edu> 
Sent: mercredi 17 juillet 2019 01:06
To: 'George Kerscher' <kerscher@montana.com>; public-epub3@w3.org;
vincent.wartelle@isicrunch.com
Subject: 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:  


 <https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/reflow.html> Understanding
Success Criterion 1.4.10: Reflow. 


 


Best, Wayne Dick


 

 

 

 

 

  _____  

From: vincent.wartelle@isicrunch.com <mailto:vincent.wartelle@isicrunch.com>
<vincent.wartelle@isicrunch.com <mailto:vincent.wartelle@isicrunch.com> >
Sent: Friday, July 12, 2019 9:30 AM
To: 'George Kerscher'; Wayne Dick; public-epub3@w3.org
<mailto: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

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

 

From: George Kerscher <kerscher@montana.com <mailto:kerscher@montana.com> > 
Sent: vendredi 12 juillet 2019 00:07
To: 'Wayne Dick' <Wayne.Dick@csulb.edu <mailto:Wayne.Dick@csulb.edu> >;
public-epub3@w3.org <mailto: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>
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