RE: [A11Y] Question from the Locators TF

Hello:

 

John is in a book club, and they are reading a title that has no print
equivalent . The members of the book club are on a wide range of platforms.
Many of the readers have selected larger fonts for their reading pleasure.
They want to turn to a passage in the book and it would help them to all be
on the same page. They want to go to that common page, and they know their
system supports Go-To the virtual page in the same way they go to a page in
a title that has a print equivalent. They are accustomed to go to the
beginning of a page and then move down to the paragraph they want to review.

 

Mary works for a publisher who is looking for a way to use a standardized
way to insert virtual page numbers in their title. They could just develop
their own approach, but Mary thinks it is better to use standards
established for this purpose. When They market the title, they will say that
it has xxx virtual print pages, which should be approximately the same
across the publishing chain for print or digital only titles.

 

Best

George

 

From: Reid, Wendy <wendy.reid@rakuten.com> 
Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2022 3:18 PM
To: public-epub-wg@w3.org; W3C Publishing Community Group
<public-publishingcg@w3.org>
Subject: [A11Y] Question from the Locators TF

 

Hi all, 

 

The Locators TF is working on an interoperable method for generating page
locators across reading systems and books. Just to give an idea of what
we're considering, we have developed a skeleton for an algorithm that could
parse an EPUB file and generate "locators" at defined intervals. 

 

One of the questions we are tackling now is where the locators live after
generation. In practice, reading systems do not typically write to the EPUB
file, meaning that if the locators are generated upon loading, they would
potentially live in a "virtual" space accessible to the reading system. This
virtual locator list would be usable by the reading system for things like
search or navigate to page but would not appear in text or in the DOM. 

 

This is the question we need help with. Our understanding is that locators
need to be accessible to assistive technology, though the user may turn them
on or off, which means we need to explore how locators need to be changed to
accommodate this. Any advice you can provide on:

*	the use cases of page numbers with AT, 
*	what use cases need to be supported, 
*	are there other ways page numbers/locators need to be exposed to the
user or AT

 

Please let us know if there are any questions, or if this is best discussed
on an upcoming call, our next one is April 29th at 10AM ET. 

 

Thanks,

Wendy 

Co-chair, EPUB3 WG