RE: Collections of web pages

> My interpretation is that this is like saying that a web page that has an incorrect order for part but not all of its content still fails. Isn’t it?

 

That’s essentially the problem. Trying to fit EPUB content into a page/set model is not just complicated by the packaging. You can make the case that reflowable epubs are just a single web page chunked into pieces for performance and content management reasons. It’s certainly possible to recreate a single page from them. It’s not always the case, though, as fixed layout publications are more like a multi-page set. Mis-sequence either and you end up with an unusable whole, but it’s hard to pick page/set as a consistent defining feature of the content.

 

> For an EPUB document, I don’t know if the expectation is that the EPUB reading system will surface the publication title at the highest level (e.g., “War and Peace”) or the more specific content page title

 

EPUB provides great latitude in terms of building reading systems, so there isn’t one answer. App-based reading systems are likely to ignore the individual page titles and treat the content like a single page, while web-based reading systems are likely to report the page title as each separate document is loaded. That’s why we push people to ensure both are set. The single page-like experience is more a fiction of the reading system so that the user doesn’t have to be bothered with the set, as the set can be somewhat arbitrary (vendors sometimes force chunking that doesn’t make a lot of logical sense).

 

> but we still need to decide if the EPUB is a set or a single page.

 

I find the single page definition places the packaging above the content, and the packaging is primarily for distribution. Conversely, the set definition captures the individual content documents in the package but misses the singular nature of the content. That’s why I’d favour a modified definition for digital publications. It also fits with future formats, like audiobooks, as we don’t want to get too epub-specific.

 

Matt

 

From: Andrew Kirkpatrick <akirkpat@adobe.com> 
Sent: April 14, 2020 11:33
To: Alastair Campbell <acampbell@nomensa.com>
Cc: 'Avneesh Singh' <avneesh.sg@gmail.com>; Matt Garrish <matt.garrish@gmail.com>; 'WCAG' <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Collections of web pages

 

The aspects from http://idpf.org/epub/a11y/#sec-wcag-eval that caught my eye as not fitting the ‘web page’ model were:

 

> it is not sufficient for individual Content Documents to have a logical reading order if the publication presents them in the wrong order.

 

AWK: My interpretation is that this is like saying that a web page that has an incorrect order for part but not all of its content still fails. Isn’t it?

 

> including a title for every Content Document is complementary to providing a title for the publication: the overall accessibility is affected if either is missing.

 

AWK: Yes, that is a difference. I haven’t looked at an EPUB reader in a while, but it seems that this is comparable to a single-page web app having the title be “Acme Reporting Tool” which would minimally meet the SC even if it would be helpful to do what Google docs does and have “Mydocument – Google Doc” which provides more specificity.

 

For an EPUB document, I don’t know if the expectation is that the EPUB reading system will surface the publication title at the highest level (e.g., “War and Peace”) or the more specific content page title (e.g., “War and Peace, Book One 1805, Chapter 1”). If the reading system just said the title and the user was able to easily get the rest of the context, would that be regarded as a failure?

 

> The inclusion of page boundary locations helps bridge this disparity by ensuring that those using reflowable media are not disadvantaged by their choice.

 

So Page titles comes up as an odd cross-over point, and the new SC “Explicit navigation markers” would probably benefit from a separate definition.

 

AWK: I think that speaks more to the need to have a way to talk about content that is presented in a way that emulates a printed publication, so maybe that is where a “digital publication” definition comes in so we can address the page boundaries, but we still need to decide if the EPUB is a set or a single page.

 

AWK