Accessible EPUB3 – Leader in Offshore Accessibility Testing | Section 508 Compliance | WCAG Conformance | BarrierBreak

Image Description – An Integral part of Content Accessibility

Ramya Venkitesh — Wed, 29 Jun 2022 05:14:54 +0000

Image Descriptions are key to providing equal access to people who are low vision or blind the same information from an accessibility perspective. Often referred to as image descriptions or alternate text or alt text, let's discuss how you can ensure accessibility for images.

Images are an integral part of telling the story on the web, in books, in content in general, but how do we make images accessible. They say 80% of our learning comes from seeing, but what if you are unable to see the images. For visually impaired users, they might be unable to see the image and understand what the image conveys. This obviously creates a challenge from an accessibility perspective.

How do we:

describe images for people with disabilities?
know that the image description can be understood by people with visual impairment?
know that the image descriptions are accurate?

Whether it is a website, a textbook or a brochure, visual designers and content creators use images as a way to visually communicate with the audiences. Images are used to break the monotony of the text, images are used to depict the information differently.

The challenge ahead of us is making images accessible by ensuring that we add image descriptions that are effective for people with disabilities. Image descriptions are often referred to as alt text by some. We might decide whether an image is informative, in which we need to provide an image description or an alt text, if the image is decorative, we need to see how to skip that for our visually impaired users.

Basic Concepts of Image Description

Image descriptions that people with visual impairment can understand.

Image descriptions that convey the message.

Image descriptions that are concise by clear in what they are communicating.

Image descriptions that are accurate.

Often Image Descriptions are not given enough of an importance. Imagine studying for your science exam and not being able to understand what the image depicting the Movement of Molecules in and out of cells or not being able to understand a graph with the rice production per year across different countries.

Images are critical to the learning. Different users learn differently. Numerous users are visual today. Images can help us overcome these challenges but we also need to ensure to take everyone along with us. We can't leave the visually impaired behind. We need to provide them access to images by providing image descriptions that support them in understanding what you and I have access to. It is about equal access to images, yes I said, equal access to images which are in the textbook, on the web or in a brochure telling me about a holiday destination.

At BarrierBreak, our image description services includes writing image descriptions for images but also testing it with people with disabilities. You might say, what a time-consuming effort! But if you are looking to implement image descriptions effectively and just want to talk, no string attached, then reach out to us at sales@barrierbreak.com or call us +91-22-26860485.

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Business Case for Publishers on how Accessibility can give you an edge in selling your product.

Shilpi Kapoor — Thu, 04 May 2017 05:50:50 +0000

Accessibility has often been the last thing on organizations minds when they develop their products and services! But this is surely changing! We have seen the impact that Section 508 has impacted procurement in the US. Today, we are seeing it providing an edge not only at the Federal or Central level but at the states too!

Let’s take the business case for Publishers and how accessibility can assist them in differentiating their product! Texas Education Agency (TEA) in the Proclamation 2017 issued a notice to both publishers and the public that the State Board of Education (SBOE) is inviting bids to furnish new instructional materials for a list of courses.

This document refers to accessibility in multiple places and for different types of deliverables and not just restricted to books. It also now includes electronic instructional material such as CD-ROMs, DVDs or web-based instructional materials.

It clearly states that for:

Printed Instructional material – one copy of the material should be delivered as a Nimas file for Braille, Large Print & Audio Production
Instructional material delivered Electronically – A third party audit report of conformance to Web Content Accessibility Guideline 2.0 – Level AA standards. It even identifies the minimum audit that needs to be conducted for home page, randomly selected pages with different types of elements like tables, forms, images. Though the publisher can determine the number of pages to be included.

It is impressive that more and more procurement guidelines are not just expecting the web accessibility standards but also refer to standards for MathML, Image Description Guidelines.

As businesses, we can’t ignore accessibility any longer. I think the publishing industry is seeing this. Its time for the rest of the industries to adopt accessibility rather than lose business to competition who is adopting it.

Let’s get proactive and not reactive about Accessibility. If you need to discuss your organizations accessibility strategy, do reach out to us!

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The world of digital publishing has just taken a very important step

Shilpi Kapoor — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 03:50:37 +0000

If you’re familiar with e-books, then you most probably are aware of the ePub standard. It has wide support, which continues to grow. Many digital book reading apps like iBooks on Mac and iOS as well as Google Books support it.

Some notable exceptions are there, but the overall trend in the industry is that if you buy a book digitally, then one of the formats in which the book will be delivered to you to download would be an ePub file. This is especially true in the technical books market, with players like O’Reilly, Packt, Manning Publications, Smashing Books and more providing ePub digital books.

The ePub standard was made by the consortium called the International Digital Publishing Forum, or IDPF. On February 1, 2017 the IDPF officially announced that it is merging with the W3C.

This makes sense for a lot of reasons. An ePub file is basically just a zip file containing a small website (HTML, CSS, assets like images, fonts, and some metadata). Partly because of this, an ePub book is more accessible than many of the other digital publishing formats right out of the gate. Since many of the underlying technologies behind ePub (like HTML, CSS etc) as well accessibility work like the WCAG guidelines are already worked upon in the W3C, it makes sense for ePub to find it’s home here too.

This should hopefully encourage more cross-pollination of experts from various fields to suggest technical improvements to upcoming standards related to ePub. I think the digital publishing industry can greatly benefit from more participation from web experts and vice versa. Dave Cramer and Tzviya Siegman have written eloquently on it, and I would encourage everyone to give a read to what they have said. Furthermore, it is important in today’s environment to have an organisation the size of the W3C to get behind open standards. If not, then we risk of the proliferation of closed proprietary formats by big players slowly winning.

The IDPF has done a great job of getting even small players in the digital publishing space to be engaged. This should continue. Upcoming work includes focussing on online and offline digital publications. The W3C has set up the EPUB (3.1) Community Group which anyone can join for free to give their feedback, suggestions and ideas. For those of you in Europe in early march, the EPUB Summit is happening in 9-10 March 2017 in Brussels. There is also a Publishing Business Group being formed which is open to people who were IDPF members in good standing. For more information on it, check out https://www.w3.org/publishing/.

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Explaining the Marrakesh Treaty for publishers and disability people’s organizations.

Shilpi Kapoor — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 03:32:15 +0000

As per the the World Health Organization, there are around 285 million blind and people with visual impairment in the world, of which 90 per cent live in developing countries. As per the World Blind Union, of the million books published every year in the world, less than 10 per cent are made available in accessible formats to people with visual impairment.

The Marrakesh Treaty was adopted on June 27, 2013 with the main goal of ensuring better access to books and other printed materials to the blind, visually impaired, and otherwise print disabled (VIPs). Here is a synopsis of what the treaty is all about.

What is Marrakesh Treaty – A summary?

The Marrakesh Treaty (formally the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works by Visually Impaired Persons and Persons with Print Disabilities) is a treaty on copyright adopted in Marrakesh, Morocco, on 28 June 2013 …Wikipedia

The main objective of the treaty is to help put an end to the book famine faced by people with visual and print impairment. The treaty aims to increase access to printed material such as books, magazines for people with print impairment.

More than 75 countries have signed the treaty. The ratification of 20 states was required for the treaty to enter in to effect and the treaty came in to force on 30th September 2016. India was the first country to ratify the treaty on 24^th July 2014. The Indian Copyright (Amendment) Act, 2012 is in harmony with the Marrakesh Treaty.

What does ratification of the treaty mean?

The country which ratify the treaty allows an “authorized entity” to convert books and printed materials into accessible format without waiting for the permission from the holder of copyright such as the author or the publisher. The country also allows import and export of the accessible formats without the permission of the copyright holder.

Who is an authorized entity?

“Authorized entity” means an entity that is authorized or recognized by the government to provide education, instructional training, adaptive reading or information access to “beneficiary” persons on a non-profit basis. It also includes a government institution or a non-profit organization that provides the same services to beneficiary persons as one of its primary activities or institutional obligations.

Who is a beneficiary?

The treaty clarifies that any person who is not able to effectively read a printed material due to a range of disabilities is a “beneficiary”. This would include people who are blind, people with visual impairment, or print disability and people with mobility impairment who cannot hold or manipulate a book or any person such as a care taker acting on their behalf.

Which countries have ratified the treaty?

20 countries have ratified the treaty. India, El Salvador, the United Arab Emirates, Mali, Uruguay, Paraguay, Singapore, Argentina, Mexico, Mongolia, the Republic of Korea, Australia, Brazil, Peru, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Israel, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala and Canada.

Write to us at info@barrierbreak.com to know more on accessible or inclusive publishing!

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Is there a case for an accessible E-book using the EPUB3 standard?

Shilpi Kapoor — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 03:29:13 +0000

The case for providing an e-book has already been made, and publishers have already started to address this market! The question now to be asked is whether there is a case for an accessible e-book using the epub3 standard rather than just an e-book which can be enjoyed by people with disabilities also.

“As an avid reader, it’s great to just be able to go online, buy a book and read it. There is no need, to wait for an accessible format! In the last year alone, I would have bought e-books of about approximately USD 200! If more and more books would be born accessible, the dimension of inclusion will change for people with print disabilities in education, employment and society in general” states Dipendra Manocha, Daisy Consortium, Developing Countries Co-ordinator.

At BarrierBreak, we do believe there is a case for all publishers to look at accessible e-books seriously. Let me pen some of our reasons why we believe this!

For people with visual impairment, e-books are actually the preferred format. E-books can be read using assistive technology! Based on the disability, they can adjust the text and formatting or listen to the e-books using a screen reader.The WHO worldwide statistics also reflect the business case, with 285 million people with visually impaired worldwide out of which 39 million are people who are blind and 246 million people have low vision. As a publisher, it only makes sense to address this target market!
Today, most of the accessible content is being created by blindness organizations & libraries catering to the needs of this group! The World Blind Union states that less than 10% of all published material can be read by blind or low vision people. The Marrakesh Treaty firstly provides for a limitation or an exception to copyright in order to allow “beneficiaries” and “authorized entities” to undertake any changes needed to make a copy of a work in an accessible format for persons with a print disability. Secondly is to allow the exchange across borders of those accessible copies produced according to the limitations and exceptions!

Publishers need to work towards providing the accessible formats, since then they would be supporting the needs of this market segment. A one time investment in the accessible format which could be accessible e-books using the epub3 standard, braille and/or large print books can go a long way in making the economic case that publishers need to consider in this changing digital environment!

Publishers now is the time to act and the opportunity to address the needs of an under-served audience!

Write to us at info@barrierbreak.com to know more on accessible epub3 and accessible or inclusive publishing!

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Is Braille the only accessible format?

Shilpi Kapoor — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 03:01:12 +0000

Access to information is one of the key barriers faced by people with disabilities! Accessible format or alternate format is a broad term to ensure that the information, book, file, video, audio or any content that you provide is accessible to people with disabilities also.

In simple terms, it means providing information access in the format that is readable, usable and as per the needs of the person.

Some commonly used terms on accessible format are:

Large Print – Text which is a minimum of 16 point size or larger based on the needs of the person.
Braille – There are two types of Braille – Grade 1 and Grade 2. In Grade 1, each braille cell represents only one letter, number or punctuation sign. In Grade 2, a cell can represent a shortened form of a word. Many cell combinations have been created as contractions to represent common words.
Audio – Using Audio formats like .wav or .mp3 formats often in human voice or synthesized text-to-speech voices. In addition, softwares like screen readers and reading writing tools, convert text to speech for the users.
Easy Read – Simple and plain English is used. In addition, short sentences are used. Often, pictures are used to illustrate sentences.

It is important to also remember how the information is being delivered and the technology being used. So is the delivery format, print or electronic or both. Is the technology you are using to deliver, PDF, Word, PowerPoint, etc. Let’s discuss some scenarios to understand this better.

Scenario 1

For are an insurance company providing a brochure as a printed document & as PDF document on your website, the accessible formats that you could provide would be large print and braille for someone looking for the printed content. If someone wants the electronic version, then the PDF document needs to be accessible so it can be read with a screen reader or other assistive technology.

Scenario 2

If you are a book publisher, then the accessible format you would provide is the large print and braille. If you are also providing an e-book, then you would provide an accessible Epub 3 e-book.

Scenario 3

If you are a teacher providing lecture notes to your students as PowerPoint slides, you would ensure that the PowerPoint file is accessible.

Some references:

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