Born Accessible �Digital Publications�
Tips from the University of Michigan Press
Jillian Downey�Jonathan McGlone
University of Michigan Press, Michigan Publishing
Museum Digital Publishing IG
March 24, 2020
Born Accessible Publishing @ U-M Press
Jillian Downey
Director of Publishing Production
University of Michigan Press
Jonathan McGlone
Senior Associate Librarian
Front-End Developer, UI Designer, Accessibility Specialist
Michigan Publishing
Overview
Web and Ebook Accessibility Standards
Accessible for Who? Four categories of A11Y
Accessibility Standards
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for the web are the backbone of accessible publications, informing many accessibility criteria for EPUB and PDF.
Format | Standard | Levels |
HTML | A, AA, AAA | |
EPUB | n/a | |
n/a |
Accessibility Guidelines
Use of guidelines from Vox and A11Y Project can help you meet WCAG criteria.
Best Practices for Making Born Accessible Publications
Accessible Workflows
MS enters workflow
Flagged for accessibility
Conversation w/ author
Resources & support
Author submits MS, plus image files, plus document of captions and descriptions.
We incorporate these pieces into accessible EPUB.
Use a workflow optimized for quality description
We modified our Author's Guide to include requirements for alt text along with links to resources for writing good descriptive text.
Provide guidance for authors
Screenshot of the Describing Visual Resources Toolkit homepage
Provide guidance for authors
Components of Accessible Publications: Content
Elements of image description
Diagram showing visible and hidden elements of a page. Image credit: Stephanie Rosen
Alt text: shorter text (often 140 characters or fewer) associated with a specific visual resource, accessed via assistive technology; shorthand for “alternative text”
Long description: longer text associated with a specific visual resource, accessed via assistive technology; may contain structural elements or subsections (e.g. a table, paragraphs)
Body: the main text of the publication, available via all reading technology
Fig. 10 Detail of New York University Child Study Center’s (2007) “Ransom Notes” campaign umbrella advertisement. Photograph by Eduardo Trejos. Reprinted with artist’s permission.
<figure class="fig">
<img src="images/Fig10.jpg" aria-describedby="Fig10-desc" alt="Photograph of Ransom Notes campaign billboard." width="600" height="375" />
<figcaption class="figcap">
<a data-locator="p153" class="page"></a>
<span class="fighn">Fig. 10</span> Detail of New York University Child Study Center’s (2007) “Ransom Notes” campaign umbrella advertisement. Photograph by Eduardo Trejos. Reprinted with artist’s permission.
<aside class="hidden" id="Fig10-desc">
<p>This image is of a towering billboard. The text on the billboard appears composed of words and letters cut out from a variety of different print sources and pasted together. The text reads:“12 million kids are held hostage by a psychiatric disorder.”</p>
</aside>
</figcaption>
</figure>
Tables
Video captioning and audio description
As books begin to include multimedia, it is important to consider the effort required to make these objects accessible.
Accessible video guidelines require captions for the deaf and hard of hearing and audio descriptions for the visually impaired.
Audio transcripts
Transcripts with audio files help provide equitable experiences for the deaf and hard of hearing, but can also benefit the visually impaired.
Encoding Language Shifts
...They were introduced in the eighth century (or possibly earlier) through contacts with Tang China and the Korean kingdoms. Specialists of acupuncture (<i xml:lang="ja" lang="ja">hari-hakase</i>, <i xml:lang="ja" lang="ja">hari-shi</i>, and <i xml:lang="ja" lang="ja">hari-sei</i>) and massage (<i xml:lang="ja" lang="ja">anma-hakase</i>, <i xml:lang="ja" lang="ja">anma-shi</i>, and <i xml:lang="ja" lang="ja">anma-sei</i>) were regularly appointed to fill posts in the Ten’yakuryô (Bureau of Medicine)...
Identifying language shifts allows assistive technologies to follow language changes, speaking or translating the text in the appropriate accent with proper pronunciation.
Components of Accessible Publications: Navigation
Logical reading order
Comparison of print and EPUB reading order layout in Julia C. Bullock's Coeds Ruining the Nation: Women, Education, and Social Change in Postwar Japanese Media
Use Headings for Content Structure
Semantic headings and document structure enables assistive device users to navigate the book content quickly.
<h1>Heading 1</h1>
<h2>Heading 2</h2>
<h3>Heading 3</h3>
<h2>Heading 2</h2>
Be careful to 1) use HTML semantically and 2) not use headers to achieve visual results, otherwise your ebook will be more difficult to use.
Including lists of tables and figures, subject indexes, and other methods to navigate an ebook helps provide alternative points of access to the text.
Provide multiple points of access
Page markers
When dealing with print+ebook combos, add page markers from the print book into the text of the digital publication for citation and lookup purposes.
Components of Accessible Publications: Design
Color and Contrast
By ensuring that the foreground and background colors of your digital publication have sufficient contrast you will help make your site more readable for everyone.
Text must have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for WCAG 2.0 AA compliance.
WebAIM's Contrast Checker and the Accessibility Palette Builder are good tools for ensuring good contrast ratios.
Don't indicate important information with color
The use of color can enhance comprehension, but do not use color alone to convey information. That information may not be available to a person who is colorblind and will be unavailable to screen reader users.
Other considerations
Test your digital publications
Ace Accessibility Checker (EPUBs)
aXe Web Accessibility Tester (Websites)
WAVE Web Accessibility Tool (Websites)
Your Keyboard! See Nielsen Norman Group's intro to testing with a keyboard
If an experience can't be made accessible...
Create another route for users to get that information.
With the Gabii Project, a 3-D model with loads of data was not accessible to assistive technology, so we created an accessibility mode that replaced 3-D model links with links to a database record containing the same information.
fulcrum-info@umich.edu�@fulcrumpub�https://fulcrum.org
�
Now Available on Fulcrum: the University of Michigan Ebook Collection
Product info at https://www.press.umich.edu/librarians
Demo at https://www.fulcrum.org/michigan