ANN: Jutoh 3.21
Julian Smart
Hi,
A Happy New Year to all!
Jutoh 3.21 is now available to download:
In this release, accessible ebook support has been overhauled to cater for the EU Accessibility Act, which comes into force in the EU in June 2025. Although microbusinesses are apparently exempt, it's useful for all ebook authors and publishers to be aware of the requirements and to be able to create the extra metadata mandated by the Act. The relevant sections of the Jutoh help and user guide (see www.jutoh.com/books) have been revised to take the new features into account and to provide a checklist for making your books accessible.
A new command, Book | Check Accessibility, gives a summary of accessibility issues found in the book, and there is a new Accessibility tab under Metadata in Project Properties. The terminology in these fields will appear strange at first, but help is at hand from the 'Deduce from Project' button which will fill in some of the metadata based on what Jutoh finds in the book. A new 'Accessibility warnings' option in Preferences/Advanced turns on accessibility checking during compilation, allowing individual problems to be located in the book.
Other accessibility improvements are not immediately visible, such as the ability to use further advanced attributes such as 'ARIA description' and the specification of the 'Role' attribute when adding semantic markup via the Project Properties/Accessibility page.
There is a new sample, Novella Accessibility Sample, which passes checks by Jutoh and also by the free accessibility checking tool 'ACE by DAISY'.
More details, including bug fixes and other changes, can be found in www.jutoh.com/whatsnew.
Thank you to those who made suggestions for and beta tested this release. Given the number of changes, it's possible that the odd bug has crept in, so do let me know of any problems.
There is one project file incompatibility with previous versions of Jutoh: if you add a label or role to a URL or page link in Jutoh 3.21, previous versions of Jutoh will complain, since they don't know about the format of the new information. So if you need to use that feature, you will need to ensure only Jutoh versions 3.21 and above are used to open and compile the project, or the links may need to be redone to avoid the error.
Regards,
Julian