Penguin Readers Epub

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Laylow Skidmore

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Aug 3, 2024, 4:38:40 PM8/3/24

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There is a growing appreciation that laws and social commitment require documents, books and corporate publications that everyone can access, including persons with disabilities. The publishing industry has embraced EPUB 3 as their format of choice. [1] Now it is time for other corporations and organizations to do the same for their publications, unlocking benefits for themselves and their audiences. EPUB 3 provides the best digital reading experience for everybody on the devices we use today, for both online and offline reading. EPUB 3 can be produced using your existing document processes. EPUB 3 is better, less expensive, and faster.

This white paper is licensed under a creative commons license and we would be delighted to assist in the development and promotion of other versions, outside the United States, in other jurisdictions.

Most companies that tag documents, to make them usable by persons with print disabilities, spend enormous amounts of time and money to do so. Many lack the internal resources to make this conversion internally and must incur the expense of a third-party vendor specializing in remediation.[2]

EPUB 3 is the most direct route to compliance with the requirements to produce accessible documents. EPUB 3 meets the legal requirements for accessibility which are explored in more detail in the section on Legal Requirements further on in this document. By embracing Born Accessible EPUB 3 for document output, organizations can gain comfort in the knowledge that they have complied with the law and provided one of the most accessible documents for their readers.

The EPUB 3 format is the most popular and recommended format for the production of accessible publications, opening up a greater potential market for content and enabling access to a far greater number of readers. Today, people are reading on all kinds of devices and viewing some document formats on a smartphone can be torture. EPUB 3 improves the experience for everyone, and we explore this theme further on in the Reading Experience section of this whitepaper.

By its very nature EPUB 3 is designed to be a great reading experience for everybody, including persons with print disabilities. The digital publishing industry, exemplified by products and organizations such as Apple Books, VitalSource, RedShelf, Macmillan Learning, John Wiley & Sons Inc. and Kogan Page are using EPUB 3 to enable wonderfully rich digital reading experiences for all their readers. Publishers producing digital books and journals have embraced EPUB 3 and many are delivering Born Accessible EPUB 3 files to their distribution outlets.

Based on technologies developed for the Open Web Platform that we use every day (such as HTML and CSS), EPUB 3 is designed to provide a rich digital reading experience on any size screen. When using a desktop display, laptop, tablet or a smart phone, an EPUB 3 file will adapt to any screen size, enabling the reader to personalize the experience by adjusting preferences for the font size, colors and much more.

Readers with and without disabilities love the customizations that a modern well-designed EPUB 3 publication supports, by default. For example, by selecting a dyslexic-friendly font and reducing the line length, persons with dyslexia can read more easily. Increasing the font size and adjusting colors will help the low vision reader. The text available in the correct reading order means that persons who are blind can have Text-To-Speech (TTS) engines read content aloud to them. These are just a few examples of how well structured and correctly enabled files can significantly alter the reading experience, making it ultimately more accessible for a larger group of readers.

There are a wide range of EPUB 3 reading apps available and the reading app evaluation available at epubtest.org helps the reader make the correct choice for them giving them the best access to their downloaded documents. There is also a quick roundup of these results on Inclusive Publishing to help beginners get started.

Organizations just starting out with EPUB 3 will find that all modern word processors support EPUB export. Google Docs, Apple Pages and LibreOffice all have EPUB support built right in. And the WordToEPUB tool enables quick and straightforward document conversion from a Word document to EPUB 3.

The opportunities for making rich and highly complex content accessible are developing at a rapid pace with EPUB 3 and exciting tools and solutions are emerging. Clear standardized methodologies are being devised (e.g. for informative graphics, math and chemistry, music notations) which are making it easier to produce these types of Born Accessible EPUB 3 files. There is plenty of guidance to make this process easy. Content producers can rely on resources, tools and solutions to ensure that they comply with the EPUB 1.0 Accessibility specification.

EPUB is built with ebooks in mind, so there is proper support for a table of contents in the standard and in reading appsTechnical ability to embed multi-media files, but is not much used, and has limited options for accessibilityWorks well and supports many more options for accessibility with multi-media filesLinks to PDF will normally launch in a default viewerLinks to an EPUB can be configured to open in an EPUB Reader (Windows requires installation of an EPUB Reader)PDF does not have a document management systemMost EPUB reading apps include a library/bookshelf function for managing documents

In the United States and other countries, the legal requirement to make documents accessible is well known. The Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act are the two pieces of legislation that deal with this.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has created extensive and exhaustive Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0 and 2.1) to help organizations create accessible digital content for people with varying degrees and types of disability. These guidelines have made their way into accessibility regulations and form the basis for accessibility laws across the United States (US) and the European Union (EU). EPUB 3 satisfies these requirements and, indeed, WCAG Level AA forms part of the EPUB 1.0 Accessibility specification.

Now that WordToEPUB is freely available and that GoogleDocs, Apple Pages, and Adobe InDesign support EPUB 3, we are encouraging the widespread adoption of Born Accessible EPUB 3 alongside or as a replacement for PDF.

It is time for companies and organizations to consider adopting modern digital publishing standards for their document output. Reading documents digitally is the norm today, and it is taking place on smartphones, tablets, and on computers. It is true that PDF workflows may be well-established within organizations, delivering printed content with success. Wonderful for printing and ubiquitous, PDF can only be made accessible to persons with disabilities after time-consuming, expensive remediation has been completed. Companies may decide to keep the delivery of PDF in place and elect to provide a Born Accessible EPUB 3 file alongside, which would meet their legal obligations for accessibility and give their customers a choice in how they read.

Many companies have a communications and document production division, but smaller organizations may leave this up to individuals. However, no matter how small or large your organization is, the strategic and business decision regarding digital communications must be made. The publishing industry along with the tech sector made the pivotal decision years ago to deliver the EPUB format to all their distribution outlets. Now, companies and institutions need to make another strategic decision; do you want to adapt to the changing user preferences of reading on different devices, and learn to embrace the free and open, modern, digital publishing format, Born Accessible EPUB 3?

This license allows re-users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms.