Signposting accessible digital books

As a reader I want to know if a book will fit my reading needs.

EDRLab is funded by french ministry of culture to make a study on the subject of information about digital book accessibility by online bookshop in order to make publishers efforts visible and ensure that people will find the book fitting theirs needs.

Directive (EU) 2019/882 article 13.2: Service providers shall prepare the necessary information in accordance (…) and shall explain how the services meet the applicable accessibility requirements. The information shall be made available to the public in written and oral format, including in a manner which is accessible to persons with disabilities. Service providers shall keep that information for as long as the service is in operation.

Some online retailers already display information about digital book accessibility functions (NNELS, ePagine, LIA, Vitalsource, Cantook, Amazon) in very different ways.

In september 2021 Publishing Community Group @W3C proposed a recommendation on the subject (Display Guide sept.2021) and asked for feedbacks. Discussions are taking place on the Accessibility task force issue tracker.

We used this recommendation as a starting point, made a translation in french and build a prototype 0. This prototype was submitted to 50 persons representing 34 organizations during 4 Workshops). Participants where asked two questions : is the user experience useful and is it technically doable. The response was a clear No, we sent a Feedback to W3C and built a prototype 1 taking in count users expectations.

A similar study has taken place in Italy and another one is starting in Netherlands. The discussion and rewriting of the Display guide has started at W3C PCG A11Y with mains topics on organizing metadata, adding important information and precisions about conformity

In France the work has followed with the building of Use cases (Cas d’usage) and a national survey about understandable vocabulary (Enquêtes), this allowed us to build a Prototype 3.

In 2023 we expect live experimentation’s by ePagine and leslibraires.fr. The experimental display is also actually implemented in Thorium Reader and Aldiko Next.

This work has led to the rewriting of the W3C Publishing Accessibility task force Display Guide (actually draft) as well as major changes on the Accessibility metadata crosswalk (draft) and a large revision of ONIX related codelists (issue 62, work in progress).

Related articles and resources

• DPUB Summit 2023 session video: Informing the user about book accessibility and features.

The project will be presented at

• IFLA LPD Satellite 2023.
• 17h International Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Assistive Technology in Europe (AAATE). AAATE 2023 conference website.