E-book accessibility has just moved up a notch as a result of work funded by TechDis to make good practice recommendations for the publishing industry. This work was done in conjunction with e-book publishers and has been described in a recent News Release from JISC.
The News Release describes some of the key messages, such as:
* The experience of the ‘keyboard-only’ user can be significantly improved through a feature known as skip links;
* Buttons or unique ‘link text’ descriptions, which allow a user with little or no sight to be able to use the menus, can easily enhance accessibility;
* It is important to maintain a consistent layout between the main page and sub pages. This is also a feature that is welcomed by people with low literacy levels or those who don’t have English as their first language.
Also, that a statement from the publisher describing the accessibility options (such as how to magnify the screen to fully personalising the e-book) can be helpful.
A practical guide Towards accessible e-book platforms (PDF format) has been produced, which can be downloaded from TechDis.
I was interested to see that the Techdis guide was in multiple column PDF which is very difficult to read in electronic format.
I echo Rowland’s comment about the PDF. Quite ironical that people espousing accessibility create a file that is so very unfriendly to users of screen reading software etc. There is no reason why a PDF, including one with multiple columns, couldn’t be made fully accessible. Starting with the Adobe website, there is plenty of information and creating a correctly structured PDF is very easy under many circumstances.