EPUB 3 Best Practices

Chapter 9. Accessibility

In EPUB 3 we have an ebook format that embraces that there is no single universal way to access information. Any reader may switch between reading modalities at any time. Sighted readers, for example, will switch and listen to books be read in many situations not amenable to visual reading, and will often read captions instead of listening to a video. Nonvisual readers may switch between tactile and audio for many of the same reasons.

Although we’re only just beginning to understand what the shift to ebooks entails, for both production and the reading experience, much has been learned about the creation of accessible digital content. We may not know yet which new EPUB 3 features are going to take off with the reading public, or in what ways, but the ability to make those features more universally accessible has evolved dramatically, to the point where we can anticipate needs better and meet them up front instead of after the fact.

In the last decade, in particular, the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has made significant progress toward making HTML-based content more accessible. A common pitfall of inaccessible formats has been to ignore existing accessibility work, or fork off from it, but EPUB 3 has instead been woven into current best practices. By adopting HTML5 as one of the two primary means of representing content, not only does it immediately make a lot of people knowledgeable about web accessibility knowledgeable about ebook accessibility ...