by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer
In November 2019, Amazon released updated epub3 accessibility guidelines and now officially recommends using the ACE Accessibility Checker from the DAISY Consortium for epub3 files that are available through their website.
Westchester has been utilizing the ACE Accessibility Checker for several years and is well prepared for this upgrade. ACE, which includes checking conformance of various HTML and epub accessibility rules, performs the following functions:
- Runs automated accessibility tests on epub content documents
- Extracts the publication metadata, and checks accessibility-related metadata
- Extracts various document outlines (the ToC, headings, and HTML structure) for side-by-side comparison
- Extracts all the epub images and graphics and their associated accessibility descriptions in a consolidated table, for easier review
- Extracts other various content features to facilitate human-driven accessibility audits
In addition to ACE, Westchester also includes these additional accessibility checks as part of our standard workflow:
- Setting the Language attribute (Daisy). Most non-Latin languages will be automatically marked (Daisy)
- Setting Page Title – Meaningful titles allow users to find and navigate documents without having to first read them (Daisy)
- Mark context breaks, aka space breaks or scene breaks (Daisy)
- Mark ornaments/purely decorative images with an empty alt attribute and ARIA “presentation” role (Daisy)
Along with the accessibility checks that Westchester provides as part of our standard workflow, we are able to incorporate the following features to give your epubs additional functionality:
- Alt text for image descriptions
- Semantically tagged italic and bold text
- Language changes when the Latin alphabet is used
- Color contrast errors can be corrected with supplied instructions/parameters (i.e., convert failing gray text to default, replace failing gray background with a border, etc.)
- Use SVG to render vector images (as long as reading systems display the image properly)
- Use MathML with image fallbacks whenever not cost-prohibitive
In addition to our full array of customizable editorial and composition services, Westchester is able to deliver epub files that include the accessibility features your publications require in order to meet the needs of your customers. Contact us today to learn how we can help your publications program be fully accessible.
