Finally, Certified Accessible Educational Materials from Publishers 6/27/2011 Finally, Certified Accessible Educational Materials from Publishers George Kerscher, Ph.D., Chief Innovations Officer, DAISY Consortium; Senior Advisor Benetech Charles LaPierre, M.Eng., Technical Lead, Born Accessible and DIAGRAM; Benetech Rachel Comerford, Director of Content Standards, Macmillan Learning Digital Image and Graphics Resources for Accessible Materials

Born Accessible EPUB That Meets the Baseline for Accessibility 6/27/2011 Born Accessible EPUB That Meets the Baseline for Accessibility George Kerscher Digital Image and Graphics Resources for Accessible Materials

Standards at the Core of Accessibility 6/27/2011 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML 5, CSS, SVG Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) WCAG 2.0 International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) http://www.idpf.org/ EPUB the digital publishing standard EPUB Accessibility Conformance and Discovery 1.0 Specification Digital Image and Graphics Resources for Accessible Materials

6/27/2011 IDPF and W3C Merger For the last three years the W3C has run a Digital Publishing Interest Group The merger has placed EPUB under the domain of W3C IDPF members will be given reduced fees for two years 82% of members supported the combination Digital Image and Graphics Resources for Accessible Materials

EPUB within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Adoption of EPUB 3 has been outstanding in most digital publishing sectors EPUB 3.1 is an approved recommendation http://www.idpf.org/epub/31/spec/epub-spec.html Included is EPUB Accessibility 1.0 http://www.idpf.org/epub/a11y/accessibility.html Conformance and Discovery Requirements for EPUB Publications First ever spec to enable accessibility certification This establishes the baseline Important: We want to be practical in that publishers should readily be able to produce accessible EPUB from their normal production process

Baseline Features Requires accessibility conformance in the EPUB publication Builds on WCAG 2.0 with some additional publishing- specific items in the USA WCAG 2.0 “AA” is generally recommended “conforms To” metadata pointing to “A,” “AA,” or “AAA” Accessibility metadata must be included Interestingly: publishers have actively participated in the EPUB Accessibility Spec development and have been updating their production process to support accessibility.

W3C DPUB’s ARIA 1.1 Module The Digital Publishing Interest Group in the W3C has produced an ARIA 1.1 module to help add some Digital Publishing semantics to ARIA Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Module 1.0 https://www.w3.org/TR/dpub-aria-1.0/ This is currently under review and has not yet been adopted as a recommendation Sample of the proposed new Roles: doc-abstract doc-appendix doc-chapter doc-introduction

Concrete Examples of Some MUSTS All headings must be marked in the HTML as headings (Critical for navigation) All textual content must use HTML text markup, e.g., paragraphs, block quotes, list items All content must be in a logical reading order Images are marked as decorative, described in surrounding text or captions, or have “alt” text If you want a fancy heading and use an image, remember to surround the image with the heading markup and use alt text (remember you can do very cool things these days with CSS)

Metadata Requirements to Be Compliant EPUBs wishing to be conformant MUST:  include accessibility discovery metadata include the following [schema.org] accessibility metadata accessMode accessibilityFeature accessibilityHazard accessibilitySummary

Supporting Techniques Updated Frequently Specifications are at a high level and techniques are concrete WCAG and EPUB techniques are maintained independently of specifications As support in Reading Systems evolve, the techniques will improve http://www.idpf.org/epub/a11y/techniques/techniques.html https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/Overview.html TTS & Braille: The techniques ensures that Text-to- Speech can be used to present the information. Also, this supports text being sent to a refreshable braille display

Accelerating Publisher Adoption: Certification of EPUB Publications Certify that digital books (and all other publications) meet the Baseline Self-certification Sad Story: What happened to Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT)? Would you have a fox guard the henhouse? DAISY is building the EPUB Accessibility Conformance Checker Auto checking must be supplemented by human inspection

Accessibility metadata supports Accelerating Publisher Adoption: Conformance and Certification of EPUB Publications Excellent accessibility metadata required to be present in the EPUB package Accessibility metadata supports Born accessible Find accessible Buy Accessible Questions: Any questions on the Standards side?

Benetech Certification Pilot 6/27/2011 Benetech Certification Pilot Charles LaPierre Digital Image and Graphics Resources for Accessible Materials

Born Accessible: Certified by Benetech Benetech is piloting the certification process A documented process for certification must be established and followed Publisher materials are reviewed and remediated Long term process improvements would be recommended to publishers

Certification Metadata in EPUB Publications  How to find certified content in the future: certifiedBy: Specifies the name of the party that certified the content. The certifier of the content could be the same party that created the EPUB publication, but can also be a third-party accessibility certifier. certifierCredential: Identifies a credential or badge that establishes the authority of the party identified in the certifiedBy property to certify content is accessible. certifierReport: Provides a link to an accessibility report created by the party identified in the certifiedBy property.  conformsTo: WCAG-A, -AA, or -AAA

Tested Software for Reading EPUB Both the EPUB and the Reading System must be accessible. A perfectly accessible EPUB with a terrible Reading System does not get you there Likewise a great Reading System with an inaccessible EPUB yields zero The answer is to test Reading Systems with perfect EPUBs It is necessary to test using a wide range of Assistive Technologies http://www.epubtest.org/ Note: VitalSource Bookshelf at 100%

Buy Accessible Procurement MUST focus on “Buy Accessible” “Buy Accessible” - Demand Certified Accessible EPUB 3 All content must be certified. Point them to “Certified by Benetech” initiative.

Role of DSS Office Supporting Born Accessible Guide students toward great reading systems and certified accessible content Support students who need more than what is in the baseline

Benetech Pilot – EPUB Accessibility Certification Currently working with Macmillan Learning, five other publishers, and one conversion vendor In depth evaluation of a sample of complex EPUB books from each Generate a detailed accessibility report for each title

Sample Pilot: Summary Title: Road Runner - Not a Myth Publisher: Acme Inc. Author(s): Wiley Coyote Sr. Package Metadata (Required): FAIL Page and Publication: FAIL Page Navigation: PASS Media Overlays Playback: FAIL Overall 1.0 Compliant: FAIL Born Accessible Score: 25.5% Overall WCAG Compliance Reached: FAIL EPUB Complexity Score: 5 - Very Complex

Sample Pilot: Born Accessible Scores Image Accessibility: 39% WCAG FAIL Audio Accessibility: 22% WCAG FAIL Video Accessibility: 0% WCAG FAIL HTML Tags: 29% WCAG FAIL General Accessibility: 29% WCAG FAIL Language: 50% WCAG Level-A Structured Navigation: 17% WCAG FAIL Links: 50% WCAG Level-A Lists: 50% WCAG FAIL Tables: 0% WCAG FAIL Notes: 67% WCAG Level-A Java Script: 0% WCAG FAIL Package Metadata (Optional): 0% DPUB ARIA (Future): N/A Born Accessible Total Score 25.5%

Accessibility Pilot Results 6/27/2011 Accessibility Pilot Results This Table shows a snapshot of the accessibility scores for thirty titles evaluated as of February 10, 2017. Most of the EPUBs tested failed certification (requiring to meet WCAG-A compliance) with an average score of 64% and an average complexity level of 2.9 out of 5. Trends showed that Links, and Lists were correctly structured -- above 85% -- with Images, Tables, General Accessibility structured poorly (below 60%).   The table is brightly colored with bolded green text cells having a passing grade for the various titles, and any feature scoring below 70% appearing non-bolded in red. The publishers and titles of the EPUBs were omitted due to confidentiality restrictions. This clearly shows that two of the six participants (one of which represented multiple publishers) had mostly accessible EPUBs but that all had some issue, especially with image descriptions and accessible table support. Digital Image and Graphics Resources for Accessible Materials

Publishers Perspective Rachel Comerford

Process is Everything Publisher’s processes are at the heart of the Certification

How we Integrated New Standards Get involved in working groups – it’s a chance to share your solutions and learn from others Standards groups provided specifications but it was up to us to develop implementation guides based on our needs V1 took 6 months to build updates are coming out every 2-3 months based on feedback Developed a validator based on open source resources and our implementation guide Update with every implementation guide update Established a checklist for non-automated QA and educated team members on what to look for

Sharing Responsibility Art – Develop all art to have proper contrast, readable text Design – Ensure read order is clearly indicated Authors – Provide guidance about pedagogical intention for digital conversion Editors – Communicate with authors about focus and development Compositor – Apply publisher standards, give feedback on gaps Quality Assurance – Automated and manual checking of everything developed

Addressing Complexity Text with markup Complex image layouts Marginal elements Texts contain a large quantity of pedagogical material in the margin MathML Reader compatibility is not standard Expensive and difficult to write alt text ChemML Reader compatibility is rare Graphic Novel All image text

Why Are We Doing This? ‘Certified by Benetech’ advantages 3rd party confirmation of accessibility standards Assurance for students and adopters Easy to roll up to administrators Gives us feedback to pass on to vendors about the quality of their work Provides internal confidence about the quality of what we’re delivering Helps identify for schools what errors are addressed and what warnings are relevant Most importantly: Shows us what we’re missing and what we have left to learn

Helpful Resources for Publishers EPUB Accessibility 1.0 (Specification) EPUB Accessibility Techniques 1.0 (Supplemental) WCAG 2.0 (Specification) BISG: Quick Start Guide to Accessible Publishing DIAGRAM Center: Image Description Guidelines Poet Image Description Training Module

Questions? THANK YOU George Kerscher georgek@benetech.org Charles LaPierre charlesl@benetech.org Rachel Comerford Rachel.comerford@macmillan.com