If you’re expecting a run-of-the-mill best practices manual, be aware that there’s an ulterior message that will be running through this one. While the primary goal is certainly to give you the information you need to create accessible EPUB 3 publications, it also seeks to address the question of why you need to pay attention to the quality of your data, and how accessible data and general good data practices are more tightly entwined than you might think.
Accessibility is not a feel-good consideration that can be deferred to republishers to fill in for you as you focus on print and quick-and-dirty ebooks, but a content imperative vital to your survival in the digital future, as I’ll take the odd detour from the planned route to point out. Your data matters, not just its presentation, and the more you see the value in it the more sense it will make to build in accessibility from the ground up.
It’s a common misconception, for example, that any kind of data is accessible data, and that assistive technologies like screen readers work magic and absolve you of paying attention to what’s going on “under the hood,” so to speak. Getting the message out early that this is not the case is essential to making EPUB more than just a minimally accessible format and preventing past mistakes from being perpetuated.
It’s unfortunately too easy when moving from a visual medium like print to treat digital content as nothing more than yet another display medium, however. The simple path is to graft what you know onto what you don’t. But it’s that thinking that perpetuates the inaccessibility of content. Everything starts with the source. All the bells and whistles your reading system can do for you to assist in rendering and playback ultimately rely on the value of the content underneath and the ability to make sense of it.
Treat your data as a second-class citizen and eventually you’ll be recognized as a second-class publisher.
But try and turn your brain off to the word accessibility as you read this guide and focus instead on the need to create rich, flexible, and versatile content that can make the reading experience better for everyone.
Inaccessible content typically means you’re settling for the least value you can get, so get ready to think bigger.