Chapter 2. Building a Better EPUB: Fundamental Accessibility

If you don’t discover an existing element that fits your need, the process of checking will typically reveal that you’re not alone in your problem, and that community-driven solutions have been developed. Standards and conventions are the friend of accessibility. And if you really don’t know and can’t find an answer, ask. The IDPF maintains discussion forums where you can seek assistance.

There are, of course, going to be many times when you have no choice but to use a generic tag, but when you do, always try to attach an epub:type attribute with a specific semantic (we’ll cover this attribute in more detail shortly). The more information you can provide, the more useful your data will be.

Take the converse situation into consideration when creating your content, too. You aren’t doing readers a service by finding more, and ever complex, ways to nest simple structures. The more layers you add the harder it can be to navigate, as I already mentioned. Over-analyzing your data can be as detrimental to navigation as under-analyzing.

For persons who cannot visually navigate your ebook, this basic effort to properly tag your data reduces many of the obstacles of the digital medium. The ability to skip structures and escape from them starts with meaningfully tagged data. The ability to move through a document without going to a table of contents starts with meaningfully tagged data.

Note

Skipping and escaping are terms that will come up repeatedly in this guide. Skipping, as you might expect, is the ability to ignore elements completely, to skip by them. Accessible reading systems typically provide the ability for the reader to specify the constructs they wish to ignore, such as sidebars, notes, and page numbers. Escapable content typically consists of deep-nested or repetitive structures—such as found in tables and lists—that a user may wish to move out from in order to continue reading at the next available item following the escaped content (a reading system’s user interface would normally provide quick access to the “escape” command, so that the operation can easily be called repetitively, if needed).

The integrity of your data is also a basic value proposition. Do you expect to throw away your content and start over every time you need to re-issue, or do you want to retain it and be able to easily upgrade it over time? Structurally meaningful data is critical to the long-term archivability of your ebooks, the ability to easily enhance and release new versions as technology progresses, as well as your ability to interchange your data and use it to create other outputs. Start making bad data now and expect to be paying for your mistakes later.