Ebooks for everyone: the mainstream publishing value chain ... pdfs/Supply chain 2018/Accessibility...

Ebooks for everyone:the mainstream publishing value chain

and e-book accessibility metadata

How to create, distribute, ingest and display

accessibility metadata for ebooks

Cristina Mussinelli and Gregorio Pellegrino

40th International Supply Chain Seminar, Frankfurt, 9th October 2018

Fondazione LIA

• LIA Foundation started in 2014 as a non-profit foundation, aimed at promoting

books and reading, in all its forms, both traditional and digital, through education,

information, awareness and research in this area.

• The Foundation intends to, in particular:

o promote reading and expand access for visual impaired people to publishing

products through research and technological innovation;

o spread a culture of accessibility through consulting and training

involving all the actors of the supply-chain: such as publishers distributors,

booksellers, manufacturers of e-reading solutions HW and SW;

o deliver training for users in the field of digital reading.

• The Foundation was created by the Italian Publisher Association (AIE) along

with the Italian Blind Union (UICI); it is now made up of 38 publishers (with

over 70 imprints) and a digital lending platform.

21/10/2018 © Fondazione LIA 2

Accessibility in the publishingindustry: a new path

The legislative framework/1

• The Marrakech Treaty (WIPO) came into force on September 30, 2016

o In Europe: A Directive and a Regulation have been adopted for the implementation

of the Marrakesh Treaty in EU law, the Directive and Regulation were published in

the Official Journal on 20 September 2017.

o European member states must ratify it by 18 October 2018

• It provides for a copyright exception:

o print impaired users (blind, low vision, dyslexic, etc.) and specialized organizations

can convert a text into an accessible format without asking permission to the owner

of the intellectual property (as it used to be);

o specialized organizations are also free to distribute the content free of charge in a

format accessible, including cross-border distribution.

• It may be possible that in the national legislation there is a clause (foreseen by the

Treaty) that says the copyright exception do not apply, if an accessible version of the

text is already available on the market.


The legislative framework/2

• The European Accessibility Act, now under discussion in the European

Parliament, includes among the services that have to be accessible the digital

publications, which means it calls on publishers on the one hand to produce

accessible content, and on the other hand the entire value chain to make content

available to users through accessible services (e-commerce, reading applications,

DRM, etc.)

• It will be mandatory that detailed information is given to the end user on the

accessibility specifications of products and services.

o Therefore it will be necessary to adopt, where existing, the available

international standards.

• The possible timeframe for the approval of the European Accessibility Act is 2019-

2020


Born Accessible Publications/1

«Born Accessible» means create digital products as accessible

since the first publication.

To create born accessible publications is required to:

• define specific procedures aimed at including accessibility features

in the traditional production workflows

• implement accessibility check (internal or external) of the

publications

• adopt international standard metadata schema while distributing

them along the value chain to provide to end users the description

of the accessibility featured available in the publications


Current situation

Two metadata standards for accessibility/1


ONIX

• supply chain

Schema.org

• webpages

• in EPUBs

Two metadata standards for accessibility/2


ONIX

• supply chain

Schema.org

• webpages

• in EPUBs

but also…

ONIX

• in EPUBs

Schema.org

• in ONIX

Two metadata standards for accessibility: result


ONIX 3 for ebook accessibility metadata/1

• The code list 196 describes the accessibility features for digital publications

• The codelist lists three types of data related to the accessibility of the ebook:

o Compliance to accessibility guidelines (LIA, EPUB Accessibility)

o Accessibility features of the ebook (interactive TOC, alternative texts, etc.)

o Link to detail information about accessibility on the certifier website, the

intermediary website or the publisher website



• The 196 code list is used in the ProductFormFeature elements group

o inside the DescriptiveDetail element

• For each accessibility feature a ProductFormFeature element is generated, which

contains two children elements:

o ProductFormFeatureType, which is based on code list 79, identifies the type

of product form feature;

to describe the accessibility features the value is always set to '09' which

stands for "E-publication accessibility detail";

o ProductFormFeatureValue, which is based on code list 196, identifies the

accessibility feature and can have the different values allowed by the code list


Schema.org for ebook accessibility metadata

• The EPUB Accessibility 1.0 guidelines published in 2017 by the International

Digital Publishing Forum - IDPF (now in the W3C) defined some mandatory

metadata to define the accessibility characteristics of EPUB files

• The IDPF metadata scheme for accessibility features is a subset of the

Schema.org’s Book scheme


Like a broken telephone game/1


Like a broken telephone game/2


1.Content creator

EPUB

metadata

Use of the same ISBN code for different formats of the same ebook

Digital distributors or

aggregators

Overriding of accessibility information

Digital bookstores

Patchy reception of metadata feeds

UI not accessible

1.Reading solutions

DRM

UI not accessible

Accessibility metadata notshown

Ideal situation

Optimal situation


content creators

• Produce accessible content

• Produce accessibility metadata

digital distributorsor BIP

• Ingest and distribute accessibility metadata

• Implement accessible DRM

digital bookstores

• Display accessibility metadata to users and searchengine

• Make the whole website accessible

Content creators


Digital distributors or Books in Print catalogues

• prepare the database and the backend to manage information on the

accessibility

o receive metadata from producers, store it and transmit it correctly

• For content distributors: Digital Rights Management system (DRM)

o often these anti-piracy solutions block some features that could be used by

malicious people to illegally access the content of the ebook

o those features are the same that assistive technologies use to allow users with

visual disability to access content


Digital bookstores (or digital libraries)

• Display accessibility metadata to users and search engines’ web crawlers

• There are four levels of information which can be shown to the user:

o an accessible / non-accessible / undeclared indicator that summarizes

the various accessibility features

o a taxonomy that identifies if the ebook is suitable for blind users, visually

impaired users and/or dyslexics

o a detailed list of all accessibility features;

o a flag that reports if the DRM can block any accessibility features or not.


The LIA case study: born accessible publications in the Italian digital market

The LIA label and MediaLibraryOnLine



Whitepaper on accessibility metadataSOON AVAILABLE!

Are you interested? Send an email to [email protected]!

Fondazione LIA

Corso di Porta Romana 108, 20122 Milano (Italy)

Tel. (+39) 02 89280808

mail: [email protected]

www.fondazionelia.org

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.fondazionelia.org/

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