E-Access Bulletin Live

Making digital resources in further and higher education more accessible – in order to comply with new regulations – can improve disabled students’ learning experience and help get more disabled people into work, according to a new report.

‘Accessible Virtual Learning Environments’ was published by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Assistive Technology (APPGAT) and cross-party think-tank Policy Connect, and written by Robert McLaren, Head of Industry, Technology and Innovation at Policy Connect. It sets out a series of recommendations on how institutions can make their digital content more accessible for students, particularly those with a disability.

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People in all parts of the publishing chain – from device manufacturers to those developing content platforms – must work together to improve e-book accessibility, delegates at the London Book Fair heard this month.

“No one player in the chain between author and reader can solve the problem of accessibility on their own … only through collaboration can we achieve our goal of delivering the content in ways and on platforms that suit the needs of particular readers”, Publishers Licensing Society (PLS) chairman Mark Bide told the fair’s seminar on accessible e-publishing.

The seminar is organised by the book industry standards body EDItEUR with the Royal National Institute of Blind People and The Publishers Association.

Speaking after the seminar, Bide told E-Access Bulletin the debate over e-book accessibility has shifted recently towards the need to ensure mainstream formats are flexible. “We are now increasingly focused on the importance of making mainstream e-books as accessible as possible, although we do not forget that there continues to be a need to facilitate access to specialist formats where no appropriate e-book is accessible”, he said.

“As with any other reader, we simply need to deliver the reading experience that [readers] require – whether it be large print, text-to-speech, different text or background colours”, Bide said.

The EPUB electronic book format is the most accessible digital document format, according to a new paper designed to open a debate on accessibility of all mainstream document formats by people with disabilities.

The debate – intended to lead to a further paper to be published in the summer – has been launched by One Voice for Accessible ICT Coalition, an umbrella group for organisations supporting access to digital technology by people with disabilities.

“At present digital documents are sent out in a variety of formats including doc, docx, pdf, EPUB, daisy, MP3 and MP4 and it is not clear what the accessibility pros and cons of these different formats are and if one should be the preferred option”, Peter Abrahams, accessibility leader at Bloor Research and author of the paper, said this week.

According to the paper, EPUB documents can be accessed by most people including users of special access technology, with the exception of sign language readers who will need video files. EPUB documents can also be easily converted into other formats, it says. However, “The present issue is that not everyone has ePub readers installed on their device. Also not everyone has an ePub creator tool”, the paper says.

“There are a wealth of document formats: so this is an opportunity to review those and recommend what the most accessible format is, to try and increase accessibility in document publication”, Nigel Lewis, chair of One Voice, told E-Access Bulletin this week.

“The initial recommendation of the EPUB format is perhaps a surprise, since most people might consider pdf or .doc as the most accessible default formats”, Lewis said. “But we wanted a controversy – to stir a debate among our membership”.

EPUB is an open electronic book standard developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), an international publishing industry body whose UK members include Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Open University and RNIB.

As well as looking at the overall accessibility of each format, the One Voice debate would examine the best ways of structuring documents in all major formats, Lewis said. “Most people still don’t structure common documents in an accessible way,” he said.

Alongside the new work, One Voice is launching a membership drive to expand its network of partners collaborating to improve digital accessibility, Lewis said. Membership of the group currently stands at about 50 organisations and individuals including E-Access Bulletin publisher Headstar. Full members must pay an annual fee to join, and new members include Barclays banking group.