Automatic and Semi-automatic 2-tier Check System for EPUB Accessibility Hyun-Young Kim, Joo-Hyun Park, Soon-Bum Lim Sookmyung Women’s University, Department of IT Engineering, Cheongpa-ro 47-gil 100, Yongsan-gu. Seoul, Korea [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract With rapid development of electronic publishing technologies, e-books, especially EPUB, are being published at the same level of paper books publication volume. But still e-books with accessibility features are rare in the Korea market due to the production cost. Generally, EPUB accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the books. Similar to Web, e-books offers the possibility of unprecedented access to information and interaction for many people with disabilities. That is, the accessibility barriers to text, audio, and image can be much more easily overcome through EPUB accessibility technologies. Also EPUB accessibility benefits others, including older people with changing abilities due to aging. We think the rareness of accessible e-books is caused by the complexity of generating EPUB with accessibility. In this paper, we aim to propose 2-tier automatic accessibility check mechanism and implement it to help EPUB production system make easier e-books with accessibility than before. To do this, we extract 158 check items from several accessibility guidelines. The usability of this system has evaluated with EPUB e-books which has several in-accessible elements. This system was installed and managed by the National Library of Korea after the verification for each process. Keywords Accessibility, EPUB, Self-diagnosis Checker, Web Checker, Guidelines Journal on Technology and Persons with Disabilities Santiago, J. (Eds): CSUN Assistive Technology Conference © 2017 California State University, Northridge Automatic and Semi-Automatic 2-Tier Check System for EPUB Accessibility 30 Introduction There are several EPUB accessibility guidelines such as IDPF (International Digital Publication Forum), BISG (Book Industry Study Group) and DAISY consortium. These guidelines are well constructed and described concrete expressions about ‘to-do’ and ‘not-to-do’. The fundamental test sheets from 3 sites provide the essential accessibility check points and instructions to the person conducting the test. In the viewpoint from publishers and writers who are not familiar to web technology, HTML, CSS and EPUB structure, it needs a lot of manual work to make EPUB which is complying with 3 kinds of guidelines. This difficulty prevents the progression of mass production of accessible EPUB. Actually in Korea, publishers convert EPUB from PDF or ADOBE InDesign files, insert some multimedia files, add some JavaScript to represent an interaction, and distribute it without accessibility features. It shows they don’t have any interest to make accessible EPUB files. When inspecting EPUB file which has been deposited at the National Library of Korea, we found that more than 95% does not have any accessibility features. At first we defined 156 accessibility check points precisely and designed 2-tier automatic checker based on those items. Therefore e-book publishers can check their EPUB accessibility automatically whenever needed and get some exact information about which line and which column should be changed and what HTML element should be input. They just follow the system and end to get EPUB with accessibility. We have experienced the automatic accessibility checkers for web contents and known their potential shortfalls; it means that they cannot check for all potential barriers. The same situation happens at the EPUB field. If there is no interaction between the checker and the e- Journal on Technology and Persons with Disabilities Santiago, J. (Eds): CSUN Assistive Technology Conference © 2017 California State University, Northridge Automatic and Semi-Automatic 2-Tier Check System for EPUB Accessibility 31 book reader doing an accessibility review, one can be guaranteed that not all potential barriers are being considered. Anywhere that meaning is being reviewed, for instance, a human must make a decision. That is, accessibility checking technology is very poor at determining whether epub:type attribute is meaningful enough, or whether the page number accurately is the same as the number at paper book, to name two examples. In these and other cases, a person must decide. Taking these shortcomings into account, the checker was developed to address the problems. We propose the check process makes 2-tier structure, one level is automatic check system and the other is semi-automatic check system. Related Research The automatic accessibility check system must be based on EPUB accessibility guidelines from several organizations. We reviewed IDPF “EPUB3 accessibility guidelines”, BISG “The Quick Start Guide to Accessible Publishing” , DIAGRAM CENTER “Top Tips for Creating Accessible EPUB3 Files”, W3C “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0” and “Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.0”. “EPUB3 accessibility guidelines” has been designed to help the creation of accessible EPUB 3 content. It includes a quality assurance checklist together with instruction on how to implement the requirements. It covers from semantic representation with logical reading order to scripted interactivity with canvas and contains roughly 63 categories. We extracted what can be implemented in the form of the automatic checker from those guidelines. “The BISG Quick Start Guide to Accessible Publishing” serves as the model for best practices in creating accessible digital content for those who live with disabilities, in compliance with international standards. It also addresses why and how to create, distribute, and display accessible digital content and provides an overview of the critical importance of accessibility. It Journal on Technology and Persons with Disabilities Santiago, J. (Eds): CSUN Assistive Technology Conference © 2017 California State University, Northridge Automatic and Semi-Automatic 2-Tier Check System for EPUB Accessibility 32 is very similar to EPUB3 accessibility guidelines and connects to “Image Guidelines for EPUB 3” from DIAGRAM. We implemented a check routine whether images has alternate text or image descriptions and whether EPUB has the accessibility metadata. “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible and provides to make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. EPUB has the foundation of web contents such as HTML, CSS, etc. each element and each page of EPUB should follow WCAG specifications. We make the checker utilize the success criteria A level of WCAG and will have to extend the deeper level AA or AAA. Accessibility of web content requires semantic information about widgets, structures, and behaviors, in order to allow assistive technologies to convey appropriate information to persons with disabilities. “Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.0” provides ontology of roles, states, and properties that define accessible user interface elements and can be used to improve the accessibility and interoperability of web content and applications. These requirements can be activated the interaction with e-book readers. We align these features into semi-automatic checking process which has linked to both web viewer and web editor. As a result of reviews of the previous guidelines, we extracted 156 check items(Kim) such as the definition of the language used, the existence of separate style file, whether or not to use of bold tag, the existence of TOC, etc. In the part of web accessibility checker (Greg Gay et al) developed open, interactive, customizable, web accessibility checking tool. Their checker allows the reviewer to interact with Journal on Technology and Persons with Disabilities Santiago, J. (Eds): CSUN Assistive Technology Conference © 2017 California State University, Northridge Automatic and Semi-Automatic 2-Tier Check System for EPUB Accessibility 33 the system while conducting an accessibility review, making decisions on issues the checker cannot identify with certainty. It is very similar to our semi-automatic check process which can address issue points automatically at web viewer and can make the reader/editor change those points at the web editor if it doesn’t satisfy the accessibility rule. Their checker is working only on web contents not on EPUB contents. IDPF EpubCheck is a tool to validate EPUB files. It can detect many types of errors in EPUB. OCF container structure, OPF and OPS mark-up, and internal reference consistency are checked. It can verify whether EPUB file is compliant to EPUB structure and specifications. It cannot verify the accessibility of EPUB. So we would utilize EpubCheck only to verify whether the file is EPUB or not whenever our system gets one. Check Process and System Components Our system handles the EPUB accessibility under 2-tier process which has the 1st tier, PC version and the 2nd tier, Web version. We call the 1st tier as automatic checker and the 2nd tier as semi-auto checker. Whenever the system gets EPUB, the 1st tier, automatic checker, automatically check the 39 accessibility check points for both EPUB contents and