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Digital Document Standards

Accessible EPUBs

EPUB Accessibility 1.1 addresses two key needs in the EPUB® ecosystem:

  • evaluation and certification of accessible EPUB Publications;

  • discovery of the accessible qualities of EPUB Publications.

This specification sets formal requirements to meet to certify content as accessible, and provides Authors a clear set of guidelines to evaluate their content against, and allow certification of quality. It is designed to be applicable to EPUB Publications that conform to any version or profile, including future versions of the standard.

An EPUB Publication must meet the following criteria to be accessible per this specification:

  • It must meet the requirements for Discoverable EPUB Publications, including providing metadata on accessibility.

  • It must meet the requirements for [WCAG 2.0] conformance defined in WCAG Conformance Requirements. This specifies WCAG 2.0 A as mandatory, and AA as recommended.

  • It must meet the requirements for EPUB Publications defined in EPUB Requirements. This section covers providing navigation to static page break locations and synchronised text and audio playback.

It must include accessibility conformance metadata as defined in Conformance Reporting. This includes stating which WCAG level (A, AA, AAA) it conforms to, and who provided this certification. 

PDF/UA - ISO 14289-1:2014 and ISO 32000-1:2008

ISO 14289-1 is also known as PDF/UA (Portable Document Format, Universal Accessibility), and is aimed at everyone involved in creating PDF. It is based on the PDF standard ISO 32000-1 (also known as Adobe PDF 1.7) and directly references that. It sets minimum requirements that make sure documents are compliant with devices that support people with disabilities. PDF/UA files require the information on their pages to be tagged, and it also allows users to create structure trees out of tags so that assistive programmes know in which order to read information.

The Matterhorn Protocol is a guide on compliance with PDF/UA: https://pdfa.org/resource/the-matterhorn-protocol/

Digital Accessible Information System

Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY), also known as ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005 (R2012), is a digital talking book standard which offers a flexible and navigable reading experience for people who are blind or print disabled, offering a significantly enhanced reading experience—one that is much closer to that of the sighted reader using a print book. A Digital Talking Book (DTB) is a collection of electronic files arranged to present information to the target population via alternative media, namely, human or synthetic speech, refreshable Braille, or visual display, e.g., large print. DAISY multimedia can be a book, magazine, newspaper, journal, computerised text, or a synchronised presentation of text and audio. It provides up to six embedded "navigation levels" for content, including embedded objects such as images, graphics, and MathML. In the DAISY standard, navigation is enabled within a sequential and hierarchical structure consisting of (marked-up) text synchronised with audio.

 

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