Frequently Asked Questions, Known Complexities and Example Solutions

Accessibility Statements in Metadata - should this be at the individual book or whole publisher content level?

Metadata formats, for example ONIX, often include a field for a human readable summary that describes the accessibility of the product. The purpose of this is for end users to make a decision on whether they are able to perceive, operate and understand the content based on their individual accessibility needs. In order to do this, it needs to describe the individual book, as each book will be very different. However, doing this could be considered an unreasonable burden for a small publisher, and in that case the publisher level description would be better than nothing. Remember, unreasonable burden exceptions generally do not apply until a full costing and benefit analysis has been completed and can be produced on request.

If books are available online, do they have to comply with every country's accessibility legislation in the world?

For general download - we would recommend complying with the legislation in the country or countries where the publisher is based. If seeking investment from an institutional library - we would recommend complying with the legislation in the country where the institution is based.

Should I use short or extended ALT text descriptions in PDFs, or both?

Best practice = short descriptions with links to extended descriptions within a specific section at the back of the book (not a supplementary file). Alternative solution = offer EPUB as a more accessible version to those that require extended descriptions, state this in the metadata.

How do I know my ALT text is good?

Firstly, you will never please every user with your ALT text, and one useful approach when writing descriptions is to imagine you are describing the image to someone over the phone. There is a very useful extended guide here: Alt-texts: The Ultimate Guide.

Here are some further tips we have collated:

• Directional cues (e.g. person on the left) can be included but shouldn't be central to understanding the image.

How to Tag Footnotes and References in PDFs

For most PDF tagging queries, you can consult the PDF Association - Tagged PDF Best Practice Guide: Syntax. There are some additional suggestions, sourced from this description from a mailing list:

• add a link to footnote/endnote reference numbers and a backlink from the note to the reference number in the body text so that visual readers can jump back and forth to the footnote and its reference easily.
• enclose footnote/endnote reference number in square brackets to increase the target size of that link and to generally make it easier for readers to notice that there is a note number there, and customise the font size of footnote numbers so that they are not so small as to be difficult to read

• some PDF checking software will flag one or both uses of <Lbl> as an error, you can turn off this check in Acrobat's settings by clearing the "Lbl and LBody must be children of LI" checkbox.

Some issues in this area are down to the choice of screen reader, which publishers don't have control over.

LaTeX documents prepared by authors are all different