Book files Frontlist / Born Accessible

This type of work concerns making accessibility improvements to books that are about to be published. It will involve making changes to how your authors, typesetters and any external providers are required to work. The frequency with which you introduce improvements, and in what order you introduce them is up to yourselves. If you have a low volume of books you may approach this on a book by book basis, or for higher volumes you might want to 'version' improvements, for example, focus on all the easy wins for books being published in the next year. 

If you are only able to consider some of the requirements in the checklist below, which encompasses the legal minimum, you will still need to plan to go back and remediate in the future so you can do all of them (see Book files Backlist / Remediation). Once these have been achieved, you may decide to go beyond this legal minimum in future frontlist 'versions', to introduce some of the requirements of WCAG AAA.

Taken from our checklist for manual checking of ebook files, here we have ordered tasks by level of complexity. You can see a full spreadsheet of this checklist, with details of the complexity level, suggested approaches to checking and improving, whether this can be machine automated and whether a publisher, author or both needs to be involved, here: (to follow)

Easy wins

Text is actual text; not images of text
Colours of text has contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1
Text is reflowable without problems
Text can be resized without problems
Line height and spacing, letter spacing and word spacing can all be changed without problems
Orientation can be changed without problems
Other clickable elements are 24 x 24 pixels
Other clickable elements have visible text that matches the text in the underlying code
A list's numbers, letters or bullets are displayed and tagged correctly
Non-decorative/real and decorative/artefact content is all tagged correctly
Non-text features (figures, graphics, captions, links, mathematical expressions) are tagged and grouped correctly
Lists, tables and TOCs are tagged correctly
Headers, footers, notes and references are tagged correctly
Headings are tagged as headings
Headings have just 1 <H1>, at the beginning
Headings <H2>-<H6> don't skip levels
No headings <H7> or higher
Other non-PDF structure elements tagged correctly
Multiple ways to navigate
Navigation consistent throughout
Repeating blocks of content can be skipped

Medium

Headings are descriptive of the content they contain
Fonts are coded correctly
Colours of non-text features (figures, graphics) has contrast ratio of at least 3:1
Links are accessible and meaningful
A tables's headers, rows and columns are tagged correctly
Static page breaks are present
Static page breaks are navigable
Reading/focus order retains meaning when using tabs or a screenreader
File has metadata
File metadata has a title that is used instead of file name
File metadata has a valid language
Source of static page breaks/pagination is identifiable
File metadata includes full accessibility conformance information

Complicated

Non-text features (figures, graphics, captions, links, mathematical expressions) have meaningful ALT text
Non-text features (figures, graphics, captions, links, mathematical expressions) have multiple ways of conveying meaning
PDF tags support the separate reading order
PDF role mapping is correct
Other structure elements in PDF tagged correctly

Variable

Where the language changes, individual parts have a valid language