Automatic and Semi-automatic 2-tier Check System for EPUB Accessibility

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 Koreamarket due to the production cost. Generally, EPUBaccessibilitymeans 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 barriersto text, audio, and image can be much more easily overcome through EPUBaccessibility technologies. Also EPUBaccessibility 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 checkmechanism 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 severalin-accessible elements. This system was installed and managed by the National Library of Korea after the verification for each process.