CSUN 2015: This session covered efforts to advance the accessibility and adoption of educational content in portable EPUB 3 format.

1. © 2015 IBM Corporation
EPUB3 Empowers Learning Professionals on the Go
 Becky Gibson – Senior Technical Staff
Member Accessibility on Readium and
Acquisitions, IBM Software
 George Kerscher - Secretary General,
DAISY Consortium, Senior Officer,
Accessible Technology, Learning Ally,
President IDPF
 Rich Schwerdtfeger – CTO Accessibility
IBM Software
EPUB Empowers
Learning Professionals
on the Go

2. 2 © 2015 IBM Corporation
What is EPUB?
• EPUB is an Open Electronic Publishing Standard from the
International Digital Publishing Forum
• EPUB is based on Open Web Standards
• EPUB is fast becoming the de-facto book publishing standard for
Education
• EPUB is supported by the major mobile devices – Android and
iOS

3. 3 © 2015 IBM Corporation
Open Web Standards used in EPUB
• HTML5
• WAI-ARIA
• SVG
• MathML
• CSS
• SMIL

4. 4 © 2015 IBM Corporation
EPUB Adoption Today
• Second only to plain text and PDF in platform reader support
– Kindle: Main exception but converters exist
• Document converters exist to convert Word to EPUB
• Authoring Tools Are Available
• Asia-Pacific: EPUB is THE standard as Amazon is not present
• Korea: All education materials are EPUB
• All the publishing support systems and conversion houses
support EPUB

5. 5 © 2015 IBM Corporation
EPUB vs. PDF - Mainstream
• EPUB is NOT designed for high print fidelity
• Reflow and scroll vs. pinch and squeeze on mobile
• More searchable (based on HTML5)
• Ability to create portable cloud annotation
– Highlighting, bookmarks, notes, etc.
• Ability to increase fonts dynamically
• Easier to translate – (Based on HTML5)
• Tie speech to text (self voice)
• Future: Deliver a context aware experience
• Deliver Interactive Documentation (Already going on in Education)
• Able to phase in features as enterprise is ready
• And More: It is programmatically accessible

6. 6 © 2015 IBM Corporation
PDF Accessibility
• Technical
– Tagged PDF Very Hard to make Accessible.
– Accessibility infrastructure outdated
– Accessibility support limited beyond Windows
– No access to Math and rich graphics
• Customers
– Costly to remediate accessibility issues
– Disabled users would like to see it 'go away'
• IBM had no control to fix

7. 7 © 2015 IBM Corporation
EPUB
Accessibility
HTML5 + ARIA 1.0
EPUB Accessibility and the Open Web
Today Tomorrow
User Context Accessibility Info.
•CSS Media Queries
•IndieUI User Context
New Accessibility Semantics
•WAI-ARIA 1.1
•WAI-ARIA Digital Book Module
•WAI-ARIA Graphics Module
SVG2 Accessibility
•WAI-ARIA
•WAI-ARIA Graphics Module
•Keyboard support
•Connectors
Miscellaneous
•Web Speech API
•QTI test widgets
•MathML reader cloud extensions
for Readium (Benetech)

8. 8 © 2015 IBM Corporation
Why IBM Moved to EPUB for Documentation
• MobileFirst – IBM Software Directive to prioritize mobile over
desktop
• Focus beyond Windows desktop platform
• PDF not a usable format for handhelds
• Print Fidelity less important on a mobile device
• Opportunity to leverage accessibility work on open web platform
for IBM Documentation
• Ability to re-use open web accessibility efforts and leverage
access to digital Math
• The ability to provide interactive documentation to customers

9. 9 © 2015 IBM Corporation
IBM Internal Transformation
• All Documentation is stored in OASIS Darwin Information Typing
Architecture (DITA)
– Many enterprises use DITA in part of their business
– Use Oxygen XML Editors to author content
– Oxygen DITA to EPUB converters
• Expanding internal web accessibility test tool to process EPUB
• Began producing EPUB documents 3Q14
• EPUB Readers
– Tactile: Lucifox plugin Firefox
– Long term: Readium.js, Readium SDK (Cloud/Mobile)

10. 10 © 2015 IBM Corporation
Readium.org
• Open Source Technology for EPUB 3 and the Open Web
Platform
• Develops technology to accelerate the adoption of EPUB 3 by
the global digital publishing industry
• Non-profit membership organization
• Formed in February, 2013

11. 11 © 2015 IBM Corporation
Readium Members (partial list)
• IBM
• DAISY Consortium
• Benetech
• Evident Point
• Learning Ally
• New York Public Library
• Bluefire Productions
• Datalogics
• Digital Public Library of
America
• KOBO
• Publiwide
• Many more …

12. 12 © 2015 IBM Corporation
Readium Products
• Readium Web
– EPUB 3 rendering engine for browser-based cloud readers
• Readium SDK – 1.0 released 12/2014
– EPUB 3 rendering engine for native apps
• Reference Applications
– OSX, iOS, Android, Windows (in progress)
• All hosted on github.com/Readium

13. 13 © 2015 IBM Corporation
Readium Applications
• Web Applications
– Chrome Extension – Release 2.15.2, 09/2014
– Cloud Reader
• Mobile Applications
– iOS, Android, Windows (in progress)
• Desktop Applications
– OS X, Windows (in progress)

14. 14 © 2015 IBM Corporation
Readium Features
• Support for EPUB 2.0 and 3.0 Rendering
• Media Overlays
• MathML (via MathJax)
• EPUB Reading System Object
• Obfuscated font support
• Accessibility
• Versioning via github hashes
For more details see Readium SDK 1.0 Release Notes

15. 15 © 2015 IBM Corporation
Readium Future Plans
• EPUB 3.01
• EDUPUB
• Digital Rights Mgmt. (DRM) via Lightweight Content
Protection (LCP)
• Cross-browser support
• Additional Features
– bookmarks, annotations, search
– pop-up footnotes
– multiple renditions
– More …

16. 16 © 2015 IBM Corporation
Readium Demo
See http://weba11y.com/Examples/Readium/ReadiumFFDemo.html

17. 17 © 2015 IBM Corporation
EPUB Authoring Tools
• EPUB 3 brings the full power of HTML 5 to portable documents
• Goal is to deliver the most readable, engaging and accessible
experience to readers
• Publishers have developed internal production processes that
make the best use of their assets
• Conversion vendors specialize in EPUB 3 for the
publishing industry
• “Save as EPUB 3” feature: demand will drive

18. 18 © 2015 IBM Corporation
Tracking Authoring Revolution
• Pages first to support EPUB creation
• iBooks Author: Caution - Apple’s ecosystem
• People with fair knowledge of XHTML 5 can create separate
XHTML files and then build .epub files with EPUBCheck
• DAISY Community uses Tobi to create EPUB 3
• DAISY Pipeline 2 converts DAISY files to EPUB 3
• List of authoring tools: http://epubzone.org/solutions
• Accessibility needs improvement

19. 19 © 2015 IBM Corporation
EPUB 3 / EDUPUB
• EDUPUB: EPUB 3 semantically enhanced for education
• Integration with LMS
• Going far beyond the print textbook
– QTI Test widgets
– Common Widget Library (Scripted components)
– Caliper analytic integration

20. 20 © 2015 IBM Corporation
Thank You

21. 21 © 2015 IBM Corporation
Backup

22. 22 © 2015 IBM Corporation
Sample ePUB Readers
• Apps
– Apple iBooks
– Google Play Books
– Aldiko
– Calibre
– FB Reader
– Various reader apps,
such as Kobo, Nook, ...
• Web and cloud
– Magic Software
– Readium
– EPUBReader
– ...

23. 23 © 2015 IBM Corporation
Readium Licensing
• Gnu Affero General Public License Version 3
– copyleft
• Alternative license based upon Apache 2.0
– targeted to commercial adopters
– requires minimum contribution

24. 24 © 2015 IBM Corporation
Sample ePUB Exporters/Converters
• Document converters exist
– Word to ePub
– PDF to ePub
• Apache ePub exporters
– EPUB generator – basic ePUB transform for OO XML Documents
– WritetoPUB – converts any OO supported document to ePUB
– ODFtoPUB – an ODF to ePub exporter