properly common functions in preparing accessible
digital contents, such as (a) alternative descriptions
for images and figures, (b) document structure
divided into sections and sub-sections through
headings, (c) metadata, and (d) digital publishing
semantics. The second question was whether the
Adobe InDesign tool is mature enough to support
accessibility in the design of interactive and
multimedia features for EPUB 3. This question is
more specifically aimed at evaluating how InDesign
works with the design of (a) interaction UI
components (e.g. text fields and buttons), (b) scripts
to handle “live content” which is dynamically
updated according to user actions (e.g. quizzes and
different table views), and (c) multimedia audio
contents which can be activated by the user.
The paper is organized as follows: section 2
introduces related works in the field, and section 3
the methods used to conduct the study. The eBook
prototype is described in section 4. Section 5
presents and discusses the results obtained by
working with InDesign tool in preparing the EPUB 3
prototype. Sections 7 and 8 present a short
discussion and some suggestions for authoring tools
developers. Section 9 concludes the paper.
2 RELATED WORK
Numerous studies and researchers have been
investigating accessibility in digital publishing for
several years (Brady et al., 2015; Calabrò et al.,
2009; Schwarz et al., 2018). The publishers’
standard and accessibility format were integrated to
achieve accessibility in the mainstream eBook
industry (Kasdorf, 2018). Nevertheless, accessibility
issues are still encountered when reading via
assistive technologies, like a screen reader on both
desktop and mobile platforms (Bartalesi and
Leporini, 2015; Leporini et al., 2019). Several
studies have focused on accessibility and usability
for reading activities and features (Henry, 2012;
Miller and Ranum, 2012). Other works propose
specific reading tools or audio books for blind
people, such as those described in (Kulkarni and
Bhurchandi, 2015; Lundh and Johnson, 2015). Our
approach consists in using the widely-used EPUB
format developed with everyday design tools.
Interactive eBooks have been investigated in
various studies in the literature (Fenwick Jr et al.,
2013; Gavrilis, 2013; Miller and Ranum, 2012).
While these studies introduce the usefulness of
interactivity in an eBook, they do not consider
accessibility and interaction features included
directly in the EPUB format. Furthermore, to the
best of our knowledge, no work considers how
accessibility support is provided by design tools.
3 METHOD
To evaluate accessibility support offered by the
InDesign tool, an interactive and multimedia eBook
prototype has been developed by two of the authors,
one of whom has long experience in the digital
publishing field and editing tools. A textbook has
been selected as basic contents to be enhanced
through interaction and multimedia features.
The eBook prototype has been designed by using
(1) InDesign (version CC 2019) as the primary tool
to develop the eBook core, and to obtain the EPUB 3
(reflowable) format. After that, the resulting EPUB
has been modified via (2) the Sigil software to
manipulate the document
2
, (3) HTML5, CSS and
JavaScript to add accessibility features and
interaction functions which were not directly
supported by the InDesign software, and (4) WAI-
ARIA techniques (W3C, 2017a) to address some
accessibility features.
In this work, we evaluated both (1) accessibility
guidelines provided by Adobe as accessibility
support offered by the tool, and (2) the accessibility
support observed in adding interactive and
multimedia contents to the document prototype.
The settings used for exporting the EPUB 3 as
output document can play a meaningful role for
effective accessible contents. Figure summarizes the
settings used to export the EPUB prototype by
InDesign. We checked the exported EPUB
document according to the EPUB Accessibility 1.0
guidelines (W3C, 2017b) to test what accessibility
features of the file can be managed in InDesign and
what requires additional work.
General Tab:
o Version: EPUB 3.0
o Navigation TOC: Multi Level (TOC style)
o Content:
Order: Same as Article panel
Text Tab:
o Footnotes: In pop-up (EPUB 3)
o Lists:
Bullets: Map to unordered lists
Numbers: Map to ordered lists
Figure 1: InDesign settings to export the EPUB format.
2
Sigil editor, https://sigil-ebook.com/