۱- Introduction

۲- Related studies

۳- Development of an electronic book accessibility standard for the physically challenged individuals

۴- Accessibility verification system design and implementation results

۵- Experiment results and considerations

۶- Conclusion

References

Abstract

Unlike popular web-based internet and mobile applications, electronic books and similar products have lower distribution and less accessibility, making them difficult for vulnerable social groups to utilize. Various institutions have proposed electronic publication (EPUB) accessibility guidelines, based on the IDEF modeling language, to provide accessible content for electronic publications. However, these are merely guidelines for securing accessibility of common electronic books. They are not geared toward the visually impaired persons. Moreover, even if accessibility standards exist, it becomes even more difficult to then find examination tools that can fully verify standards compliance. This study establishes an electronic book accessibility standard for the physically challenged individuals, based on the EPUB 3.0 accessibility guideline. We developed an automatic/semi-automatic examination tool that can test the standard. We linked the SIGIL electronic book reader, having the highest market share in Korea, to an examination tool to verify error detection performance. Lastly, an accessibility test was performed on 50 electronic books, commercially used in the Korean electronic book market, to assess which accessibility standard domain is the most problematic. Thus, we propose a guideline on matters that should be considered when writing electronic books in Korea.

Introduction

Korea’s information and communication technology development speed may be the highest in the world. However, this is based only on external growth. Inside Korea, there ought to be an environment where the 2.5 million physically challenged individuals, who make of 5% of the entire population, can enjoy their fair share of electronically published information [1]. Unlike widely popular web-based internet and mobile applications, electronic books and similar products have lower distribution and less accessibility, making them difficult for vulnerable social groups to utilize. In our current era of informatization, any gap in information creates wider gaps in other domains, including education and income [2]. Physically challenged individuals are defined as not only persons with physical disabilities but also situations in which reading activity is interrupted by external environmental factors. It includes, for example, all blind and low vision due to inherited, acquired factors, and who are not free to use the visual, such as when driving, cooking, and so on. Also included, reading disabled people including dyslexia and illiteracy. A few electronic publication (EPUB) accessibility guidelines exist today, including the International Digital Publication Forum (IDPF), the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), and the Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) consortium. These guidelines provide required accessibility checkpoints and rules that must be adhered to by developers that create electronic books. From the perspective of publishers or writers who are not accustomed to web technologies (e.g., HTML, CSS, and EPUB), substantial time and money is wasted creating adhering to these guidelines, because they believe doing so requires foreign-language fluency and significant manual labor. This opinion inhibits the mass production of accessible EPUBs. According to [3], in Korea, a publisher first converts the EPUB from a PDF or ADOBE InDesign file, inserts some multimedia files, adds interacting JavaScript, and then distributes the PDF without essential options required for the user. This demonstrates that they have no interest in creating a truly accessible EPUB file. Upon examining the EPUB files that has been donated to the National Library of Korea, 95% of needy users found that these files do not have the functions they require. Furthermore, extant EPUB accessibility guidelines include use of electronic books by the physically challenged individuals, but they do not specify accessibility for them. Structural accessibility standards for electronic books must be designed such that all the physically challenged individuals enjoy accessibility [4]. However, they must also be meaningfully accessible.