[Athen] Production of EPUB 3 Content?

[Ken Petri]

Hi Al,

This is an excellent question. I have no great answer. There is no EPUB3
movement underway at OSU, either within disability services or within
eLearning. It will likely start in eLearning before it starts in our DS
office.

InDesign will produce EPUB3, but from all reports I've heard, it's pretty
broken. The sigil editor has EPUB 3 production on the radar but it's not
implemented, not even in beta, from what I can tell. BlueGriffon EPUB
Edition will produce EPUB3. You can try it for free. It's about $265 to
purchase (advertised prices are in Euros). It could be the best bet for
book production as EPUB3, at this point. (Perhaps an InDesign to broken
EPUB to BlueGriffon to fix that borked EPUB?) If only iBooks Author created
real rather than bastardized EPUB3....

And Al what are you recommending for reading EPUB 3? iBooks handles a lot
of the spec, but not all. There's Azardi, but it lacks screen reader
accessibility. And there's Adobe Digital Editions. ADE has pretty decent
initial EPUB3 support, but it doesn't render MathML or the canvas element,
not sure about SVG, but I know it doesn't handle video or audio tags. The
advantage of ADE is that it has good screen reader support. Nook Study will
open basic EPUB3 books and it has the advantage of having built in
reading+text-highlighting, but it will crash if complex EPUB3 is opened in
it. Then there's the promising Readium project. It has very good EPUB3
support, but its designed as a test bed platform not as a "production"
reader and it's not working well with any screen reader at this point,
including ChromeVox. It will support most MathML (through MathJax) and
supports video and audio (because it's running in Chrome, after all). We
need one killer EPUB3 player on Windows and Mac but it's just not there
yet. I'm hoping Adobe comes to the rescue. ADE has been getting better. We
were working the B&N on Nook Study accessibility for a short time but that
effort fell through.

I'd love to hear what you guys are doing.

Best,


ken
--
Ken Petri
Program Director, OSU Web Accessibility Center
102D Pomerene Hall, 1760 Neil Avenue, Columbus, Ohio  43210
Office: 614.292.1760 | Mobile: 614.218.1499 | Fax: 614.292.4190
http://wac.osu.edu | petri.1 at osu.edu


On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 10:34 AM, Al Puzzuoli <alpuzz at msu.edu> wrote:


>  Just curious as to whether anyone is currently producing E-Text content

> in EPUB 3, or whether you have begun looking at how to do so in future?  We

> are currently exploring the possibility of transitioning  our base format

> to EPUB 3 but at this point, we’re not even sure which software out there

> would provide the best solution.  ****

>

> Any comments would be very welcome,****

>

> Thanks,****

>

> ** **

>

> ** **

>

> Al Puzzuoli****

>

> Michigan State University****

>

> Information Technologist

> http://www.rcpd.msu.edu****

>

> Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities  517-884-1915 120 Bessey

> Hall East Lansing, MI  48824-1033****

>

> ** **

>

> ** **

>

> ** **

>

> ** **

>

> ** **

>

> ** **

>

> ** **

>

> ** **

>

> ** **

>

> ** **

>

> ** **

>

> ** **

>

> ** **

>

> ** **

>

> ** **

>

> _______________________________________________

> athen-list mailing list

> athen-list at mailman1.u.washington.edu

> http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/athen-list

>

>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman12.u.washington.edu/pipermail/athen-list/attachments/20130131/c62d06e7/attachment.html>