[Athen] Inkling

[Carrie Nelson]

Hi All. I'm wondering if any of you have experience with supporting screen-reader-based use of the Inkling ebook platform in any way and can share what you've found. Are some aspects of the texts usable with screen readers?


If you are interested in more details about what we're doing and why I'm asking, you can read on, but it isn't necessary:

UW-Madison is continuing eTextbook experimentation and we are currently supporting creation of new texts by our own faculty that could be made openly available. We have several instructors with content and have been looking for a workflow to get that content produced in a nice flexible format that can be used on a variety of devices/readers, will make sense through screen-readers, and looks enough like commercially-published content to make authors happy.

Yes, we know this is a big challenge, and we may end up phasing in our solutions.

One of our front-running solutions is a product/platform called Inkling.They provide an authoring tool and store that delivers ebooks in their platform. The authoring tool creates HTML5/CSS3-based books with "enhancements." The tool is also fairly open and allows people to directly edit the HTML and CSS codes, so we're hoping it may allow us to develop nice (and accessible) templates that allow our authors to create content in the Inkling WYSIWYG editor (an accessible authoring tool that does the rest of what we need is unfortunately beyond our hopes at this stage).

We will be able to output EPUB3 versions of the books we create and our real goal is to make sure that anything created in Inkling can be used equally well in non-Inkling platforms (eg: ADE, Azardi, Readium), but it's clear that at least some of their interactive features currently will break in other platforms. It's possible that our interim solution will be some compromise version of the books that link out to simpler standards-based versions of the interactive features alongside built-in interactivity that can only be used by people inside the Inkling platform (not great, I know).

As we figure out what we can do in our version of these texts, and whether the Inkling tool is going to work for us at all, it would be helpful to have a better understanding of how usable their reader is, which is why I've come to all of you.

Thanks in advance for anything you're able to share! and please feel free to contact me off-list if you have issues or suggestions better handled that way.
Carrie

________________________
Carrie Nelson, Academic Librarian
College Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison
600 North Park Street, Madison, WI 53706
cnelson at library.wisc.edu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman12.u.washington.edu/pipermail/athen-list/attachments/20140414/1c68adfe/attachment.html>