[Athen] Inkling

[Gaeir Dietrich]

The reader is very usable. Inkling has been working with Lucy Greco, who
works at UC Berkeley and provides accessibility testing as a side business.
If you would like to contact Lucy, please contact me off-list and I will
provide her contact info.

 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Gaeir (rhymes with "fire") Dietrich
408-996-6047 or 408-996-4636

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 

From: athen-list [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu] On
Behalf Of Carrie Nelson
Sent: Monday, April 14, 2014 9:55 AM
To: athen-list at u.washington.edu
Subject: [Athen] Inkling

 

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

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