[Athen] Are Accessible Multilingual/Multi-directional EPUBs supported today?

[Brian Richwine]

Update: Well, surprisingly, performing either a Save As PDF directly from
Word 2013 or by using the Adobe Acrobat plug-in for Word, creates a
multi-lingual / multi-directional PDF that works in iBooks on iOS 8.0 just
fine. It is interesting to me that iBooks handles this from a PDF so well,
and not in the somewhat (at least what I consider to be) less complex EPUB
file format.

We tried a few different XHTML and HTML5 files, and experimented sending a
link to the file by email and trying to read the file using Safari on iOS
(again, latest 8.0.x as of last week). VoiceOver started reading the Arabic
just fine, but stopped reading altogether when it hit the language change
into en-US. The files we tried validated and displayed fine, just would not
read. We didn't dig too deeply on this option to see if it worked, say on
VoiceOver on OS X, etc.

None of the EPUB players we have handled language changes in the EPUB
(including VoiceDream).

Multi-lingual files are very important to us in the higher education
environment due to many students required to take language learning courses
(books that switch repeatedly between English and Spanish, English and
French, etc.). Getting it to work on iOS and iBooks is important too since
several of our low-vision students use iOS devices.

Considering it is a conversion from a Microsoft format to an Adobe format
and then being played on an Apple platform, I'm super happy that such a
simple conversion process works. If there was an easy way to mark up
language changes in PDFs then we'd probably kept the text in the original
PDF. However, we only know how to mark up language and direction changes by
converting it to Word. The export to Word feature in the latest Acrobat Pro
worked like a charm for this... much better than trying to OCR fancy Arabic
fonts!

-Brian



On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 2:22 PM, Ron Stewart <ron at ahead.org> wrote:


> That is true George, I was just trying to think of a simple solution and

> not having to wait for the reading system vendors to build such a feature

> in.

>

>

>

> Ron

>

>

>

> *From:* athen-list [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu] *On

> Behalf Of *George Kerscher

> *Sent:* Tuesday, September 30, 2014 11:37 AM

> *To:* 'Access Technology Higher Education Network'

> *Subject:* Re: [Athen] Are Accessible Multilingual/Multi-directional

> EPUBs supported today?

>

>

>

> Hi Ron,

>

>

>

>

>

> I find that JFW changes languages on the fly and I believe this is based

> on the language attribute. Is there more than that is needed? Of course, we

> need the language switching capabilities in a broad range of accessible

> reading systems.

>

>

>

> The information is there in the DOM; the visual presentation is good, so

> it is the AT that needs to send the change language command to the tts

> engine.

>

>

>

> Best

>

> George

>

>

>

>

>

> Best

>

> George

>

>

>

> *From:* athen-list [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu] *On

> Behalf Of *Ron Stewart

> *Sent:* Monday, September 29, 2014 3:12 PM

> *To:* 'Access Technology Higher Education Network'

> *Subject:* Re: [Athen] Are Accessible Multilingual/Multi-directional

> EPUBs supported today?

>

>

>

> Good advice George,

>

>

>

> I have been playing with epubtest.org and it at least does some of the

> validation grunt work.  In my thinking through the parsing issues with

> properly tagged code I am wondering if it can be done on the fly without

> some kind of a toggle initiated to go from left to right to right to left.

> Secondly would be the transition from romance based languages to more

> symbolic type languages such as Farsi or Arabic.

>

>

>

> Here is my thought, a reading system that would pick up the lang tagging

> and announce it with the user then using a quick keystroke combination to

> switch the user agent to the new language.  Not elegant I know, but nothing

> in this space has ever been elegant.

>

>

>

> There is clearly the potential in the rich semantic markup that is

> possible in XML, and has been for years, but I am yet to see a reader

> system that can actually deliver it.

>

>

>

> Ron Stewart

>

>

>

> *From:* athen-list [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu

> <athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu>] *On Behalf Of *George

> Kerscher

> *Sent:* Monday, September 29, 2014 1:53 PM

> *To:* 'Access Technology Higher Education Network'

> *Subject:* Re: [Athen] Are Accessible Multilingual/Multi-directional

> EPUBs supported today?

>

>

>

> Hi,

>

>

>

> If you look at epubtest.org, you would find a list of readers and in the

> test suite, there are tests for right to left readers.

>

>

>

> I would try the EPUBs you created to see if they change language on the

> fly. My guess, and we have not tested for this specifically that Readium

> for Chrome under Windows using JFW or NVDA would work the best. Also, look

> at Vital Source.

>

>

>

> Oh, and it may make a difference if the language change is on a block

> element, like a paragraph and not on a span.

>

>

>

> Let me know how this goes.

>

>

>

> Best

>

> George

>

>

>

>

>

> *From:* athen-list [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu] *On

> Behalf Of *Brian Richwine

> *Sent:* Monday, September 29, 2014 11:44 AM

> *To:* Access Technology Higher Education Network

> *Subject:* [Athen] Are Accessible Multilingual/Multi-directional EPUBs

> supported today?

>

>

>

> Hi,

>

>

>

>   Does anyone have knowledge of an accessible EPUB reader on iOS/VoiceOver

> (or any platform for that matter) that supports multilingual access,

> including a mix of directional languages? If it could work on iOS, I

> suppose we'd support any other file format that would be accessible and

> could be converted from a Word document.

>

>

>

>  We have a student that is blind, a native Arabic speaker, and does not

> want to use desktop screen-reading software since his iPhone natively

> supports Arabic TTS.

>

>

>

>  We've been converting his materials by editing in Word documents, and

> then converting them to the EPUB format. The student opens the materials in

> iBooks on his phone.

>

>

>

>  This has been going splendidly for books that are in all one language.

> However, the student is studying languages and many of the materials he

> needs make extensive use of two or more languages.

>

>

>

>   We've checked the underlying HTML, metadata files, etc. in the EPUBs we

> are creating. They seem to have the proper language markup around the

> changes (span elements with lang attributes as expected). However, none of

> the EPUB readers (accessible and with TTS) for iOS are handling the

> language changes.

>

>

>

>   It appears that for iBooks, at least, that this is currently by design.

> The iBooks Asset Guide speaks of "The language of your book" (as in

> singular language, pg. 19 of the iBooks Asset Guide 5.1 R2).

>

>

>

>   To complicate it, many of the texts switch between left-to-right

> languages and right-to-left languages. Often many times in a given line.

>

>

>

> Thanks!

>

>   Brian Richwine

>

>

>

> Manager, UITS Assistive Technology and Accessibility Centers

>

> Indiana University – Bloomington / Indianapolis

>

> http://iuadapts.iu.edu

>

> (812) 856-2757 [Direct Line]

>

> (812) 856-4112 [Office Number]

>

> brichwin at iu.edu

>

>

>

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