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

[Brian Richwine]

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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