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

[Brian Richwine]

Thanks Ron,

We haven't tried XHTML or even HTML. I'll give that a shot. We should have
thought of that... if we can get the file to open in Safari on his iPhone,
then I'm reasonably sure VoiceOver with Safari will handle the language
changes.

Thanks again, Ron!

On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 1:49 PM, Ron <ronrstewart at gmail.com> wrote:


> Unfortunately not that I am aware of. Aside from this issue is that iBooks

> is actually an Apple proprietary reading platform. The student may not have

> an option to move to a real computer reading platform, and also to Windows.

>

>

> Have you tried converting to XHTML instead of to ePub, not sure if it will

> work either but since the tagging is already there it may be worth a try.

>

> Ron Stewart

>

>

> On Monday, September 29, 2014, Brian Richwine <blrichwine at gmail.com>

> wrote:

>

>> 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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