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

[George Kerscher]

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 <http://iuadapts.iu.edu/> 
(812) 856-2757 [Direct Line]
(812) 856-4112 [Office Number]
brichwin at iu.edu
 
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