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

[Ron Stewart]

Just further thinking on this, obviously you have perked my interest since this is a challenge I attempted to resolve several years ago with a certain commercial vendor.  

 

The underlying XML tagging structure includes the proper semantic markup based on what you have shared. So some thoughts to ponder on this wonderful Fall afternoon, before I get back on Spydee and ride ride ride. :-)

 

Could you use  Webkit to do an implementation on the Mac that built on the lang tag presentation to provide a key that was presented to the user to toggle/switch upon prompt?. You would need a different, though not too dissimilar implementation on iOS but there are also some significant hardware limitations as well.

 

Some have suggested using Chrome in a non-native Chrome browser and I wonder how disruptive that would be in the reading experience.  A Chrome on Chrome implementation would make more sense in my mind since that is the direction that Google has been going on for years.

 

I am thinking each implementation of such a technique would need to be platform dependent due to the underlying heuristics and hardware limitations imposed on switching from font face to another and one TTS engine to another. On the Win platform it seems it would be much more doable in the Firefox/Mozilla space if they actually ever get back to getting their act together in regards to audio support.

 

Thinking out loud here boys and girls, please let me know where I am wrong in my thinking but if nothing else my very experienced brain cells are energized.

 

Cheers!

 

 

 

From: athen-list [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman13.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Brian Richwine
Sent: Monday, September 29, 2014 1:25 PM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network
Subject: Re: [Athen] Are Accessible Multilingual/Multi-directional EPUBs supported today?

 

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 <http://iuadapts.iu.edu/> 

(812) 856-2757 <tel:%28812%29%20856-2757>  [Direct Line]

(812) 856-4112 <tel:%28812%29%20856-4112>  [Office Number]

brichwin at iu.edu

 


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