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

[Ron Stewart]

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

(812) 856-2757 [Direct Line]

(812) 856-4112 [Office Number]

brichwin at iu.edu

 

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