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Old 05-02-2018, 08:03 PM   #15
Tex2002ans
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Quote:
Originally Posted by j.p.s View Post
My question was theoretical, but I thought the whole point of the ALT attribute was to address accessibility and that accessibility was a major use case for TTS. It's a shame if no TTS out there uses the ALT attribute.
JAWS and NVDA are the largest/most popular screen readers:

http://www.freedomscientific.com/Pro...Blindness/JAWS

https://www.nvaccess.org/

According to this site:

http://accessibleculture.org/researc...aws-we-all.php

the œ + æ ligatures are not spoken out by default in JAWS (although this could be outdated info, it was back in 2008).

Side Note: Also, a great resource for all things Accessibility is the "Web Accessibility in Mind" website. They explain reasons for using alt text with some examples:

https://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/

Side Note #2: Also, WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and all the Web Accessibility rules are good standards to follow as well:

https://www.w3.org/WAI/alt/

Quote:
Originally Posted by j.p.s View Post
No use shaming authors/publishers on that one then.
Hmmm, I would shame some of these if they are creating books with poor Accessibility.

WCAG is becoming more important, especially in government documents (or academic resources).

And Accessibility is definitely a larger topic that libraries/publishers are going to begin to pushing for as well. Many ebookcraft talks the past few years covered this topic:

https://lernerbooks.blog/2018/04/acc...raft-2018.html

Creating a Roadmap for Accessibility - ebookcraft 2017

Anyone creating documents for the web should be keeping these types of processes in mind.

And don't just think "no current ereader I know of handles this", you have to keep in mind that:
  • People convert/strip the EPUB
    • So they may just read the straight HTML, or read it as DAISY
  • Future formats/tools/readers may handle the HTML better/differently
  • There could be updates to the reading programs themselves (especially in the Android/iOS space)
  • There could be tools out there you aren't currently aware of

And who knows, maybe in the future Amazon/Google may uprank books/sites that offer better Accessibility... and then some companies may be scrambling trying to introduce it to their backlog, when you instantly reap the benefits since you've been following good practices for years!

Last edited by Tex2002ans; 05-02-2018 at 09:00 PM.
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