First, I wanted to point out KevinH's Sigil Plugin,
"Access-Aide".
It helps fill blank <title>s (using the first heading in the document) + add lang + xml:lang to your <html>.
Did you convert using Calibre or something else?
Sometimes the tools put gibberish (like InDesign puts the filenames in there... you can safely delete those):
Code:
<title>Chapter_1.xhtml</title>
<title>abc123456890_book_EPUB.epub</title>
Sometimes tools will put some info (like Book Title, Chapter Title, Author, [...]) in the <title></title>:
Code:
<title>Gregg Bell - Dupes-A-Navy: Chapter 1</title>
It doesn't hurt if it's blank, but it could be helpful IF there is meaningful info in the <title>.
Something like:
Code:
<head>
<title>Chapter One: The Beginning</title>
<link href="../Styles/stylesheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
</head>
<body>
<h2>Chapter One: The Beginning</h2>
would be helpful for Accessibility reasons:
- If that HTML gets opened up in a browser, the <title> is what shows in the tab.
- If being read by a screenreader, the person may have the <title> spoken out loud.
- Some ereaders might display that as the header/footer (don't know of any that do).
Technical Side Note: WCAG has a few articles on how to create good <title>s:
G88: Providing descriptive titles for Web pages
H25: Providing a title using the title element
Understanding SC 2.4.2
For example, G88 gives this reasoning/recommendation for good <title>s:
Again, having the
lang +
xml:lang there doesn't hurt.
An EPUB Reader should be able to still pull the book's language from the EPUB's Metadata (
Tools > Metadata Editor), and grab your
dc:language (in your case, "en" (English) or "en-US" (English (United States)).
BUT, again, think screen reader or someone converting to a different format. They may pull the HTML out separately and read it elsewhere.
So you may want to add the
lang +
xml:lang to your HTML as well.
This doesn't hurt:
Code:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
but this could be made more helpful:
Code:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-US" xml:lang="en-US">
Another way of explaining: The EPUB Metadata tells the reader "This EPUB is in US English", while the HTML tells the reader "This specific HTML page is in US English".
(Imagine there could be a US English book, but it has a British English chapter within it.)
Technical Side Note:
H57: Using language attributes on the html element
H57 explains why
lang +
xml:lang on <html> are important:
So it could help Braille conversion, TTS, Dictionary support, Automatic Translation, [...].
Again, an EPUB Reader SHOULD still be able to pull it from the EPUB Metadata... but not all tools will be reading your EPUB in EPUB. :P