richardmurray

KWL Live Q&A – Accessibility Tips for Authors with Wendy Reid started at noon

MY THOUGHTS AS  I LISTENED

12:02 what does accessibility mean?
The main focus on the needs and requirements for people with disabilities

12:03 How did you get involved?
She did work for the world wide web technical standards. She mostly work on epub and digital publishing. She got a lot of insight from people in disability community cause they,epub and similar,  are so important for people with disabilities.

12:05 The exercise to using the audio on her phone to navigating to her phone by audio was a challenge.
Most tools are not accessible but the disability community members have figured out workarounds
if you want to know more about accessiblity in kobo email the following
< kobo-accessibility@rakuten.com >

12:08 What is your day to day at Kobo
A lot of meetings. A lot of time researching trying to find the best way to do things. Accessibility on a tech company with a lot of different interfaces is busy. 
Another interview side wendy 
< https://www.kobo.com/blog/learn-how-kobo-makes-reading-more-accessible > 

12:12 What will you say to an author who ask with accessibility?
We all deal with accessibility or disability  issues  in life. You are planning for your future self and being inclusive of your audience.
Captions are designed for people who are hard to hear but they are a huge accessibility option 

12:15 do you know about accessibility options that authors need to be aware of, top complaints?
Image descriptions. If you are using a screen reader, and an image isn't described it is frustrating to the reader. Around NAvigation, have a really good table of contents. Name your chapters, or subsections.  Table your headings. That structure will help those who have a hard time seeing.  

12:18 How will an author know if their file is as accessible as can be?
if you are not creating the epub yourself, you can mark themself up in word. they all have accessibility checkers in them. Make sure headings are headings. Describe all images. 
Question to ask platform you distributing to, are you using that information to make epub. Are you making sure the heading 1 in word is heading 1 in epub. 
Alot of companies put disabled users to the side but one in five worldwide have a disability.

12:22 how detailed should alt text should be
There is no one way to make alt text. <She gives a great example of describing a cat> How to present a science fiction map, may be really long. The author has to decide which is best.

12:25 Epub files
It is better to make a bigger book be split into multiple files.

<one thing you guys can do is allow people to have the choice of retaining old interfaces. Some people feel better accessibility with older interfaces>

12:28 Accessibility Checker
Kobo will add it. 

12:31 How do you handle alt text in covers?
We don't have that information cause and can't do it at scale but inside your book, describe your cover. 

12:32 Can they work on fonts on covers?
Make covers readable. She has seen covers that is barely visible in small image form. Be mindful of how busy an image is. Make text stand out more. She gets complaints, try testing covers in greyscale and it is hard to see. Her father's love sending screen shots in ereader. 

Book on history of audiobook
< https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-untold-story-of-the-talking-book-3 > 
< https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/the-untold-story-of-the-talking-book-2 >

12:35 what about accessibility in audio books?
Underexplored area. Audiobooks were developed to be accessibile. Soldiers from world war 1 who lost their vision to be able to read. Two essential things: If you have images in book, describe in audio. Audiobook structure, she likes to know chapters in table of contents, not tracks.
She uses a book that came out two months ago and it had track 1 track 2 not chapters.

Audiobook format in Kobo
< https://kobowritinglife.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360059385511-How-to-Upload-Your-Audiobook-Directly-on-Kobo >  

12:40 What can authors do now in terms of metadata?
Can include in description. The summary is the best place to do that. DRM is not really accessible. Kobo is looking at implementing more accessibility formats in DRM. But DRM isn't great for accessibility. 

12:42 Is anything authors should be aware of for external links?
Put in link text. Recommend don't using link text that uses vague things. Use the alt text. 

12:44 How to make websites more accessible?
Describe all images. Describe all links. Wix or squarespace have accessibility options. You can do yourself. Ask about color palette. No highlighter color on black. Try to avoid putting text on top of book covers. Highly recommend using simple fonts, dyslexia or visually processing issues, and the most readable fonts are times new roman, helvitica, georgia, callibri. Describe book covers. 

12:48 any newsletter or email practices?
Same issues for the websites or books. Alot of design fundamentals cross into accessibility fundamentals. 

12:52 what about accessibility in social media?
 Alt text are needed for every image. Highly recommend. If a platform doesn't have it, use the caption. Alot of tiktokers use captions in videos. Apply captions for video post. Higly recommend reviewing captions for automated captions. Use the most simple captions , it is best for accessibility. They need to detect whether you have your own captions cause you get double captions at times. Youtube provide audio descriptions, consider that. 

12:57 about emoji's?
Use emoji's carefully. Every emoji has a name. use simplest, and don't open with emoji's. 

1:00 What do you think the publishing industry need to be more accessible ? 
The publshing industry in some countries, canada included, the biggest problem is funding, and going through backlist and making them more accessible.  Alt text is hard for very old books. Publishers try to figure that out. How do we make text that are visually complex , more accessible.

List of her links in comments
https://kobowritinglife.com/2023/08/03/kwl-live-qa-accessibility-tips-for-authors-with-wendy-reid/ 

Ace by DAISY – accessibility checker for EPUB < https://daisy.org/activities/software/ace/ >  
DAISY Knowledge Base, everything you need to know about coding accessible EPUBs < http://kb.daisy.org/publishing/docs/epub/ > 
Accessible Publishing Learning Network – lots of excellent resources! < https://apln.ca/ > 
WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool < https://wave.webaim.org/ > 
Colour Contrast, an easy to use colour contrast checker < https://colourcontrast.cc/ > 
Accessible Social, a resource for creating accessible social media content < https://www.accessible-social.com/ > 
Social Visual Alt Text, fun web extension for viewing alternative text on social media < https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-visual-alt-text/bkpbmomfemcjdeekdffmbohifpndodm > 
WordToEPUB < https://daisy.org/activities/software/wordtoepub/ > 

MY CLOSING THOUGHTS

I thought about accessibility. If accessibility was considered from the beginning of most processes it would undo alot of the schemes/scams/ aspects of entertainment/social media/wesbites or other. 
For example, I like the mandolorian show from Disney. If someone is blind and they can't see the Mandolorian maybe they have an audio read version available. So they can hear each episode absent commercials. But imagine if you are listening to an on demand film, like Godzilla,  like from TNT of the warner bros group in Discovery. Imagine you hear:"this thing killed my wife!, have you ever had bad bowels, Well try..." The commercial break is by default a terrible element. For someone who can only hear they are bound to hear a commercial where those with sight can mute and move on and come back. 
Accessibility if engineered optimally will delete many methods of commercialization in entertainment or media through electronic means.