It seems that everyone is talking about accessibility these days. And there is a very good reason for that. Unless you have your head buried in the sand, you have likely heard that the European Accessibility Act is bearing down. Publishers are working on smoothing out the kinks in their workflows, remediating their backlists, and generally getting their houses in order to be able to keep content in the marketplace after June 2025.
Some of us have been anticipating this shift for several years. A small working group was set up by the Accessible Books Consortium to advocate with the folks at Adobe to improve their EPUB export. The DAISY Consortium’s Richard Orme and I are on the board of the ABC and organized a group which presently includes Gregorio Pellegrino (Italy, Fondazione LIA), and Jonas Lillqvist (Finland, CELIA).
Why This is Important
This is a big issue because the vast majority of digital books in the world are created from print layout files—and with good reason. The print format is still far and away the most popular consumer format for books. According to Booknet Canada, 74% of book buyers prefer print, 17% prefer ebooks, and 6% favor audiobooks. So, naturally most publishers work on the print layouts first, adapting the content to other formats once the print edition goes to press.
While it’s difficult to get precise data, it’s safe to assume that the vast majority of publishing houses use Adobe InDesign for print books. Affinity Publisher is the new kid on the block, and there is a group of publishers that still use QuarkXPress, but InDesign has a lock on upwards of 90% of the market. I like to say that InDesign is a democratic choice — not because it’s cheap or easy to access, but because most publishers are already using it.
For this reason, it is critical that Adobe improve the accessibility of EPUB exports from InDesign. I teach EPUB production in various places, including workshops for publishers. Over the years, I have created a number of hacks and workarounds in order to “trick” InDesign into giving me relatively cleanly coded ebooks. I have personally been advocating with the InDesign engineers and blogging about how to fix InDesign’s EPUB export for more than a decade. The main problem is that InDesign creates generic code that “looks” okay but is a mess under the hood. And that sloppiness interferes with the print-disabled reading experience.
There are many things that the InDesign engineers could fix about the EPUB export but with a tight focus on accessibility, our group assembled a list of 33 critical issues, assigned priority categories focussed both on the user experience and on content creators needs (that is, how much post-export remediation would be required). This work was organized into a GitHub repository so that the working group and the InDesign engineers could communicate, offer use cases, ask questions, and give code samples.
This advocacy work has been very slow. We started engaging the Adobe team directly more than two years ago in February 2022, after the ABC wrote a letter directly to the CEO of Adobe stating that this work is important and urgent. The Adobe team couldn’t seem to see past PDF and, indeed, asked us why book publishers didn’t simply publish in that format. It took some time for the InDesign team to understand the urgency of our work. We continued to chip away at them, organizing meetings, sending code samples and, eventually, more letters from both the ABC and the Federation of European Publishers.
Improvements in InDesign 19.4 EPUB Exports
The good news is that it is working. There have been significant updates to how InDesign exports EPUBs including the following:
- Language tags in the correct place in the HTML
- An option to mark an image as decorative and therefore not needing alt text
- A suite of schema accessibility metadata options at export
- Pagelist navigation
- More semantic footnotes and endnotes
- An option for a cover image description (alt text)
All of the above are available now in the InDesign 19.4 release. If you want to dig into the technical details about the recent changes, you can find them in this Fondazione LIA blog post. There is also a summary with the InDesign release notes. And with these incremental improvements to how InDesign creates ebooks, we collectively move closer and closer to the dream of “born accessible” content.
Our working group of experts continues to work and advocate with the InDesign team. It is wonderful to see these improvements, no doubt. There is still much work to be done but we are getting there!
This article was last modified on April 30, 2024
This article was first published on April 30, 2024
Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!
