Caspian that’s a tall order! ;-D

You might want to watch some of Chad’s lynda.com title on creating accessible PDFs:
https://www.lynda.com/Acrobat-tutorials/Creating-Accessible-PDFs/147579-2.html

Some of the best practices he outlines there would also help you create accessible EPUB 3s out of ID, such as adding ALT tags.

I have a few videos in my recently updated InDesign CC 2015: EPUB Fundamentals lynda.com course about enhancing accessibility:
https://www.lynda.com/InDesign-tutorials/InDesign-CC-2015-EPUB-Fundamentals/374187-2.html

(semantic markup, alt tags, etc.)

AM

I was a beta tester for it last year, and demo’d it at PePcon. I was *so* excited to learn of it, it seemed like a natural win.

But testing the beta, I found was that it was unfortunately really buggy on my Mac and the interface was confusing. The developers were initially helpful but then went into quiet mode. Then it got released with few of my concerns addressed, and I see it hasn’t been updated since. I’ve not heard from them at all.

I also found it strange that 1) there is no demo version you can download and 2) it’s very expensive.

I did see some promise in it. If you can somehow get them to send you a demo, I’d go that route.

AM

The advantage to making an FXL is that your family could view the document and play with any interactivity in a mobile device as well as iBooks or Adobe Digital Editions. FXLs support many interactive features that PDFs don’t, including animations. And though PDFs support buttons and MSOs and videos and such on the desktop, they usually fail on mobile. FXL ebooks, opened in iBooks on an iPad or iPhone, handle those w/aplomb.

The file that results is an .epub instead of a .pdf. So they just need an eReader that opens EPUBs. Which iBooks does on iOS devices. Android eReaders have a spotty record of what interactive features they support.

In sum: If your family/readership is mainly using Macs and iOS, and you want to include more interactivity, give it a shot. It’s as simple as exporting to EPUB (fixed layout). If most everyone is on Android/Windows, it’s a more difficult row to hoe.

AM

I’m having trouble understanding your picture. Is it supposed to be single page portrait? But you’ve turned the iPad to landscape view for the picture, is that right? Does the problem appear when you’re in portrait view?

When you exported to FXL epub from InDesign, which option did you choose for Spread Control?

AM

Oh jeez … does the consultant work for you or the DAM developer? Because if they work for you then they need to look for a different solution.

You need to immediately show them (your boss?) that moving to this solution will cost them X amount of money and time for your workflow (estimate it with a few examples of before/after for losing all the Place options, and having to redo the layout whenever a single bullet adds or removes a line for example), that it will cost X in difficulty in training (how long will it take to teach the InCopy users how move from single line frame to the next), and working with freelancers, and proofing, and losing track changes, etc.

You might extract some of the relevant pages, sections, or chapters from InDesign or InCopy Help pdf (like the whole section on Import Options) and say “we use this feature 40-50 times a day, if we go with censhare, we lose this feature and there is no workaround.” Ditto for other heavily-used features (like IC/ID workflow) that wont be tenable. The powers that be might not be aware … they’re only concerned with Office files, probably.

And hiring is another cost! Because if they go through with this, and InDesign is a big part of your job … they may need to find someone new, after you fly the coop. ;\

AM

You should check out Kevin Callahans’ feature story, “From InDesign to Kindle,” in last month’s InDesign magazine:

https://creativepro.com/issues/issue-72-indesign-kindle

I’m pretty sure he covers tweaking TOCs and anchor tags.

AM