Making e-Publishing Accessible -- and Not Just for Kindle (interview with George Kerscher)

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by Susan Hall, IT Business Edge, reprinted from source

Susan Hall spoke with George Kerscher, Secretary General, Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) Consortium, about accessibility issues with Kindle and e-books.

Hall: Tell me about your work with e-books.
Kerscher: I’ve been doing e-books for more than 20 years. I started it as a service for people with disabilities. … and I’ve been working on standards forever.

When I went back to college for a degree in computer science, there was not one accessible book available to me for any of my courses. That’s when I actually created my own e-books. I contacted authors, got their source files and read their books. This was 1987. I wrote software that converted their stuff into the first e-books [for the computer screen reader]. …When you have the book, you can compete. You can’t compete if you don’t have the same information as everybody else. …

The DAISY Consortium is to publishing what the WAI [The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative] is to the Internet. Our vision is that anybody should be able to buy a book at the same time, at the same price as anybody else, whether they’re blind, whether they’re dyslexic -- any disability. The mission is to develop the standards and the technology to make that happen. While the W3C builds standards, we build standards, but we also build the tools for the implementation of the standards. We have some fabulous tools – it’s all open source -- that we’ve developed to assist the publishing arena in making their books accessible.

The standards are in the DAISY plan and in the International Digital Publishing Forum. So the IDPF is the group that sets the standards for “.epub” [“.epub" is the file extension of an XML format for reflowable digital books and publications]. I’m on the board of IDPF and I’m one of the authors of this spec for this. I’m blind and when the spec is developed, I’m the watchdog there to make sure they’re not going to put things into the spec that’s going to lock people with disabilities out of the content.

Hall: So what are the issues with that?
Kerscher: There are two things: On one side, there's an e-book and on the other side an e-book reader. And there’s a handshake that has to take place between these two in order to make it accessible. The book has to be created so that the content is fundamentally accessible. A lot of .pdfs are images of things and that gets me nowhere. But XML is really presentation agnostic --  it describes the structure and content, and the presentation is left up to the user agent, the reading system. The handshake is the reading system, whatever it might be, and it must be accessible to the user. There’s a lot of specialized equipment out there. There’s like 18 or 20 different DAISY players on cell phones, dedicated PDAs, software, refreshable Braille.

The “.epub” standard is what we’re moving into next. So the IDPF has just named DAISY as the maintenance organization for the “.epub” standard. And strategically what we want to do is to make sure that as the standard evolves and grows, it remains accessible.

We’re still having trouble in a lot of areas. You’ve heard of the Author’s Guild controversy? They want to turn off TTS (text-to-speech). So I helped bring people together, the Reading Rights Coalition. Now there’s like 32 different organizations screaming about this.

This is mind-boggling to me. The “.epub” standard from the beginning has had clauses in there saying, “This is XML content that the reading system will render and we’re presentation agnostic. We do fully anticipate that synthetic speech, refreshable Braille and other methods of access are going to be used by people, not only the visual presentation of fonts and things.” … I’m not sure [the authors] can do this. I think that when you’re buying an e-book, you’re not buying a particular presentation, you’re buying the e-book and it can be presented to you in any way you want.

Kindle has TTS built into it, but every PC has TTS built into it, too. And there’s lots of different “.epub” readers out there. So, what are the authors saying? You’re going to turn off TTS on all digital publications? That’s crazy.

The other obstacle is that most companies never think about anything besides a fully sighted person when they’re building their system. … [We’ve made some visits to universities that are considering the work of publishers that is totally inaccessible.] I would like to see universities just stop buying things that are not accessible.