Lab: Getting to grips with creating and editing EPUB

Handouts Media

Presented at 10:30am in Virtual A on Monday, November 9, 2020.

Speaker(s)

• Richard Orme, Mr, DAISY Consortium
• Joseph Polizzotto, , University of California, Berkeley
• George Kerscher, , DAISY Consortium
• Rachel Comerford, , Macmillan Learning

Session Details

• Length of Session: 3-hr
• Format: Lab
• Expertise Level: Intermediate
• Type of session: Pre-conference

Summary

This workshop will help faculty, alt media and DSO colleagues get up to speed with this publishing standard and its built-in accessibility features. Attendees will learn how to create EPUB publications using simple tools, how to evaluate EPUBs for accessibility, and how to edit and add accessibility features to existing EPUB files. We will conclude

Abstract

In this workshop we will show how we can use familiar tools to make various EPUBs, from a straightforward paper to an entire book. Participants will learn how to evaluate whether an EPUB is valid and accessible. And you may want to modify even a perfectly constructed EPUB, such as by adding specific explanatory notes or additional resources. Using freely available tools, we will learn how to make improvements to an EPUB file, and how to validate the new version we made. Finally, we’ll explore the latest evaluation results and experience the EPUBs we made in the reading apps that you may want to recommend to your learners.

Keypoints

1. If you can operate a word processor, you can build a wonderful EPUB
2. Software tools can quickly assess if an EPUB file is valid, and help identify accessibility issues
3. It isn’t rocket science to edit an existing EPUB, add explanatory notes and other accessibility enhancements

Disability Areas

Topic Areas

Accessible Educational Materials, Alternate Format, EPUB Track, Uncategorized

Speaker Bio(s)

Richard Orme

When teaching in a college in rural England more than 30 years ago, Richard encountered his first blind student, beginning a career in what we now refer to as accessibility. He has worked for local, national and international organizations, with young, old, and very old people, with visual, physical, dual sensory and cognitive disabilities. Having identified a critical lack of accessible curriculum materials in the UK, Richard led an initiative for a national database of accessible textbooks, now grown to become the national Education Collection operating as RNIB Bookshare.

Richard is Chief Executive of the DAISY Consortium, the global organization whose mission is to develop standards and solutions for accessible publishing and reading.He volunteers in his community as a home visitor, providing technology support for people with disabilities. Richard’s brother James has a profound learning disability, and his son Jim has dyslexia and is currently studying aerospace engineering at university.

Joseph Polizzotto

Already submitted

George Kerscher

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Rachel Comerford

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Handout(s)

• Getting to grips with creating EPUB workshop slides (pptx)