The American Society for Indexing held its 2022 Virtual Conference, “The Future of Indexing: A Mix of Art and Technology,” on Friday, April 29, 2022 and Saturday, April 30, 2022. Four sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.
The final session on Saturday, EPUB is Essential–It’s for more than just trade books, featured keynote speakers, Bill Kasdorf and Caroline Desrosiers, CEO and Founder of Scribely. Kasdorf discussed EPUB, which has become virtually the universal format for providing trade and scholarly books as ebooks. The latest version is EPUB3.
A fundamental reason for this shift is that EPUB 3 has become the standard format for accessibility. It follows the same standards for accessibility that web technologies have, which are designed to enable content to be accessible to people with visual, physical, or cognitive disabilities like blindness, low vision, and dyslexia. Properly structured and coded EPUBs are “born accessible,” which are better for everybody.
Proper EPUBs have page break markers in the HTML to mark where each page in the print book begins and which provide the page numbers. The metadata has a required property for identifying the exact print edition to which the page break markers correspond. Publishers just need to link the locators in the index to those page break markers, which should become a standard requirement.
EPUBs often lack image descriptions, and alt text, if present, is rarely done properly. The description isn’t just what an image is a picture of; it needs to convey to a print disabled user what the image conveys to a sighted user. Indexers would be ideal writers of image descriptions, because it requires analyzing and understanding the content, and then expressing it at a granular level. Desrosiers discussed the principles of writing good alt text and extended descriptions, with concrete examples.
This concludes the blog series on the ASI 2022 Virtual Conference. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com.