A hefty chunk of the world's population relies on accessible ebook technology to read due to either a permanent or situational disability. Laura Brady, ebook developer and principal of Brady Type, joins the BookNet podcast to educate us about the benefits and challenges associated with bringing accessible features to ebooks in Canadian publishing. We talk about ableist privilege, InDesign quirks, and if the future of print and digital in harmony could include coding that much-touted "old book smell" into our ebooks.
(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)
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Transcript
Krista Mitchell: Hello everyone and welcome to BookNet Podcast. I'm Krista Mitchell, the Marketing Associate here at BookNet Canada. Have you ever imagined what it would be like to pick up a print book and be unable to read the words for yourself? Maybe the font is too small, or the words appear out of order despite your best efforts. Maybe the only way you could read that book is to have someone read it to you. For at least 15% of the world's population, they don't have to imagine the frustrations that come from the simple act of opening a book. They live it.
For the 15% who use assistive technology due to a disability, and the 85% of the non-disabled market who utilize assistive tech due to a situational disability, accessible ebooks open up the world of reading and break down the barriers to education. It would seem then that building accessible features into ebooks like text to speech, resizeable text, and even descriptive text for images and diagrams would be a no-brainer. The cost and even the ebook production process itself can be prohibitive to making ebooks more accessible. Joining us this month, Laura Brady, ebook developer and principal of Brady Type will join us to talk about the importance of accessibility, ableist privilege, coding that old book spell, and more.
Laura Brady: My name is Laura Brady. I'm an ebook developer based just a little bit north of Toronto. I do backlist conversions, frontlist conversions. I am a consulter. I consult on digital publishing. And I also do a lot of travelling and public speaking on these topics. I have been developing ebooks since about 2009. And I have recently become worried about the work that I do and people like me do impacts end-users' experience from an accessibility perspective. And that's me.
Krista: So, you've been developing ebooks since ebooks were around, right?
Laura: Pretty much. Yeah, pretty much, you know, not exactly in 2007 when the Kindle came out, but I started thinking about it pretty quickly.
Krista: And how do you feel that...? Well, first of all, let's talk about accessibility. I pulled some statistics from your tech forum presentation. And you said that 15% of the world's population uses assistive technology due to having a disability. And 80% of the population that doesn't have a disability have a situational disability, which sometimes requires them to need accessibility services. But how do you feel those statistics impact the way we should approach ebooks?
Laura: So, basically, I really think that everyone benefits at the end of the day from good accessibility best practices, whether or not a situational disability left you in your car, and you use Siri to send texts. Or if say, you know, something different. I used to use captioning on my television all the time when my children were little and I was stuck in front of the TV while they knocked on me or breastfed or something like that. There's thinking about that situational disability. That's a minor use of it, but people use it in their work all the time and use it in their leisure time as well. The idea is that as a population ages as well, people naturally develop a disability. And pretty much everyone is impacted by having good accessibility features built into your ebooks eventually anyway.
Krista: Sure. And if we add this technology to these features into the ebooks, it's curious to me that it's happened more often. Do you find that...?
Laura: Yeah. So, what I think is that there's, I mean, I think that BISG's Quick Start Accessibility Guideline which is an excellent resource, and sort of me proselytizing it, it raises awareness. I think that people think that if it renders well, and it looks good to them, it's good to go. But if you scratch the surface and do a little bit more testing from an accessibility perspective, it's not always good to go. But people just don't think about it that partly because of cost and time. Ebooks are almost always still an afterthought to the production process. And so they just want them done quickly and onto the marketplace. And we'll think about queuing or troubleshooting it later. And so there I think that a lot of accessibility testing, for example, is not built into the process, even in the general QA process. And so, partly, it's the tools, they're not built from an accessibility perspective. And partly, it's just the way it's done. Because ebooks are thought of as a secondary, you know, they're thought of as an afterthought to the print product still.
Krista: That brings me to sort of a debate that's been raising in our industry, I think, since ebooks became a thing is this print versus ebook debate. I think every week a new article pops up like, “the death of ebooks, the rise of print”? Like as a person who makes ebooks, do you feel that they should be in opposition like this, or that we're making products that go hand in hand together?
Laura: So, what I think is that the people with the print books fetish are speaking from a really privileged position. I think that the whole promise of digital publishing is that we can be really inclusive and that if you're not thinking of your ebook from an accessibility perspective, and you're kind of missing the point of the democracy of format. And so people who are like, "Oh, I can only read print books, I love the smell of print, and ebooks hurt my eyes," they're really...it's such a privileged position to take. They're really ignoring that people need ebooks in order to read. Look, this is how they consume that content. And otherwise, they may be couldn't or they would have to wait on a large print version or a braille edition, which is several more layers of later, later, later. So those...
Krista: Which is interesting because you never see any article saying, you know, print versus large print or print versus braille. So, they're not from like an accessibility standpoint, like you said. Instead, they're rather seeing it as something that's taking away from the print market share.
Laura: Yeah, it really is. It's a little bit obnoxious, for sure. But it's also just ignoring this whole sort of rich theme of what digital publishing can do, and just ignoring it altogether because they like the feel of paper in their hands. Yeah.
Krista: So, we had, I guess, like the sky's the limit, or what technology can do right now. If you can dream it, you can build it into an ebook is sort of the approach that I think some people in the industry would like to take, what do you think are the barriers to making more accessible ebooks? What could bring down the cost or the time dedicated to it?
Laura: Well, so, one quick thing is I think that the idea that building accessible ebooks costs more is a bit of a fiction. I mean, one of the major arguments for making accessible ebooks is that you then reach a much broader audience. There's a statistic that I found in my research from the Italian Publishing Association, which stated that a lot of people actually consume more books than in non-print — print disabled people. And if your books are built accessible from the get-go, they're more likely to get purchased by libraries and other institutions, which can only buy accessible content instead of using any kind of government funding, for example. So, creating accessible written content actually means the reading experience is best for everyone. But it also means that your content isn't saleable, that actually adds value and extends the long sale of the book. So I think that people haven't made accessible ebooks a priority until now because they think it's more expensive. It takes a little bit more time, but it pays off eventually in the long run. I suppose I think that's a bit of a myth, a fiction. And what was the other part of your question, I'm sorry, Krista?
Krista: Actually, I want to run with what you just said. In your text, you said that sometimes the publishers' process of converting to ebook actually strips the file of the metadata needed by accessible technology. So, if they're already building the tech into the book, how does it happen that they then remove that added value?
Laura: So, what happens is that if you're using a product like for example, InDesign, it kind of exports...it exports structure without a ton of meaning. So, it doesn't build in sections and subsections. And it doesn't mark notations properly or mark contents as an aside properly. So what it does is it gives you a kind of a generic product, and that their product is kind of a minimum viable product. That's why I said, for example, an ebook that's exported from InDesign still needs a fair bit of remediation to meet the minimum standard of accessibility. It's not using HTML5 tags properly, for example. So, and then the metadata that describes that product, ideally, it follows in an honest feedback travel with your ebook, right? But you can build a lot of metadata even into that InDesign file. I think this is something that's an underused feature of InDesign. But it's there, and it can be done.
Krista: So, you said when we were talking before during email, well, and also you just said now that InDesign can create a minimally viable product. How do we go about sort of...what would the process be for rebuilding that value into InDesign? Are there sort of best practices that ebook builders can follow?
Laura: So, one of the messages is that what comes out of InDesign, people need to use InDesign knowing where it fails, and to squeeze the life out of it. So, there are a lot of things you can do to get rich EPUB 3 out of InDesign. Some of the features are hidden, some of them involve adding scripts into your work process. But once you do that, there's still...you still need to do some editing, post export. And some people aren't totally comfortable with that. And they need to get down with it, they need to get their hands dirty in HTML. And so keep the ebook open and fix the section tags and figure tags and all those other HTML5 tags that don't get added by InDesign.
The generic tags mean that there's not a lot of semantic meaning in HTML5 and your HTML. And so, if you add those tags, and then your content can be read by a machine, it's machine-readable, and it makes sense to text to speech readers, for example, or any other. And it actually means that your content is ready for whatever innovation is next, whatever is coming next in digital publishing, it's maybe something we can't even quite imagine yet.
Krista: What do you think is coming next?
Laura: I don't know. I don't really know. I mean, but I think that making...so the other thing about InDesign is it creates a really overburdened HTML. So, tables and footnotes, for example, have all these classes and all these IDs piled on top of them that they don't need. And that overburdened HTML, it's just not going to function as well as simplified HTML. So, clean simple code is going to be able to survive whatever the next innovation is. And as always, so that's what I always focus on when I'm developing ebooks, is making it as simple as possible and making sure that semantics are there so that when the book, for example, becomes separated from the CSS that I used to style the book and make it look pretty, and it will happen that it becomes separated from the CSS, so the reading systems just ignore that, and put in overrides on any content. And when that happens, the presentations have access to sighted readers and the interpretation of that content as a whole for people who are print disabled.
Krista: Do you think that this need for sort of more accessibility is combined possibly with the current trend of rising audiobooks right now? Audiobooks...
Laura: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I also think that wanting to think about accessibility is a sign of a mature field as well, like moving off from just basic best practices, to how can we reach a broader audience is a sign of mature industry. So, ebooks are no longer teenagers, right? It's a little bit more grown-up. And let's treat them that way and make sure that they're working for everybody. But also, a well-made ebook then can be read by text to speech readers, and they are becoming really sophisticated.
Audiobooks are awesome, but they're expensive to produce. And they require an actor to read the...or a specialist anyway to read the content, and then for a recording to be made and instantly be put up on sale for an audiobook store. But a lot of... print-disabled people that consume content on the web and ebooks via text to speech resources are using VoiceOver technology. Those are really sophisticated. There's one called Natural Reader which has like 100 different voice styles built into it. So, you can have that content in a fairly sophisticated way, by a machine, by a robot, right. And that's kind of phenomenal.
Krista: Do you think maybe in the future, it would be responsible of our industry to sort of make bundling more of an option? Like, if you purchase a print book, maybe ebooks should come with it for more accessibility.
Laura: That's always made a lot of sense to me. I know that there are a couple of small publishers in Toronto who do it and it made a lot of sense to me. Wiley does it as well, they don't bundle it, you can buy an ebook as well for just a little bit more. And that makes sense because you don't know how you're gonna use the content. Sometimes print is really how you want to consume it for note-taking or, you know, whatever I can't imagine, maybe because you like the smell, I don't know. And then digital is an add-on for when you can't use print. It makes a ton of sense to me to bundle. And I'm never really sure why more people don't do that. And I think that it must, I mean, I don't understand the back end of publishing, sales isn't my specialty. So, there must barriers to it, because in my opinion, it makes a ton of sense.
Krista: There's like a recent article going around too about the science behind people who say that they love the smell of old books, and it's apparently a chemical reaction that we're reacting to. I wonder if there'll ever be a time where they build that smell into ebooks? That would be fun. But it could be...
Laura: Krista, over my dead body.
Krista: I just imagine you having to code smell into something in the future.
Laura: Yeah. Oh, brother, can you imagine? Actually, it's super interesting and more of a... and all your senses in one experience, maybe VR for ebooks, right? That comes with smell and...
Krista: ...moving towards the virtual reality experience. People are starting to experiment with it more and more. Why not try it?
Laura: Why not? Yeah.
Krista: But that's not a big seller on the market.
Laura: You know, you can get a...Kobo e-reader that you can dip in your bathtub if you want. Smells can't be all that far off.
Krista: That was my major barrier to ebooks, I think, was not being able to take them in the bathtub for fear that I would drop it. But I was just devastated when I dropped my actual book in the bath, so.
Laura: Right, it's even more ruined, right? A print book.
Krista: Then it starts to go mouldy, let alone short circuiting.
Laura: Yeah. And the smell is not good.
Krista: No, that ruins the smell of the old book for sure, the bath does not...
Laura: Oh, sure. Yeah. I'm gonna say something about the article about the chemical reaction to the smell of print is that, and print has only existed for 500 years. It's actually a relatively new technology. Before that, it was, you know, everything was treated differently and books or books were a serious privilege that only the upper classes or learned classes had. So there's some real chauvinism even in those articles about the chemical reaction of print, right?
Krista: Well, that's an interesting point that you bring up, the print is actually a relatively new technology that was treated much the way that ebooks are sort of treated now, people are touting it as the death of print, you know, which turned out to be true in a way, but also provided much more accessibility to the masses' education.
Laura: Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Krista: Ebooks, I think are going through sort of the same trials that every new technology goes through when it emerges the first time, becoming more widely accepted because it opened the doors to those who would have been excluded, which is what we're talking about, accessibility.
Laura: Yeah. The democratic process of a promise of digital publishing is just like the democratic promise of print production and how it meant that more people could access books more widely. And this is the same exact same phenomenon, right? Just slightly tweaked. It's about ebooks instead of print books.
Krista: Right. So I every time I see one of those articles that locks them in opposition, it sort of baffles me that we're still squabbling about...
Laura: It's such a boring conversation at some point.
Krista: But they serve different needs, ebooks.
Laura: Yeah, yeah.
Krista: Definitely.
Laura: It actually makes me, turns me into this huge ebook advocate. When in fact, I would say I read ebooks 50% of the time and read print 50% of the time. I'm an old school typester, right. I love print. I'm not ready to argue that it's the only way that people should read. I don't think anyone's actually arguing that. Those articles sort of set up that dichotomy. Right?
Krista: Right.
Laura: Yeah.
Krista: Yeah. I don't think that anyone is really trying to argue that but the message comes across that way...
Laura: It totally does.
Krista: ...as well as reading at this point and trying to find that more people can read, people that previously would be limited to reading can now be read to by ebooks and that's a beautiful thing.
Laura: Right. Just read, don't worry about how you read, just do it.
Krista: Probably the title of this podcast, hashtag just read, don't worry. Are there any topics that we haven't sort of touched on that you're interested in going over?
Laura: So, the QA is really important. A really important piece to me. I think that people who produce ebooks or people who think about ebooks and selling print books need to consume it in a way that their consumers consume. So that means that sales directors should be reading ebooks. And production managers should be turning on voiceover on their phone and consuming an ebook and seeing what happens because it can be quite amazing, it can be a little bit alarming, but it will definitely be surprising to the people who do it. There's no way to understand how accessible content is consumed, except by doing it, by turning on text to speech, for example, and trying to consume it the way that your audience is consuming it and that the people that you're targeting, your audience are going to read it.
Krista: Yes, that does sound like a really important aspect of making sure that...what if we turned on that voiceover and something completely unexpected came out, and nobody had did that before?
Laura: Derrick Schultz who spoke at Tech Forum in 2015, he talked about dogfooding. And this is the idea that people who make books should be consuming those books, and consuming them however their readers consume them. So, people should be reading ebooks and people should be turning voiceover on and seeing what happens. And this is an important part of the process and understanding how books are consumed.
Krista: I think that's important as well from like a user experience standpoint. If you get an ebook and you don't know how...if you don't even know how to turn on the voiceover function, that's a huge barrier.
Laura: Yeah. Go find it on your phone, it's there, all phones have it built-in. And then turn it on and see how your phone talks to you constantly and drives you a little bit mad just trying to navigate where you want to go. It's a funny experience. I found it really frustrating. And obviously, I'm speaking from a position of privilege. So, imagine how hard it is to someone who's got a couple of barriers to even turning that on and understanding what's happening.
Krista: That's true. And do you find that the...I guess, between large presses and small presses, the approach to accessibility in ebooks is any different? Or do you find the sort of approach to them in a similar way?
Laura: So what I've always found in the digital publishing space is that smaller presses are more responsive and more agile and ready to tweak their production process more quickly, and think these things through, partly because the decision-making chain is smaller, but almost always, they have been making nice ebooks this whole time because they've had...for whatever reason, they just have been able to do it better from the get-go. I'm analyzing the ebooks that smaller presses put out from an accessibility standpoint. So, I can't say for sure, but I imagine that they're actually better at it and that they can think it through more quickly and make changes to the process more quickly.
Krista: It's interesting to me that smaller presses seem quicker to embrace sort of different technology from an experiment.
Laura: I think it has something to do with small presses have fewer resources. So, most people who work there are wearing more hats. And it's the old idiom that if you want something done and give it to someone who's busy because it will get done really quickly. I think that's what's happening here and from my own experience, that's definitely what's happened. These people are doing three or four different jobs at once and they can just get it done more quickly because they're so busy.
Krista: How do you think that the backlist should be approached with regards to accessibility? Do you think that maybe publishers should revisit old ebooks that they've put out and start adding enhanced accessibility features?
Laura: It's really great question. I don't know that there's a straightforward answer to that. I'd say yes, of course they should. But I'm not spending money and resources on that. So, easy for me to say, right? I think that especially in the ebook space, there's been a trend to wait till someone complained about a product and then to fix it. So, put it on the market, see if anyone searches about it and put some effort and remediation into it. I think it's a great idea because it makes your content, you know, it means that the long tail of that content is extended even further. But easy for me to say.
Krista: That could be an interesting business center for a few developers.
Laura: Yeah. Yeah. Even in PDF land, actually, there's a lot of content that still gets consumed just as PDF. It's obviously not necessarily content that goes up for sale because most ebook retailers won't sell PDFs. But for example in government, content is almost exclusively in PDF. And making PDF side of InDesign isn't as accessible as it should be. And still there's actually a lot of work out there in the world to remediate PDFs and make them more accessible. And people that are thinking about that and putting effort into it now. I get requests for this kind of quotes on this kind of work a lot more. I mean, only a pattern in the last year or so. And it's increasing. So, people are thinking about accessibility more even for PDFs in addition to ebooks. PDFs aren't natively as accessible as ebooks because you can't always increase the font size and it's harder to consume on mobile. But I think that's a trend that's happening, for sure. I see it in my own work.
Krista: I can imagine that even just the amount of devices out there, the different formats, the ebooks, more of digital content can become available and is some sort of barrier to how accessible you can make your products.
Laura: Yeah, I think one ebook that serves all of the ebook retailers out there has been a struggle for ebook developers from the beginning, how to extract contents that gracefully across from the extremely agile reading systems down to the ones that will separate your CSS from your HTML and do nasty things to the content. That's always been a concern for ebook developers. But just go back to my comment earlier about the simplest HTML, the simplest markup on the content is going to be the one that degrades gracefully across the reading systems spectrum and survives even the most...
Krista: ...quality assurance comments. The easiest way to make sure that the device is not garbling your content is to test it as if you were consuming it the way your consumer would.
Laura: Testing, testing, testing, QA is the same. I think that in general, not enough is done from a variety of perspectives even in, you know, MOBI7 is an extremely clunky rendering engine, but it's still something we have to think about. Those Kindles are out there and they're alive and getting used by a lot of people. And so if you want to ask how your content is being read by people who own legacy Kindles, then you should be testing in MOBI7 and that's a real clunky rendering environment. So.
Krista: Oh, thank you, Laura, for answering all my questions and talking to me today.
Laura: Yeah. You're welcome.
Krista: For more information on accessibility, please download BISG's Quick Start Guide to Accessible Publishing, an excellent beginner's resource. To learn more about what we do here at BookNet, visit us at booknetcanada.ca. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund. And of course, thank you for listening. We'll see you next month.
