Accessibility in Publishing

Enhancing Digital Content Accessibility and Usability

Welcome to content services where accessibility matters! At diacriTech, whether it’s about creating Web Content, ePub, or digital assets, performing accessibility checks takes center stage. We believe that for products to be successful, accessibility takes priority over everything else. So we consistently work towards leveraging technology to improve accessibility.

Apart from serving legal, business, and ethical needs, accessible publishing is the best option to reach a wider audience. Accessible content helps people with disabilities, those with attention deficit disorders, age-related impairments, and also others to experience greater standards in user experience and satisfaction. It enables leading educational institutions to have their content accessed and understood by all audiences connecting all students to new opportunities and success alike.

Speaking of accessibility, a simple glance at common accessibility hazards/barriers for web and other digital content can help to tackle them sooner or later.

Key points include  

  • web forms that do not have keyboard equivalents
  • video and other media content that are not captioned
  • where the color contrast of text and images is not adequate or where color alone is used to indicate required fields 
  • when websites are not properly coded and do not include alt text descriptions on images
  • search functionality that do not suggest alternative spellings
  • distorted CAPTCHA images
  • hard-to-use navigation
  • digital content with too much of flashing or motion simulation
  • unordered content without structural hierarchy preventing the screen reader user to understand the narration

This is only a good starting point in the web accessibility journey. There is so much more.

diacriTech is committed to creating accessible products and content which meets WCAG standards and is perceivable, operable, understandable and robust (including compatibility with assistive technologies). Our expertise falls in the areas of website remediation, adding alt text descriptions, subtitles and closed captions, EPUB adhering to IDPF, ADA-compliant PDFs, NIMAS files creation etc.

diacriTech’s automated publishing platform XEditpro provides an integrated framework for accessibility to be incorporated within the publishing cycle at an early stage itself and hence provides a baseline for accessible publications. Some of the ways in which XEditPro helps to create accessible content include:

  • XML–First workflow to enrich semantic tagging
  • Inclusion of relevant accessibility metadata
  • Inclusion of Alt text and longdesc attribute to images
  • Support for standardized DTD’s (to include tags for specific accessibility elements such as image descriptions)
  • Support for MathML for Accessible Math Markup
  • Incorporation of links for improving accessibility  
  • Table structure for accessibility (especially screen reader) and more…

We continuously strive to incorporate the highest standards of accessibility in all the products we deliver. For more details of our digital-led accessibility services, get in touch with marketing@diacritech.com.

References

https://www.w3.org/WAI/people-use-web/user-stories/

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *