Ask the Expert: Reading apps and accessibility

In this session host Katie Durand and CEO of the DAISY Consortium, Richard Orme, talk about the different reading systems, what their features are and which of those features are useful for persons with a print impairment.

The expert

Richard Orme is the CEO of the DAISY Consortium, a global consortium of organisations committed to creating tools and standards to make information accessible for persons with a print impairment. In one of their more recent projects DAISY delivered authoritative evaluations of EPUB reading systems to reveal the user experience for people with the most common reading disabilities.  

Questions and answers

What makes an application accessible?

The possibility of visual adjustments. For example, in an ebook, to be able to increase the size of the text, to change the font, to change the margins, the colors et cetera. But also tables behaving correctly, images adjusting appropriately. This helps for persons with a visual impairment and low vision, but is also very useful for persons with dyslexia. And research tells us that that works for many people as does changing the colors and the font. 

And when you start moving to a larger size, or if you just struggle with dealing with processing that text visually, we then move into the world of what we call read aloud. For instance with Text to speech, like Read Aloud.and of course you know people know about. They should make their apps accessible to voiceover or to talk back. 

Finally navigation is a kind of superpower. If you're moving into a digital world, if you're using a smaller screen, if your access to content is via an assistive technology, the ability to be able to orientate yourself within that content, to be able to go to somewhere within the content, the ability to be know where you are. These things are really important. So navigation is one of those things that comes with a well-made ebook working together with a well-made app working together with assistive technology that's compatible with those things.

What are the most common accessibility gaps in reading apps? How can developers address them?

The DAISY Consortium started EPUBTest. The purpose is to be able to evaluate and document the accessibility features of various epub reading systems. DAISY very much relies on a global network of expert volunteers who then conduct systematic accessibility evaluations. And then we publish the findings online. We test critical features that are fundamental to accessible reading. For example: can you go to a specific page in the book (navigation)? Can you find out which page you're on without losing your reading place? Can you effectively navigate a table of contents? Can you change the colors? Can you zoom in on an image? Can you change the fonts? These sorts of things? Can you do continuous reading? 

How do you communicate that information to users who are maybe not very familiar with these options, and how they go about approaching the digital reading experience and using these different features?

EPUBTest.org is not a destination for end users. It has got lots of detail, which is exactly what a developer needs to know. But just too much detail to be able to pass for someone who just wants to know what apps are out there. So we produce a roundup of the latest testing results. That's in a much more friendly and user oriented way. That's on the Inclusive Publishing website under resources and in the reading system roundup. We don't list all of the apps we list. The most commonly asked about ones. We'll give some information about the app. Is it free? What platform it's on? What sort of formats does it read? And then we'll say things that we like about the app, or what the evaluators like about the app, and then things that someone should be aware of. So that's much more of a user friendly type. 

What are examples of accessible or inaccessible apps; which are better for particular categories of users than others?

Three main categories are mentioned: 

1. In-box apps or built-in apps. These are apps that you have on your device that if you get an ebook it will actually open in that app.  

• Apple Books: Apple Books on iOS or on Mac scores 100% for the fundamental visual adjustments. The books app plays well with the read aloud function. It'll do visual highlighting with the highlights showing what's currently being read. It doesn't just read the current page. It turns the page. So that works well. Knowing whether or not you're actually on a chapter heading or a subsection is difficult. So Apple Books is okay if you're using visual adjustments, and if you don't have lots of requirements when it comes to read aloud, but falls short on less than trivial content or more complex content. 

• PlayBooks: The story on Android is less happy. On visual adjustments they don't score 100% because they have issues with displaying images that are included as svg, so that's a type of encoding the image, which means that when you make it bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, it all stays smooth. But they do have the kind of text adjustments that people say are important. PlayBooks is doing okay on read aloud. But for screenreaders, it fails on being able to navigate well with the table of contents to do page navigation. 

2. Apps you use from the supplier of the ebook (‘walled garden’). Those books which you have licensed from that platform you have to use that platform.  

• For instance Kindle. Kindle, across different platforms, scores 100% on visual adjustments. On read aloud  the experience is pretty good. However, using a screen reader with Kindle on Android, for example, means that your heading navigation doesn't work. Your table of contents doesn't work. Your page. Navigation doesn't work. Kindle does pay attention to the accessibility of their apps, but for less complex content. 

• Vitalsource Bookshelf does well with visual adjustments. Again, 100%. It scores 100% for read aloud. So that means they do provide the option to decide whether or not you hear the alt text in the read aloud, experience, and then with a screen, reader, well, they're getting a B plus at the moment. So the non visual reading is failing on that hierarchical table of contents, and the ability to be able to confidently add notes and bookmarks in the right position and Vitalsource Bookshelf is available not only on iOS and on Android, but also on Windows and Mac.

3. Independent apps 

• Thorium Reader. It is now scoring a hundred percent across the board on our fundamental tests. So 100% on visual adjustments, 100% on read aloud, and 100% on support for all of our tests for non-visual reading as well. But Thorium Reader is not available on mobile platforms. 

How often do you do you run those tests? And can you tell us a little bit more about the protocol?

If someone visits epubtest.org, there is a page that lists all the test results. But there's also a page that lists the test titles. We have these volunteers who do these reading system tests. But also we encourage the app developers to use these books and do their own tests. Results should be repeatable. We should get the same results as the app developer or an end user. So it's very transparent. We tend to adjust the books at most once a year, then we have this kind of period of a few months going through and doing the retests on those. So that's how often we do that. And we put the dates on when we did a last retest there. So the casual viewer and the app developer have the assurance of when that test was last done, and who did the test. 

How can publishers use EpubTest.org as part of their quality assurance process?

The Inclusive Publishing Knowledge base is the place on the web that will help someone who's creating. Certainly EPUB content or web type content, to know what techniques to use and links to the standards, code, snippets, and so on. The value of EPUBTest here is that if they're finding something is not working, they could go to EPUBTest and see whether or not that particular feature is supported by that app. So thereby hopefully saving them some grief. If they're struggling with it's not working, they would see whether it's actually supported by that app or not. 

How can publishers mitigate the issues when a reading app is not supporting their accessible ebook file? What can they do to to overcome that?

Richard would caution against then coding your ebook. So it works with that app by somehow diverting from best practice. If the publishers are not producing the content that follows this best practices, then the reading app developers are hardly motivated to fix that kind of issue. And then, when the reading systems do support that issue, the publisher is left with content that is suboptimal. So it's best to stick to those standards and then have that conversation with the app developer. 

In the case of digital rights management systems, Digital Editions has always been considered particularly problematic in the past. Has that evolved? And what are the alternatives? And are these alternatives supported currently by the reading apps?

Adobe's digital protection system has been a thorn in the side of accessible reading for a long time. This is no surprise to Adobe. The good news is that the apps that have technical protection, they lock you into that ecosystem. But there are other options now, like the Kindle and the Vitalsource, and the Kobo and Libby from Overdrive. And those sorts of things. They all use technical protection. Technical protection can be a pain, but it can be invisible to an end user. As long as the reading app is a good one and has the features that they want. And in Digital Editions it usually doesn't. And that's why it's so important for those others. 

Will AI help make a difference?

I think it will. We've already got some examples of this. So be my eyes provides an end user an independent way of being able to understand more about an image. It will give a visual description, and you're able to ask questions of an image that you've copied to the clipboard. Similarly, having just said that I'm not happy with digital editions, Adobe Acrobat's reader on mobile has the ability for someone to ask questions, ask for a summary of things. Now these are a glimpse of what is possible with AI. It's sometimes kind of clunky; you have to sort of go from one thing to another, and it's not a smooth user experience, but they look really really promising. There are several other kind of examples of how AI could be useful, but describing and interrogating the content, including the images going beyond the alt-text is very interesting and summarizing all with the same kind of cautions.