Development of an electronic book accessibility standard for physically challenged individuals and deduction of a production guideline

Abstract

Unlike popular web-based internet and mobile applications, electronic books and similar products have lower distribution and less accessibility, making them difficult for vulnerable social groups to utilize. Various institutions have proposed electronic publication (EPUB) accessibility guidelines, based on the IDEF modeling language, to provide accessible content for electronic publications. However, these are merely guidelines for securing accessibility of common electronic books. They are not geared toward the visually impaired persons. Moreover, even if accessibility standards exist, it becomes even more difficult to then find examination tools that can fully verify standards compliance. This study establishes an electronic book accessibility standard for the physically challenged individuals, based on the EPUB 3.0 accessibility guideline. We developed an automatic/semi-automatic examination tool that can test the standard. We linked the SIGIL electronic book reader, having the highest market share in Korea, to an examination tool to verify error detection performance. Lastly, an accessibility test was performed on 50 electronic books, commercially used in the Korean electronic book market, to assess which accessibility standard domain is the most problematic. Thus, we propose a guideline on matters that should be considered when writing electronic books in Korea.