Hachette Livre Head of digitalization laudrain@hachette-livre.fr - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Luc Audrain Hachette Livre Head of digitalization laudrain@hachette-livre.fr

Publishers activity  For books, publishers are at the origin of content  Contracts with authors  Editing process of author’s text  From authors to published books, editing skills are used to :  Edit text  Design pages with images and graphics  Produce PDF output to printer  Convert to digital version 18/03/2013 2

Publishers digital activity  Digital version of books are built on edited contents whatever the process or the technology used to produce the ebook file.  Digital accessibility then depends directly on the editing tasks and on the good practices used at the very beginning of content creation. 18/03/2013 3

Tools for content editing  Since the 80’s, text editing has been eased by text processors on personal computers  This has been the best and the worst things to occur for accessibility  Best as text is not anymore ink on paper but also character codes that a software can read aloud  Worst as ill use of text processors lead to good printing of non structured, non navigable, non semantic content, producing non accessible digital products! 18/03/2013 4

Good practices are at hand  Text processors can :  Help separate content and presentation  Help structure documents  Give meaning to content  Enable navigation in content  Define language of text  Provide tools for Math  Good practices rely on the use of these available functions Inspired by http://www.diagramcenter.org/standards-and-practices/54-9-tips-for- creating-accessible-epub-3-files.html 18/03/2013 5

Content and presentation separation  Content oriented typography  Text typography has no meaning in itself, it is derived from semantic  Typography reveals the meaning but it is not the meaning  Meaningful information is interoperable, accessible, not presentation  Practical issues  Use semantic character styles names in Word  Names of styles is more important than presentation  Example  Citation of a work title  In the middle of paragraph, title of a work is generally printed in italic, but better use a style named Work_Title than direct italic 18/03/2013 6

Document hierarchy  Consider any content as a tree within a container (the document), root and hierarchy of branches : parts, chapters, sections, etc.  This hierarchy should be explicit in sections headings  Practical issues  Learn to use hierarchy tools at hand in text processors  Example  Tree panel in Word 18/03/2013 7

Content meaning  Name any piece of information even if its presentation isn’t different from the rest of the text!  With semantically named styles, content structure is portable  Semantic in EPUB is then easy to declare  Practical issues  Use paragraph or character style names to identify any information  In editing process, do not present content as it will be printed but to reveal its meaning  Example :  Use symbolic decoration in text processor 18/03/2013 8

Document navigation  The structure of the document is the foundation of navigation  Table of content is not a part of the document  It is the summary of its structure  Practical issues  Learn to build table of content from the structure of the document. Every text software has built in tools to extract a table of content from styles  Examples  Hierarchy level of paragraph styles  Indexes : use index marks in text  Index is not a part of the documents : it’s an extraction of document places ordered alphabetically  It can be generated from in-text indexing markup 18/03/2013 9

Language of text  In a word processor text is always written in a language, be it the default one  Better be aware of the language used as you type  Practical issues  Language can be explicitly defined  On paragraphs styles globally  On characters styles for some words  Language is used for orthographic and grammar checking 18/03/2013 10

Math tools  Math formulæ are objects full of meaning, not just signs and numbers  This meaning has to be explicit in the object  Practical issues  Use Math tools within word proccessors  These tools work in Math context  Math objects can be exported in MathML 18/03/2013 11

Processes and standards  XML first production processes have considerably helped accessibility  Page composition built upon structured text  Book semantic vocabulary  Mandatory XML output  Correctness checked before archiving  Preserve paper page numbering  Unicode standard for characters  Automated eBook production  Conversion process from XML to HTML  Based on semantic tagging 18/03/2013 12

Paper pages  Digital production processes must keep track of page breaks  Include this constraints in RFP for EPUB production  Practical issues  Know how this works in different EPUB readers  Check correctness in validating EPUBs  Example  iBooks shows pages numbers in EPUBs 18/03/2013 13

So, where is the problem?  Year and years of training on :  Content and presentation separation  Structuration to add semantic and hierarchy to content  Courses have been given on :  Word processors advanced functions  Semantic styling  XML and its advantages  Seems to be inefficient in the end !  Newcomers repeat ill use  Good practices never spread 18/03/2013 14

Call for e-accessibility as a skill  Accessibility needs :  Match good practices for editorial content creation  Are available in every day publishing tools This is a call for a Copernic revolution in training  Training programs should be built from accessibility and digital needs :  It will benefit digital AND paper production  It will help better content repurpose on any direction  It will match accessibility needs in content 18/03/2013 15