Webinars: EPUB3: Marching to Replace PDF as the Standard for Accessible Published Materials

ARCHIVE: EPUB3: Marching to Replace PDF as the Standard for Accessible Published Materials

Live Broadcast Held On: Wednesday, August 19, 2015 
Length: 1.5 hours 
Fee: $39 for members; $79 for nonmembers

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Speakers: George Kerscher, Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium and Senior Officer of Accessible Technology-Learning Ally, and Becky Gibson, Senior Technical Staff Member, Accessibility, at IBM 

Target Audience: Educators, authors, and corporate facilitators interested in learning more about EPUB and the options for using EPUB to create accessible materials 

Skill Level: Beginner and Intermediate 

Overview: This seminar will provide an update on the current state of the art regarding EPUB. We will drill down into the following high-level topics: development and adoption of EDUPUB, status of the EPUB 3.01 specification, review of EPUB reading systems, EPUB testing, and EPUB authoring.

Outline:

1. EDUPUB

a. Development and Adoption

2. EPUB 3.01

a. Multiple renditions (including Braille)
b. Dictionaries and Indexes
c. MathML, WebGL, Canvas, SVG, and interactivity

3. Reading Systems

a. Open Source Readium.org
b. Proprietary Systems

4. Testing Reading Systems via epubtest.org

a. Methodologies, Sample Books, Testing Roles
b. Promoting Test Results
c. Identifying the top reading systems for accessibility

5. EPUB Authoring

a. What makes up an EPUB document
b. Open source and commercial tools
c. Who is distributing EPUB now?
d. DRM (Digital Rights Management) and vertical markets

Learning Objectives:

Participants will be able to: 

1. Understand what EPUB3 is and why publishers, educators, and corporations are moving to this format for documentation and learning

2. Understand how the EDUPUB profile adapts the functionality of the EPUB3 format to the unique structural semantic and behavioral requirements of educational publishing

3. Identify how the Readium.org project is providing open source, accessible EPUB renderers for desktop and mobile platforms; find out who is using Readium to build EPUB reading systems and what proprietary reading systems are available

4. Become familiar with EPUBtest.org and how EPUB3 documents are tested and results are recorded and used 

5. Comprehend what makes up an EPUB3 document and how it is authored and distributed

Speaker Bios: 

George Kerscher began his IT innovations in 1987 and coined the term "print disabled." George is dedicated to developing technologies that make information not only accessible, but also fully functional in the hands of persons who are blind or who have a print disability. He believes properly designed information systems can make information accessible to all people. George is an advocate for semantically rich content that can be used effectively by everybody.

As Secretary General of the DAISY Consortium and President of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), Kerscher is a recognized international leader in document access. In addition, Kerscher is the Senior Officer of Accessible Technology at Learning Ally in the USA. He chairs the DAISY/NISO Standards committee, and also serves on the Advisory Board of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

Becky Gibson is a Senior Technical Staff Member in IBM's Emerging Internet Technologies Group with over 20 years of development experience in languages ranging from PC assembly, C, C++, Java, Objective-C and Web technologies. She is currently working with Readium.org to help build accessible, open source EPUB readers. In addition, she helps to evaluate accessibility for IBM acquisitions. Becky has worked on other open source projects, including Apache Cordova/PhoneGap and the Dojo Javascript Toolkit. As the Accessibility Lead for the Dojo toolkit, Becky was responsible for leading the effort to implement full accessibility in the core UI widget set. She participated in the development of the W3C WAI-ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) specification and was a contributor in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group for several years.