iBooks Accessibility

Luis F. Pérez, M. Ed.

iBooks Author

CHAPTER 1

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IntroductionThis chapter focuses on the “why” of accessibility. First, you will learn why it is important to provide accessibility for digital content in order to meet legal and ethical responsibilities to serve the needs of all students. You will then learn about the many accessibility features that are already built into IOS to ensure access for students with visual, hearing and motor disabilities. For students who have learning difficulties, iBooks also includes a number of reading supports and study aids to make it easier for these students to understand the information in iBooks textbooks like the one you are currently reading. As you will learn in this chapter, educators already have many of the tools they need to provide access to all students, the challenge now is learning to how to author content in a way that allows these tools to work effectively for the students who rely on them.

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SECTION 1

Improving the accessibility of your iBooks textbooks will result in an improved reading experience for everyone, not just people with disabilities. For example, the use of headings to divide long chapters into more manageable sections benefits students with cognitive disabilities. This same technique also makes it easier for other readers to quickly scan the chapters in order get an overview of the content in preparation for more in-depth reading.

Aside from the better user experience it provides, accessibility is a legal requirement in many countries. In the U.S., Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in any program that receives federal funding. This includes K-12 schools and institutions of higher learning. The rights of students with disabilities are also protected under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, which applies to all

entities of state and local government, including public schools, colleges and universities.

In response to the increasing use of e-readers and other emerging technologies in education, the U.S. Department of Education recently issued a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) to college and university presidents. The purpose of the DCL was to clarify how the ADA and Section 504 apply to emerging technology such as e-readers. According to the DCL, the application of the nondiscrimination requirements of Section 504 and the ADA means that schools must ensure that emerging technology such as e-readers is fully accessible to students who are blind or have low vision.

However, it is not just students with visual disabilities who are protected under these laws. In the DCL, the Department of Education added that students with specific learning disabilities that make it difficult for them to get information from printed sources (those

Why Accessibility?

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students who have “print disabilities”) are also protected under U.S. disability laws. While the DCL was addressed to college and university presidents, it contained a section that clearly stated that elementary and secondary schools have the same legal obligations toward students with disabilities.

Your country may have similar regulations related to the accessibility of electronic documents. Space constraints prevent an in-depth discussion of every country’s regulations here, but a good resource on this topic is available from the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative.

While meeting legal requirements may be a good reason for implementing accessibility, a more important consideration is the ethical responsibility educators have to their students. We currently live in an age of rapid change in which full participation in the digital economy depends on access to information and knowledge. As educators, we have a responsibility to provide students with disabilities with the tools and skills they will need to have access to the same opportunities as other members of society. By selecting technologies that implement universal design and accessibility, we will not only be ensuring students with disabilities can participate in the classroom today, we

will be preparing them with the skills they will need to function as productive, independent members of society in the future.

It could be said that there are two phases or waves of accessibility. In the first wave we have been concerned primarily with the tools: developing tools such as screen readers, switch systems and other technologies that provide access and level the playing field for all. In the second wave, the focus will need to be on awareness and education. Many of the technologies needed by people with disabilities are now in place, but often educators are either not aware of their availability or know how to effectively use them with students with disabilities. Along with knowledge of the technologies that are available, educators will also need to learn how to develop content in a way that allows assistive technology to function as intended.

By implementing the techniques outlined in this book, authors can ensure their iBooks textbooks are accessible to all learners, including those who rely on the accessibility features built into their mobile devices. In this book, you will learn the following techniques for authoring accessible content with iBooks Author:

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• how to add accessibility descriptions to ensure images can be described by the VoiceOver screen reader used by people with visual disabilities.

• how to ensure the videos in your iBooks textbooks are accessible to people with hearing disabilities and others who benefit from closed captions (e.g. those learning a second language, struggling readers).

• how to include a glossary where readers can look up key terms that is essential to understanding the information presented in the book.

• how to add review widgets that allow learners to check their understanding and determine when they are ready to move on to more challenging content.

• how to make it easier for people with information processing difficulties to understand the content by using styles to divide long chapters into more manageable sections and make the structure of the information more explicit.

• how to make sure the text is legible for people with low vision and those with reading difficulties such as dyslexia.

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SECTION 2

The IOS operating system that runs on the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch already provides a number of features to ensure equal access to information for all students, including students with disabilities.

Out of the box, each of these devices include the following accessibility features:

• VoiceOver, a screen reader that allows students with visual disabilities who cannot see information on the screen to have the content read aloud to them.

• Zoom, to magnify the display for students with low vision.

• White on Black, for improved contrast that can make it easier for students with low vision to read content.

• Speak Selection to read highlighted text aloud for people with low vision who do not use VoiceOver, or for students with learning disabilities who can benefit from text to speech. This feature can also benefit auditory learners as well as English language learners.

• Large Text, for increasing the text size in built-in apps such as Notes, Contacts and Mail.

• Closed captions to allow students with hearing disabilities to follow along with what is being said in a movie or podcast.

• Mono Audio, for ensuring that someone with hearing loss in one ear does not miss any of the audio content in a movie or podcast recorded in stereo.

• AssistiveTouch to make it easier for people with motor difficulties to perform Multi-Touch gestures and access the few physical buttons on the iPad and other IOS devices.

The iPhone includes a few additional features for people with hearing disabilities:

• the LED flash can be triggered to provide a visual cue to someone who has a hearing disability that prevents them from hearing the ring tone.

IOS Accessibility Features

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• custom vibration patterns can be used to identify individual callers.

The upcoming IOS 6 release promises even more accessibility with the following new features:

• Guided Access for enabling a single app mode where students are not able to use the Home button to exit the current app. This feature will be useful for working with

students who rely on speech apps, such as students with autism and related disabilities. Guided Access will also allow the teacher or other professional to disable parts of the interface in any app (such as the settings button, navigation, bar).

• Better VoiceOver integration with Zoom, AssistiveTouch and Maps. Currently Zoom and VoiceOver cannot be used at the same time and AssistiveTouch is not compatible with Voiceover. With IOS 6 this will change, a great benefit for people with multiple disabilities who need more than one feature.

• Word highlights in Speak Selection. The enhanced text to speech feature will highlight the words as it reads them aloud. This should benefit students with learning disabilities as well as struggling readers and auditory learners.

These are just a few of the new accessibility features coming to IOS 6. A more thorough discussion is available on my website.

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Movie 1.1 Accessibility Features for IOS 5

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SECTION 3

Many of the accessibility features of IOS can be used in conjunction with the iBooks app to ensure students have equal access to ebook content. For example, a student with a learning disability who needs text to speech can use Speak Selection to have the content read aloud to him or her. iBooks also supports the built-in Dictionary available in IOS to allow a student to look up unfamiliar words as he or she reads.

Along with these learning supports in IOS, iBooks also includes a number of features that support active reading strategies, such as the ability to highlight and underline critical information in the text. Students can also take notes, and with the new Study Cards feature built into iBooks, these notes can be turned into flashcards that make it easy to review for assessments.

iBooks Reading Supports

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Movie 1.2 Reading Supports and Study Aids in iBooks 2

iBooks Author

iBooks 2 retains support for the ePub standard. This is the standard for reflowable text that is used for most of the books available in the iBookstore. For ePub books, iBooks 2 provides a number of text display options that allow students to customize the reading experience to meet their needs. A few of these features, such as the ability to change to a sans-serif font and to use a sepia background, can benefit students with dyslexia.

To access the text display options for an ePub book:

1.Tap once on the screen to reveal the toolbar at the top of the screen.

2.Tap the button for text options (third from the right).

3.Use the text resize buttons to adjust the text size.

4. Tap on Fonts to choose a different font. F

5.Tap on Theme to change the background or select the full screen view (on iPad only).

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CHAPTER 2

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Accessibility TechniquesWhile the accessibility features of IOS and the iBooks app go a long way toward ensuring equal access to information for students with disabilities, there are some techniques that iBooks authors can implement to ensure their content provides additional supports for students with learning difficulties. The rest of this ebook will focus on specific techniques iBooks authors can implement to make their content more accessible to all students.

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In iBooks Author, each image can have a brief accessibility description. This accessibility description allows the VoiceOver screen reader to describe the image to someone with a visual disability. If you leave out the accessibility description for an image, VoiceOver will read the image’s file name, which may be confusing to the person listening to the content. To prevent this from happening, add an accessibility description for each image as follows:

1.In iBooks Author, select the image that will be described and click on the Inspector button in the toolbar (or choose View, Show Inspector).

2.Choose the Widget Inspector, then the Layout tab.

3.At the bottom of the Layout tab, enter the desired text in the Accessibility Description text box.

Add Accessibility Descriptions

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GuidelinesWriting descriptions (or alternative text as it is more commonly known in the accessibility world) is as much an art as it is a science, and much of it is subjective. There are many sites that provide information on how to write good alt text for images on websites, but I have found little guidance on how to write descriptions for other online content such as ebooks.

My recommendation would be to focus on three Cs when writing descriptions for images in iBooks Author:

• Content: As much as possible, accessibility descriptions should focus on the content of each image rather than its visual appearance. Thus, in a chemistry book that has an image of a scientist working in a lab I would need to know that the scientist is placing test tubes in a centrifuge, but not that he or she is wearing a white lab coat, has short brown hair, and so on. There could be a few exceptions where you might need to focus on the visual details of the image, but these cases should be the exception rather than the rule.

• Context: the context in which the image is used is also important. For example, if I am writing a book on the Civil War and the text surrounding an image already explains a great deal about a famous general,

I would try as much as possible to avoid redundancy in the accessibility description. I would ask myself if the image of the general is already properly described in the surrounding text. If it is, then it might be more appropriate to mark it up as a decorative image (“Background”). You could also reference the image in the surrounding text. In that case, in the text you would write “see Figure X, or as seen on Figure X” and the matching accessibility description would be “Figure X.” Avoiding redundancy also applies to the use of words such as “image” or “graphic” in the description. Since VoiceOver will announce that information when it comes across the image on the page (it will say “image” after reading the description), including these words in the descriptions makes them redundant.

• Conciseness. The final consideration is to keep the description as brief and concise as possible. Of course, you should include as much of a description as is necessary to ensure understanding, but I would try to keep it to no more than 100 characters if possible. This will keep the accessibility description from disrupting the reader from the rest of the content too much.

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Decorative images such as dividers are a special case. For those images, I would just enter the word “Background” for the accessibility description. This will indicate to the reader that the image is not important for understanding the content, and the word is short enough that it should be easy to ignore. Leaving out the description will cause VoiceOver to read the entire file name, which is often not descriptive enough to avoid confusion.

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iBooks Author

SECTION 2

Closed captions are a text representation of the dialogue and other audio content in a video program. This text usually appears in a box at the bottom of the screen, and it is synchronized to the audio. Closed captions benefit not only people with hearing difficulties, but also struggling readers and those learning a second language. Closed captioned content can also be accessed in many settings where it is not possible to turn on the audio, such as in the quiet area of a library.

Viewing CaptionsWith iBooks textbooks, you can view the captions when you open the book on the iPad by going to Settings, Video and making sure Closed Captions is set to On. This is a global setting that affects playback for all video files on your device. You are not able to control the visibility of captions on individual videos.

Captioning Your VideosTo create a captioned video, I have found that a workflow combining MovieCaptioner (available from www.synchrimedia.com for $99) and Compressor (available on the Mac App Store for $50) works well. I like MovieCaptioner for creating the captions because it is affordable and easy to learn and use. With MovieCaptioner, I create an SCC file that has the caption text and timecodes. I then use Compressor to combine this SCC file with the original video file, resulting in a captioned version of the video. Compressor also helps me make sure the captioned video file is in the correct format for the iPad. I found that when I exported the captioned video directly from MovieCaptioner I would get an error message in iBooks Author and the software would refuse to import the video.

Caution: videos tend to add significantly to the file size of your iBooks textbooks. Use videos only when they are essential to the content. That way you textbook will

Close Caption Videos

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be easier to download and will take up less space on your readers’ iPads.

To provide some guidance for caption authors, the National Association of the Deaf developed a Captioning Key. In general, when captioning you should:

• Try to limit captions to 2 lines to prevent the captions from interfering with the action shown in the video.

• Left align captions that are 2 or more lines of text.

• Caption as much of what is said in the video as possible. This may include captioning slang and dialect.

These are are just a few of the guidelines suggested by the National Association of the Deaf in their Captioning Key for Educational Media. For a more extensive discussion of these guidelines, please visit the Captioning Key website.

Movie 2.1 Closed Captioned Videos for iBooks Author

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SECTION 3

iBooks supports a Reading View when the iPad is in the portrait orientation, and that view includes buttons for resizing the text. A similar option is not available when the iPad is in the landscape orientation (the Zoom feature is an option, but enlarging the text that way does not provide the best reading experience). To ensure your text is legible in this orientation, I recommend the following guidelines:

• Use a text size of at least 18.

• Select sans-serif fonts in iBooks Author. These are fonts without the extra ornamentation at the end of strokes. These fonts are easier to read for people with dyslexia. Select the appropriate font using the Format Bar rather than the Fonts window to make sure your font is iPad-compatible.

• Be careful with the use of the colors red and green. Many people (males more than females) are not able to see these colors. When creating hyperlinks, a color such as blue may be easier to see for those with color vision difficulties.

• Use left justification for text. The iBooks Author templates have the body text set to left justification by default and I recommend not changing it to full justification to avoid the jagged edges on the right side of paragraphs. Full justification can add extra gaps between the words, and these gaps can cause problems for people with dyslexia.

• Limit the use of italics. Italic text can make it difficult for readers with dyslexia to make out the letters. A better way to highlight information is to make it bold.

Ensure Legibility

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SECTION 4

Each iBooks textbook can include an introductory video when it opens. This video is a good opportunity to provide an overview of the content. Just like heading styles, it can help make the structure of the content more explicit. As with any other video in your iBooks textbooks, make sure the introductory video is closed captioned, and try to keep it brief (no more than one minute) to keep the file size for the iBook file down to a manageable size.

To add an introductory movie, select Intro Media from the sidebar, then drag your video from your hard drive and drop it on top of the media placeholder.

Provide an Overview

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SECTION 5

With iBooks Author, you can add a glossary of key terms to your iBooks textbooks. The glossary can be helpful for pointing out important information to students. Combined with the Study Cards feature in the iBooks app, the glossary can also be a valuable study aid for any student. These study cards are flashcards students can flip over to reveal the definition for each key term.

The steps for adding a glossary entry in iBooks Author are as follows:

1.Make sure the Glossary Toolbar is visible by choosing View > Show Glossary Toolbar.

2.Select the text that will be the glossary entry. This is the text the reader will tap on to display the definition in a popover window.

3.Click on Add Term in the Glossary Toolbar.

4.Select Glossary in the sidebar, select the new entry from the Terms list, and replace the placeholder text on the right side with your definition.

Include a Glossary

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SECTION 6

In iBooks Author, you can add a review widget at the end of each chapter or section. This review widget allows students to check their understanding before moving to the next chapter or section. Doing well in these short assessments can also help motivate reluctant readers. Whenever you add images in a review widget, make sure you include accessibility descriptions as you would with other images in your textbooks (just be careful to not give away the answer in your description).

To add a review widget to your book:

1.Click on Widgets in the toolbar.

2.Choose the Review widget.

3. Position the widget on the page as desired, then edit the text for the question and answer choices as needed and check the radio button for the correct answer.

4. To add additional questions or change the number of answer choices, with the review widget selected open the Inspector and choose Widget, Interaction.

Include Knowledge Checks

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5. Click on Add to add a question, or select a different number of answers using the pulldown to the right of each question. You can also reorder questions by dragging inside the Questions list.

In addition to multiple choice questions, the Review widgets available in iBooks Author can include a number of interactive question types, including some requiring drag and drop (drag label to target or drag thumbnail to target). These widgets allow readers to practice labeling the critical features of diagram, for example. However, keep in mind that not all readers will

be able to do drag and drop (e.g. they may have fine motor challenges that make this difficult).

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SECTION 7

It is important to take the needs of people with cognitive disabilities into consideration by splitting long documents into more manageable sections with headings, subheadings and other styles. In addition to helping break up long passages, styles such as headings and subheadings can indicate how the information is structured.

The document structure should be created with the Styles menu in iBooks Author rather than by selecting text and changing its appearance to resemble a heading or subheading (i.e. by making it bold and larger than the surrounding text with the text options in the toolbar). Pages should be structured in a hierarchical manner, with lower level headings contained within headings of the next highest level. Thus, the most important headings (usually page titles) should be followed by the second level headings (usually major section headings), down to third level headings (sub-sections within the major sections), and so on.

An added benefit of using styles is that it will make it easier for you to make changes to your document. Rather than having to change each section heading individually, you can change all of them at once by changing the associated style.

To add a heading style in iBooks Author:

1.Add the desired heading text in your book.

2.Select the heading text.

3.Click on the Styles button in the Format Bar and choose the desired style (e.g. Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.).

Add Structure with Styles

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To change the appearance of a style (this will affect all instances of that style in your book):

1.Select an instance of the style.

2.Change the appearance of that instance (make the text bigger, change the color, etc.).

3.Open the Styles Drawer (View > Show Styles Drawer).

4.Click the disclosure triangle to the right of that style and choose “Redefine style from selection.”

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CHAPTER 3

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ReviewReview 3.1 Check your understanding.

Check Answer

Question 1 of 6

The Dear Colleague Letter from the Department of Education only mentioned students with visual disabilities in higher education.

A. True

B. False

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Accessibility description

A text equivalent that allows screen reader software to describe the content of an image to a person with a visual disability.

Related Glossary Terms

Index

Chapter 2 - Add Accessibility Descriptions

Drag related terms here

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Americans with Disabilities Act

The ADA is a wide-ranging civil rights law that affords similar protections against discrimination to Americans with disabilities as the Civil Rights Act of 1964,[4] which made discrimination based on race, religion, sex, national origin, and other characteristics illegal. Disability is defined by the ADA as "a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity." The ADA was enacted into law in 1990.

Related Glossary Terms

Index

Chapter 1 - Why Accessibility?

Section 504

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Closed captions

Text equivalents of the dialogue and other audio content in a video program. Closed captions are distinguished from open captions in that they can be turned on and off, whereas open captions are always visible.

Related Glossary Terms

Index

Chapter 2 - Close Caption Videos

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ePub

Standard for e-books with re-flowable content that is maintained by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF).

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Index

Chapter 1 - iBooks Reading Supports

iBooks, iBooks app

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iBooks

A format Apple developed for interactive electronic textbooks that can include embedded videos, presentations and more. iBooks textbooks are only compatible with the iPad, where they can be opened with the iBooks app (version 2 and later).

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Index

ePub, iBooks app

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iBooks app

IOS app for reading electronic books in the following formats: Portable Document Format (PDF), ePub, and iBooks.

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Index

Chapter 1 - iBooks Reading Supports

ePub, iBooks

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Section 504

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 is a federal law designed to protect the rights of individuals with disabilities in programs and activities that receive Federal financial assistance from the U.S. Department of Education (ED). Section 504 provides: "No otherwise qualified individual with a disability in the United States . . . shall, solely by reason of her or his disability, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance . . . ."

Related Glossary Terms

Index

Chapter 1 - Why Accessibility?

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