As highlighted in our previous post, accessibility issues have increased in significance in recent years, and are set to become essential in Europe as early as 2025.
But beyond the upcoming legal regulations, why is accessibility in ebooks so important? What is the real-world impact for readers in their daily lives?
A book that adapts to its reader
An accessible ebook offers remarkable flexibility in the way content can be accessed by anyone, whether or not they suffer from perceptual impairments, through tools such as text-to-speech, font size and spacing adjustment, background color, and so on. In this way, it provides readers with a great deal of freedom in their reading process: the book adapts to them, rather than the other way round.
Boundless access to knowledge
Accessible ebooks can therefore be the difference between a challenging or fulfilling experience in school, and change the way a student approaches reading and, more generally, acquiring knowledge. It can also facilitate the incorporation of reading into leisure activities rather than make it an ordeal. In this sense, accessible ebooks really do have the power to change someone’s journey.
Real-life testimonials
A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, which is why we’ve included several videos demonstrating the reading process for people with perceptual and cognitive disorders (visually impaired, blind and dyslexic readers).
- Demonstration of a reflowable EPUB read by a blind person: Accessible Publishing Summit 2022 | EPUB Demonstration #1: Reflowable Books | Pre-recorded
- Tools used by blind people to access image contents: Complex Image Descriptions
- The reading process of a person with dyslexia: Lire lorsqu’on est dyslexique | Voici pourquoi j’ai besoin de livres accessibles
- The challenges of fixed-format EPUB for people with dyslexia: Accessible Publishing Summit 2022 | EPUB Demonstration #2: Fixed Layout Books | Pre-recorded
- Processus de lecture d’une personne malvoyante: The Experience of the Low-Vision Reader
- À 9:30, Demonstration of a reading application used by people with dyslexia (starting at 9:30) Pourquoi est-il crucial de produire des livres accessibles dès maintenant
Our hope is that these videos will shed some light on the realities facing such readers, as well as on the importance of accessibility for these audiences.