Luc Audrain
Hachette Livre
Head of digitalization
[email protected]
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
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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.
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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!
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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-forcreating-accessible-epub-3-files.html
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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

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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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


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These tools work in Math context
Math objects can be exported in MathML
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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
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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
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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
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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
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