Digital Publishing: Are You Getting the Most Out of EPUB 3?
It’s All About Accessibility
To wrap things up, I want to point out that EPUB 3 is designed for accessibility in many more ways than one.
What first comes to mind with the term “accessibility” is making content accessible to those who have an inability to consume the content visually — the blind, seniors and others with low vision, folks with dyslexia, and many others. A fundamental design mandate for EPUB 3 was to accommodate the needs of the print disabled. The DAISY Consortium — the international organization responsible for the primary accessibility standards — was an invaluable contributor to the development of EPUB 3, and EPUB 3.0 has become an official DAISY standard for the provision of accessible content. (O’Reilly has made Matt Garrish’s chapter of EPUB 3 Best Practices devoted to accessibility available as a free eBook.)