I was Twitter chatting with Laura about ebooks, and she said,
Sometime soon I would like to brainstorm with you about a flavour of FXL EPUB with descriptive audio, i.e., the image descriptions are part of the read aloud.
So I said,
Now that sounds interesting.
I’m working on a proof of concept with an indie author now.
That’s really interesting… Do you know the behavior you want from it?
I don’t, and that’s what I’d like to brainstorm. I definitely want the word-level highlighting of the text. But what happens when the description is voiced? Highlight a button that says “image description” or similar?
What I’m also wondering is how a visually impaired person would trigger it.
My idea is to normalize image descriptions for all readers. So everyone gets it. The read aloud would be triggered via the usual play button.
I’m thinking marginalia, and it plays last before the page turn.
That way it’s normalized for everyone, not an annoyance to anyone, and doesn’t break what I consider a basic accessiblity guideline, which is everyone ingesting the same book gets the same words.
So she sent me the files, which meant now I had to think of something that actually worked.
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For those not in the ebook business:
ALT TEXT is a written description of an image, embedded in the coding of ebook or web page. Assistive technology reads it to visually impaired people, so they can know what’s in the image. In this article, “alt text” and “image description” are synonymous.
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Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
~ Iris Murdoch
When you’re trying to do something new with ebooks, there are lots of perfect ideas that not only don’t work, but wreck – and not only wreck, but burst into flames, explode, explode bigger, sink into the core of the Earth, and leave a smoking chasm and an electric fence with thousand-year radiation warning signs.
So first decision: Avoid those.
Paislee and the Talking Tree is a calm, peaceful, pretty book, with calm, peaceful, pretty design. It needs to stay that way.
So second decision: No alt-text marginalia. I still like the idea, but not for this book – it needs not to feel like a Rube Goldberg device. (Though if Dav Pilkey wants to talk about making big chaotic messes out of all of his books, that could be all kinds of fun…)
I also wanted to avoid buttons because:
Let’s not make visually impaired people push a button for assistance like they’re pedestrians hoping some day they can cross a street.
Most children’s picture books are carefully designed to look nice. They’re clean and simple. They should stay that way.
But also:
A readaloud picture book is—literally—an adult reading to a child. I want the ebook experience to be as close as possible to when I’d read picture books to my own little ones.
Reading to my kids went like this:
Read the spread to them.
Pause to let them look at everything
Point things out. “See the cat?”
Only then, turn the page
So—with the exception of the ensuing conversation about kitties—that’s what Paislee and the Talking Tree does:
The page appears onscreen. It’s exactly the print book. No visible alt text, nothing added.
The narrator reads it to the child, with readaloud highlighting (each word lights up as it’s read).
When that’s almost done, alt text fades up on the page
The narrator reads the alt text, which highlights just like body text.
The page turns.
(Unless the kid didn’t want to hear the alt text, in which case the page was turned long before this.)
It feels like being read to by an adult, it’s simple and clean, and it makes image description accessible to every child, not just those using assistive technology.
Laura wrote about this at her blog, too: Accessible FXL Ebooks