Using InDesign tool to develop an accessible interactive EPUB 3: a case study

EPUB (Electronic Publication) is a format primarily used for digital books. EPUB 3 is based on the Open Web Platform, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. In short, EPUB content can be considered as a web interface. Thus, existing accessibility guidelines and techniques can be applied in order to obtain an accessible eBook. In our study, we investigate if popular editing tools are sufficiently mature to support the authors in designing interactive and multimedia EPUB 3 fully accessible via assistive technology like screen readers. To this purpose, in this work, the Adobe InDesign tool has been used to prepare an interactive EPUB 3 prototype as a case study. Our aim was to analyze whether the InDesign tool was able to support authors in getting a fully accessible interactive EPUB 3. The results revealed that accessibility is not fully guaranteed directly by the tool: some additional steps are required by the authors or professional operators.