Announcing a new partnership between Acme Books (Laura Brady) and Typeflow Books (Keith Snyder) to support publishers make accessible ebooks.

Is it possible to make reflowable ebooks with human-narrated audio synchronized at the word level? It sure is. Media overlays and a new automation tool called the EPUBulator make the process painless.

Coding a digital graphic novel with long descriptions is a challenge. One possible solution is to keep the image description live on the page but set the opacity to zero. Includes a video snippet of the reading experience.

Quality assurance for accessible ebooks can be daunting. There are automated tools that will make it easier but they only go about 30% or the way to a thorough check. What must be checked manually? And is InDesign any help?

There are significant updates to how InDesign 19.4 exports ebooks from print layouts, particularly when it comes to accessibility. New features include page-list navigation, decorative images, language tags, semantic notes, and more.

The European Accessibility Act is due to go into force in June 2025 and will have a seismic impact on digital publishing. Here’s what publishers and distributors outside the EU need to know.

Hacks, tips, and tricks for InDesign typesetting and layout that eases the transition to digital.

Introducing the Canadian Children’s Book Centre’s Accessible Books Bank, a centralized repository of books by Canadian creators that are fully accessible.

The key to moving the needle on accessibility in book publishing is to get editorial staff involved and invested. This piece includes actionable ways that editors can made a difference.

Why read ebooks? So many reasons! Portable, lightweight, and accommodating, ebooks can fill all your reading needs. [Alt: a man’s hand holds up an ereader in a tent doorway with mountains in the background.]

An accessible book is a book that has features which make reading possible for people with disabilities. It is one that can be read in ways other than reading print. Header image alt: Books about books being held up by a bookend of a woman shelving books. Includes books by Robert Bringhurst, Jan Tschichold, Peter Meyers, Keith Houston, and Alberto Manguel.

Accessibility in fixed-layout books is a bit of a thorny topic but there are a number of things developers can do to make this inherently inaccessible format as accessible as possible, including semantic HTML, logical reading order, paying attention to background behind type, and image descriptions.

InDesign is a terrific print layout tool but in order to get really good ebooks out of it, you need to understand how to work the gears. And even then, you will need to do some cleanup of the HTML and CSS that InDesign creates. Announcing a course that will help.

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) will have a dramatic impact on the digital publishing marketplace in North America as it prohibits putting content for sale that doesn’t meet rigorous accessibility guidelines.

A robust navigation is a critical part of an accessible ebook and a page list is an important piece of that puzzle. This post includes a script and a hack to help ebook developers build a page list from InDesign.

Experimenting with ways to make fixed-layout ebooks more accessible, this is an example of a book that incorporated the image descriptions into the read-aloud narration.

Use cross-references to create long descriptions from within InDesign when creating an ebook.

Accessible EPUB from InDesign course coming soon!