On this episode of The Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway breaks down what indie authors need to know about the European Accessibility Act and its 2025 deadline. He also explores Canada’s controversial copyright exemption for educational use and its implications, along with the recent MacArthur “Genius” Awards for writers.
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Listen to Self-Publishing News: European Accessibility Act
Are your e-books ready for the European Accessibility Act? @agnieszkasshoes breaks down what indie authors need to know. Share on XDon't Miss an #AskALLi Broadcast
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
Thank you for this Dan. As I enhance my ebook editor Jutoh to handle the requirements of the EAA, I look forward to further thoughts on this subject. I’m a bit nonplussed by the lack of discussion about it, for example on YouTube, since it will affect such a lot of indie authors. It’s not going to be straightforward for people to get to grips with the concepts and practicalities, particularly the metadata. The ever-changing specifications are hard to track as there doesn’t seem much non-technical explanation of the differences between the specs and conformance levels. The official WCAG specs are hard going especially for anyone unfamiliar with the intricacies of HTML and Epub formats.
I have lots of questions. What does Amazon intend to do, especially if its whole catalogue needs to be conformant by 2030? Ditto for other platforms. Will there be automatic checking to reject non-conformant books from EU distribution? Will self-certification always be an option, or will we find ourselves confronting expensive gatekeepers in the future? How many people will opt simply to avoid the fuss and not distribute to the EU? How far will the spec creep in the direction of censorship? That may sound like conspiracy theory but consider this from the WCAG draft 3.0 spec (currently just a collection of talking points admittedly): “Explanations for figurative and non-literal language [such as jokes, sarcasm, hyperbole, metaphors, similes, and idioms] are available.” I look forwarded to annotating my next novel with exhaustive, vibe-killing explanations. (For the purposes of clarity under WCAG 3.0, that was sarcasm, meaning I do not in fact look forward to it at all.)
Obviously I’m all for accessibility; I have been interested in it for decades and much is already built into Jutoh output, but given WCAG want to embrace all digital publishing including streaming, it’s rather important that they are scrutinized for mission creep. They have a vested interest in adding to their remit little by little, ad infinitum.
Another thing that vexes me is the lack of support for the specs. SSML has been out for 20 years and yet I have failed to find a single Epub 3 reader that supports it (please correct me if I’m wrong). All the public money thrown into projects like this and yet Thorium Reader doesn’t have ssml:ph support – the ability to specify pronunciation being surely a very basic aspect of accessibility!
On the positive side, the tool ACE by DAISY is good at identifying conformance issues, and I am ensuring Jutoh also emits a lot of suggestions for accessibility improvements.
Looking forward to your next podcast on the topic.