Our goal is to help you own your book production workflow without needing to make a huge financial investment or become a technology guru.
Publishers of all sizes are looking for ways to reach their widest possible audience — a task that’s become especially hard due to the effects of the pandemic. Our cloud-based publishing tools can help you create born-accessible books and publications that can be exported to PDF, EPUB, and HTML for simultaneous distribution across a wide variety of platforms. Here are some features we include in our EPUB files to make them born-accessible:
This is one of the most basic and fundamental aspects of creating accessible EPUB files. HTML semantics are the codes that are used to tag every element in a book. In the HTML language, certain tags have specific meanings that are important for screen reading software, and for generally communicating information about your book to digital environments. With the Hederis tagging system, every file includes proper semantics that tell screen readers where the book headings are, extracts, sidebars, and so on.
Building on HTML semantics, ARIA roles are extra bits of metadata that can be added to individual paragraphs in an EPUB that convey even more information to screen reader software about what kind of element is being looked at. This helps people with vision disabilities to properly understand the information that is being presented.
Hederis adds all appropriate ARIA roles to our EPUB files automatically — no extra steps required.
Pagelists are a fundamental feature for giving readers a common reference for talking about a book. Pagelists in an EPUB create markers that show the ebook readers what print page corresponds to the location they are looking at, and are extremely useful in classrooms, where students frequently need to reference page locations within a book.
Hederis creates and embeds pagelists automatically that correspond to the print PDF file created in our app.
Hederis has an ALT text editor that allows users to edit the ALT text for their images in one convenient location right on the dashboard, without having to page through the book and find every image. Users can also mark images as “purely decorative” in that same editor, which tells screen reader software that an image doesn’t need to be described to a reader (for example, decorative images used to mark line spaces).
Hederis creates a complete and accurate table of contents for every EPUB file by default. This enables screen reader software to help readers navigate your book.
You can add metadata to your EPUB files to warn readers if your book contains any of the following: flashing images, graphics that simulate motion, sound or audio clips. These types of content can present safety issues for readers with disabilities, and adding these metadata warnings in Hederis is as simple as clicking a checkbox.