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<title>Chapter 2. Building a Better EPUB: Fundamental Accessibility</title>
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<h2 class="title" data-origPath="/html/body/section/h2">Chapter 2. Building a Better EPUB: Fundamental Accessibility</h2>
<p data-origPath="/html/body/section/p[1]">This guide takes a slightly different approach to accessibility because of the
feature-rich nature of EPUB 3. Instead of grouping all the practices together under
a single rubric of essentiality, I’m going to instead take a two-tier approach to
making your content accessible.</p>
<p data-origPath="/html/body/section/p[2]">This first section deals with the core text and image EPUB basics, while the second
ventures into the wilder areas, like scripting and the new accessible
superstructures you can build on top.</p>
<p data-origPath="/html/body/section/p[3]">I’m going to start with a section on the fundamentals of accessible content,
naturally enough, because if you get your foundation wrong, everything else degrades
along with it.</p>
<h2 class="title" id="_a_solid_foundation_structure_and_semantics" data-origPath="/html/body/section/section/h2">A Solid
Foundation: Structure and Semantics</h2>
<p data-origPath="/html/body/section/section/p[1]">The way to begin a discussion on the importance of structure and semantics is not
by jumping into a series of seemingly detached best practices for markup, but to
stop for a moment to understand what these terms actually mean and why they’re
so important to making data accessible. We’ll get to the guidelines soon enough,
but if you don’t know why structure and semantics matter, you’re already on the
fast track to falling into the kinds of bad habits that make digital data
inaccessible, no matter the format.</p>
<p data-origPath="/html/body/section/section/p[2]">Although the terms are fairly ubiquitous when it comes to discussing markup
languages and data modeling generally—because they are so important to the
quality of your data and your ability to do fantastic-seeming things with
it—they are often bandied about in ways that make them sound geeky and
inaccessible to all but data architects. I’m going to try and make them more
accessible in showing how they facilitate reading for everyone, however.</p>
<p data-origPath="/html/body/section/section/p[3]">Let’s start simple, though. You’re probably used to hearing the terms defined
along these lines: structure is the elements you use to craft your EPUB content,
and <em>semantics</em> is the additional meaning you can layer on top of those
structures to better indicate what they represent.</p>
<p data-origPath="/html/body/section/section/p[4]">But that’s undoubtedly a bit esoteric if you don’t go mucking around in your
markup on a regular basis, so let’s take a more descriptive approach to their
meaning. Another way to think about their importance and relationship is via a
little reformulation of Plato’s allegory of the cave. In this dialogue, if
you’ve forgotten your undergrad Greek philosophy, Socrates describes how the
prisoners in the cave can only see shadows of the true forms of things on the
walls as they pass in front of a fire, and only the philosopher kings will
eventually break free of the chains that bind them in ignorance and come to see
the reality of those forms.</p>
<p data-origPath="/html/body/section/section/p[5]">As we reformulate Plato, the concept of generalized and specific forms is all
that you need to take away from the original allegory, as getting from
generalized to specific is the key to semantic markup. In the new content world
view I’m proposing, the elements you use to mark up a document represent the
generalized reflection of the reality you are trying to express. At the shadow
level, so to speak, a chapter and a part and an introduction and an epilogue and
many other structures in a book all function in the same way, like encapsulated
containers of structurally significant content.</p>
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