Make your accessible ebook more fun and usable with Acme enhancements.

Seamless Alt Text

Seamless Alt Text is an approach to fixed-layout picture books that we developed with the geniuses at Typeflow Books in which the image description is surfaced as part of human-narrated readaloud. Alt text fades up unobtrusively when the read-aloud is almost done, and read-aloud highlighting of that text continues seamlessly. That way, every page still looks just like the print book, without any additional text or buttons on top of it, and if a child doesn’t want to hear the alt text (or even see it), they can simply click to the next page. But a child who does want to hear it – whether because they’re visually impaired or they just like having pages described, as an adult might do when reading to them – doesn’t have to do anything. They can just sit and enjoy being read to.

Screenshot: EPUB spread with part of the title highlighted in bright yellow.

Reflowable EPUB with media overlays

What if you could make an ebook that has as the affordances of an ebook — the user can customize it to their reading needs, for example — but has word-level media synchronization so that users can listen to human-narrated audio as it highlights? Well, you can. Acme Books has developed a tool that syncs audio with the text so that words are highlighted as the audio plays created a perfect format for all manner of readers, but particularly for readers with learning disabilities.

Screenshot: The front cover of a book called Tales from Phantom City from Thorium reading system.

Accessible Digital Comics

Coding a digital graphic novel with image descriptions is a challenge. One possible solution is to keep the image description live on the page but set the opacity to zero. This makes the image description live on the page but invisible to sighted readers. There is short alt text on the image — mostly there in the event that a reading system inadvertently skips the long description.

We are thinking through the accessible reading experience for all kinds of content and all kinds of readers.