Monday, February 16, 2015

Web Based eBook Interface for Young Students?

Another "learning object" I have had to review as as part of a course on instructional design, is an e-book for young readers: "Sk8 for Jake". The content of the book seemed suitable for the intended audience, but the web interface has some problems. Perhaps this would be better as an ePub e-book.

Some routine tests run on the interface:
  1. W3C Markup Validation Service: 32 Errors, 12 warnings.
  2.  W3C mobileOK Checker: Score of 0 out of 5 (lowest possible score). Failures per severity: critical 4, severe 2, medium 2, low 5.
  3. Achecker Accessibility Review for WCAG 2.0 (Level AA) Guidelines: Known Problems (22), Likely Problems (0), Potential Problems (187).
These are some easily fixed problems with the interface. However the major difficulty is that the content of the book appears to be presented as one large image per page. There is no text which could be converted to Braille, or synthetic speech. This makes the entire book inaccessible.
There is an audio option, which has very clear narration and has the option of setting the speed. But I had difficulty operating the audio interface and it does not appear to exactly match the text in the book.

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