Accessibility

Accessible content meets the needs of as many users as possible, including those with visual or print disabilities. Large-print editions, videos with closed captioning or descriptive audio, and e-readers with text-to-speech software are examples of accessible media. Not only is making publications more accessible the right thing to do, it’s also increasingly mandated by local, national, and international legislation.

Accessibility doesn’t just happen! To make your digital publications accessible, you need to

  • Clearly identify document structure by using appropriate, meaningful tags
  • Create searchable, re-sizable, and screen-readable tables and equations
  • Include well-crafted descriptive alt-text for images
  • Create rich internal linking

When accessibility is the challenge, an XML-based workflow is part of the solution. Step 1 of creating “born accessible” content is building semantic structure—that is, XML—into your publications early on! Once elements are correctly identified, accessibility tools can interpret them accurately and meaningfully.

eXtyles is an ideal solution for ensuring your content is accessible to the widest readership possible.

Inera is committed to ensuring that our software meets accessibility standards for our users.

View our 2021 VPAT here.

XML documents are born machine-readable

A machine-readable document is not just any digital document, but one that a computer can understand. To “read” a document, the “machine” needs both structured text that it can interpret, and metadata to tell it how to interpret the structured text.

Why is this important? Machine-readable documents can be data-mined for large-scale research studies—or interpreted by text-to-voice software installed on a tablet or e-reader. Organizations such as government departments may be mandated to ensure that all documents they create are machine readable. In the United States, for example, Executive Order 13642 and the Open Data Act of 2019 require government information to be open and machine readable.

eXtyles and an XML-based workflow can help you meet the challenge of producing machine-readable content: XML defines a set of rules for encoding content in a format that both machines and humans can read.