page numbering best practices

[RachelComerford]

from BISG survey

[RachelComerford]

epub:type="pagebreak" and "pagelist" or role="doc-pagebreak" "pagelist" are used for page markers in limited reading systems. Kindle ignores it when it's provided by most publishers. Many systems simply ignore it.

Marketplace impact Straightforward way to provide same experience for digital and print users, sighted and non-sighted users.

[LauraB7]

Kindle is now supporting this according to last week's fresh release of their Publishing Guidelines. They point to http://kb.daisy.org/publishing/docs/navigation/pagelist.html for details on how to implement in their format.

[amandasramalho]

This is a topic of great interest mainly to the scientific sector of books. Some publishers are including the page number in text form ([23]) to improve identification page in the references. On the other hand, this is lousy for readers of accessible formats.

[avneeshsingh]

The required information is provided at the following links. In case more information is required, we will be glad to incorporate your suggestions.

DAISY knowledgebase http://kb.daisy.org/publishing/docs/navigation/pagelist.html

Techniques for EPUB Accessibility Conformance and Discovery 1.0 http://www.idpf.org/epub/a11y/techniques/techniques.html

[RachelComerford]

@avneeshsingh Thank you for the contribution!

@LauraB7 or @amandasramalho would either of you be interested in taking ownership of this issue?

Here are the factors to consider as an issue owner: As you explore this topic - please keep this guiding structure in mind:

• identify quirks or exceptions in specific reading systems (edited)
• Identify gaps in documentation that need to be developed
• Identify variations based of business verticals - how might you implement this standard differently as journal publisher vs a textbook publisher? A magazine vs scholarly? etc.
• Use plain language. Use diagrams where they will help (and provide alt text). Tag your colleagues for assistance.
• If you reference prior art, older development projects, or other materials, provide clarifying information including a basic definition and the importance to the best practice

When you are proposing language/contributions to best practice, please consider and respond to the following questions:

• What is the problem you are trying to solve?
• What is your preferred solution and why do you believe this is the best option?
• What alternatives did you consider?
• What's the best fallback/back up plan?

[llemeurfr]

Please note the ongoing study on the page-break subject in the Readium community. https://github.com/readium/readium-css/issues/45#issuecomment-388725287

We're trying to solve this using CSS as much as possible.

Our requirements, the the UA side, could be summarized as:

• It would be really better is there was only one way to author page-breaks (=> there should be an authoring spec, more than best practice). We can come over the two main types of implem, but the spec lacks precision. (EPUB 3.2 could make things better on that aspect, but it would break some existing implementations).
• the page-break display must not be mixed-up by the user with the "synthetic page numbers" generated by the automatic pagination of a reflow publication. There appearance must be "special".
• the page-break value must find some room in the margin of the page. It may be difficult if the user has chosen a thin margin and the data is "large" (e.g. 3 digits) or on a tiny screen.
• it must be possible for the user to hide page-break info (e.g. dyslexia)
• the page-break value must to interfere with screen readers (or TTS embedded in the UA itself).

[avneeshsingh]

Would like to add that go to page functionality is a must, but announcement of page numbers while reading is optional. We term it as skippable structure. If a person is reading a novel with a TTS, he may not like to hear Page 21 while reading the book, however he will like to go to page 21. On the other hand if a person is reading a more complex book in a class and he want to synchronize with his peer then he would like to hear page 21 while reading. So, reading system should provide option to turn the TTs announcement off or on. But must always provide go to page functionality.

[JayPanoz]

So, reading system should provide option to turn the TTs announcement off or on.

Does this mean handling the aria-label in example 2 — Page break marker of the “Accessible Publishing Knowledge Base > Page Navigation”?

Also @llemeurfr this will be an issue in a pure CSS implementation.

[nekennedy]

I'd also like to add a request of a more practical nature: How should we handle page numbers for blank pages in the print file? From a technical perspective my initial instinct was they shouldn't be included, but there are some user needs that have overridden that.

If a fiction chapter ends abruptly and there is a blank verso, the missing page number could cause a reader to think some content has been dropped (actual reader complaint we received).

For content that as been seriously rearranged for epub, this isn't as much of a concern. If the page numbers aren't in order, a single missing page number is unlikely to be noticed by the user. Should the best practice be the same in this case?

We should also consider guidance for pages that exist in print but haven't been included in the epub (half titles, colophons), pages that have been added to the epub that weren't in the body of the print book (endpapers, flap copy), and pages that don't have number (inserts is the only example that comes to mind).

[deborahgu]

from the accessibility perspective, the page numbers (at least, as represented in page list, whether visible or not) need to have a one-to-one correspondence between print and digital, if both exist. This means that in the example you give here:

pages that have been added to the epub that weren't in the body of the print book (endpapers, flap copy), and pages that don't have number (inserts is the only example that comes to mind).

there ends up being the potential for skipped numbers in the page list, and page breaks which don't have corresponding page-list entries. This is less true for these specific examples such as endpapers and flap copy, which are unlikely to have page numbers anyway, but inserts are a good example. This is a nonproblematic use case but we should specify it as a best practice because it's not intuitive to creators.

For content that as been seriously rearranged for epub, this isn't as much of a concern.

For content that has been seriously rearranged, it's possible the accessibility concern just goes away. If the print edition and the epub don't have a very close correspondence, than the accessibility requirement that a user of the epub be able to interact in, say, a classroom environment, as if they were reading the print edition, becomes basically meaningless.

[mattgarrish]

Daisy guidelines (for the daisy format) have suggested to insert a label like "blank page" in the past to avoid confusion.

This could be done unobtrusively using aria-describedby if you don't want to go from users questioning why pages have no content to users questioning whether pages were dropped.

[mattgarrish]

have suggested to insert a label like "blank page"

cf. http://www.daisy.org/z3986/structure/archive-SG-DAISY2005/part2-inline.htm#page_examp3