The core idea behind Inclusive Publishing is that everyone should have equal access to every piece of published literature. Hence, every reading material that is ever published needs to be available in formats accessible to people with reading as well as intellectual disabilities.
We at ePUB-Hub had an opportunity to meet with Dr. Homiyar Mobedji and Mr. Dipendra Manocha from the DAISY Consortium. The DAISY Consortium is a global partnership of organisations committed to creating the best way to read and publish, for everyone. They contribute expertise in standards working groups, develop guidelines and checklists so that best practices are clear and widely available and promote reading systems that ensure the best possible reading experience. They support open standards and help develop inclusive publishing ecosystem for everybody.
eShabda – the flagship implementation of ePUB-Hub – has been publishing print books as well as eBooks in various Indian regional languages with predominance in Gujarati along with a few quality English literature. The innovative digital publishing solution being a part of an IT company, and under the leadership of the visionary Mr. Apurva Ashar, all eBooks and Books published under the eShabda label are in the ePUB formats using Unicode fonts. And this module of eBooks has made it very smooth and quick for us to convert them to Speech as well as Braille.
Dr. Mobedji and Mr. Manocha enlightened us with how they have been working with DAISY Consortium for the development of semantically rich content that can be read and navigated easily by people with print disabilities. It was truly a satisfying moment when ePUB-Hub could showcase how efficiently and seamlessly eShabda was able make its content ready for conversion to Braille and Speech on an instantaneous basis.
ePUB-Hub team is truly ecstatic at the prospect of what such a technologically innovative platform in India could do for such an esteemed organization with such challenging and fulfilling goals - empowering tens of thousands of lives.
This Diwali, ePUB-Hub and eShabda are joining hands with the DAISY consortium in their mission “to create the best way to read and publish for everybody” and do our little bit in spreading the joy of reading.